The Meta-OpenAI Talent War, Canada Drops its Tech Tax & a GOP Blow to Clean Energy

Ed breaks down Canada’s decision to rescind its digital services tax, unpacks the escalating talent war between OpenAI and Meta, and takes a look at how the latest provision in the GOP tax bill could reshape the clean energy industry. Subscribe to the Prof G Markets newsletter Order "The Algebra of Wealth" out now Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram and X Follow Scott on Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:29Ed Elson?

  Today's number? 300. That's how many times per year the average American wakes up in a bad mood. Put another way, Americans are grumpy 82% of the time, or six days a week. So if you live in America and anything goes wrong in your life, whether that's a meeting at work or an argument with your spouse, just remember, the probability that one or both of you woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning is approximately 100%. So there's your explanation. On the flip side, if you live in America and anything goes right in your life, just be grateful, because statistically speaking, that is a miracle.

• 2:11Speaker 05

  Money markets mad. If money is evil, then that building is hell.

• 2:15Speaker 06

  The show goes on! The folks in there are watching. So, so!

• 2:21Ed Elson?

  Welcome to Prof G Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is July 1st. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The S and P and the Nasdaq both ended the day at all time highs. The Dow rose 0.6%. Meta also hit a record high after Mark Zuckerberg restructured the company's AI division and hired 11 new researchers and engineers. We'll talk more about that later. Meanwhile, the dollar fell to close out its worst first half of a year in decades. And the yield on 10 year treasuries declined through the day as Wall Street kept tabs on the Senate's tax bill vote. Okay. What else is happening? Canada has officially rescinded their talks of imposing a digital services tax on American companies.

• 3:04Ed Elson?

  This comes just 48 hours after Trump called the tax egregious and then threatened to terminate all trade talks with Canada. After the tax was rescinded by Canada, trade talks between the US and Canada resumed. That is according to Canadian government officials. So let's be very clear here and let's give credit where credit is due. Canada capitulated to Trump. Trump said he didn't like this tax. He made these scorched earth trade threats and then Canada responded to his demands. They'd cancel the tax. So this is a win for Trump. And as far as I can tell, it's actually the first win for Trump. I mean, you remember he blinked with China. He blinked with Europe.

• 3:48Ed Elson?

  He's blinked on every trade negotiation that has happened during this administration. But on this occasion, for the first time, suddenly the art of the deal appears to be actually working. Trump got what he wanted. He got a removal of the digital services tax. So good for Trump. He got his win. Now, what does this win actually mean? What does it mean to remove Canada's digital services tax? What does it mean for America? What does it mean for Americans? Well, as it turns out, not that much at all. This is essentially a tax on big tech companies, big tech companies that license user data from Canadians. It's the same tax that exists in Austria and in France

• 4:31Ed Elson?

  and in the UK and several other countries. And the point of it is basically to recognize the value that big tech gets from monetizing the data of their citizens. So that's why Canada has this tax. So if you get rid of this tax, who does it help? Well, it helps big tech, but barely. It's around $2 billion, which has a percentage of Apple, Google, Meta and Amazon's annual revenue. That stacks up to an increase of roughly 0.1%. Meanwhile, over in Canada, the number is again peanuts. $2 billion, that's about how much the city of Toronto is going to spend on policing in 2025. In other words,

• 5:14Ed Elson?

  Trump went scorched earth for a concession that is basically of little to no consequence for either Canada or America. And I wonder if that is actually why Canada capitulated here. I wonder if Carney realized that actually all Trump really cares about, as we've discussed, is to look like he's winning. It's to appear to the public victorious, to look like the winner in the headlines. So why not just hand him this superficial victory? Say, you know, we lost. Get rid of the digital services tax, make him happy and essentially lose nothing. I personally think that that is what happened here. So yes, Trump won here,

• 5:55Ed Elson?

  but just remind yourself what it is that he actually won. What he won is an additional $2 billion for big tech, which for Mark Zuckerberg and for Jeff Bezos is basically like getting your parking ticket dismissed. It's nice. It makes your day better, but it's not important. So we wanted to get some more information on this decision from Canada. So our producer Claire talked to Vas Bednar, the Managing Director of the Canadian Shield Institute for Public Policy.

• 6:21Speaker 07

  Absolutely, it's being framed as a huge win. And it's, it's hard to really say how symbolic or concrete it really is. Under President Biden's administration, They had contested it through CASMA. So we knew that the Americans or that the United States was not a fan of this tax. So it could have been that Canada was just anticipating it needed to be one of the cards or tokens at our negotiating table. There was a lot of speculation that it would be something that we would walk away from quickly. Now, why is that? Because it was still in design, right? It came into effect last year, but the payments were going to happen around right now at the very end of June, and they were actually backdated to 2022.

• 7:05Speaker 07

  Another challenge potentially with the design of the tax is that it was never,

• 7:11Speaker 07

  the money was just going to go into kind of general purpose funds federally. So we also didn't attach or tether it to anything either related to our, maybe our digital sovereignty, right? Or public investments in, in digital infrastructure that we might want to make as a country. And that may have also, again, muddled and lessened some of the, not excitement for it, but appreciation of what this policy intervention was trying to achieve. I do think, you know, just before Canada Day for Canadians in this moment where we've been very patriotic, or we've been quite proud of what we've been able to do with the Buy Canadian campaign, and we're seeing, you know, changes in tourism patterns and

• 7:54Speaker 07

  feeling quite prideful about shopping locally or staying locally, that it does feel deflating.

• 8:01Ed Elson?

  So she's going over some of the details of that tax there. I mean, one of them being that it is a backward looking, it's technically a retroactive tax that dates back to 2022. But the long and short of it is the number. And that is, as I said, $2 billion. And just remember, whenever you see, as we're going to see this week, when Trump gets up on stage, he says, look at this big win that I achieved. And yes, as I've conceded on this podcast, it is a win for him. But think about the number and think about the money and where the money goes. It's $2 billion. It's a win for Trump, yes, but it's mostly just a marginal win for big tech, for Google, for Amazon, for Meta.

• 8:44Ed Elson?

  It's $2 billion more for them to share amongst themselves. And that's, again, not even really a big win. I mean, just think about what happened this weekend where you saw Jeff Bezos, who spent $50 million on a wedding. So Trump's going to call this a win. He's going to say this is a turning point. But just remember, this is, this is barely a win. This is peanuts for all parties involved.

• 9:13Ed Elson?

  The AI talent war between Meta and OpenAI has reached new heights, with reports of Meta having poached at least eight senior OpenAI researchers in just the past month. These are not just junior engineers. They include leaders from OpenAI's perception team, advanced reasoning and GPT-14. This news caused Meta's stock to reach record highs yesterday. It's up over 10% in the last month. And these new hires are a part of Meta's effort to create an elite new AI research group internally called the Superintelligence Team. The team is made up of 50 of the world's top AI researchers, and Mark Zuckerberg is personally overseeing it and even reaching out to potential candidates.

• 9:54Ed Elson?

  This is also the group that former Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang was tapped to lead, which, as we discussed a couple of weeks ago, was essentially a $14 billion aqua hire that was disguised as an investment. So it appears that Meta is taking this whole AI thing very, very seriously, probably more seriously than anyone else. As we've discussed, Meta's capex is accelerating faster than any other big tech company. Microsoft's capex has been trending down. Meanwhile, Meta's is going up. They're expected to invest $72 billion in capex this year. By the way, that is essentially just Latin for AI at this point. If you're investing in capex and you're in tech, you're investing in AI.

• 10:36Ed Elson?

  And at the same time, they're trying to build this SEAL Team Six of AI engineers, and they appear to be willing to pay anything to get it. So Meta is all in. On AI and that could mean two things. Either one, they simply believe in AI more than other companies and they're willing to take on more risk to win it. Or number two, perhaps Meta feels behind on AI. Perhaps Zuckerberg feels a little bit desperate and that would make sense because technically speaking, Meta is trailing in the AI race. You look at all of the different LLM leaderboards and all of the benchmarks. The top two AI models belong not to Meta, but to OpenAI and Google.

• 11:19Ed Elson?

  Those are the two winners in AI as of today. And if you look at the prediction markets, Meta's situation doesn't look so great either. According to Polymarket, Meta's chances of having the best AI model by the end of the year are just 6%. By the way, the one with the best chances is Google. Gemini has a 51% chance of having the best model. More reason again to be bullish on Google. So with that in mind, it starts to make sense why Meta is getting so aggressive on AI. And now, as opposed to buying companies, as they used to do and they used to love to do, they are instead buying people. And that brings us to the number that's been making all the headlines and that is $100 million.

• 12:02Ed Elson?

  That's how much Meta is offering as a signing bonus to researchers at OpenAI. Or at least that is according to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. But we wanted to get some more clarity on this situation. So we brought on Zoe Schiffer. She is the Director of Business and Industry at Wired.

• 12:20Speaker 08

  So we should have some more details coming out this week on what the offers actually look like. What we can say right now is that Sam Altman said on a recent podcast with his brother, Jack Altman, that OpenAI researchers, high level talent, was seeing as much as $100 million in signing bonuses and year one compensation.

• 12:42Speaker 08

  We know that at least one Meta executive has pushed back, calling that number dishonest. And a couple of researchers who left OpenAI to go to Meta have actually said, like, "We didn't receive that offer." It looks like those really, really high numbers are going to, you know, if they are accurate, are just being offered to a very select few, kind of high-level talent. But right now, we could just kind of have the word of these two roaring executives. And there's a lot of speculation around them, too. You know, some people feel like Sam Altman has a reason to come out and say this crazy high number, because then if Meta tries to poach other talent and they're just getting $50 million, maybe that person then feels slighted.

• 13:25Speaker 08

  And so, but I do think it's fair to say that OpenAI, you know, is nervous in this moment. They do feel like competing against Meta purely from a compensation perspective isn't a viable option for a private company. Meta is public. It has an enormous amount that it can offer people from a financial perspective. And it's hard for OpenAI to compete purely from that POV.

• 13:52Speaker 09

  Do you think it says anything about Meta that they have to offer packages that big to steal talent? Is that a worthy price for talent of this caliber? Or is it kind of about having to sweeten the deal to get talent to join Meta?

• 14:09Speaker 08

  That's a really good question. And I think there's two things going on. I think that on one level, it's almost symbolic. It's Mark Zuckerberg saying, "This is my number one priority. I am personally reaching out to recruit people. I am offering as much as we possibly can to get this talent over to Meta, because this initiative is so important. It's really almost existential for the future of the company." On the other hand, I talked to some people at OpenAI who kind of joked, "Yeah, it would take about that much money for me to want to join Meta." I think there are a lot of people in the research community who... Really like being at a small lab where they can move fast and be nimble.

• 14:53Speaker 08

  There's not a lot of bureaucracy and they feel like the entire organization is set up around the research, which is not, has not historically been the case at Meta. And so I think that there's a bit of a, um, a brand issue that Mark Zuckerberg is having to combat, um, and he's doing so, it seems, with money.

• 15:12Speaker 09

  Do you think Meta's buying spree will pay off? Can they buy a win in the AI race?

• 15:18Speaker 08

  Uh, no. I mean, my opinion is that, no, I think you can buy a lot. Like, I think money goes a long way, but I think they're going to have to match that with creating, I mean, not to like shill for Sam Altman out here, but like creating a culture of innovation. You can have those very, very talented people, but we all know talented people who have been in an environment where they weren't able to be successful. And I think in order for them to be successful, Meta is going to need to be willing to take risks. And they're going to have to be really research focused while at the same time pairing that with products, AI products that people really want to use. And that, those are hard things to, to do, you know?

• 16:03Speaker 08

  Meta, I think for the past many, many years, hasn't necessarily been a company that we think of as particularly innovative at its core, although it's been quite savvy in kind of acquiring other innovative companies. You know, whether you can then bring those people in and make them successful, I think, remains to be seen.

• 16:25Ed Elson?

  So the question Claire raised there, which I think is an important one, is can Meta buy its way to success? Can Mark Zuckerberg buy his way to success? And that is an interesting question, but if you look at the history of Meta, if you look at what they've done in the past, I think you will find the answer is yes. The only difference is that today, they're not buying companies. Today, they're buying people.

• 16:51Ed Elson?

  After the break, an update on the big, beautiful bill. Stay with us.

• 17:00Speaker 00

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• 17:10Speaker 01

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• 18:01Speaker 03

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• 18:34Ed Elson?

  We're back with Prof G Markets. The race to pass the big, beautiful bill continues with Republican senators working around the clock to answer to Trump's July 4th deadline. By the time you hear this, the Senate may have already passed the bill back to the House. We're recording this Monday evening. We've talked at length about this bill, how it will increase the deficit, how it will make these cuts to Medicaid, how the proposed tax cuts will, put simply, make the rich richer and the poor poorer. I don't think we need to relitigate these issues. But seeing as the full bill was released to the public just after midnight. Night on Friday over the weekend, we thought it would be interesting to take a look at one of the major surprises that is hidden in the bill.

• 19:15Ed Elson?

  Specifically, one that has the potential to reshape the future of energy in America, which, as Scott and I discussed in yesterday's episode, is a very precarious situation. As I highlighted, the US is producing less than half of the electricity that China produces. And 15 years ago, those numbers were roughly equal. So if you believe that energy is core to prosperity and also geopolitical power, then you'd probably want to put your foot on the gas when it comes to investing in energy. And that might mean an acceleration in fossil fuel investment. We know Trump's a big fan of that, drill, baby, drill. But also renewable energy investment, because regardless of your opinions on climate change, the reality is

• 19:59Ed Elson?

  we're going to run out of oil. That is just a fact, and we therefore should probably be weaning ourselves off of it. So it might concern you that one of the biggest losers in this new bill is renewable energy. According to Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, who, by the way, you'll hear from in a moment, this is, quote, "how you kill an industry." Tax credits for renewable energy will be eliminated by 2027. That is expected to reduce wind and solar investment by 72%. It could also result in a net loss of nearly a half a trillion dollars in renewable capital investment. Meanwhile, there is a new provision, which says that any new wind or solar project that doesn't

• 20:41Ed Elson?

  fully disentangle its supply chain from China will face new excise taxes. For solar, the excise tax is 30%, for wind, it's 50%. Now, you might think, okay, that's fine. We're trying to lower dependence on China, and I would agree with that. The trouble is, though. Because of our historical lack of renewable investment, we are at this point so intertwined with China that by implementing these taxes, in addition to cancelling the clean energy credits, we will, on most accounts, be killing clean energy in America. According to Jason Grummet, CEO of the American Clean Power Association, the new provision is, quote, "so carelessly written and haphazardly drafted

• 21:26Ed Elson?

  that the concern is it will create uncertainty and freeze the markets." Elon Musk, meanwhile, put it differently. He said the new bill is, quote, "utterly insane and destructive, and it gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging the future." We wanted to understand more about what this bill will do, especially in terms of energy and renewables. So we spoke with Bob Keefe, Executive Director of E2, a nonpartisan business group.

• 21:51Speaker 10

  Well, look, if we ever wanted a plan to kill jobs, to turn away business investments in America, to reduce energy supplies and make our country less competitive in the global marketplace, this is it. This is that plan because it will do all of those things. You know, as you mentioned, not only does this eliminate tax credits that really have driven the biggest economic expansion in recent generations in this country, it adds taxes to the energy supplies that last year provided more than 90% of all energy added to the grid, AKA solar, wind and batteries. This would levy a new tax on the power that's the cheapest and the fastest to deploy.

• 22:33Speaker 10

  And that currently accounts for about 90% of all the energy that utilities are putting on the grid.

• 22:40Speaker 09

  I've seen some Republicans make the argument that if removing subsidies can kill your industry, then maybe that industry shouldn't exist in the first place. What would your response be to that argument?

• 22:53Speaker 10

  Well, if that was the case, we should have killed the subsidies for oil and gas that have been around for 100 years. But that doesn't make sense because we need oil and gas right now. We need energy right now. And this is investing in American energy. America invests in a lot of things: roads, schools, healthcare, what have you, because it's fundamental to our economy. Energy is fundamental to our economy. And again, right now... The vast majority of energy that that is being added to the grid is solar, wind, and batteries. By the way, this also has the added effect of creating jobs, driving economic growth,

• 23:38Speaker 10

  including a whole lot of it in the Republican states and districts where these lawmakers are trying to kill the very bill that's bringing new opportunities to their to their communities. You know, my organization for the past three years now has been tracking clean energy project announcements around the country since the passage of these tax policies with the Inflation Reduction Act. What we know is that businesses have invested more than $130 billion into more than 400 factories and other projects where we're now building solar panels we don't have to buy from China, where we're building batteries to store the energy that we can produce from

• 24:19Speaker 10

  the sun and the wind and use it overnight, electric vehicles that are re-energizing, if you will, the the the transportation industry. Three years, $130 billion worth of business investments, 400 factories, 120,000 jobs, all of those now are at risk.

• 24:37Speaker 09

  Well, it looks like the bill will pass, so if this provision makes it in, what can we expect for the clean energy industry?

• 24:45Speaker 10

  We know that these project cancellations will continue. We've already heard from major manufacturers of everything from cars to to wind turbines to say that and solar panels for that matter, to say that, look, if this happens, we're going to have to scale back, we're going to have to put our plans on the shelves, and and we're going to take our investments to other countries. So we know that's happening. We also know, again, what the electricity demand is like and the forecast for the future, and there's absolutely no way that we'll be able to meet those demands without a robust growth in solar batteries and wind.

• 25:26Speaker 10

  And, OK, we can say, sure, well, let's build nuclear plants to to to produce that. Fine, guess what? That's going to take about 15 years. We're talking about meeting demand tomorrow. Well, let's build natural gas plants, you know, quote unquote, "natural gas plants." OK, that's fine. You can't get a gas turbine right now for five years, maybe seven years. And by the way, if you build a a gas plant or a nuclear plant... The amount of energy that you would produce in a typical gas or nuclear plant, you can produce it with solar or wind and batteries. And you can do it for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time. You can build the equivalent of a solar power plant with battery storage and wind in about a year, year and a half right now.

• 26:11Speaker 10

  If you wanted to do that in a gas plant, it'd take you five to seven years. If you wanted to do it in a nuclear plant, it would take you 15 to 20 years. And a whole hell of a lot more money to do it, which means higher cost to consumers.

• 26:26Ed Elson?

  That was Bob Keefe, Executive Director of E2. In sum, yes, we do need more energy. And yes, we do need more renewable energy, especially if we are to compete with China. And this bill, by the looks of it, completely undermines America's ability to do that. So we'll be watching this throughout the week. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for listening to Prof G Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Ed Elson. I'll see you tomorrow.

• 26:55Ed Elson?

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