Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta & Tesla Earnings, Cruise Pauses Operations, Zuck vs. Sam Altman

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Ranjan's Taylor Swift costume 2) The broader picture on Big Tech earnings 3) Amazon's impressive earnings beat 4) Investor metaphysics 5) Microsoft's AI uplift 6) Tesla's lower margins 7) Meta's impressive revenue and user growth 8) Meta's TikTok clone is working. 9) SBF takes the stand 10) Cruise pulls its self-driving cars off the road 11) That's good? 12) Mark Zuckerberg vs. Sam Altman You can subscribe to Big Technology Premium for 25% off at https://bit.ly/bigtechnology -- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Big tech earnings are coming in hot, but the stock market is reacting cold. SBF takes the stand, Cruz hits the brakes hard and Zuckerberg is coming for Sam Altman. All that and more coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs

• 0:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razor were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network slash Alex for free consultation. That's akash.network slash Alex for free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool headed and nuanced format.

• 1:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  We have a big week of tech earnings, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft all reported and the stock market is kicking the butt of Alphabet and not treating the others much better. So we'll get into that and plenty more as we go on. As always, we're joined by Ron John Roy of Margins. Ron John, welcome to the show.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Hey, as the RBC Capital Markets Head of US Equity Strategy said, the markets are in a spooky place right now. So I'm very excited to talk about tech earnings of four days ahead of Halloween.

• 1:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Bring on the scary puns. Apple, of course, has its super scary event where it's going to introduce a whole lineup of MacBooks coming up on the 30th. You heard about that a little bit with Brian McCullough on Wednesday, but meanwhile, we can get down to these new tech stories. But first, on the subject of Halloween, I logged on to our little stream today and I was like, Ron John, you got a haircut, but it turns out that I had misread the situation entirely. Can you share a little bit more about what's happened here?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Like an observant podcast host, Alex totally got the situation wrong and it was not a haircut. I shaved my beard for the first time in three years, but and for those on LinkedIn watching, you can see in the stream, but I will be Taylor Swift for Halloween and paired with a Travis Kelsey, but I have chosen to be Taylor Swift because it's just funnier that way. So.

• 2:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's amazing. Well.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I will say I've gotten, okay, very quickly, not to get too into Taylor Swift territory, but I in in researching this costume as only a big technology podcast co-host could do and writer of margins, I will admit I have gotten more fascinated into how she conducts business and how kind of baller she is about certain things, even recently, the era's tour, going essentially direct to distributor and bypassing the studios and going direct to the movie theaters, all these kinds of things. I went into a rabbit hole and finally learned about how and why she re-released all of her albums and trauma on the masters and stuff.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  So, so I'll say Taylor Swift, businesswoman extraordinaire.

• 3:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  I definitely want to go see that movie in theaters and you know, Ron, John, you know, sometimes you zig where others zag, but you are zigging where others are zigging because Taylor Swift is the gonna be the most popular costume this Halloween, Travis Kelsey number two. And look at, look at you go. You're gonna be Taylor.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  I know, which is why I had to be Taylor in this situation because otherwise it would be too basic and too, too of the moment. So we had to mix it up a little bit. That was my zag.

• 4:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. So, speaking of zigzags, there you have tech earnings and the market reaction to them. You have a really ugly slate of.

• 4:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Tech stock movement this week led by Alphabet, which is down 10% this week off of like what I felt was a tiny miss. But Meta is also down 5% after a huge beat. Apple's down 2%. It'll report earnings next week. Amazon just delivered this amazing, I mean crushing earnings report in a good way. And it's up 3% this week and Microsoft also had such impressive numbers and it's up 2%. So you look at the reaction and then you look at the way that the market has treated these companies. And it seems to be quite incongruous, right? They're basically delivering almost everything Wall Street wants. And yet their share prices are falling and it's like, oh, they just went through this whole cycle of year of efficiency

• 5:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  and try to get into line with what the macro environment demands and they're still getting punished. So what's happening around John?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  I think the market is starting to understand, but we should definitely dig into each company because I think there's nuances within the different reports. But overall, and going back to that comment from the RBC equity analyst about spooky season in the, in big tech. It's, these companies had made such a big comeback in the last year. Then in all of the NASDAQ's growth, they comprised, I believe it's 86% of all of that growth. So the entire market, one of the analysts called them the magnificent seven. It's no longer Fang, now it's a magnificent.

• 5:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh yeah, they use that term every day on CNBC.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Tesla and Nvidia. So the market has come to depend on them, but again, we're heading into a moment where now that all of their valuations have both recovered and then some, now the expectations for continued insane growth remain and.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  You know, AI and all the excitement around it has saved the market and pushed it back into a point where people are excited, but at a certain point, especially given macroeconomic concerns, geopolitical concerns and competitive concerns, because can they all be winners in the AI space? I think finally, people are starting to go one by one and really try to understand where these companies are really going.

• 6:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  But here's the thing, like, they, they did have their run up, but they still remain relatively cheap and they're even cheaper now. And you would imagine there would be, I think they call it like a level of support where they don't fall this way, but they are falling this way. Just listen to something that Brad Gerson, the investor, shared on top of his CNBC clip this, this week that basically went into more depth. So he said, "When the market faces near-term uncertainties like war and higher rates, owning the future of tech and AI at multiples below Walmart and the S and P 500 for double the growth and much higher margins feels compelling. Zuck reduced his year-over-year headcount

• 7:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  from 86,000 to 66,000 while doubling free cash flow to 30, 30 billion." So it almost seems that, that, that yes, these are serious macroeconomic factors, but if you look at the logic of it, these companies are still, I mean, Meta is what at a 15 multiple? So it's trading, it's a less expensive stock than a Nike, which is effectively the point that Gerson was making. So why are they continuing to fall?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, but this is where I think it's interesting is that, and, and until I had, you had shared that quote to me earlier, and I actually was looking up Walmart, Walmart is trading at 31 times earnings. As you said, Nike, I believe, is around high twenties, low thirties. But what's really interesting to me is maybe part of what's being signaled here is big tech companies have dominated anything technology. And again, with or in their cloud divisions and around AI spend potentially, they could continue to dominate. But Nike and Walmart show that traditional companies outside of pure technology are, I hate to say, becoming part technology companies. This isn't kind of, you know,

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Adam Newman, WeWork BS where it's we're a tech company when we're really a real estate company. It's that. Walmart has built a huge technology operation. Nike clearly is, I mean, a very innovative retail company. So it's as technology becomes more integrated into these more traditional retailers and retail or outside of pure technology companies, I think they become more interesting. That almost necessarily will limit pure big tech growth.

• 8:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but if you look at a Walmart or Nike, they still have higher capital costs than a tech platform. I mean, you know, the margins for Meta are insane compared to the margins from a Nike. So even though Nike has a website or Walmart has an e-commerce division, it doesn't make any sense that, well, that Meta is, if you look at earnings, you know, twice as expensive.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, that's fair. I mean, we have to take Tesla out of that conversation, which we'll definitely get to in terms of capital costs. But, but, but I agree. It's, it's, but also remember, these companies are gigantic. So growing, again, Google's this last quarter was 70 billion in revenue. I think it was 29 billion in profit. Microsoft, 56.5 billion in revenue, 22.3 billion in profit, which was up 27%. So already the market has factored in these insane levels of growth on top of just gigantic bases. I think that, to me, that's the thing.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  It's, we've become so accustomed to assuming, again, 27% profit growth on a base of 20 billion plus is just insane to me. And in any other market or economy would never have even been imagined, but in tech, big tech, it has worked so far. I think it's just a reminder that a little bit of caution is not the worst thing.

• 10:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. So here's kind of how I responded to Gristner's comments on air. And I don't know how, if it came out well or not, but I figured it's worth bringing up. If you look at the valuation of some of these tech stocks, you know, six months ago, they were, the valuations were richer than they are today. Absolutely. They're cheaper now than they were previously. But I think what Brad is missing in the big picture is, is that investors are spiritually, metaphysically, they're a little bit nervous about being in equities in a way that they weren't before. To take all the logic you want out of it, there's still a behavioral aspect to it. And I think that's something to concentrate on. I basically said that there's like a spiritual slash metaphysical aspect to this, which is that

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Always on cable news getting into spiritual.

• 10:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  I do. I love to talk about it. But basically, like, that's a fancy way of saying that there's a behavioral aspect to it, which is that these companies have made up such a large part of the S and P 500 for so long. And when the market feels a little bit shaky, investors get jittery and they run away. And that's basically the point I made is throw it like, you might have the logic, throw the logic away because there's the behavioral aspect that you can't ignore. What's your perspective there?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm certainly the first to believe in animal spirits in the stock market and the idea that psychology drives things much more than pure numerical and financial analyses. And it's true. Yeah, these are, these are the bellwethers. These are where everyone's money is. And also, let's not forget that these are companies where so many people in the economy have made so much money over such a long period of time now, going on 13 years, let's say, or even 23 years, if you got people who are very early, that it's one of those things that at any point, the idea that, you know, they've already made

• 12:05Speaker 01

  their money, selling at the first sign of turbulence is not always going to be the worst thing. So yeah, I think they represent such a big part of growth right now that any sign of degrowth, they're going to be the first to kind of reflect that at least publicly. So I can buy that.

• 12:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Man, I wish I would have said it the way that you said it. That's very, very well put. And it's basically the point that I was trying to get at, but just far less eloquent. So one thing I did get right, though, was that Amazon was in a really good position to thrive this quarter. And if you look at it, they've had six straight quarters of AWS, or maybe seven now, of AWS growth contraction in their web services, cloud hosting division.

• 12:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  The thing is, you look at it and it's, you're basically taking four quarters of comps onto COVID growth, like when you have AWS growing 39% in the middle of COVID, because that was basically the entire, entire economy. And then you come and you say, well, growth decelerated. It's like, well, of course it decelerated. The comparison was impossible to meet. You follow that up with two quarters of, you know, higher rates, unpredictable economy, maybe recession talk. And that's when customers go to Amazon Web Services and they say, well, we need to optimize our spend. And that basically means, you know, we're not going to grow our spend and help us take what our spend is today and get our, get the job done. And so you end up with like, yeah, that's, that's the recipe.

• 13:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's not because of business weakness necessarily. It's because of the broader context. And what Amazon's coming up now is it's going to be able to, to turn in quarters, looking back at those old expectations versus the impossible to beat expectations. And it's really set up for a really nice run here. And it seems to have its ducks in order when it comes to AI now with the anthropic investment and finally a coherent strategy with AWS. Retail's picked up. We had a 4.9% GDP growth that we just turned in this week. And so of course, Amazon retail numbers were supposed to be pretty good. And then advertising, right?

• 14:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like when advertisers need to spend smartly, they're going to spend on Amazon advertising because it's just the closest possible way to get an ROI. And lo and behold, the company did, did quite well. It blew out its earnings expectations and it's up, you know, 3% on the week, but about 7% on Friday, which is quite impressive.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Andy Jassy has had a bit of a rough go in terms of like public perception of his performance, but I think this was a good report for him. Again, as you said, these numbers still, net income tripled to $10 billion from $3 billion just a year ago. And, and I think that's a good point. It's like, we're finally. I don't want to say the world is certainly not normal, but any comps against COVID era, like the COVID era, call that six quarters, maybe, maybe even up to eight, all of the Q2, 3 and 4 of 2020, certainly first half of 2021, maybe the entirety of 2021.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Now, at least, we finally have companies being able to have reasonable comps from a year ago. So being able to really understand, are they growing? Are they in a good position? It's starting to make more sense. And for Amazon, to me, the advertising number stood out, that they beat expectations. And now it's a $12 billion business. Analysts were expecting 11 and a half billion. As you said, Amazon Web Services beat expectations. So the two very high margin businesses for them are doing well. What's interesting to me as a company, and also, it made me think is, is Andy Jassy going to become kind of like, could he be the Wall Street friendly version of Amazon

• 16:04Speaker 01

  CEO? Because he is going to be focusing on, again, high margin things. He's from AWS that Wall Street always liked versus Bezos, who was given plenty of leeway to do whatever he wanted, but still always focused on not making a profit and just growing. So it's going to be interesting for them.

• 16:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, the ship is definitely turning. I mean, you look at the advertising business, and that's coming in at almost half the revenue of AWS. And the margins are insane there. I mean, basically, it's 100% margins. The stuff that they're paying for is everything on the retail side, which tends to zero out.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Oh, hold on. One thing I had to, in the report, one of the things that jumped out to me is, net income for Amazon, included, to get that $10 billion number, included a pre-tax valuation gain of $1.2 billion from their investment in Rivian. Are you familiar with Rivian?

• 16:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not only my

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Have you ever been in a Rivian?

• 17:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ranj, let me pick you up, because in November, I'm going to get, I think, a week-long lease or loan from Rivian of, I probably shouldn't say this, but I'm saying it. It's coming, I hope. We're speaking to them now about getting a week-long loan of their pickup truck. And I'm going to tool around New York with it for a week and then RJ Scorinj, the CEO is going to come on the show. So.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Okay. All right. All right.

• 17:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Familiar.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 17:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I just interviewed him for GQ, but we're actually going to do an in-depth, another in-depth conversation for the show, which I'm stoked about.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah, no, I, I wrote in one recently and it was a very, very cool experience. So I, that one jumped out. It was just always a reminder of how certain line items can actually make a big difference in these earnings reports that you might miss or don't actually have that much to do with the company itself. But yeah, I think, I think Amazon, I will still say, and this is something happy to rant about, but as a user of Amazon and the core product, it still just seems to get worse and worse. And I still wonder, you know, when they have Prime Day, summer, Prime Day, October, like trying to create multiple holidays every

• 18:14Speaker 01

  year. And I don't know, overall, the experience, even things coming arriving reliably, it just seems to just continuously degrade. So I'm still curious where this goes. I mean, competitively against Shein and Timu, maybe that's the only way to, to play, but it feels like, I don't know if they're paying simply less attention to amazon.com proper, but it's just gotten so much worse for me.

• 18:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I have a column coming in big technology from Christie Coulter, who she was on the show recently, and she's going to talk about why the design of Amazon is so bad. I just, we're going through an edit now. It's such a good story. So we can talk about that afterward.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  It's bad.

• 18:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sorry?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  On purpose? It's on purpose? It's bad?

• 19:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Or I can't share anymore because I'm going to give away the story. But when, when we, when, when it publishes, we'll definitely talk about it. Maybe Christie can come on to explain a little bit. About what's going on there. All right, let's talk about Alphabet, right? Very difficult week for Alphabet, which is interesting because it sort of beat expectations across the board, except for in one little area, cloud. Cloud is not even important, such an important part of Alphabet's business. And it didn't even miss, well, it actually did miss fairly decently. It was expected to bring in 8.64 billion in revenue and broaden 8.41. It had its worst day in the stock market since the start of COVID, since March 2020. And it looks like all of a sudden, people are fleeing from Alphabet.

• 19:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  What do you think is behind this exodus from the company as far as investors go?

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, okay, so I was surprised and felt maybe it is a bit of an overreaction. But I think it's a reminder again, and I mean, on the topic of amazon.com core versus AWS and advertising, Google's search and ad business has been a stable and steadily growing giant over years, but their cloud business has been a major source of growth. I mean, it's pretty nuts. It was, you know, only 8 billion in total in 2019. It's growing 50% year on year. Still, sometimes it always just astounds me when you see those. Again, a company growing 50% or a unit growing 50% from 8 billion.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Now around 26 billion, I believe. So then if it misses and it's not growing at that insane rate, obviously that doesn't look good. And even more important is every investor understands right now that, you know, where and how people make money in AI is especially in generative AI. No one really knows what that model is going to look like and how it's going to look like. Even if we think about it, and we've talked about this a lot here, like Amazon's investment in Anthropic is either 1 billion up to 4 billion. A lot of it is cloud credits. How much of it is actual cash? How do they even see a return? What are they hoping to get out of it? Like, this stuff is so convoluted and complex

• 21:18Speaker 01

  right now and uncertain. So investors, they just want to know that.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Alphabets, Cloud Division, Google Cloud, or Microsoft, and they, Microsoft even breaks out what they call intelligent cloud, and that business line, which is their AI services, that these are growing, that they're actually figuring out, starting to figure out how to make money and showing they can grow. And it's, Google didn't. And, and I think that that's going to cause more fear than anything right now, because that's really how people, when you're thinking about this three to five years down the road, that's clearly where everyone's betting on growth.

• 21:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  So my perspective on this, and this, I guess it plays off of what you're saying, is that people are starting to have big questions about Google's ability to do anything big, again, outside of search. And cloud is a proxy for that, because cloud is a proxy for AI. And even though AI is only accounting for like, what, two, three percent of revenue in places like Azure, where it's actually doing well, if Google's missing its cloud number, people just see that as like a glaring red flag in terms of where its business is going, while the others are growing. What do you think?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's it. It's, it's, I mean, myself, like, and as a major user of plenty of generative services, and how this stuff is going to be profitable, is it's, it's so up in the air. And it honestly makes it, for me, the most exciting story to follow, the topic as a user to actually use, or technology to use, because it's so up in the air. Like, we might see some companies we're not even thinking about become giants right now, because, because the business model side of generative AI is so Wild West

• 23:05Speaker 01

  still. So, so I think investors are just really desperate to see someone show something. And I think, I mean, honestly, Microsoft, you have to imagine from an enterprise side, like, to me, it's almost like a tertiary benefit of the OpenAI relationship. Is there probably closing major deals solely based on the OpenAI brand? And, you know, like, big enterprises just being, you, people using ChatGPT.

• 23:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  And even when, when it comes to the stuff that has nothing to do with OpenAI, just the idea that you're loosely connected to one of their models is probably helping some. Enterprise salesperson on a golf course, close a deal versus uh versus, I mean, you can see that that that was a smart play like that.

• 23:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Absolutely. It's like, yeah, hey, one day you would like to your cloud to speak with you, wouldn't you? Look, yeah, just give me an extra few seats.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  If you think of it, now that I'm thinking about it, so Meta has made a pretty good splash with Llama and you know, we're taking this alternative approach of open source, but there's still a brand there. Amazon now is trying to associate its enterprise business with Anthropic, which as a user increasingly of Claude, the Anthropic chatbot, which is really good. I think it might be the best of the bunch.

• 24:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Really?

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, Claude, because you can also, you can dump in massive amounts of text. I will admit for this podcast, what I do beforehand is I basically copy the text of like 20 to 30 articles, dump it in Claude and say, pull out all the numbers and then, you know, pull out like 15 to 20 insights or something like that. And then, and then go back and then read more deeply into certain things that like were of interest. But that's where I start now because it can just take massive dumps of text. So.

• 25:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  We've been doing this show with the LLM the entire time. My goodness.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  I'm not even, I'm not even here. This is just generated.

• 25:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is the future for sure.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, instead of starting with reading all the articles, you start with the extractions of insights and summaries and then then dive deeper. To me, as a research process is always better. But, but, but then Microsoft has OpenAI, Google does not have any kind of cool and sexy brand to any of their underlying models like.

• 25:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  You don't find Bard cool and sexy? No, neither do I.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Still one of the worst namings, but, but actually, wait, hold on, Bard is pretty good. I will say.

• 25:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  You've always been a Bard boy. It is true.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  A Bard boy, never a Bing boy, always a Bard boy. What Bard I will use for is current events, anything recent. Actually, right now, you can put, give me the growth of Google Cloud over the last three years in terms of revenue and growth rates. And it'll make you a nice table, whereas ChatGPT will say, I'm sorry, my data is only trained up until whenever. Anthropic will say the same thing. So, so Bard for pulling together, and this is where I think Google could do something huge if they execute on this well. Generative search, I think, is really impressive in Google. For anyone who, and we've talked about this, who's experienced it, when you get, what that does to their business model, I have no idea.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  And it's going to be really interesting, but if they become the leader in continuing to have people search there and then presenting you with the best and right information. And Bard is actually doing pretty good at that kind of current event search as well, or recent financial data or anything like that. So, so I think that's a huge opportunity for them, but like, do you know the name of Google's main large, like large language model that they use? It's Text Bison, and then they have Text, a couple of other ones, but again, it's like, these are not in headlines. So I think the branding element of all this AI, enterprise AI, definitely, I think, is playing a part in their behind.

• 27:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  I want to put a point on something that you said about Microsoft being able to close deals based off of the OpenAI Association. Because let's move to that company and on the golf course, let's move to that company's earnings. Because they actually gave us some numbers this quarter about how many deals they are closing directly linked to OpenAI, which does make you believe that there are more. So.

• 27:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Look, the company, Azure OpenAI service now has 18,000 customers from CNBC, up from 11,000 customers in July. I mean, to close an additional 7,000 enterprise customers in a quarter for this OpenAI service is just enormous. It's enormous. A jump 63% in a quarter is wild. So, we do know that this is having a material impact. And like, while, you know, it might be 2% to 3%, they'll say like, this is growth that they can count on for quite some time and will just expand. And that's why when you think about the winners this week, and you have Microsoft that's up in a week that most other big tech companies are down.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Yep, I think that's definitely fair. That, uh, yep, that captures it all right there.

• 28:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, one more thing about Microsoft earnings. So, this is apparently something that has been around for the past week or so. They might owe the US government like $29 billion in tax. And it has something to do with like trying to set up shop in Puerto Rico or something. And they're appealing this amount of, uh, this amount of fine. But that's also something to like, look at for Microsoft is that $29 billion is not something you shrug off. I mean, that's a tremendous amount of money that they could potentially owe to the US government. I mean, think about-

• 28:57Speaker 01

  It's finally, finally a number that actually would matter for one of these companies.

• 29:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's not a fine, it's just the back taxes element. But if and when they do actually have to pay that, that's seriously going to hit that company's, I mean, you think about the loss they'll have for that quarter, it's going to be enormous.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  But in terms of the other company I definitely wanted to touch on this week is Tesla earnings. Because to me, this is one of the bigger earnings reports for Tesla because-

• 29:27Speaker 01

  It wasn't a good one for them. It was definitely, and I know we go back and forth in terms of, I certainly lean more to the bearish side on the company, but what was really interesting was, I have been certainly seeing more Teslas on the road. I have talked to more people who have bought Teslas in the last year, and it's because they had made the, I mean, to their credit, the very specific strategic decision to go for growth over profitability, and we're seeing it in their margins. Margins have compressed down to, net margin was 8%, where it was almost 19% a year ago. So I think in terms of profitability,

• 30:11Speaker 01

  it's already showing up in the reports, and it's a reminder because, like, the direction of the company and the valuation demands extreme profitability. Obviously, certain analysts will say the dojo AI systems are super high-margin items, like robots that will manage your entire supply chain are how you'll get there. But just on the cars alone, it's moving into a way where it's almost feeling too mass-market. And when you bring down the price, I mean, as a traditional, like, retail problem, are they losing some of their cachet and allure when you can get it almost for cheaper than

• 30:53Speaker 01

  mid-level Honda? And what does that do to the overall brand as well?

• 30:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, and this is why I feel like Wall Street is sometimes so unfair to companies, even though they've been very fair, beyond fair to Tesla. But sometimes the stock valuations and the incentives that companies chase on Wall Street have nothing to do with, like, the actual company health. Look, the environment right now for EVs is extremely competitive. Not only that, we are in a moment of higher rates. And for Tesla, which is just basically getting to the point where it's able to make the amount of cars that it wants to make. Getting those cars on the road, getting them into the, you know, into the hands of owners. I guess you don't really put a car in somebody's hands, but getting them into owners' driveways,

• 31:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  I guess is how a car reporter would say it, is crucial. And like, is mass market something that you actually don't want? I mean, think about it, the, the, you know, what better mark of success could you have for a vehicle than to be one of the most sold and most owned vehicles in, in the U.S. or in the world? And if Tesla's trying to get it, make its way there, and it can do that, and it's gotten manufacturing to the point where it's able to discount and still make profit, albeit less profit than before, I think that should be a good thing, especially, I mean, think about how many EVs are hitting the road. Ultimately, this is, this is good news.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  That's good news in two ways. One, if, if every person who now buys a Tesla wants to buy a Tesla again and then again, and, or theoretically, in the perfectly executed world, subscribes to whatever additional services of full self-driving or other super high-margin items Tesla provides, insurance, whatever. Okay, that's good for them. But when you say Wall Street has been incredibly fair to them, Tesla, we were just talking about Google trading or big tech trading at kind of like a 20x P ratio versus Nike even around 30 and Walmart around 30. Tesla is at 66.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Tesla's price to sales ratio is 7.5, whereas Ford trades at 0.5, Volkswagen, Toyota trades at 0.5. So for an established, mature automaker, many of whom have pretty compelling EV offerings right now, Tesla's still trading at insane levels relative to them.

• 33:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's way too cheap, Ron, John. Absolutely wrong. Give it a 200 multiple, okay? Be done with it.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  And this was one of my favorite things that happened this week with Tesla, which was a little under the radar. Hurts if we remember.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Bankrupt during COVID and then came out of it. And one of the big things they did was announce in 2021, and I'll never forget, I was on CNBC discussing this partnership that Hertz had announced that they would be buying up to 100,000 Teslas for their fleet. It was an amazing moment, and I was actually going back just to go back into that COVID time machine to October 2021, because Hertz makes this big announcement. It was at the time that, do you remember the Matt Levine, companies are no longer valued based on financial future cash flows, but instead proximity to Elon Musk was something that he had said for a while. It was literally companies would say like something about being associated

• 34:19Speaker 01

  with Elon Musk and see their stock go up. Hertz makes this announcement. Elon Musk weirdly came out and said it's not true, right at the, at that moment, but it, that was when it skyrocketed Tesla's valuation to the peak, the peak which was hit in November 2021. That was like the announcement that pushed this move. Now, about two years later, in Hertz's most recent earnings report, they missed on profit because their fleet of Teslas has fallen in value so much because of these price cuts that are happening on by, they're being generated by Tesla. And this is one thing I hadn't even really thought

• 35:00Speaker 01

  about is a rental car company, a lot of their business is based on the potential resale value of their entire fleet.

• 35:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, that's fascinating.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So because Tesla is cutting prices on its own side, Hertz is now getting hit because their, their profitability is getting hit because the value overall of their Teslas has fallen so much, it's actually hurting their bottom line. And their CEO had said that Hertz is suffering a higher incidence of damage with its Tesla fleet relative to its regular fleet.

• 35:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, if the worst thing that happens when Elon Musk tries to get Teslas in the hands of people around the world is that Hertz takes a hit on the resale value of their cars, sign me up. A Tesla in every driveway, a chicken in every pot.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Do you believe Elon is doing this for the people?

• 35:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  To bring Teslas to the world?

• 35:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Listen.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Even if it means losing money and watching that stock absolutely plummet from its inflated valuations.

• 36:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  But it's for the people.

• 36:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  What's the mission? What's the mission? Maybe this is all, maybe this is a appetizer course for everyone to upgrade to the Cybertruck. Get me in one of those Cybertrucks.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  And the robots, and the robots, let's not forget that.

• 36:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, speaking of Elon Musk, let's talk for a moment about his fake cage match partner, Mark Zuckerberg. Okay, so.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Oh, wait. Did we ever, has anyone talked about the cage match recently?

• 36:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  No. Oh, Elon did tweet about it this week and he's, I think he's ready to fight, fight Zuck.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  He's back?

• 36:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  He's back.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  As Alex and I have debated endlessly on this show, I believe you thought the cage match would happen. I'm still, uh, still ahead on this one.

• 36:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, I'm ready to take the L on this. I don't think it's happening. I don't think Zuckerberg wants anything to do with this anymore.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  No, especially right now.

• 36:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, and, and why would he? Because his company is doing great. It beat, uh, top and bottom line on earnings and revenue, uh, for Meta is up 23%. It's the fastest rate of growth since 2021. Not only that, time spent on the apps are increasing dramatically. 7% time spent increase on Facebook, 6% time increase on Instagram. Zuckerberg calls it a result of our recommendation improvements. Translation, we have become TikTok and people are staying around longer. And not only that, we've now figured out how to make money off of it. Okay. Great earnings report for Meta, obviously in great shape.

• 37:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Stock's down 5% because the CFO talked about how the war in the Middle East is creating some uncertainty for the ad business. So, good or bad moment for Meta?

• 37:49Speaker 01

  I think it's still a good moment because the things they have said they would deliver on, they have delivered on. And I think that's the thing that, you know, especially Wall Street always wants to see is that time spent reels monetization and growth of reels and short form video products has done incredibly well. And, and especially again monetizing reels is something that was a nascent business for them and that they have been building is, uh, is, it's doing well. So that means that they can compete against TikTok. Certainly like my, uh, feeds and chats have been inundated with people sharing reels and, and it's definitely increased as anecdotal

• 38:30Speaker 01

  evidence over the last six months, let's say. Also for me, this was big. They fixed their ad business. They, they, they figured it out. And honestly, some, it's back to tracking is so, or sorry, ad personalization has gotten so good again on Instagram. It's kind of creepy to me because, so for context, I always say do not track whenever given the option by Apple. And still it gets me and knows what I'm looking at and thinking about. But as Meta had stated, instead of in the past cookie based tracking that you go click on a website elsewhere, it tracks you and then based on that serves you. Now that they had been developing machine

• 39:12Speaker 01

  learning that based on who you follow and other attributes about your actual in app activity across Facebook properties, it would be able to predict what you're thinking about and looking at. And, and you can imagine it's if all of the people I follow, many of whom have opted into tracking are looking at something and probably talking to me about it, then it'll know to serve me that ad. So, so they have come up with all these other ways to still deliver you that personalized ad and it's working again. So I think this company is in a good place.

• 39:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we talked about this on Wednesday with Brian McCullough, but basically what's happened is advertisers have, and you probably know this well, right? Taken their money that they had in Meta previously. And said, okay, this isn't working anymore. We're going to go to Snapchat. We're going to go to Twitter. We're going to go to Tik Tok and then basically come back to Meta because the others have been hit so much harder by Apple's anti-tracking moves and can't do anything about it. And I'll tell you like, I don't even feel like I should. Well, I feel like after what we talked about last week, this will be somewhat, you know, G rated, but my, uh, my Twitter ad platform knows me so poorly that it regularly serves me ads for bras, uh, small cup bras.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Okay. All right.

• 40:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I'm just like, what? And then I remember, oh, I opted out of tracking.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but this is where you, so if you think about it for Meta, think about how much signal they have within their own ecosystem, right? Like on Facebook, every person you are connected to, the degree with which you're connected to that person, how many mutual connections you have, and then what those other people do create signal about you.

• 40:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  But think about all the signal you have on Twitter, all the interests that you have. You have so many, every interest, everything you're interested in the world is on Twitter.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  I, I agree. That was always when Elon took over, the most ridiculous thing to me was all they needed to do was just fix their ad platform. Again, I agree. I have, Twitter has more insight into my interests than any other platform in over 13 or 15 year period right now, that to not be able to turn that in and oh my God, my Twitter ads are, are even weirder than getting small cup bras. So I,

• 41:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  I want to know then what you're getting. Okay. Let's take a break here and come back to talk a little bit more about some of the other stuff we teased at the top of the show. Back right after this. This episode is brought to you by AVPoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data. And most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what AVPoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf.

• 42:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales without scaling risk. AVPoint, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to AVPoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at AVPT.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's AVPT.co/bigtechnologypodcast. Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. When a company experiences backlash, executives are the first people blamed. When their address and other personal details are sitting online, this backlash can lead right to their front door. The team at Ironwell knows this better than anyone. They've protected some of the most targeted executives

• 43:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  and individuals on the planet for almost two decades. As a wide-glove enterprise security service, they protect your people with continuous personal data removal, proactive prevention tools, and human-led emergency support. So when someone goes looking for your executives, Ironwell ensures they hit a dead end. So here's what to do. Go to ironwell.com/bigtechnology, fill in the quick form, and request your free risk assessment. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwell.com/bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 43:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition with Ron Jon Roy of Margins. You can get margins at readmargins.com. Very quickly, lightning round, maybe five minutes each for our next group of topics. First of all, SBF is in court. His lawyers this week said our client will testify and the Washington Post has a headline describing that testimony where it says, Bankman Freed Dodges Waffles During Cross Examination at Trial Hearing. Nick Thompson from The Atlantic pointed out that it's a very good thing. The headline writer remembered the comma, so didn't have him dodging waffles, just dodging and waffling. But it says during Thursday's hearing, Bankman Freed spoke

• 44:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  coherently and precisely. Under questioning from defense attorney Mark Cohen, he said his lawyers on FTX legal counsel had signed off on the bulk of his decisions. These are the people that obviously he's going to blame, right? I'm saying this and now back to the post. The defendant spoke with his usual mannerisms, often smiling, bobbing his head, and sometimes answering the defense's questions with his signature yelp response. But when it came time for Bankman Freed to answer questions from federal prosecutor Danielle Sassoon, he responded with the uncertainty of a man who may or may not be responsible for losing billions in customer deposits. Huh? I mean, good idea, bad idea for him to testify?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  I think a terrible idea because everything I've been reading in terms of the coverage is he even had talked about, you know, like, that wasn't the right question. Like, you would want to ask it this way. I can see the you don't understand crypto arrogance probably is just going to be seeping through and the whole kind of cutesy, disheveled billionaire thing no longer works. So I think him testifying is going to be a terrible thing for his defense and especially with just a jury of normal people. So I'm curious to see where it goes. Actually, have you made it any further in the Michael Lewis book?

• 45:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yeah. I'm just about done and I'm starting to get angry at this point. It was very, very good. I think the first two thirds were very, very good. And then Sam starts doing the crimes and Michael Lewis is just like.

• 46:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just irresponsibly soft on him. It's very frustrating.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think.

• 46:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Two stars.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Two, two stars, two stars. To me, the, the, yeah, we, we, more needs to come out and we can cover this more, but my, my favorite exercise on the podcast is us trying to present SBF's defense. And maybe we should do an entire segment next week of each of us play the role of SBF's lawyer, because I just don't see how it's going to go, but.

• 46:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, there's, there's nothing he can say. Although, okay, let me just preview what the defense might be.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Go, go, go.

• 46:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Have you seen the price of Bitcoin lately, Ron, John?

• 46:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Thirty-five?

• 46:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thirty-three. It was up to thirty-five. It's thirty-three.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's twenty-seven, up twenty-seven percent in the month and sixty-five percent in the past year. All right? So.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Crypto's back.

• 47:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  If it, you could, the FTX defense could argue, if this world just waited a year, they would see that Sam Bankman's Series B investment in Anthropic is now worth almost the entire eight billion that he lost, and the Bitcoin investment is now worth, I don't know, much more than it was previously.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Actually, Michael Saylor is now apparently profitable on his Bitcoin bet. For those unfamiliar, the MicroStrategy, what was previously a consulting firm, basically just became a proxy for Bitcoin.

• 47:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Uh, so yeah, crypto's back.

• 47:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, and they would say that if, if the bankruptcy, uh, uh, group.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  It was all the fault of those.

• 47:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Liquidated the Bitcoins, sold the stuff on the secondary, and they are responsible for this terrible shame.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  It's their fault. It's their fault.

• 47:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Your Honor, I rest my case.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Not guilty.

• 48:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. Apologies to Michael Lewis.

• 48:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  No, no, clearly it's not going to be good for him. Okay, Cruise. Cruise is from the Times. Cruise stops all driverless taxi operations in the United States. Cruise said on Thursday evening that it would pause all driverless operations in the United States. Two days after California regulators told General Motors, the General Motors subsidiary, to take its autonomous cars off the state's roads. The decision affects Cruise's robotaxi services in Austin, Texas and Phoenix, where a limited number of public riders could hail rides. Non-commercial operations in Dallas, Houston and Miami were also paused. Terrible blow for Cruise and self-driving, which I feel terrible about because I'm about to have Tekejra Mawakana, the co-CEO of Waymo on the show on Wednesday.

• 48:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  We already had that discussion, so we're not going to cover this part. I will say, so basically at the core of this is, we now know that a cruise car may have dragged a pedestrian for about 20 feet after hitting them and potentially it was like a human driver that hit that person. But the cruise car did drag the person and that's an unacceptable failure of technology. So I guess like I want to make a quick point here, which is that I still remain extremely bullish on self-driving cars. They've obviously proven safer than than anything else. I'm excited to air the interview with Tekejra on Wednesday, where we talk about Waymo's expansion and safety and the potential there. However,

• 49:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  you're not going to get a lot of chances at this if you're the self-driving industry. Because if this stuff goes wrong, it is extremely dangerous. And I don't know, I read this headline with concern, especially if it turns out true that Cruise wasn't completely forthcoming here.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  I completely disagree. Why I'm excited about that headline? And at first I was, again, you know, like we both, you especially have been very bullish on EVs and actual. And I agree with you that this is one of the kind of quiet stories that are revolutionary this year that we're going to, I think we're going to look back in a few years and be like, this, this happened, this was real. Why this is good is it's a reminder that now the companies are ready, now companies are working with regulators. And again, it was, I mean, I think they, I saw they have 50 on the road. In San Francisco during the day, 150 at night, when obviously there's less pedestrian

• 50:27Speaker 01

  traffic. So it's, they're doing this in a smart way. And I, I believe this is again, I know Tesla ranting is something I may do more often than I should, but to me, it's that lack of coordination with regulatory bodies, it's actually hampered the industry. It's, it's because everything was done in a move fast and break things way versus now working directly with regulators being like, okay, it's just 200 cars. We'll take them off the road. Let's talk about this. Let's come up with a solution. Cause I, I, I believe that the excitement and the energy around this is going to grow so much that every policymaker and politician is going to know it's going to make them more popular and

• 51:09Speaker 01

  good, be good for them to actually support this entire industry. So I think approaching this in a responsible way is much better than in the past, you know, like just putting self-driving cars on the road and calling it self-driving and videos leaking about people not actually driving when they're supposed to be. I think that was much more damaging to the long-term health versus what, what's happening right now. So

• 51:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, great.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  So I liked this article.

• 51:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. My mind has changed. That makes me feel a lot better than I did coming in, seeing that headline. I felt stupid because like, you know, obviously, Tekejra and I will not discuss the cruise situation because we'll talk about some of the things that have happened, but we won't discuss it because it happened after we recorded. But, uh, you know, it is good to know that there is some above board stuff happening here. And, you know, it's obvious riding in those cars, they feel a lot safer than, than if you're with a human driver and you definitely want to puke a lot less. Um, but by the way, they, they are doing this partnership with Uber, which is very interesting. Tekejra and I will, uh, speak about that as well, where you're just going to be able to start to hail Waymos through Uber, which is super cool, very interesting from a competitive standpoint. Yeah. The news just broke yesterday. I mean, we talked about, I wish I had done it. Like,

• 52:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  I wish they held that embargo for a Wednesday as opposed to a Thursday, uh, but they didn't. So anyway, we'll have to air it next week, but, um, and here I am Googling just to make sure it did, even though I know it did. Yeah. Um, yeah. Yesterday they announced it. So. Anyway, all right, more on that with the Keydra next week. Last, uh, last segment here. I wrote this story today about Mark Zuckerberg and coming for Sam Altman and OpenAI. And basically the can see the story is that like OpenAI is actually a real threat to Meta's business. Not only did it have the fastest growing consumer product, but it's building a platform and chat, which is something Meta has tried to do. It's a very attractive place as an employer to work.

• 53:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  And potentially threatens to poach Meta's AI employees who want the money, they want the prestige. And, um, and it's arguing for more regulation where Meta really would like this research to be able to be done with limited restrictions. And so now Zuckerberg is coming for Sam Altman. As the headline says, he is, um, you know, he instead of one general purpose chatbot, he's built 28 that are now in Messenger and WhatsApp. And he's released Lama two, the open source LLM. And of course he's in Washington, uh, are advocating against some of the alarmism care, whatever you want to call it, that OpenAI is pushing. What do you make of this? Is this actually a, is this a real rivalry? Am I reading this right?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  I think so. I mean, as we had said, uh, Meta is back in a good place again. And I think clearly, you know, putting AI at the center again, as the ad personalization that's driven by machine learning and machine learning prediction is clearly doing well. So they've figured something out, but, but on the consumer side, have you used any of the Facebook, the, or the Messenger chatbots featuring, uh, I think it's Kylie Jenner, one with Snoop Dogg?

• 54:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 54:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  I have, I've used the Tom Brady one.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Oh, you did?

• 54:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  I tried to get him to weigh in. I talked to him about Colin Kaepernick and tried to get him to weigh in there.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Oh, what what happened?

• 54:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  He supported Colin Kaepernick, which is interesting.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Oh, he did?

• 54:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  I would have seen that happening. Okay, that's almost better because I I I would have predicted that it would have programmed in as a chatbot. I will not like weigh in on politically sensitive issues.

• 54:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Wow. So the Tom Brady generative chatbot was pro Kaepernick?

• 54:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And by the way, I we should definitely cover this in a subsequent show, but I do have this theory that we are really about to move from this more general purpose chat GPT type application into much more narrow use cases like Harvey, the legal AI or character AI, or what Meta is doing with its bots, where you have one that's a dance teacher, one that's a trainer, one that, you know, tells you jokes, one that's, you know, you get to hang out with Tom Brady. And Oh, I think Meta has really done a good job outflanking OpenAI on this front. And by the way, you take that and you put that into, you know, three billion user or two billion user chat apps, and maybe you do it in Instagram as well. I mean, you're cooking with grease once you do that.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Oh, actually, wait, wait, hold on. To add on to this, to apparently, we're going to end this episode just all about Meta. So broadcast channels. So they just announced last week that Facebook and Instagram or Facebook and Facebook Messenger are going to start having these broadcast channels. I have it on WhatsApp. And so for to explain what they are, it's a now it it gets its own section on the bottom menu called updates. And I follow the Atlantic, the Major League Baseball, Wall Street Journal, CNN. And basically, all they do is kind of broadcast things in a fairly conversational way. And I actually have been using it on WhatsApp regularly for news consumption.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  It's almost kind of creating my own mini news reader. And I was thinking about it, it's going after Twitter. And clearly Threads, maybe not, in my opinion, the strongest Facebook product or rollout, even though the fastest growing to 100 million and now who knows where it is. But this was really interesting because even as another experiment that they're quietly doing is taking over broadcast. So I will now get like regular updates from Major League Baseball that could have been a tweet, but their highlights, their updates as the playoffs have been going on, the Atlantic will have short video interviews. So yeah, so and they're bringing it to Facebook Blue and Facebook Messenger.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  So the idea that they're going after Twitter's broadcasting ability is like one way broadcasting, essentially. You can even follow certain musicians and stuff have signed up and they'll say like ticket sales are coming. So, so I think this even just on WhatsApp alone, this was very interesting to me.

• 57:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Nice.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  And yet another Mark Zuckerberg in the cage coming out on top.

• 57:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Damn, like on one hand, like I'm excited about these channels. On the other hand, I'm just like, another thing to post on, I can't, man, I just can't. But.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, but no, but wait, hold on.

• 57:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  I think this is good. This is good. Now it's, uh, things are fragmented in a good way. It's that different people consume in different ways versus.

• 57:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  You only have Twitter and Instagram and just that one feed. So I'm, I'm pro.

• 58:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think it's good for the ecosystem and bad for the creator, you know?

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's just my perspective. All right.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  We're running long, so let's call it here. Ranjan, thank you so much for coming on again. Great to have you.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, good to be here.

• 58:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Awesome. Enjoy your, your weekend as Taylor Swift.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  I will be very excited. It's for Tuesday, but maybe I'll wear it all weekend.

• 58:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sounds good.

• 58:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. And thank you, everybody, for listening. Thank you, everyone, who signed up for the paid edition of Big Technology. It's been awesome to see the support this week. You can do it at bigtechnology.com. Get 25% off for the annual, which is 50% off the monthly for the next couple of days. And a really great week of news. We managed to go through it without talking about World War III. We'll probably do that next week. So stay tuned for that. On Monday, my interview with Guarev Namade, who is the original product manager on Google's Lam, sorry, Google's Lambda Chatbot, which never released, is going to come out on this feed and on my new Big Tech War Stories podcast feed. So stay tuned for that. I'm going to drop it as a bonus episode. And then on Wednesday, my interview

• 59:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  with Tekeidra Mawalana. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening, and we will see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  In this life, you can't win.

• 1:00:05Speaker 04

  When the world gets you down.

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  No!

• 1:00:06Speaker 04

  Escape to Pluto TV.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  This is objectively fantastic.

• 1:00:10Speaker 04

  Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free.

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  Shwing!

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  Even our news is uplifting.

• 1:00:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  You stay classy, San Diego.

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  Watch School of Rock, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The X-Files, Wayne's World, and so much more.

• 1:00:23Speaker 03

  We're not worthy!

• 1:00:25Speaker 04

  The best things on TV really are free. You just have to know where to look. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.