(Preview) Meta’s Plans to Spend $135 Billion, The ‘AI Bubble’ Bubble?, Why Hyperscalers Should NOT Invest in TSMC

Unpacking the latest round of Meta earnings, including Wall Street’s about-face after last year’s CapEx squeamishness, whether Zuckerberg’s astronomical CapEx plans are more evidence he yearns to be more than an app maker, why Meta owes a thank you to Apple, Apple and Meta in the AI era, and a word about Instagram messages. Then: Are we in an “AI is a Bubble” bubble? Thoughts on mass adoption among software makers, demand that looks insatiable, product managers vs. engineers, and the era of perfect competition among employees. From there: Why hyperscalers should not solve the CapEx problem by co-investing in TSMC, why Ben sympathizes with TSMC, and a note on Samsung. At the end: Andrew shares his experience with Bucks-Lakers in the Vision Pro and reviews Ben’s takes.

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

• 0:00Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

• 0:08Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing? Are you surviving winter out there?

• 0:20Ben Thompson?

  I'm feeling pretty touched right now, actually. I warned you before we came on that my voice is not right. It was much worse. I just recorded dithering. It was much worse there. I sort of just, just woken up. But you're, you know, you expressed your sympathy, concern, winter. And then you jumped on. I think your voice sounds terrible, too.

• 0:39Andrew Sharp?

  My voice isn't in a great place either, you know? 'Tis the season.

• 0:43Ben Thompson?

  You made it sound bad for me. That's great. Oh, yeah, this might be a rough listen. Hopefully the content's good because the sound quality, but the sound generation capabilities appear to be quite low on both sides.

• 0:54Andrew Sharp?

  There you go. So with that caveat and/or warning out of the way, we can dive into the news of the day. We're going to start with Sir Teckery's bread and butter here, Ben. A little company out there in Menlo Park. I will read from Bloomberg who wrote this week. Meta's better-than-expected sales outlook helped ease Wall Street concerns about plans for unprecedented spending on artificial intelligence this year. The social networking giant topped projections for the holiday quarter revenue and gave a strong forecast for the current period during its earnings report on Wednesday. And then later in the story, they write, Meta projected record spending for 2026,

• 1:36Andrew Sharp?

  driven by Mark Zuckerberg's aggressive campaign to amass the infrastructure, computing power, and talent that he deems necessary to win a competitive AI race. Zuckerberg has said his strategy centers on front-loading computing capacity in preparation for reaching the company's goal of superintelligence. A theoretical milestone.

• 1:58Ben Thompson?

  What are you laughing about?

• 2:00Andrew Sharp?

  They have to add that it's a theoretical milestone, at which point AI can meet or outperform humans at many tasks.

• 2:08Ben Thompson?

  So much for being a neutral sort of arbiter.

• 2:11Andrew Sharp?

  I'm sort of giving away the game here. To get there, Meta is spending aggressively. The company estimated that full-year capital expenditures will be between $115 billion and $135 billion at the upper limit. So. It's now time to play the most dangerous game. What is Wall Street thinking reacting to these earnings? Why do investors like these results? And up to $135 billion in projected capex this year? After getting squeamish in the middle of last year's $72 billion AI spending? What do you think?

• 2:49Ben Thompson?

  I don't know. That's a good question. It's pretty interesting because last quarter, I thought, once again, Wall Street totally overreacted. And this quarter, it's like an overreaction in the opposite direction. So last quarter was, I think, a very actually impressive quarter from Meta. They, you know, they delivered increased, impressions increased for reasons that I sort of identified back in Q2. They clearly can increase engagement. And they can increase ad load and both seem to be happening. And they didn't really cop to the second one last summer.

• 3:30Ben Thompson?

  They did this, uh, this earnings call, which I thought was very interesting. And you could argue that's actually a very bullish signal for Meta's business. You could absolutely make the case based on the last six months. That Meta has been under monetized throughout its entire history. Uh, you know, I remember back in, you know, for a long time, they just sort of got growth for free. As more people joined social, joined Facebook and, you know, then Instagram came along. And, you know, I made this point last summer. Investors for ages gave them insufficient credit for how organic their growth was.

• 4:07Ben Thompson?

  And so it was not just sort of the, such that they underestimated the extent to which the entire world was Facebook's audience and would grow into that. And by the way, was never shrinking, is still growing, uh, even its sort of old properties. But also every time they would introduce these new inventory surfaces, that was a huge opportunity to increase ads even more. Whether that be stories or reels or sort of whatever, whatever it might be. And the concern I expressed, I think a year, year and a half ago, is where's the new inventory going to come from? Right? Like, yes, this Meta AI thing could be a thing. It could be an app that people use. But it wasn't like a Reels or a Stories thing where there's this obvious new format with

• 4:50Andrew Sharp?

  There's a limit to how much they can grow the monetization pie in that scenario was at least the concern.

• 4:56Ben Thompson?

  No, it's just like back in the day, Stories clearly worked. So of course they would get money from ads. Reels clearly worked, so of course they would get money from ads. Does Meta AI work?

• 5:10Andrew Sharp?

  Well, no, I know.

• 5:11Ben Thompson?

  And is it a good advertising surface? So like, I mean, these were, I was, I think it was fair to be somewhat skeptical.

• 5:20Ben Thompson?

  It turns out that Meta does have more inventory available, which is all their existing products. They can shove that many more ads into.

• 5:29Andrew Sharp?

  Exactly. That's what we've learned. We've also learned that they can do that without bleeding users because engagement is up. I mean, it really does underscore how dominant the company is.

• 5:40Ben Thompson?

  They're increasing engagement. Now, of course, they want you to believe that both of these are downstream from AI and investments. And they're not wrong. They do have new recommendation capabilities. They do have new ad, sort of this ad model, pretty this one called Gem, that is sort of, it's not, it's not an LM per se. It is similar to LM. There's aspects of it that are transformer based. And the key part of that is it does scale. Like you throw more compute at it, it gets better, which is great. Like if you're like, and that is like a core validation of the thesis that Meta should be spending more on compute because there's a direct link between spending more on compute and getting better ads. I don't think that takes 135 billion dollars.

• 6:26Andrew Sharp?

  It's like, can you actually solve that without spending 130 billion dollars? Yeah. Well, and it seems like what Wall Street is doing is buying this story that the spending to date, 72 billion dollars last year is accretive to the core businesses.

• 6:41Ben Thompson?

  They grew 26% last quarter, which again, I think last quarter is more impressive than this quarter. This quarter they do 24%. It was actually less. And they had more of a currency advantage this quarter. Next quarter, they're talking about growing 30% or as much as 30%. I think it's 26 to 30%. Again, that's with a sort of 4% or 400 basis points of that is from currency. You know, the US dollar weakening, but. That's on a debate on a $200 billion company. That's incredible. That's like their best growth in like five years. So that more than anything, I suspect undergirds why suddenly everyone's piling back into Meta. And this is part of the meta pattern.

• 7:20Ben Thompson?

  They continually surprise Wall Street and surprise investors with their ability to grow from ever larger basis. Every time this happens and they show these incredible growth numbers, it's off of a base that is dramatically larger than the last time there was a crisis, right? And so the, I think this fits.

• 7:40Andrew Sharp?

  So every 18 months, people say, oh, it turns out that's actually a pretty good business.

• 7:45Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, it's more like three to four years. But yes, it happened. It happened with stories. It happened with reels and now it's happening with, actually, we can just shove ads everywhere as much as we want.

• 7:54Andrew Sharp?

  So. Yeah. And there's nobody that can touch us. Our users aren't going anywhere. So it's all really, really impressive. What did you think of the results, though? And the idea, I mean, I was struck by a note in your daily update on Thursday. Almost the entire free cash flow that Meta has is going to go to AI CapEx in 2026.

• 8:15Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, my takeaway is it's actually underappreciated the extent to which Mark Zuckerberg is burning the boats, as it were. Like, I think, I don't know that people have fully accepted or internalized the implication of this spend. How do they come up with 135 billion at the top end? I actually think it's pretty simple. 135 billion is how much free cash flow they're projected to have this year. And so we're talking about putting basically every single dollar of cash they have towards buying data centers and chips and all the sorts of things that go into that. And to put that in context, a few years ago, they were spending, I don't have the number in front of me, but I'll say 12, 15 billion dollars sort of in CapEx.

• 9:00Ben Thompson?

  The increase from like three years ago to this year's projected number is basically more than they've lost in Reality Labs over the last 13 years. This supposed albatross where they're spending all this money. So Reality Labs, which is like this symbol of Meta sort of excess and Mark Zuckerberg like on a lark and fine, if he keeps turning out results, we'll let him spend money, is a footnote compared to the amount of money they are projecting to spend. And that is, yeah, what it, what it is, is, it was this earnings call, actually, I think I might have literally laughed. I laugh at very stupid things because I'm a business nerd. But the very first analyst question is, can you

• 9:45Ben Thompson?

  give us some examples of how you expect to get a return on invested capital over the next three, five, 10 years?

• 9:50Andrew Sharp?

  This was my favorite part of your daily update, just for the record.

• 9:53Ben Thompson?

  And Mark Zuckerberg, he's like, no.

• 9:56Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, exactly. It's like a paragraph long no from Mark Zuckerberg.

• 10:02Ben Thompson?

  Right. I appreciate the honesty. After, like, it was very honest, the part that I quoted. There was another, like, few hundred words. Oh, my voice is fading. You can hear it.

• 10:11Andrew Sharp?

  I can't wait to see how it holds up over 90 minutes here.

• 10:14Ben Thompson?

  Of him actually then trying to come up with examples of stuff they might do. But it was appropriately, should be appropriately taken with a grain of salt. The grain of salt that Mark Zuckerberg is like that meme, remember the salt guy meme of the guy like just flinging salt? That was Mark Zuckerberg at the beginning of this answer, basically.

• 10:33Andrew Sharp?

  Flinging, yeah.

• 10:34Ben Thompson?

  Everything I say should be taken with a grain of salt and let me throw the salt on the, on the steak for you because you're gonna need a lot of it.

• 10:42Andrew Sharp?

  Well, we got a question from Adam that tracks with some of my instinctive skepticism that I gave away when I was reading the Bloomberg article. So Adam says, Ben, in your update Thursday, I would have liked some discussion of whether Zuckerberg ought to come to terms with the idea of being just an app or a set of apps. I'm skeptical of Meta's right to win in Gen AI even as a capability. Isn't all the ad revenue just funding Zuck's ongoing yearning to be more than a set of apps? What do you think of that?

• 11:16Ben Thompson?

  I do think it continues to be underrated and underappreciated. The extent to which Apple saved Meta from itself, saved Mark Zuckerberg from himself. People forget the Facebook platform, like the idea that we're going to be this place for other apps and we have Facebook credits and Farmville and all these sorts of things that was sort of the stated goal and what the company was doing and what happened was the phone comes along, they under invest in it and they actually try this HTML5 sort of app approach that would theoretically give them more flexibility to do this sort of stuff in the future and got killed for it and then in 2012 or 2013, they just restart everything, redo the app, it's going to be a great app on a phone.

• 12:01Ben Thompson?

  And as an app on the phone, you don't get to be a platform. The phone is the platform. You don't get to do a platform on top of a platform, not just because of Apple's policies, which are certainly part of it. But also because you're dealing with a 3.5 inch screen, what are you going to actually do with it? And the reality is, is that forced Facebook into their advertising business, which is incredible. And I pointed this out way back in 2013 when I first started. I think I wrote an article, "Mobile Makes Facebook Just an App", like basically state making this case, like Facebook's being saved from themselves. And what was incredible even back then, and it's only being extended, like this point is, you know, is a good point because it's 100, it's even more true today in 2026, it directly ties to these results.

• 12:46Ben Thompson?

  I pointed out back in 2013 that what is incredible from a business perspective about Facebook is that they somehow have gotten permission of users to continually show them full screen ads.

• 13:01Andrew Sharp?

  Yep.

• 13:01Ben Thompson?

  Like you scroll the feed and for some fraction of time, every single pixel on this device in your hand on which you're focused is an ad.

• 13:09Andrew Sharp?

  Is an ad, yeah.

• 13:09Ben Thompson?

  And actually users preferred it and liked it and responded to it dramatically better than they did like the banner ad idea.

• 13:17Andrew Sharp?

  Inline advertising on newspapers, yeah, totally.

• 13:20Ben Thompson?

  Like the banner ads were actually, this is a great example of how people think about these. Things so wrong and what actually happens can completely upset your assumptions. People would think, oh, the banner ads, at least then they can see their content and they're not so bothered by like this. It's like the negative view of advertising, I think is is persistent. People are like ashamed of advertising. It's like, well, just put it on the side. We're not going to bother you too much, but can you look over here? Like this is basically the newspaper industry in a nutshell. And what Meta achieved, Facebook back then achieved with the feed and Apple forcing them into the constraint of a 3.5 inch screen. Is they figured out how to actually not tiptoe around ads, but shove them in your face.

• 14:02Ben Thompson?

  To the extent that people weren't bothered and they actually liked it.

• 14:06Andrew Sharp?

  It's really true. As a user, it is a preferable experience to see a full screen ad and then go back to the full screen content. As opposed to seeing.

• 14:16Ben Thompson?

  It's all content. That's the thing. It's all content.

• 14:20Andrew Sharp?

  That's true. Well, and the Instagram ads are good content.

• 14:23Ben Thompson?

  Well, this is what happened last quarter. Last quarter basically was a re-validation of the point I made in 2013. It it it not only are the ads way better now because they're all video and they're sort of immersive and you can click through, do all these things you couldn't do back then. But actually, we have way more capacity to shove this in people's faces than we thought we did.

• 14:45Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Ben Thompson?

  We could put more ads taking over the full screen. And by the way, now it's not like a scroll and you're going past it. It's like a whole video that's locked with your with your to real and you flick and it's going through a video and you're like, wow, I just spent 20 seconds watching an ad. When when actually it was totally in my control to skip it the whole time, but the ad was compelling and interesting. And actually, I kind of want to buy this thing. Like it's it's this remains underrated and I think it remains underrated by Facebook itself. They like they are insufficiently grateful to Apple for forcing them to do what they didn't want to do. Now, I think they have much more valid points later on, like we've talked about ATT. I think that what Apple does in terms of APIs for devices where they favor their own stuff is is clearly problematic.

• 15:28Ben Thompson?

  And for particularly for a company trying to build a device business. But overall, in the grand dark of Facebook, if I. The Facebook story.

• 15:35Andrew Sharp?

  Facebook, not Facebook without Apple.

• 15:37Ben Thompson?

  Apple is arguably the most important company to their success, which they will never, ever want to admit.

• 15:44Andrew Sharp?

  Well, and look, in terms of what Facebook slash Meta is now trying to do in AI. The reason I'm skeptical and the reason I identify with some of the questions that Adam is asking, like, I'm not a meta investor and so far be it from me to tell Mark Zuckerberg how to spend $135 billion. But on its face, Meta's AI strategy, it looks like a business that's been sketched on the back of a napkin where.

• 16:12Ben Thompson?

  No, that's the only business at all. I think you're actually giving them too much credit. But here's, here's sort of the defense of it.

• 16:18Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 16:18Ben Thompson?

  If you truly believe that AI is a total paradigm shifter.

• 16:23Andrew Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:24Ben Thompson?

  And that everything that, yes, will look back on the smartphone, the smartphone will still be around, like the PC is still around. Not actually pertinent to the way people interact in the future. And, you know, this idea of just in time AI, whether it be D'Arvia glasses or, or little handheld devices or earpieces or, or whatever it might be.

• 16:45Andrew Sharp?

  You'll need the infrastructure, you'll need the muscle groups.

• 16:47Ben Thompson?

  You'll need to have actually. That's right. And it's actually interesting. The contrast between Meta and Apple right now is extremely striking.

• 16:59Andrew Sharp?

  No kidding?

• 17:00Ben Thompson?

  Apple has basically abandoned this, their outsourcing to, to Google. Like John Gruber and Detering just pointed out, like you go back to the, the Tim Cook doctrine. One of the core things is we have to own and control the technologies that are like critical to our business.

• 17:18Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 17:19Ben Thompson?

  Apple is basically either giving up on that doctrine or stating that AI isn't actually going to be that big of a deal in terms of disrupting their core business. Which by the way, all might be true, right? Like, like maybe they could just rent AI all on, that's right.

• 17:35Andrew Sharp?

  Right? And it's fascinating to me watching Meta because we've kind of raked Apple over the coals for its complacency over the last two and a half years. Even as every conversation does include the caveat, this might be smart, but it's less interesting from a technology standpoint.

• 17:53Ben Thompson?

  Right. So, so that's why I'm going to push back on you laughing at this. Like if you actually, if you want, if you're going to rake apple over the coals, shouldn't you be lauding Mark Zuckerberg?

• 18:03Andrew Sharp?

  Well.

• 18:03Ben Thompson?

  Basically saying, we are going to push and squeeze our core business and we're not going to dilly-dally around. We're actually going to take every single dollar from our existing business and put it into being competitive and controlling our own destiny in the future.

• 18:22Andrew Sharp?

  Totally. You interrupted me before I could say, actually, I've come to respect Apple's stance more. When I look at what Meta is doing, because I look at the napkin and it says, Capex plus super intelligence equals profit is basically what I'm taking away from a lot of what Mark Zuckerberg has had to say over the last year or so. And I find myself sitting here being like, all right, so what's the product and why is that product going to be differentiated from any of the companies that are already dominating in this space? And I think one argument is that performance will be correlated to compute and the infrastructure that you have. And so they'll eventually take the lead that way or get near the top that way. But they seem to be operating from the assumption

• 19:06Andrew Sharp?

  that none of their present day advantages will matter in an AI dominated future, which itself is a pretty speculative premise. And it's why a lot of this is such a fascinating bet from Zuckerberg.

• 19:20Ben Thompson?

  I'd push back on that. I, I actually think it is a defense of Meta's spending that AI, even as it is today, has tremendous upsides for their business. I wrote this, uh, two years ago that like Meta should be the biggest beneficiary of this. We talked about like ad, generating ads just in time or the better targeting. Or in the long run, every single pixel on Instagram should be monetizable. Like it should be content, then you go to an ad, no, everything should be an ad. Like basically that is viable, like with the technology as it exists today. You can identify everything on screen. You could link it to something else. You could have a buy, like when I. Right now, I take a screenshot of our podcast, I'm looking at you, I'm like, what kind of mic does Andrew have?

• 20:05Ben Thompson?

  I should be able to click on that.

• 20:06Andrew Sharp?

  Buy that, yeah.

• 20:07Ben Thompson?

  I should be able to buy that, like, and that should be monetizable, like, like, there's no reason, given technology as exists right now, that that couldn't be done. So Meta, more than any other company, we talk about the product overhang of the model capabilities and all the things that could be built, just given what exists today, never mind what might exist in the future. I actually buy the case that.

• 20:26Andrew Sharp?

  I do too, I just don't know, you, I don't know that you need to spend a hundred and thirty billion dollars to get there, do you?

• 20:32Ben Thompson?

  But why not? Like, so, we're talking about AIs that exist today, what is AI gonna look like in two to three to four years? And if you're not investing today, then all you're doing is making it that much further and falling, and falling behind. Like, I guess my defense of this is, what do you want them to save the money for?

• 20:51Andrew Sharp?

  Uh, that's a good question too. Again, I'm not, I'm not a Meta shareholder, and this makes for more interesting podcasting. But I'm just not sure where the money leads, I think is a fair question to ask at this point, given the lack of clarity from Meta and Zuckerberg.

• 21:05Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, but if, if it was super clear, again, I do think there's real things in terms of the current business, so I, I, I think you're actually.

• 21:15Ben Thompson?

  Yes, we laughed at his, sort of, I don't, you know, I'm not gonna give you a clear answer here. But he did say in the answer, it'll benefit our current business, and I do think that's super clear. Actually, if anything, I think he understates this. And I would argue doesn't fully understand this, in part because one of my critiques of Zuckerberg is, he doesn't really like ads either.

• 21:36Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Ben Thompson?

  And, uh, doesn't fully understand or think about the potential there. Like, I, I feel I am much more enthusiastic about Meta ads than Mark Zuckerberg is, which is kind of a problem.

• 21:45Andrew Sharp?

  I mean, you could go back to.

• 21:46Ben Thompson?

  Advocate for them.

• 21:47Andrew Sharp?

  You're enthusiastic about all the AI opportunities, going back to the interview with Zuckerberg about a year ago, year and a half ago.

• 21:53Ben Thompson?

  Right, well, I, I think this ad angle in particular, I think he could actually sell this much better, if he was deeper into and cared more about ads. Because I just think the opportunity here is astronomical, like, just again, with LLMs as they are, and Facebook inventory as it is. Like, I just think, like, and you look now, what, uh, yes, there is an aspect of their growth that is from shoving more ads in front of people. But number one, you get away with that because your recommendation gets so good that people don't mind. And also, just they talk about like 1% increase, 5% increase. That level of increase in terms of effectiveness and targeting and quick throughs on a $200 billion

• 22:37Ben Thompson?

  business is astronomical. Like, like, so like, these, these are very real gains that they are achieving today. And I think it's completely legitimate. When they talk about building new targeting built around L M's, which is basically what they're saying is we can understand the content. And then I went, oh, and we're going to build new ones where you can go back further in people's history to understand what what is interesting to them. That's about increasing context windows and like understanding all the stuff that's going on. All this is totally legitimate. These are legitimate arguments. And I actually think my critique of Zuckerberg is he doesn't make these arguments well enough because he doesn't care. I think Mark Zuckerberg just wants to control the future

• 23:18Ben Thompson?

  technology, which he believes is AI. And it's working out because that is going, he has smart people who do care about ads and and build them out. But, you know, at least he's better than like, you know, OpenAI in that he accepts the reality of ads and lets those people do what they need to

• 23:36Andrew Sharp?

  do. Right. We do need money in order to sell any of this. That makes sense.

• 23:40Ben Thompson?

  Right. So, yeah, so I, so I do think the future opportunity is real. But why do you need, you know, this is, I guess, the critical thing.

• 23:47Andrew Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:48Ben Thompson?

  You want, let's take consider regulation.

• 23:51Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 23:52Ben Thompson?

  You love regulation, I don't.

• 23:54Andrew Sharp?

  This depends on the regulation, for the record. A lot of bad EU regulation out there, but sure.

• 23:59Ben Thompson?

  What is my core concern with regulation?

• 24:03Andrew Sharp?

  Um, the core concern, drawing on about 50 different Sharp Tech episodes over the last couple of years, the core concern with regulation is that it stifles innovation and we don't, we fail to account for the products we don't see and the businesses we don't see in an overregulated environment. Is that right?

• 24:25Ben Thompson?

  Excellent. Great job. A plus for you. You know, it's always tricky at the end of the semester. You're tired, worn down, and you have your final and you're a little sick.

• 24:35Andrew Sharp?

  No, no.

• 24:35Ben Thompson?

  Can you actually come through in the clutch? Can you come through in the clutch?

• 24:39Andrew Sharp?

  That's what the Starbucks is for.

• 24:40Ben Thompson?

  And give the right answer, and you did it. I'm extremely proud of you.

• 24:43Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 24:44Ben Thompson?

  So the point is, it's a hard argument to be on the anti-regulatory side because on the pro-regulatory side, you get to point to actual harms that happen. And on the anti-regulatory side, you have to point to things that didn't happen, that were foreclosed. Which by definition, you don't actually know what they are. And that's what is so frustrating and also concerning. You don't actually, we don't actually have a measure of everything that didn't happen. And it could be actually way larger than we think it might have been. And but then, but then people like you who want more laws, they're like, well, give me an example. Give me, what is it, huh?

• 25:26Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 25:26Ben Thompson?

  But that's what you're doing to Facebook and AI. That's what you're doing to Facebook and AI, right? So there, there is an aspect of the more transformative that you think AI is, almost by definition, the less you can say what the transformative aspects are going to be. Simply because what is possible in the future wasn't even imaginable previously. And so if you're, I have sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg in that he clearly believes this is that level of transformative. He believes to the extent they're going to spend every single dollar of free cash flow they have.

• 26:04Ben Thompson?

  But implied in that level of belief is that we're pursuing things that are definitionally impossible to say what they are because that's how transformative this technology is.

• 26:17Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 26:18Ben Thompson?

  Now, maybe an insane perspective for a public company CEO, but that's the whole point of having founder control.

• 26:25Andrew Sharp?

  Like, so I, I respect where he's coming from. I do think Adam nailed it, that Zuck at his core is a technologist and a dreamer, and he feels like this is the next big thing, and he wants Meta to be at the center of it. And it's his company, so it's his prerogative to spend. I just am not sure it's an existential concern to the extent you need to spend every last dollar.

• 26:48Ben Thompson?

  I know, but, but, but the point where you validate whether it's existential or not is too late. Like that's what Apple's that like we're running an experiment.

• 26:57Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 26:57Ben Thompson?

  Let's let's let's schedule our podcast for 2036 and see who was right. Apple or Meta.

• 27:05Andrew Sharp?

  And I think ultimately my skepticism here is a vote of confidence in the moat that Meta has with Instagram and Facebook and how durable those businesses are going to be even in a paradigm shifted environment 10 years from now. But maybe I haven't read enough Dario essays to fully internalize the revolution that's coming for all of us. Who can say? All right. And that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharp tech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle. Check it out.

• 27:50Andrew Sharp?

  And if you've got feedback, please email us at email at sharp tech.fm.