Nvidia’s $500B Compute Deal, Paramount Threatens CA Exit, Musk’s “Shortcut” to $1T Payday | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Is that the Nvidia compute deal alarm? Huge deal on the cover of the Financial Times today. Wall Street, big names join Nvidia to build $500 billion AI financing package, a landmark lending plan. Jensen really lined up the murderer's row of financiers for his new AI financing package.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  Legendary setup over on CNBC, too. One of the greatest roundtables of all time.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, incredible. Only Larry Fink was remote. They got David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, in studio. John Gray from Blackstone, Jim Zelter from Apollo, Bruce Flat from Brookfield, and of course Jensen, breaking it all down for everyone. I'm sure the Hollywood starlets were pounding on the glass outside looking for some new arm candy, don't you think?

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  100%.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  100% because it's very rare to see that many individuals. Capital allocators, specifically capital allocators, put it on, put it all on the line every day in the market.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  Some would call them bad boys.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Some might, some might, some have. So I'm sure they were lined up, but it's a great segment. I wanted to play this one clip of them discussing just the profitability, why they see this as an investable asset. There were a couple of quotes. The sheer size of the AI infrastructure build out is unprecedented. The president of Apollo said more than $8 trillion of capital is expected to be invested, a staggering sum. We see an enormous opportunity for private capital to finance a portion of this, along with public capital. So Wall Street's not taking their foot off the gas. Anyway, let's play this clip from CNBC. More of your margin of safety of energy.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  So are these concerns about whether we can meet this demand overdone at this point? Do you think, Jensen, that from where you see things, the demand level and how we're building up around it, that it's going to be okay? It'll all work out?

• 1:51Speaker 03

  We're going to be constrained for some time and pretty much across the board, from chips to memories to packaging, to systems, photonics, connectors, land, power, construction workers, the whole thing. The entire supply chain up and down, behind me upstream, all the way downstream. And this is happening at a time when AI has become useful because it's starting to do productive work and it's happening all over, all over the world. And AI tokens are profitable, incredibly profitable. When you have something profitable, everybody wants to make more of it.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Great demand, great profitability. The conditions are exactly right for the work that we're doing right now.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Jensen, why these companies? And did you go to any partners who said no?

• 2:40Speaker 03

  No one said no, but this is the sixth premier, world's premier institutional financiers for infrastructure. This is the best of the best.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  What John said, that right now you'll be less likely to have public capital that comes into this because a lot of these are companies that aren't making money yet. Is he right on that? Or are there going to be big banks and others that kind of step up?

• 3:05Speaker 03

  I believe within months, you're going to realize that these companies are extremely profitable. These are the fastest growing technology companies in history.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  Your customers, you mean?

• 3:14Speaker 03

  That's right. These are fastest growing technology companies in history and the tokens they're generating are incredibly profitable. You know, if, if the wafers that we buy from TSMC are incredibly profitable, there's incredible demand for it, I'm going to want to buy a lot more.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  By the way, who are we talking about? Your customers, which customers will have access to?

• 3:32Speaker 03

  AI labs.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  AI labs are the ones, that's the ones that you think are profitable, but this, will this?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  AI labs, AI startups. You know, as you know, this last six months, the world put in about $500 billion in AI startups. $500 billion, the largest investing, investing period, probably in recent history. And these companies need compute. And so we now have the vehicle to do so.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  That's great stuff. 500 billion.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Huge number.

• 4:02John Coogan?

  But it feels a lot smaller when he lays out the actual compute calculation. 50 billion per gigawatt.

• 4:09Jordi Hays?

  50 to 60.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  50 to 60. So you're looking at 10 billion or 10 gigawatts of powered compute, which is, you know, the labs are at like three combined across a few of them. And we've been on this three X scaling. So this is really just like next year's compute. Basically, I think Meta individually has a 10 gigawatt plan or something like that, so.

• 4:30Jordi Hays?

  He's having to talk about profitability and the profitability of incremental tokens. And I think one of the reasons that a lot of people are just very uncomfortable with this is that the two leading companies in the space are private and their various numbers leak out from time to time, but you definitely don't get a complete picture. And it's very unusual to have the two companies driving the public markets are actually private.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  Yes, well, there is the SpaceX factor here, too, which recently announced that they're going all in on Nvidia. But again, they are turning into a NeoCloud in many ways and licensing out compute. So there's this world where you might see Wall Street.

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I look, but I, but I, but I'm looking at SpaceX more on this, on the supply side, right? Not driving.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  No, exactly. So it's like a six layer cake and you're seeing the, the finance guys there. Then Nvidia making the chips, marshalling all this capital. A lot of it's going to go to a Colossus five data center and then be rented by a lab. Like that will be one of the potential outcomes. But then they're, they're just in the supply chain. Because I don't think, I don't think the, like the semi-analysis forecast was for like Grok token demand specifically. It was just overall inference and compute demand because they're capable of building data centers very quickly. Anyway, Jensen also took to X to post a, a long essay, 12,000 likes. He's like fully on X now. He's, I haven't, I haven't seen him.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  It's almost like he was lurking.

• 6:00John Coogan?

  You think he was studying the whole time? Well, I don't know if he was studying enough because people are getting mad at him about for, for using the, the forbidden phrase. He says Nvidia compute is not just a chip. It is a complete AI factory platform, including accelerated computing, networking, system, software, AI frameworks and global develop, and a global developer ecosystem. That doesn't sound that AI to me. I don't know. Somebody will run this through Pangram and we'll, we'll get to the bottom of it. Jensen is completing the circle, says Prakash. Bankers don't like GPUs as collateral because the depreciation is unpredictable. It's unpredictable because a new GPU can obsolete an old one, but Jensen knows his own roadmap. So he's offering depreciation insurance to the banks. The depreciation insurance up to 25% helps the banks get marginal deals over time.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  Speculation here from Prakash. Nvidia will also advise the banks on reference designs for data centers that will make them fungible. So you will know this is a one gigawatt data center, but it's the, in this particular class, this particular configuration. It's Blackwell data center, it's powered this way. And so if you can put it in this bucket, you can underwrite it a particular way because it's, it's, it becomes more fungible. Having them be fungible means the debt can be repackaged into asset backed securities, collateralized loan obligations and collateralized debt obligations, ABS, CLOs and CDOs from 2008. Ha ha. I'm sure there will be a lot of, a lot of folks upset about all of the comparisons to the mortgage, the mortgage backed security build out in 2008.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  This allows tranching to get investment grade ratings on the debt so it can be sold and resold to pension funds and insurance firms. It also allows the banks to trade idiosyncratic project specific credit risk for sector wide credit risk. So Jensen is trying to get his customers the same cost of financing as real estate rather than venture equity. This is going to move the data center game out of the V season into the big leagues. And so I'm sure people will be speculating all sorts of different things on what happens next. There are some other stories. Paramount is threatening to leave California by October 1st if the state refuses to negotiate a settlement in the legal fight over its Warner Brothers Discovery merger. We've been covering the story back and forth for a while.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  But according to Variety, Paramount CEO David Ellison wants a quick resolution to the antitrust lawsuit brought by 12 state attorneys general seeking to block the deal. He has now told senior executives that Paramount is prepared to begin the process of moving its operations out of California if Attorney General Rob Bonta doesn't enter settlement talks. Ellison reportedly told his leadership team last week that the Paramount Skydance Board has already approved the relocation plans. If negotiations with Bonta haven't begun by August 1st, the company would start preparing its exit with Paramount's Los Angeles headquarters potentially moving out of the state as early as, as October. The threat dramatically raises the stakes in Paramount's fight with Bonta,

• 8:55John Coogan?

  who has emerged as a leading opponent of the Warner Brothers Discovery acquisition. Bonta hasn't publicly detailed what Paramount would need to offer to resolve the case, but he has said that any acceptable remedies would likely need to be structural, such as asset divestitures rather than behavioral commitments, like maintaining certain levels of production. So it's not going to be enough for Ellison to say, hey, we're still going to do 12 movies a year, 24 movies a year. It needs to be something specific about the, like the actual structure of the company. Paramount is also racing against an expensive clock. Beginning October 1st, the company will owe Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders a $7 million, $7 million per day ticking fee until the transaction closes.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  The state's antitrust trial isn't scheduled to begin until May 2nd of 2027. So almost nine months from now, meaning Paramount could rack up roughly $1.2 billion in payments by the time the case is expected to conclude. Ellison is effectively putting pressure on California from the other direction. If the state won't help find a path to closing the merger, Paramount is prepared to take, start taking jobs elsewhere.

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so he's, he's trying to force the issue. This gets extremely painful for the Ellison's. If this antitrust thing just drags on, you could imagine it dragging on for a couple of years. That puts a pause on all of their integration plans. It just makes everything a lot harder. I don't think he has, this, this seems like his one option, right? It's kind of the nuclear option. It, it's going to piss off a lot of the industry here in LA.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  It is the most symbolic move because according to Variety, the company's LA headquarters would be the first operation to leave. And Ellison already has a five year plan to move most studio jobs out of California. No destination has been selected, but Georgia, Texas and Tennessee reportedly under consideration. So it's like, if you're moving the LA headquarters, the iconic Paramount headquarters, you've, everyone's seen the water tower. That is a, a huge shot across the bow, as opposed to something that might actually be more economically impactful, like just, oh, for this production, we were going to make it in, in LA, we're going to do it in, in Atlanta. That might actually move more dollars around, but maintaining that headquarters is so symbolic, right?

• 11:18John Coogan?

  So Ellison and much of Paramount's senior leadership currently work from the historic Paramount Pictures studio lot in Hollywood, but maybe it will be moving to Georgia, Texas or Tennessee. I wonder where they will go. Anyway, speaking of publicly traded companies, Elon Musk may have found a shortcut to unlocking a trillion dollar payday. He needed a win.

• 11:40Jordi Hays?

  You asked for it, he's delivering.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. The idea is having SpaceX buy Tesla. This has been rumored for a long time. Lots of speculation on when these two companies will merge, if they will merge. But the Wall Street Journal on the front page outlines a very odd scenario where Elon could wind up making an incremental $1 trillion. It's really complicated and it's not, it's not as simple as just, oh, he'll just buy the companies and then he just gets another trillion dollars. It's more, it's more complicated, but there is a potential outcome, but there's some mitigating factors, but it's worth, it's worth understanding the mechanics of the deal or the mechanics of potential deal as it might play out over the next few years. Cause this is something that couldn't happen right now, but in the future it is

• 12:27John Coogan?

  possible. So the Wall Street Journal reports that there's an obscure provision in Musk's 2025 Tesla pay agreement that's already been approved by the shareholders. And it was that crazy one we talked about where it was like a million robo taxis by this time and like the optimist needs to be shipping and it was a lot of really bold claims, but if he hits all those and, and the stock goes to like 10 trillion, then he gets a huge unlock of new stock. And it was all like, okay, well, like it's a lot of money, but that's a lot of progress for this company.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  Because there's a lot of projects at Tesla that just are sort of slow and steady, not really advancing that quickly. And so he was sort of throwing down the gauntlet, saying, okay, give me another couple of years and I'm going to deliver in a really big way. And if I do, I want to be compensated for that. And the shareholders approved, but the obscure provision, there's an obscure provision in the already approved Tesla pay agreement that could eliminate half of those performance requirements attached to the stock award if Tesla is acquired. So change of control affects those, those pay packages. What are you laughing about?

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  Mark in the chat says, talk about Zuckerberg again. I like Feisty Jordy. Feisty Jordy is based AF.

• 13:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Guess I woke up on the wrong side of the bed yesterday. I had some strong opinions.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  We'll see.

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  Somebody had to say it.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  Hey, hey, he fired back. He called out he Alex Heath. He said something big is coming. He was vague posting directly to Alex Heath.

• 13:59Jordi Hays?

  And again, I just felt like that was so memetic with all the people that are actually at the frontier. And it's just the whole thing. I'm like, yeah, I'll, I'll believe it when I see it.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's kind of.

• 14:12Jordi Hays?

  What was the actual, see, see Mark, now you got me started.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  Now you snapped him.

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  I snapped. Over the weekend, Zuck called me via his meta glasses while fishing to discuss the 6,000 word pro AI manifesto he published this morning. Uh, yes. So he's, he's trying to bounce.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  I love that aesthetically. That's, that's fantastic.

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  Good old American.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  Fishing.

• 14:35Jordi Hays?

  American, American, Mark. Um, he told me the immediate reason he decided to publish his philosophy now is that he believes Meta is very close to having substantially stronger models.

• 14:49John Coogan?

  Probably true.

• 14:50Jordi Hays?

  And he wants people to understand his values before those models arrive.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  We know your values. We know your values, which are.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  Connecting the world. It's fine. Instagram's fine.

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, the, the, whatever, whatever the stated values versus the, the lived values, the lived values are if there is a hot product.

• 15:16John Coogan?

  Helps small businesses grow. What about that value? Come on. Instagram has birthed so many companies. We know so many people that their companies would not exist if not for meta platforms.

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  How about great hours of enjoyable content?

• 15:29John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 15:30Jordi Hays?

  Everyday Americans to watch every day.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Would we be even remotely familiar with Professor Sendi and the creation of the Lombo without Mark Zuckerberg?

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  You would have never seen that he turned it down.

• 15:41John Coogan?

  You, you would have never seen that he turned it down.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Or the dabeeta.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, you wouldn't, you wouldn't have, you would not be aware of that.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  All these iconic moments.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  You also wouldn't know that once you go to Ibiza, you must go back to Ibiza. And you would not know that there's a 21 year old bodybuilder who looks like he's 35, who's on his way.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  See, it's enjoyable. Admit it.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  I, I don't have a problem with Mark.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  And I don't have a problem with meta products. I do get enjoyment out of them. I.

• 16:14John Coogan?

  In the business, the ads are good.

• 16:15Jordi Hays?

  Companies that are dependent on meta platforms. I've invested in many companies that, that exist in their current form entirely because of meta platforms.

• 16:24John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  But I, I know what Mark's values are.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  What are those?

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  Mark cares about.

• 16:31John Coogan?

  Delighting customers, profitable advertising. These are good values.

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I wish he cared more about advertising.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  That's true. Yeah.

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  I wish he cared more about advertising.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  That would be good.

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  But, but you know, you just look at the historical behavior. It's like buy or copy or chase the hot thing.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that's just, that's just a game. Like, you know, you're talking about a $10 billion startup that's, you know, coming after you with some new form factor. I don't know. You copy it.

• 17:00Jordi Hays?

  I, I think you're discounting how good MSL is. Everyone is saying that MSL is like clearly in third place, right? That means that they're ahead of XAI and DeepMind.

• 17:06John Coogan?

  I mean, if they flip DeepMind, it's crazy. If they, if they, if they actually get the next version of Spark out before Gemini four, and it's better, and then Gemini four launches and stays in fourth place, like that is a crazy, crazy reversal.

• 17:20Jordi Hays?

  They're executing well.

• 17:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  Coming from incredibly far behind. They are approaching the frontier. I just think that if he wants to be the pick me lab leader.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  You don't like the comms.

• 17:32Jordi Hays?

  I don't. Yeah. I just think it's, I think it's not, uh, I just don't think it's very authentic.

• 17:40John Coogan?

  Okay. I, I, I think it's the opposite. I think, I think it is authentic. I think it is, he, he is thinking about this stuff. He might not be the, it is, it is just a little bit of a tough voice because there's so much attention from the social reckoning and the social network and stuff. And then like, in terms of the overall AI industry attaching him, it's like attaching Demis to the AI industry was definitely better for the voices of the AI industry. Cause Demis would stay on message and just talk purely about science. He won the Nobel Prize. And so if, if I was like, okay, I'm, I'm dealing with an AI skeptic who is paranoid about water use and surveillance. Like,

• 18:23John Coogan?

  who can I put them in the room with? I'm like, yeah, go sit down with Demis, Sir Demis. He's going to put on a good show and like, and like walk you through this and give you a really optimistic, optimistic vision. And he's not going to have the baggage of anything else, any lawsuits or anything else. Right? Uh, and so, yeah, it, it, it's a little bit of a, it's a little bit of a tough, tough go. Anyway, back to Elon Musk.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I just, I just think like, again.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  Let's get back to less controversial tech leaders. Let's talk about Elon Musk and how he's going to make his next trillion. Cause this is what's in the Wall Street Journal today.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  I wish, I'll, I'll just, I'll just, I'll just end it here. I wish that Zuck came out with like a five point plan to get his own trillion dollar pay package, which was just like sell like trillions of dollars worth of ads.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  And I would, I would just be praising that all day.

• 19:15John Coogan?

  That would be sick.

• 19:16Jordi Hays?

  I would be praising that all day versus being like, oh, we're doing open source and now we're not doing open source and now we're open, uh, we're open sourcing again because I'll, I'll get some brownie points. Uh, but also we're gonna.

• 19:30John Coogan?

  It doesn't feel like.

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  Still have closed models.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you go to the Dario thing and it's like, the guy's been hard on China. He's been anti-open source since day one.

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  Extremely consistent.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  Extremely consistent. You love him, you hate him, but like there's consistency there and that is just reliable and in many ways admirable. I understand what you're saying. Anyway, back to Elon Musk. He's been extremely consistent. He's getting that trillion dollars from Tesla one way or another, and there are multiple ways.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  He's tasted being a trillionaire before. He wants to run it back.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  He's got to run it up. He's got to double it. They say your first trillion is the hardest and this is how he gets his second trillion. So this is how he's going to do it. So in Musk's 2025 Tesla pay agreement, uh, if he hit certain milestones, he can eliminate a lot of those performance, uh, performance requirements that were previously attached to his stock award. Uh, if the company's acquired. And so change of control at this scale, normally you would think that's impossible. You cannot take Tesla private. He tried and it was not, it was too big of a company. And then also.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  Funding was secured.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  Funding was secured, but, uh, but there was a trillion dollar, once you're a trillion dollar company, like you can't just get acquired, except there, we're in this very unique case where SpaceX is also a trillion dollar company. So Tesla shareholders approved the compensation plan in November, last November. Under its normal terms, Musk can earn as many as 423 million Tesla shares across 12 tranches, but each tranche requires Tesla to hit both a market cap and an operational milestone. So the goals are deliberately enormous. Uh, Tesla would eventually need to reach an 8.5 trillion dollar market cap while accomplishing targets, including delivering 20 million vehicles.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  Remember, I think the number of vehicle deliveries is actually like declining this year. Uh, it was a very, very bold plan. They need 10 million active FSD subscriptions. That actually seems easy. FSD is really good. They need to deliver 1 million Optimus robots. That seems crazy because Optimus is still so early as a project.

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  We should try to interview someone with a Tesla that doesn't get the FSD.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  They turn it down?

• 21:36Jordi Hays?

  They turn it down.

• 21:36John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 21:37Jordi Hays?

  And I want to understand why.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  I understand that if you just bought an older, older Tesla, you like the ease of charging and you haven't upgraded to the newer hardware package. Uh, because it's like, like the, the FSD is available on the older hardware three, uh, technology, but I think it's best on the hardware four, which is like 2024 onward. Not everyone can upgrade. If it's a financial decision, I understand it. Um, but the last one was, uh, they need to get a million robo taxis into commercial operation. That also seems pretty doable. I saw a robo taxi driving around LA recently in gold and, uh, like just from using FSD, it seems like it's ready. Like there's probably some legal stuff, but, uh, in general, I think they could roll out the, the robo taxis like very

• 22:23John Coogan?

  quickly. They can make a million cars pretty quickly and they have the technology. So it's just about putting those on the road.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I haven't spent a ton of time in Teslas, but the times recently where human drivers had to take over was getting into a driveway, into effectively like private property.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  Into a robo taxi, you can just pull over the side of the street and say, like, you're walking the last 100 feet, buddy.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Yep, totally. And so, yeah, I mean, that one doesn't seem that that difficult, although obviously it is a lot. I think that's like 100 times as many Waymos. I think there's like 10,000 Waymos out there. So it would be it would be a big, a big move. But over a couple of years, is that possible?

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So vehicle deliveries were falling in 2024 and 2025, but seemed to be rebounding.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  But they're not they're not far off from like a million vehicles, right?

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  838 in each one.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  838,000. Yeah. And so, and so over a year or two, they could probably manufacture a million robot taxis. And I think the technology is pretty much there. When you actually look online and you see the reviews of people talking about Tesla Ubers, they're like, I wish there was a Tesla product or an Uber product where I could demand that if it's a Tesla, they have to stay in full self-driving mode, because many Uber riders regard the full self-driving experience as smoother and less likely to cause indigestion and sickness in the backseat versus watching a driver who has a Tesla who isn't that experienced and doesn't understand how to use the regenerative braking properly. And so it's much more jerky

• 23:59John Coogan?

  when a human's driving it, because FSD is actually superhuman relative to a newbie Uber driver with a Tesla. So I think the technology is like very, very close. They got to manufacture it, obviously legal stuff, but they'll get there. But there's a major exception buried in the agreement. If Tesla undergoes a change of control, essentially, if Tesla is acquired, the operational requirements disappear. You no longer have to hit a million robot taxis or a million Optimuses to unlock those new tranches of stock for Elon. If there's a change of control, it's purely based on the market cap. And so instead, Tesla will determine how many of Musk's 12 tranches have been earned solely by looking at the company's

• 24:42John Coogan?

  value at the time of the transaction. So the milestones don't matter anymore. Only the market cap matters. And so that could become extremely important if the widely speculated buyer turns out to be another Musk-controlled company, SpaceX. So if SpaceX comes in and gives a really high price for Tesla, Musk can unlock more of those tranches and get more equity in Tesla, which then rolls into the combined entity, of course. So under this agreement, Tesla's value in an acquisition would be calculated using whichever is higher, its market capitalization immediately before the deal, or the value implied by the price being paid to Tesla shareholders. If that figure reached 8.5 trillion, all 12 tranches

• 25:23John Coogan?

  could qualify, putting Musk in line for the full 423 million share award without Tesla ever having to accomplish many of the pay package's operational milestones. So there's an obvious catch, which is, how are you going to acquire Tesla for 8.5 trillion when SpaceX is not a $10 trillion company or $50 trillion company? It's a hard pitch to do a merger at that scale. But this is more of like a what might happen in a number of years?

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and there's also the trade off between he has more ownership of SpaceX, which would mean that he would benefit from acquiring Tesla at a lower valuation. But then, depending on these milestones, you know, he's, there's probably, his bankers probably have some very elaborate spreadsheets, you know, six different monitors, looking at all the different.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  So basically, there's sort of a U shape to the incentive. If Tesla's a really low price, Elon probably benefits from acquiring it. And if Tesla's a really high price, he benefits from, he actually increases overall ownership from buying it. But there's sort of like a messy middle where it gets a little bit rougher. So 8.5 trillion would be more than six times Tesla's recent market cap. And Tesla shareholders would still have to approve a SpaceX acquisition. The Journal estimates that Musk's maximum award is currently worth about 824 billion, despite the package's familiar $1 trillion label. Still, the provision creates an unusual path around some of the hardest arguments, hardest requirements in Musk's compensation package. Instead of spending the next decade hitting a dozen separate

• 27:01John Coogan?

  operating goals, a sufficiently expensive acquisition of Tesla could effectively declare those goals accomplished.

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  New bumper stick, new Tesla bumper sticker idea. I bought this to help Elon achieve his $1 trillion pay package.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  Yes. Full send on the pro Elon Tesla. Get a lot of thumbs up.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  A lot of thumbs up, a lot of positive honks.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. There could be another major benefit for Musk. A combination with SpaceX could increase his effective control over Tesla, something Musk has repeatedly sought while consolidating even more of his business empire under a single roof. Well, it's a fascinating story. Any other stories you want to cover? Bending spoons, apparently on a tear, 265x price to earnings ratio, buying old boring SaaS with slow growth. People are excited about that, I guess. Bending spoons added 11 billion in market cap after announcing the Airtable acquisition. Can't make it up. Is that true? Wow, 33, 34 billion dollar

• 28:04John Coogan?

  company, way up since IPO. Wow, really, really, really impressive, up 50% since they IPOed. They're on a tear. Who will be the next Ben Spoon? That is the question everyone's asking. Do not get.

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  Don't get your spoon bent.

• 28:20John Coogan?

  Get your spoon bent. Do we need to?

• 28:21Jordi Hays?

  Unless that's the best possible outcome.

• 28:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 28:24Jordi Hays?

  We'll leave this show with a post from June Chu, who was the COO at Zillow until very recently. He posted on LinkedIn, I have stepped down from my role as COO of Zillow. That's all I have to say about that.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Mic drop moment. There we go.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I'm curious. I'm sure we'll find out in due time what he really wants to say about that.

• 28:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like teeing up a tell-all.

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  Feels like he maybe can't say anything.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. Anyway, there's a bunch of other good stories.

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  Last, but not least, Leonardo DiCaprio urged Chilean authorities to protect a critically endangered frog from a proposed power transmission project. This feels like something that's solvable. I think we can protect the frogs and do the power transmission project.

• 29:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  Do you agree, John? I know nothing about the situation, but I have, I have a little faith.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Spiny chest frog. There's a thousand of them that remain in the wild.

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  I think Leo should let them move in.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  Bring them to America, put them in a zoo or something. I think they want to live there. I think you got to do a lot of work. It's got to be rough being the, in the Chilean government and just being like, who's taking shots?

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  Leo just comes over the top.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  60, he sent 60 million Instagram followers our way.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  Sickness on us?

• 29:52John Coogan?

  It's got to be brutal.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  It's summer.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's summer.

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  Go touch some grass for us.

• 29:58John Coogan?

  And we'll see you tomorrow. Rolling Flash, guys. Pacific. Goodbye.

• 30:01Jordi Hays?

  Love you.