Anthropic的2万亿美元IPO、Zuck的AI宣言、Nvidia的5000亿美元AI押注、Grok王者归来

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the All-In Podcast, the number one podcast in the world. David Sacks and Gavin Baker are with us this week. We got a short crew, but a long docket, and we're going to rock it. How are you doing, Gavin? Nice to see you.

Fantastic.

Are you still in that SpaceX afterglow? This is the biggest win of your career, correct?

You know, SpaceX was a magical moment. There's only one SpaceX, but—to quote Bill Belichick—“It's on to Cincinnati.”

Yep.

And there's a lot, I think, ahead for SpaceX, so the SpaceX story isn't over.

Yeah, and you're only as good as your last investment in our business, I guess. Everybody's like, “What now?” Sacks, you're back. How are you doing, brother? How's the summer wrapping up for you?

Good. I'm looking forward to talking to Gavin.

Oh, fantastic. I'll try to stay out of the way—

And putting up with you.

And not step on you. You missed a really great discussion we had on the All-In Interview Show with your guy, Rahm Emanuel.

How'd that go? I heard it actually got kind of spicy, no?

It got super spicy. Rahm came in full guns blazing, but it's a really great interview, and we'll take anybody who wants to do the interview show who's running in 2028. Did you catch it, Gavin, by chance? Did you catch it?

I haven't watched it yet.

Okay, got it in the queue? Beautiful.

Of course.

And basically, the verdict on Rahm is that he's kind of a throwback to the Clinton-Obama DNC.

I think if you were thinking of a Clinton moderate—

Which means he has no chance whatsoever in the Mamdani DSA Democrat Party.

This is the great irony. It's a very similar moment, I think, to what happened in your Republican Party, where you had this sort of civil war internally, and I'm hoping the moderates have a chance here. But who knows what's going to happen with these lunatic Democratic socialists? We don't have too much of that.

Did he have a take on that—their takeover—

Yeah, I mean, he—

The Democratic Party?

He—I’d say, first of all, he's got an incredible amount of experience, having worked for Obama and Clinton, been mayor of Chicago, and been ambassador to Japan, so he was awesome on foreign relations, et cetera. To your point, he thinks it's a hard no on Democratic socialists, and that socialist policies are a road to nowhere. So he went totally hard at it, as hard as you would, Sacks, in fact. Nothing would be greater than having a moderate or more moderate candidate. I think we can all agree on that. So we'll see. We'll see. It's worth checking out.

1. Anthropic Targets Two Trillion

All right, let's get to the docket. Breaking news at the time of this recording. For those of you who don't know, we record on Thursdays and publish on Fridays. Anthropic is targeting a $2 trillion IPO, according to the Financial Times. This would obviously break the record-setting $1.75 trillion IPO by SpaceX. The FT reported Wednesday night that investors expect the company to go public in October, which is 6 to 8 weeks away.

This lines up with the sharps at Polymarket saying there's an 80% chance of Anthropic IPOing this year. Brad Gerstner, our fifth bestie, was also signaling that this would happen sooner rather than later. The annualized run rate, as we talked about a bunch, Sacks, will end the year between $100 billion and $120 billion. This is an extraordinary ramp-up of revenue that we have never seen in Silicon Valley.

At a $2 trillion valuation, you all can do the math, but it's 16 to 20 times sales, which is a fraction of what SpaceX, Palantir, and some of these highly valued stocks went out at. So, pretty interesting revenue growth over the last year: 10X. Anthropic still has AI's top model, but Grok—and we're going to get into it today—is catching up quickly, and OpenAI is not too shabby either. Polymarket says there's a 67% chance that, at the end of the year, Anthropic will have the top model.

Breaking on Thursday, Anthropic is in talks to buy an AI startup called Decart for $6 billion. Its software lowers the cost of AI training and inference by making chips more efficient. I'll stop here. Gavin, if you could comment—and I don't know if you're a shareholder in Anthropic or not—it'd be great to get that out of the way. What's your take on the straight-up revenue ramp we're seeing here, and then what to expect from an IPO?

So, a few things. I'm not currently an Anthropic shareholder. I would say the Anthropic-xAI détente probably came a little too late. I don't generally invest in Elon's competitors. I don't think it's a wise course of action.

That tracks. And the détente was obviously Elon deciding, when he had so much extra compute with Colossus, that he would rent it to Dario and Anthropic.

Absolutely, and I think, more importantly, he got comfortable with Dario's morals and that Dario is a good person. Like all humans, to be human is to err, so maybe he's made some mistakes in the way he's handled government relations. But he got comfortable that his morals were in a good place. As Elon said, “They don't set off my evil detector,” and he has a pretty good evil detector. He famously cut his conversation with SBF short.

So, a couple of things on Anthropic. The rumored numbers are exceptional. We've really never seen anything like this. I still think those moments in April and May were some of the most extraordinary moments in the history of capitalism. What's wild to me is that, probably on the margin, Anthropic is losing share to OpenAI, open source, and Grok, and they're still growing so fast. The numbers are still exceptional. So I think that speaks to the strength of the—

And why is that? This is an important thing for people to understand. The pie is getting ginormous, so even if, on a percentage basis, Anthropic is losing share, the real number—and we talked about open source being dark tokens that aren't tracked anywhere—is growing tremendously. This is a major, major pie-growing moment. That's what you mean there, Gavin?

That's the point. I think AI broadly accelerated in July, which was kind of crazy to contrast with the public stock market action. Now we have a higher-resolution view of what was happening. But a few things on the Anthropic IPO: it's an exceptional business. They've executed really well, and they haven't just executed on the model; their products are amazing.

I always think about Eric Vishria. I don't think you've ever had him on the pod, but I think he'd be a great guest. He's a good friend. He said, as a thought experiment nearly 2 years ago, that he thought OpenAI and Anthropic would still have a lot of value even if they lost at the model layer. The product, the harness, and user familiarity are all so important, and I think there's an element of truth to that.

But as far as the IPO, the first thing I would just say is that the $2 trillion figure makes me a little skeptical. We saw this with SpaceX. If everybody's jockeying to be lead left for Anthropic and you lose that, the first thing you want to do is make whoever's lead left look bad.

Mm.

So you leak to the press and say, “Hey, we're in the room. The bar is a $2 trillion IPO.”

And you said on a previous episode $3 to $4 trillion.

Absolutely, but I think that's probably where it might trade. We haven't seen the S-1. I do think if you're bringing a company out responsibly, like you do, you want to price it in such a way that you can absorb the lockup. You don't want to price it really high and create a lot of volatility. That's very disconcerting for employees, and you do not want anyone distracted at this moment.

So I think they'll price it smartly. Maybe that is $2 trillion; maybe it is $2 trillion and it trades to $3 trillion. You just have to remember these leaks are always coming from the bankers who probably lost lead left, and they want to make lead left look bad. If it comes out at $2 trillion, it probably means that the testing of the waters or the roadshow just went incredibly well, and people do want to own this. We've never seen numbers like this. Something goes up, like—

So are you saying the roadshow probably occurred already, or quietly occurred?

No. No, definitely not. I'm saying—

Definitely not. Oh.

If they price it at $2 trillion, it means—

Ah.

—the testing of the waters went well, the roadshow went well, and they've got a lot of confidence about where it's going to trade.

Okay, I understand.

2. AI Demand Meets Physical Limits

Sacks, in the history of Silicon Valley, you pointed out multiple times here during this podcast in 2026 that we've never seen a revenue ramp like this. Can it continue? And if it does continue, what would that say about the value of AI to corporations and enterprises where Claude is the definitive leader?

Well, I think it can continue, although it is a legitimate question, because if you're ending the year at, let's say, a $100 billion run rate, up 10X-plus year over year.

And by the way, they've grown 10X year over year for the last 3 years. So it's growing exponentially. If that rate of growth were to continue, that'd hit $1 trillion of ARR by the end of next year. Then the question you have to ask is: Is the TAM big enough for that? But also, is there enough compute? Is there enough energy? I think you start to get into physical constraints.

I do think the TAM is big enough. I think the demand is going to be there. There are so many new applications of AI. Agents are just taking off now. You saw that with the launch of Grok Bot. All these other companies are going to keep extending the uses of AI into more and more contexts, so the demand for tokens is going to keep growing exponentially.

I think the question is whether they can physically meet that demand, and then also Gavin's point about market share. Other companies are seeing what they're doing, and they're competing more effectively to take share. Remember, Anthropic made this huge bet on coding, and that ended up being a very prescient bet. I don't know if it was because of ideology—they thought that was the way to get to recursive self-improvement first. I don't know if it was because they saw Cursor—

That's the reason—

…building on top of them.

From our understanding. Yeah. They watched Cursor's utilization.

Right.

And they said, "We're going to take that business."

Right.

And that's such an important note for you to make, Sacks.

So they moved vertically.

Yeah.

Yeah. So they've started moving into verticals where they see their own users building successfully on top of their platform. That was, I think, definitely a signal to them to get into coding. Nonetheless, they got into it first. They got into it very successfully. That led to a boom.

We hear that OpenAI has basically pivoted to coding. They're doing a better job with that now with GPT-5.6. We've heard their growth rate is accelerating. They used to be growing at 3 to 4X a year. I've heard that over the past 2 months, that growth rate is now over 20% month over month, which, if you extrapolate it out over 12 months, would be a 10X growth rate.

Hmm.

So you're now seeing OpenAI growing as fast as Anthropic, having made that pivot. We can talk about whether we think SpaceX AI may be able to get there as well. But in any event, look, I think that regardless of whether Anthropic is able to grow 10X next year, I think they're going to grow very fast, and then the question is just: What does the market share look like relative to their competitors?

And I guess, Gavin, it would be worth double-clicking on 2 points there. The first point: Is there going to be a market for these tokens—

Mm-hmm.

—and can the growth keep up? In other words, is there a demand? I think all 3 of us agree: Yeah, sure, of course there's demand. But the next 2 pieces, which Sacks mentioned, were energy and data centers. That is a question I want you to answer. Can they get to $1 trillion in revenue? Let's slow down here and actually try to do some back-of-the-envelope math. This is your wheelhouse. What would it take in terms of infrastructure for them to go from $100 billion a year in revenue and 10X it, and is that humanly possible in the next year?

A few thoughts. I think they're the right questions. First, internally, Anthropic is very confident. I have been told by multiple people I trust that Dario has said that Anthropic might be the only private company in the world at some point. Think about that. In this vision, an Anthropic maximalist vision, there's Anthropic, and then there are governments, and that's it.

So there's a lot of confidence. I'm sure they have more advanced checkpoints than Fable up their sleeve. They've executed really, really well. I would probably take the under on them being the only private company in the world. I think it's going to be a long time before they land a rocket or they're in—

Or they deliver your lunch.

Space.

I don't know. There might be other businesses in the world. Zipline might want to bring you a burrito. Uber might want to take you somewhere. Waymo might want to drive you home. But sure, Dario.

Well, I might interpret that as a negative signal because it's so hubristic.

Yeah.

This is getting into SBF land a little bit.

Yes. Yeah.

I would certainly discourage Dario from saying that ever again to anyone.

So AI Jesus should not claim that he is AI Jesus. Okay.

Pride cometh before the fall. Yes. Yes.

And that will be a long fall.

But look, I have heard from other people at the company that when they were at about $60 billion of ARR, they thought they could get to $600 billion in 1 year. Meaning, they thought they were on that 10X ramp from the middle of this year. Now they're at over $80 billion, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down.

So I think this is the big question: How fast can they grow next year? Does it go all the way from $100 billion or $120 billion to $1 trillion? If they merely got to $400 billion to $500 billion, that would make them the biggest software company. If they get to $200 billion, that's an amazing outcome.

Yeah. Where does that put them relative to Microsoft's Office franchise or Google's search franchise? We're starting to become a peer to those 2 companies.

Absolutely. Just to break the question down, it's a good question, into demand and supply: Depending on how you count it, there's $25 trillion to $65 trillion in knowledge work. $25 trillion is a number I've used. I was told by the head of the AI institute at one of the 3 largest investment banks that it was way low.

Hmm.

This is the TAM that they're going after today, before we have robotics. Then it's a question of whether it's labor substitution or accelerating growth. Thus far, it really does look like it's accelerating growth. There are more job openings for software coders today than there were a year ago. There's more demand for coders, and that is in the epicenter of the blast zone.

There is some evidence that for very young people coming right out of college—

Yeah.

—maybe there's been a negative impact. But broadly speaking, it has to come from one of those 2. I just think it's better for everyone if it comes from accelerating growth, and these companies are now at a scale where, if it's going to come from accelerating growth, we will start to see that in the national accounts over the next 18 months.

Okay. You want to go to the energy part? Yeah.

Supply.

Yeah.

Yeah. And listen, this is where the rubber meets the proverbial road. The people who build these data centers—the best way to understand it is to go watch that series, Landman. It's like you need Billy Bob Thorntons out there—

Permian Basin time. Bring it on.

…the Permian Basin. You're in the patch; you're actually worried about narcos.

Yes.

It is the tip of the spear. It's 110-degree heat. You have to orchestrate thousands of people in these remote locations.

It's atoms, not bits.

It's atoms, not bits, and it's really, really hard. Now, America is actually really good once we gear up for something like that. America and capitalism are very good at solving those problems.

Everybody talks about the ultimate constraint being these turbine blades, and they're only made in 2 facilities in America and Europe. Each facility is a giant building, and there's a 40-ton press. But now they're running 24-hour shifts.

Necessity is—

Yes.

…in fact, the mother of innovation—

Yeah.

…and nothing like capitalism will make that happen.

We'll solve that.

In fact, Boom Supersonic is making a new jet for supersonic flight. I know Sacks has one on deposit.

Those jets—he's like, "You know what? We're going to build a turbine business first because we have so much demand." And then Elon, I understand there was a news report that he bought a turbine company, and he did it personally because that speaks to me that he just wanted to go fast, right?

On top of that, residuals for private jets are extremely strong these days. A big part of the reason is that people are taking jet engines off old planes and repurposing—

What?

…them as turbines to power data centers, 100%.

That's insane.

It's crazy. This is a big business and growing really, really fast. And then you have Caterpillar, Cummins, GE Vernova, and Siemens Energy.

They are all expanding capacity fast. So I think the supply question—the Billy Bob Thorntons here in America—are going to work with those companies and get these turbines on the ground. It's politics and regulation, and the fact that Texas has kind of announced what I think is probably going to be an—

An energy audit is what you're referring to.

Yeah.

Governor Abbott announced this week he's going to do an energy audit—not that he's going to slow things down, not that there's a moratorium, but that everybody has to go through an energy audit. If you BYOE, you're going to be fine. But if you don't have a solution for that and you want to tap the Texas—the great state of Texas's—grid, you're going to need to maybe pass an audit because we don't want the whole grid going down here, which it does every January when things freeze over.

Yeah. And right now, the narrative on AI is not good. It's that a data center takes all the water because someone made a mistake in a book three years ago, and they're off by, I think, a factor of 100,000 in the amount of water a data center uses, so it's just wrong. They raise your cost of electricity, which is just wrong. They lower your cost of electricity.

I just read a story in The Wall Street Journal about a town called Ellendale where it was a dying town, and a data center got built. It's revitalized the town. Tax revenue is 10x. It's been the best thing that's ever happened. But nobody's telling those stories, and people need to.

I think we've discussed on the show many times that the Chinese Communist Party does have a very active anti-AI, anti-data-center campaign because that's what's good for them and bad for America, and someone needs to tell the truth about AI. One of the best phrases in the Bible is, “The truth shall set you free.”

Yes.

It can't set you free if nobody tells the truth.

Yes.

And, yeah.

Yeah.

The data center panic is a testament to the power of the media to create hoaxes and hysteria over literally nothing. Every single aspect of the data center story is wrong. It's a lie. Like you said, they don't use up a community's water. The water use is quite manageable—less than a golf course. The water recirculates.

It brings down electricity costs, assuming that you have the data center stand up its own power generation, because they will sell the excess back to the grid and pay for grid upgrade costs. The real reason electricity prices are rising in blue states is decarbonization and all the other green-type regulations they have that make power generation more difficult. What are the other accusations? That they—

Well, no, those are—noise—

They create pollution.

I'd say the noise pollution is legitimate, so there's nobody in their right mind—

They don't actually put it in anyone's backyard.

...doing that today.

We have a lot of land in this country.

But people did do that for a bit—

If we just used common sense—

Yes.

...look, you just use common sense and there's no problem. The idea that you have to have a complete ban on data center construction is just silly.

Yes.

And the communities that are embracing them are seeing that they have better schools and better services because they're making—

Mm. Tax incentives.

...a lot of revenue.

Well, and then—

Yes, exactly.

...to your point, Gavin, when entrepreneurs get on something, we're all of a sudden seeing solar, batteries, nuclear, and more clean energy being tapped to power these, and that demand will lower the prices of those services over time. Solar panels will get cheaper, batteries will get cheaper because they're going to be scaled much faster, which is good for humanity. This is basic, folks. It's very basic.

The green stuff can't scale in the short term. It's all gas-powered for the new data centers. That's the only way to get the amount of scale that you need in the next year or two. But in any event, look, I think—

Do you agree with that, Gavin? I think—

I do.

...solar will be viable, but it's obviously not as—

No, no—

...fast as popping up natural gas.

Yeah, I largely agree. I will say Elon is building a $10 billion new solar manufacturing plant in Texas.

For a reason.

My home state.

Yeah.

I think the world will eventually run on sunlight, but we're going to run on natural gas for a while. We have a lot of natural gas in America. It's a clean fuel. It's the greenest carbon fuel.

This media hysteria about data centers is doing such a disservice to low-income Americans, to small-town Americans, and often to minority Americans. It's so good in every way, and the media is doing such a disservice, but no one's taking the other side. Someone needs to take the other side and tell the truth.

Yeah. Well, I don't know who's relying on the media for their facts now, but I think there's a reason why we were number 4 in the world last week: We actually are part of this build-out, and we can explain it to you a little more succinctly.

Noise pollution is an issue. Air pollution is an issue from natural gas. Keep these things far away from people, as Sax—

Yeah.

...just said, and you don't have as much of an issue. There is a minor issue: If you put these at scale in a certain location, you can raise the temperature of that valley, or wherever you put it, a couple of degrees. That's something worth monitoring.

These are all absolutely manageable issues. And if you really want to get obsessed about water, please, for the love of God, stop eating almonds. Maybe the golf course doesn't have to use a billion gallons of water every year.

3. Open Source Threatens Anthropic

I will say, on the demand side and on the pricing side, if you pull up this quick note I have here, I think Anthropic's growth rate is going to slow considerably next year, and it's obviously been on a tear. There's no way they get to a billion in revenue next year. I think maybe they could triple, get to $300 or $400 million, and the reason is—

Watching startups, and also watching some of the large companies now embrace GLM 5.2, and Zuckerberg—which we'll get to in a moment—releasing really great open-source models, you just look at the pricing here of GLM 2 versus Claude Opus, and it is 90% cheaper to use these products.

I'm using them. The founders I invest in are using them, and increasingly, corporate America is going to embrace these solutions. It's just a little bit harder to set them up, and it's coming, folks.

If you think corporate America is not going to embrace open source, you have not been paying attention to the last 20 years, when they did exactly that. Twenty years ago, there was a big argument: “Oh my God, corporate America will never trust open source.” And corporate America said, “We don't want to get rug-pulled or have some large tech corporation hold us hostage for their technology, which they're experts at doing. So open source is the safer bet for us.”

That's what's happening in corporate America today and inside startups. This is going to be very real. Gavin, you're—

This is a larger point. For sure it's good for corporate America. For sure open source is good for the world. For sure it's good for America.

But Dworkash, who's a podcaster and a thoughtful guy close to the AI scene, posted something that really resonated with me. He said, “At the end of the day, Anthropic's AI and its constitution are wired to do what Anthropic thinks is best for humanity.”

Let's take Elon's judgment as gold-plated, and he's right. His don't-be-evil detector did not go off.

Yeah.

And I genuinely believe they're good people who are doing what they think is good for humanity. I actually believe that. The problem is that there are always unintended consequences, and the world is chaotic and unpredictable.

I just think what's great about open source is that it means we're going to have a rich variety of AIs. We're going to have diversity of AIs, and that is a good world for humans in America.

Absolutely.

We do not want 1, 2, or 3 dominant models. And that's why, by the way, I don't want to always talk about Grok, but it's great. I think history will judge Elon kindly for having Grok dedicated to the pursuit of objective truth.

Yeah, talk that book.

Objective truth.

Yeah, talk that book.

Yeah.

You made a—

No.

The whole point, Gavin, is that if you made the bet, that means you used your intelligence and your savvy to pick what you think the winner is. That actually is, I think, super accurate. And I think Elon explicitly believes in open source, and he believes that this is a technology that should be shared for the good of it.

And in fact, that was his first foray into this, which was backing OpenAI.

Yeah.

4. Zuckerberg Champions Decentralized AI

OpenAI’s manifesto was rewritten this week—topic 2—by Mark Zuckerberg, quite paradoxically or ironically, in a 6,500-word essay. It’s titled “The Future Is for Everyone: The Path to a Positive AI Future.”

He laid out an extremely optimistic AI worldview where he would release open-source models. He would create an agent for everybody. He would make it free. He would provide everybody in the world with their own tutor and unlimited abundance. He has picked up the abundance crown, which Sam Altman dropped when he went for the private company. And he says superintelligence is invention, not automation, and that AI safety should be based on the balance of power. No singular centralized intelligence.

I’m assuming, Sacks, you read or scanned Zuckerberg’s manifesto, or got the coverage of it. Do you have any thoughts on his positioning?

Yeah, I read it, and I found myself nodding in agreement with much of it. I really like the point he made pretty early on, where he pointed out that a lot of the doomers—and I think he was kind of taking a shot at the effective altruists and then Anthropic—

Dario.

He said—

Yeah.

“Look, why are you guys rushing to create a future that you don’t believe in, that is so dystopian? You know, if you think this is such a bad future where everyone’s out of work and—

Yeah.

AI goes rogue and creates all these safety issues, why are you so excited about creating it?”

So I think he does point out a fundamental contradiction. Now, there is an answer to that question, which is—actually, there are 2 answers. One is they could be trying to create a future they don’t believe in for, let’s call it, mercenary reasons. It could be lucrative. Although I don’t think that’s the real reason. I think most of those guys are missionaries, and what they believe is that that future is dangerous, and only under their enlightened control—

Mm.

—can humanity be protected.

Yes.

It’s right out of The Vision of the Anointed, which is a book Thomas Sowell wrote 30 years ago, where intellectuals throughout history have thought that if they’re maximally empowered, then they can engineer society in a more benevolent direction.

Mm.

And this has always backfired. It’s always led to not just empty or broken promises, but it also becomes an excuse for totalitarian schemes and state power.

And actually, Zuckerberg goes on to say something that I think gets at this. So right after he kind of made the point about, you know, why are you rushing to build a future that—

You don’t want.

—you don’t believe in, you don’t want—he says, “The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safer, positive outcomes.”

So I think the point he’s getting at here is that a major frame on the whole AI debate is that it’s not just about open or closed; it’s also about centralized versus decentralized, and whether you think a centralized outcome is the right outcome or a decentralized outcome. I’m on the side of decentralized. I think Zuck—

How could you not be on the side of decentralized? It’s like the most obvious—

They are not.

—argument ever.

The EA types are not. By the way, I experienced—

Yeah, they’re delusional.

Well, I experienced this when I got to Washington, and all the former Biden people had just moved over to Anthropic’s government affairs. I also dealt with think tank people who are part of this clique.

Mm.

And their frame on AI was that it was inherently dangerous and that we had to centralize control over it in the government. There should be just 2 or 3 companies, and they should essentially work together to be made into a cartel. Remember, Marc Andreessen had a meeting with those Biden officials where he came out—

Yeah, they said, “Don’t bother. Don’t bother competing.”

Yeah. Now, they dispute that characterization. Maybe they didn’t use those words exactly, but I do believe that Marc was correct in his interpretation of what he heard because I heard similar things.

And they really believe that the way to control what they essentially thought of as malign or at least very dangerous was, first, you limit it all to the United States. So you don’t export the chips. You don’t export the models. It’s basically—you retain total control over it in the U.S., which frankly is a pipe dream because the rest of the world is going to get AI. The idea that you could—

Of course. Of course.

But anyways, that was sort of part 1. And then part 2 was you form an Atomic Energy Commission or something like that to cartelize the industry, and then you have it deeply embedded with the government. You effectively have a merger of—

The state.

—a sort of corporate and state power.

So it was this extremely centralized vision of the future. I think they still believe in that to some degree.

Clearly Zuckerberg listens to the All-In podcast, and clearly I think we have a seat open next week. Mark Zuckerberg—can somebody reach out to him? Come on the pod next week. Thursdays, we’ll tape at about 10 or 11 a.m. your time. Whether you’re in Hawaii or in Tahoe, we will get a Starlink to you, and you can do it from your efoil, guaranteed. But it would be great to have Mark to talk—

But the thing that Zuckerberg—

—about this directly. Let me get Gavin involved if—

Right.

Yeah, go ahead.

Well, just to wrap up, though, I think where Zuckerberg goes with this that I agree with is we want maximum empowerment of the individual. That’s the way to solve this problem. We want decentralized outcomes. We want open models. Like you were saying, JCal, we want data sovereignty. Look, there can also be these proprietary frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

Yeah.

But we want to create a decentralized, empowering outcome for individuals, and I think that’s the side Zuck is on. I very much agree with that.

Gavin, I assume you read it. Yeah? Or did you just—

No, no.

—get the high-level? You didn’t read it yet? You didn’t have time for 6,500 words?

Of course I read it.

If he writes 9 more, by the way, he’s got the average nonfiction book, which is right around 60,000 or 70,000 words. So Harper Business, Hollis, go call Zuckerberg and get the other 8 parts of this manifesto going.

I read it. I agreed with it. And I would super-agree with everything David said. I would boil it down to this: I think Anthropic and people in the effective altruism movement believe that this technology is too dangerous to distribute.

Hmm.

And what Mark Zuckerberg, and I think Elon and Jensen, believe is that this technology is too dangerous to centralize. History has spoken, and when given the choice, it is always better to distribute and decentralize. There’s really no counterexample that I can think of.

And not just as an American, but as a human, I want an AI that looks out for me. Looks out for me.

The individual.

The individual. My conception—

The sovereign individual was a key point.

—the sovereign individual.

Yes, it is.

Yeah. My conception of what’s good for America: I do not want Dario Amodei or Anthropic deciding what’s in my best interests.

Hmm.

I fundamentally don’t want that. I don’t trust—

You don’t trust AI Jesus.

I do—I mean, AI Jesus seems like a great guy, you know? Although it is funny, somebody said he was cursed with a resting smiling face, and it is a little weird—

Like Mamdani.

—to listen to him talk about this terrible vision for humanity while he’s smiling happily.

It’s hilarious. He’s literally got that grin on while he explains to you the Terminator scenario and that only he can save us, and that even he doesn’t know whether there’s a 20% chance that he might not be able to save us all.

Gavin, I love that framing about it being too dangerous to centralize, and I think one other closely analogous point is what you think about competition. So I think that the EAs think that competition will create a race to the bottom and will create a lack of safety, whereas what I believe is that competition brings out the best. And so they think it brings out the worst. Now, look, there are examples of probably both, but fundamentally they want to centralize control and have less competition. We want to decentralize and have more competition.

I would have said I want the right to bear arms in the Constitution, and I think that’s important. I grew up in Texas. I think it is kind of like—

When are you coming home?

—the last line of defense against tyranny. I love Texas.

Gavin, when are you coming home?

I’ll be back soon, I promise.

Okay.

But I want the right to have my own AI.

Of course.

I want the right to my own AI, where its values are aligned with me, not—

Right.

Not someone—

And by the way—

As good a person as they might be—

The right to bear arms is a good analogy because we do allow you to have a gun even though you might misuse it. Guns are used to kill things, right? Whereas AI has much more creative and much more salutary uses. It's beneficial. Fundamentally, it's a consumer technology that everyone's gonna want to use. So if we allow you to have guns, I agree, you should be allowed to have AI.

Well, let me correct you there, Sacks, now that you're in the great state of Texas with me. Guns also help you feed your family and defend you against evil forces in the world, so those are virtuous uses of a gun.

Yeah, I get it.

See?

They are. That's self-defense. But I'm saying you'd still use the gun to kill or hurt the person in self-defense. I get it. I'm not against guns.

And protein.

Use the gun to kill or hurt the person in self-defense. I get it. I'm not against guns.

I think this is the delusion of Dario. If we think about it with these effective altruists, you can look it up, folks, but they think that they're gonna make all the money in the world, create the one company, the money-printing machine, and then they're gonna save all of us. It's a massive delusion of grandeur—

The technology's gonna diffuse anyway.

Of course it is.

This idea that you can keep the genie in the bottle is absurd. But, by the way, if Dario—

Well, they're treating it—hold on a second.

Yeah.

I think, Sacks, the way they view it is that they view this literally as superintelligence and the nuclear bomb. And if you convince yourself that you're building the nuclear bomb and you're building the Terminator that you yourself cannot control, and it's superintelligence that will make a billion Terminators and a billion bombs, they literally have deluded themselves while taking peyote or LSD at Burning Man that this is the reality. It's not the reality.

Yes.

You could unplug it at any time. They're suffering from delusions of grandeur, period, full stop. This is not the nuclear bomb.

Well, you're right about that. When I first came into Washington, that was the dominant analogy that they and their sort of related think tanks, their people in their group, had promoted: the idea that AI was like a nuclear weapon, and we needed an Atomic Energy Commission—a global one—to regulate this. Total pipe dream, never gonna happen.

But you're right that they were using that analogy, and I think the reason why they were using that analogy is because you do not have a right to have a nuclear weapon, to build your own nuclear weapon. You have the right to a gun, but not a nuclear weapon. So they wanted to put AI in that bucket. But as Jensen has said, no individual, no consumer needs a nuclear weapon. Every consumer, every business needs AI. It's fundamentally different.

This is a consumer technology. It's a consumer technology before it's a military technology. And this idea that it's primarily like a nuclear bomb is just kind of absurd.

Yes.

It's a consumer technology before it's a military technology.

In fairness—

Yes.

Cyberdyne Industries also thought they were building good technology. So science fiction has literally polluted people's brains.

If we're going to have a Terminator thing, I want my own Terminators who like me, okay?

Yeah, open-source the Terminator.

But, boiling everything else down, I'm an American; I'm a patriot. If we ban open source, if we let this control be centralized, we will lose AI, we will lose geopolitics, we will lose everything to China. It's just that simple. So if you're an American patriot—

Yes.

You should be for the distribution, democratization, decentralization, and individualization of this technology. Hey, JCal, man, what are your thoughts?

Um—

What are your thoughts on the essay?

Well, like you, Sacks, I found myself nodding the whole way because he kind of ran in front of the parade and grabbed the baton and was like, “I agree with the best takes here.” And the best take is open source empowering the individual, and this isn't nuclear technology. I just want to point out 2 other points that I think got buried because he did try to cover a lot of ground.

The first is I want to give him credit for his view of specifically job displacement because he says, “Hey, listen, that is possible job displacement.” But he says, “People fear that automation will outpace individuals’ capability growth, leading to job displacement, followed by a difficult period as people learn new jobs.” I think we can all agree that that is a concern. But there is no rule that AI must increase automation faster than it increases individuals’ capabilities or demand for new skills. Recent statistics suggest it may be more likely that individuals’ capability growth could match or outpace automation.

I thought this was a really good framing and is just another way of saying what Jensen said: “Hey, you're not going to lose your job to AI. You're going to lose it to somebody with AI.” And that's the game on the field right now. Every time I use this technology, 3 new business opportunities open up, and I create 2 more job reqs, and people are doing 5 or 10 times as much work if they embrace the technology—and that's a big if, if people will do it.

The second thing I thought was pretty interesting was that he makes a play for having the right to index anybody's content and learn from it. The quote he says here is, “All AI models are derived from human knowledge.” Okay, fair enough. Just pretty plain vanilla there. Some have tried to frame distillation as harmful, but I think it's important to protect the principle that you can learn from anything you can observe.

In other words, he's preemptively saying, “I want to scan the world's data.” Well, I have a message for him, which is, “Zuckerberg, please explain how this concept is compatible with the fact that you have sued every startup, many of which I've invested in, that has ever tried to index or use the social graph at Instagram or Facebook.” They have hundreds of lawsuits in which they have sued people for trying to distill who the top influencers on Instagram are, who's in my social graph, and they lock that whole thing down. So there's a bit of hypocrisy here that reminded me, Sacks, of our discussion on previous episodes with Claude ripping apart old books and distilling them.

Yeah, we've had the distillation debate many times.

Yeah.

Let me just go back to this point: there's a huge irony in the fact that Dario did not get his way in Washington for the most part during this administration. I think if he had gotten his way—if he had realized his dream of this highly regulated AI apparatus—I don't think that company would be set up for a hugely successful IPO.

Why? Because their whole right to charge this massive premium for tokens—that's the point you were making before, JCal; you're wondering how sustainable that is because all these open models are coming up and offering tokens for much less—is their pricing power. That premium they're able to charge exists because they're 6 months ahead of those open models. And that 6 months would be eaten up in the blink of an eye if they were subject to regulatory approval.

Dario himself keeps writing these blog posts where he says, “We need an FAA for AI.” You know how long it takes the FAA to certify and approve a new model, in this case for airframes? Minimum of 5 years. Okay?

If you want to change a table in your plane, it takes 8 years.

How long does it take the FDA to approve a new medicine? Years, okay? You're gonna apply that regulatory framework to AI model releases?

Game over.

Forget about it. Your 6 months will be gone like that. Your model will be commoditized. To Gavin's point, the Chinese competitors will catch up, and that's bad for the United States, it's bad for our competitiveness, it's bad for the AI race. Obviously, we don't want China beating us. But aside from just the geopolitical dimension, it'd be horrible for Anthropic as a company because, again, all their pricing power depends on them remaining in the lead by 6 months.

I will say—

If they ever slip up and lose that 6 months, they're toast. Hold on.

What does that do to revenue?

Exactly. So now, look, I actually think that their pricing power may be quite sustainable because I think people are willing to pay. Not the whole market, but a decent subset of the market—

Yeah.

—is willing to pay a premium for true frontier intelligence. So as long as—

Hey, if the top 20%—

Anthropic—

Sacks, if the top 20% is willing to pay 10X, they're golden, right? Just doing the math.

Like I said before, it's Apple—

Yeah.

It's Apple versus Android, right? Most of the market is willing to go with Android. It's cheaper, but there's a significant subset of the market that's willing to pay a huge premium for Apple because it's a better experience.

Same thing if you're a company that's in a competitive market and you want the absolute best for competitive or other reasons: You're going to pay a premium for true frontier intelligence. But Anthropic and OpenAI are on that hamster wheel.

Mm-hmm.

They have to stay in the lead in order to justify that premium. And by the way, I think they can, and they think they can. In fact, they think their lead is growing because they're on the way to recursive self-improvement.

5. CEOs Need Their Own Voice

I just want to make another point about the going-direct movement. Zuck has had his Twitter account since the beginning, when he tried to buy the company, @finkd—F-I-N-K-D—which was his handle in college, I believe. And in the last 30 or 60 days, Nikesh from Palo Alto Networks, friend of the pod, started tweeting and doing long-form. Jensen opened an X account. He started going long-form. Thanks for the follow, Jensen.

Zuckerberg has activated his account, and he's going direct. I want to point out that Zuckerberg previously, I think, was letting other people craft his message and send it to the market, and I think he has matured and decided, “I am going to write my own missive.” This missive, I believe, was written by him, probably with some help, but I ran it through an AI detector. It's 100% human-crafted, bespoke human words.

I think it's fantastic that he's now getting ahead and saying, “These are the potential problems in the future,” and it would have been so great if he had done that with teenage girls and the impact of social media on kids, and addiction with Instagram and Facebook, earlier on. I give him a lot of credit for deciding, “I will go direct. I will write my essay. I will speak my truth.” And X is getting exceptional at these dialogues and these missives now. It's fantastic.

Yeah, so I profoundly agree with everything you said, and I want to come back to a couple of things that Sacks said about computation—about how open source actually makes Anthropic more valuable.

Mm.

And computational efficiency of humans is the case for humans. But I think what you said is really important: If you are a public figure, if you are the CEO of a company, and you do not have your own voice on X, you are at risk. It's just that simple.

Risk of what? Unpack.

You know, ultimately, in the same department as “the truth shall set you free,” the only person who can tell someone's own individual truth is themselves, in their own authentic words. And obviously Mark Zuckerberg has super-voting stock. He's never going to be thrown out of Meta.

But there are many CEOs who think, “Oh, my corporate PR department is keeping me safe. They're my voice.” Well, guess what? Maybe you retire. Maybe the next CEO doesn't like you, and you get called in front of Congress. And I do think at some point the Democrats have talked about how—

Love it.

—they're going to have an accountability agenda and they're going to go after everyone. And I'm not sure that's a good message for the Democrats. But be that as it may, if you do not have your own voice and your own brand on X, you are at risk.

I think—

And having your own voice—

Yeah.

—it is protection, it's power, it's armor—

I got it.

—and I think it's a sigil.

Hey, yeah, it is a superpower. I don't know about you, Sacks, but I am loving Zuckerberg's Jeremy Strong era much better than the Jesse Eisenberg era.

Are you still doing this MMA stuff? There was a video of him on a barge—

Yes.

—or something.

On a floating—

A floating barge.

What is that, a barge in Lake Tahoe?

Man.

Yeah. Dude is—

Don't—I would be careful about saying bad things about him, JCal—

No, no, no.

—because—

I am, too. Listen, I have turned over a new leaf. I am into Zuck 2.0. I hope he likes JCal 3.0.

Oh.

Come on the pod, Zuck.

I want him on the eFoil with the American flag every Fourth of July. And I want it livestreamed, and if he falls, that would be aura-maxing for him. If he gets back up and records it again and does it live, that would—

Yo, he's got to do that in Kauai—

Because—

—with the bull sharks. Let me see some fins chasing him. He is—

Yes.

—aura farming times a thousand. Way to go, Zuck.

We need more of this authenticity.

Face the CEO, go direct.

100%, man.

Yes, you gotta counter the weirdos.

Go direct, protect yourself.

All right.

Yeah, and be yourself, man. And—

Yeah.

He's being himself, and—

Let your freak flag fly.

He's a good guy.

It's all good, folks.

There are 2 points that I think are really important. Open source makes frontier tokens more valuable. Let's use an example. Let's say Anthropic, OpenAI, and Grok are at, like, a 250 IQ or 200 IQ.

If you have a 200 or a 250 IQ intellect that can orchestrate these open-source 150 IQ intellects, that actually makes the 250 IQ intellect more valuable, because it can farm out tasks. In the same way, if we're going to use the Manhattan Project analogy, everybody talks about Richard Feynman and who's the guy who ran it all? There are these 10 really smart physicists. Who's the guy who ran it—who said, “I am become death”? Who ran the Manhattan Project? Come on, somebody has to—

Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer.

Yeah.

You had Oppenheimer, and you had 10, effectively Nobel laureates, maybe 30 of them. But they needed 2,000 merely top-10,000-in-the-world physicists.

Mm.

So having more affordable intelligence—

Mm.

—it actually makes the frontier even more valuable. And I think a very plausible outcome is one in which frontier tokens are 65% to 85% of the economic value. Open-source models are, like, 80% of the volume, and that's good for everyone, and everyone wins.

Tell me Anthropic's revenue by the end of 2027. What is its 2027 revenue if 2026 ends at exactly 100 billion? What is its 2027 revenue, Gavin Baker?

I will take the over.

Over what? A trillion?

On a lot of estimates. I'm not going to take the over on a trillion. How about this—

Okay, I'm going to put 500 billion, over or under, Gavin Baker.

How about this? I'm going to take the over.

Of 500 billion.

No, I'm going to take the over—whatever the Wall Street consensus is for 2027, which I don't know. I'll take 25% to 30% over on that, assuming that this regulation campaign doesn't succeed.

So you're basically going out on a limb here, saying that the underwriters are going to sandbag revenue. Okay, congratulations. Bet, Gavin.

Not by a material amount.

Yes. Give me my answer.

No, no, no. I will—

Over 500 or under?

I think 400 to 500 billion—

What is your gut saying?

I think 400 to 500 billion—

Okay, so you're under. You're under 500.

—is within the zone of realistic and achievable.

Sacks?

Can I just say one other thing? One other thing. Okay, it's over.

Over or under 500 billion, Sacks?

I actually was going to say 400 to 500 billion as exit ARR for next year seems very comfortable.

Okay.

And the only reason it's not higher is because I do think that somehow you get into physical limitations at that point. But maybe not. Maybe there'll be enough compute.

Hmm. Yes.

Also, there is competition, so—

Let's think: We all believe that they're going to hit 400 billion next year, and they're going to 4X. 4X 100 billion. Just let it sink in.

Well, keep in mind they'll be at 120, so I guess that implies 4X would be more like 500.

3 to 4. Yeah, 4X.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's kind of where we're coming at.

I'd say the over-under really is 500 billion exit ARR for next year. And I think they think they'll do the over.

Okay.

We were talking about them at 10 billion 10 months ago.

Yeah.

10 billion to 400 billion is 40X, gentlemen.

Are they going to thank me for preventing Dario from shooting himself in the foot?

I think they should.

That's what I'd like to know.

He literally put 2 guns on 2 ankles, emptied both clips, and you had taken the bullets out. They should give you 1%.

Well, no. More importantly, I actually don't think the bullets were taken out. I think he had them pointed at his temples and—

Oh, you're saying he did The Deer Hunter?

And Sacks pulled him down, and he just shot himself in the foot.

This is where their hostility to open models comes from, I think: if they're going to slow down, they have to slow down the open models as well. Otherwise, they do get commoditized, and their business goes away. However, the United States does not have jurisdiction over what happens in China, and China was not going to slow down. That was always, I think, a huge flaw in this whole conception.

These EA types thought they were going to institute global compute governance. Somehow they were going to get—

Yeah, good luck.

—some global agreement with China. Total pipe dream, never going to happen. If we slow down, China is just going to race ahead. It was, I think, always a naive—

This guy thought he was going to create the Pax Accords 2.0—

—a naive vision.

—and that didn't work, so—

Yeah.

—slow your roll, kid.

Can I just say one thing that I think is also important about open source, and why I think AI is going to be good for humans—

Mm.

It's going to be good for Americans. If we are short on compute, we're talking about compute slowing down Anthropic's growth because literally we're just—

Yeah.

We're running out of energy. We can't bring on—

Physics. Atoms. Yeah.

Yeah, we're running into physics and planetary-scale limitations, and I think this is a reality. Just think about how energy-efficient we are. To approximate all of our brains, you need a data center that consumes the power of 1 million American homes running for probably 6 to 9 months, and then you get our brains. Every time you want to answer a question, you need the power of 1,000 American homes to operate at the level of our minds.

We're smart, but all those figures are going to get better. We're so energy-efficient. Capitalism—there's going to be a use for the most computationally efficient intelligences on planet Earth, and those are human intelligences.

It's so well said because if you look at what Cerebras, Groq, and NVIDIA are up to, they're making inference 5 to 10 times more efficient every year, and you're the chip master here, Gavin. They'll be 5 to 10 times more efficient every 12 to 18 months.

Then you look at the models. By the way, congratulations: you got Zuckerberg on your ass. Go ask MySpace, go ask Snapchat what it's like to have Zuckerberg in the rearview mirror. That's literally the T. rex coming at the frontier models. He is a beast at copying, mimicking, and competing. He's going to be the open-source hero from America. He is going to have the best open-source model in the next year. I guarantee it.

I might take the under.

How was it?

And there's another American hero.

Okay.

Jensen Huang. And, like—

Okay, Nemotron.

I think you might see NVIDIA at the open-source frontier.

He doesn't like us talking about that. I got the back channel. He's like, “We're not in the open-source business. I mean, we do have Nemotron, and we can give you a full stack.”

But one of the hyperscalers we know, by the way, Gavin, told me they just did a 9-figure double Lindy reverse, where they went from doing a frontier model on $100 billion in infrastructure, and they're like, “Bink, it's going to be open source, not frontier.” So people are looking at this and saying, “It's time to, bink, maybe move over to some open-source models.”

6. NVIDIA Finances the AI Buildout

Speaking of Jensen, NVIDIA is partnering with Goldman, BlackRock, and others to raise $500 billion in AI compute. Jensen laid out his vision in an X article, as we mentioned, titled “NVIDIA AI Factory Compute Is Becoming an Investable Asset Class.” The firms will establish independent financing platforms, raising third-party capital. The idea is to treat GPUs like a financeable, income-producing asset, like mortgage-backed securities—hopefully not with the same outcome.

Here's how it works at a basic level: instead of a company paying billions to buy chips up front, they borrow money. They buy NVIDIA-based systems and use them to start generating revenue—that is, renting compute. They can then use the cash flows to pay back the loan. NVIDIA's role is matchmaker, connecting customers who need compute with lenders. Obviously, GM and Ford have their own finance divisions.

Gavin, what do you think of this announcement vis-à-vis round-tripping and the hand-wringing concerns we talked about on this very podcast a year or 2 ago?

Well, I do think what's important here is what's essentially happened: Blackstone, KKR, these firms, Goldman Sachs—they would not have done that CNBC episode with Jensen if they did not believe that NVIDIA GPU compute was a financeable asset. What's really smart here is you're getting some of the smartest asset managers in the world, who charge 2 and 20 for many products, to essentially validate this market.

NVIDIA's being a matchmaker, and what they're basically saying is, “Hey, our compute, because it's so flexible, is going to have a long enough life that you can finance it at lower rates than other kinds of compute.” I think that's smart. That's good for everyone.

It is interesting: if you look at the underlying architectures of the 3 big Chinese open-source models—and maybe even throw in a 4th—if we have Qwen, Kimi, DeepSeek, and then GLM, they're actually evolving in very different ways. That architectural variation works in NVIDIA's favor and in GPUs' favor because it means that you do need this more flexible compute to be able to finance it, to be able to think that you can have a long life.

But what NVIDIA is doing that I think is really smart is they're saying, “Hey, we are going to help create this market, grow this market.” They're going to provide 2 very important functions. They're going to say, “Hey, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, KKR, Apollo, BlackRock—I'm leaving someone out, and I'm so sorry. There are 6 of them. Come to us. If you have a deal, you can bring it to us, and we will give a residual-value guarantee.”

I think the way that that residual-value guarantee—which will further lower the cost of financing these—can then be incorporated into those companies' underwriting. What that basically means is they're saying that after 3 or 4 years, we guarantee that these GPUs can be rented at a certain rate. Then the risk that they are bearing is the risk between that value and wherever the market rate is.

Right now, everything's going straight up. NVIDIA has better telemetry than almost anyone into the supply and demand of compute, so they can put that at a very, very smart place and further make it financeable. They're only bearing 25% of the risk. The world's—some of the world's smartest underwriters, in terms of reputation—

What could go wrong, Gavin? I mentioned mortgage-backed securities, et cetera. Obviously, the lifespan is the key issue here. The different hyperscalers are saying, “Hey, 4, 5, 6 years”—Amazon—and the big debate happened.

But what we've seen is, to your point with the open-source models, they can be tweaked to run on the oldest hardware, so maybe we get year 6, 7, 8 out of these.

Is that the key to this?

No, we're gonna get more than that. CoreWeave said that they are renting Ampere GPUs at economically profitable rates today for 2029. So an Ampere that came out in 2020 is going to have a 9-year life. And I think that's what NVIDIA sees. It's like old American cars: they get sent overseas. Just the idea that these GPUs—

Where could it go wrong? That's what I think everybody—

Here, I'll tell you where it could go wrong in theory, okay?

Yeah, Sacks, help us out here. In theory, just so we're steelmanning it.

The biggest risk—

Yeah.

The biggest risk, to me, is not on the demand side. The biggest risk is that you get a glut of compute and you get an overbuild. In the same way that we had dark fiber after the dot-com crash, if you had dark GPUs, that'd be a disaster for everyone, especially if you built out your compute infrastructure expecting a spot price of $30 to $50 a watt, as Elon said they were expecting, right?

So if all of a sudden there are too many people racing to provide this compute, and now there's an oversupply and the market crashes, that'd be the risk factor. In a weird way, all the political headwinds, I think, insure against that outcome. Because it is so hard to build data centers for all the reasons we said, there's a whole moral panic, hysteria, and hoax going on. Actually, those political headwinds, I think, will almost guarantee that there's not an oversupply relative to the exponentially growing demand. So, in a weird way, you're protected against that.

But Jake, could I shift gears for a second to—

Absolutely.

—tell you what's so brilliant about what Jensen did here?

Well, there's one part—

Or Gavin, you respond to that, yeah.

There's just one other part. In return for that, they get a revenue share above that floor.

Who gets the revenue share above the floor? Explain.

NVIDIA.

Yeah.

So, I think the way the deals will work is, say, we're willing to guarantee offtake at nowhere near $30 or $50 a watt. We're willing to guarantee offtake at a very low-risk level that, with our really high-resolution view of productive capacity and future model trends, we're comfortable with.

And in return, we get some revenue share above probably a higher level. Morgan Stanley wrote a great note, I think, 2 days ago. NVIDIA could become—and these are effectively royalties, these revenue shares—a very large cloud with a capital-light business.

Let me tell you why I think what Jensen did was so brilliant. It's because the numbers are getting so big that the TAM is getting constrained by the ability to finance this buildout. What he's doing is alleviating that finance constraint so that he can grow as big as the TAM actually is, right? It's removing that constraint.

So, just to take one example, Elon wants to add somewhere around 6 to 8 gigawatts next year. We know that would cost $300 to $400 billion of CapEx. The company just raised $100 billion in its equity and debt offerings, so obviously they would have to go out and finance that somehow.

As we talked about on our previous episode, the simplest way to finance it would be to get seller financing from NVIDIA, especially given that the payback period could be as quick as 1 year. So now Jensen is creating, you could say, the line of credit using these big banks and these big private equity shops, and he's making that available. That's now gonna benefit all of these downstream purchasers.

I don't think it's circular. This is not a circular situation like Gurley's worried about. This is, I think, Wall Street banks and private equity firms providing financing based on the expected cash flows that will be delivered from these GPUs.

In some ways, NVIDIA is kind of becoming the central bank of AI, the Federal Reserve of AI. That is a way to conceptualize what they are doing. And in the same way the Federal Reserve's monetary policy works through private banks, here you're gonna have—and probably more banks will opt into this—private markets charging fees and underwriting these deals, and NVIDIA is helping to facilitate that. So I don't think it's really circular financing.

Yeah, I watched that CNBC special as well. One point that really stuck with me was when the private equity guys said that this was a little bit like what they do for plane financing. When an airline buys airplanes, they're able to finance it not just based on the creditworthiness of the airline, but rather because the airplanes themselves have value.

That makes it much easier to finance because you know that even if the airline gets in trouble, you're protected, right? You have asset-backed financing. And that's what they're basically doing here with GPUs.

Now, in order for that to happen, NVIDIA has to standardize. They have to create essentially reference designs and so forth, so that it can all be standardized enough for these Wall Street guys to package it up and securitize it, turn it into securities. That's basically what they're doing, like they did with mortgages.

Yeah. I'll say there's a reason why I'm not worried about this buildout. There's a governor, like a throttle, Gavin, if you will. There's a governor on this, which is the physics of the real world that we talked about in building data centers.

There's also a dead-man switch on this, which is the switch that you have to hold down to run the train, but if you have a heart attack, your hand comes off the switch. That dead-man switch is Anthropic and OpenAI. These are the 2 biggest customers.

One of them—OpenAI—has scaled back its ambitions in this regard, its buildout, from like $1.4 trillion to like $600 billion. And then there's Anthropic, which we just said is gonna go to $400 billion in revenue next year, something like that, where they'll end the year at that run rate.

If they don't need the compute, or compute gets so efficient, or open-source models create a headwind, whatever it is, they're gonna take their hand off the buy button, and that dead-man switch will then slow everything down so we don't get a mortgage-backed securities situation.

7. Anthropic Sets the AI Pace

Well, that could lead to a car crash. But actually, this is why I think the Anthropic IPO is really important for the market: getting those quarterly earnings and being able to see their numbers—

Profitability.

—every quarter. I think it'll become probably the most important signal the entire industry has. Why? Because you've got all these people out there saying that AI is a bubble, this CapEx is not justified, and there won't be an ROI.

Everyone's gonna be looking to Anthropic's quarterly earnings as the pace car. Not just them—it'll be them, OpenAI, and xAI—but you'd have to say that Anthropic right now is the pace car. And they're gonna be looking to them to see if the demand signal is there. And if there's a hiccup or a wobble, you know, the industry—

It'll show up there first. Yes.

If Anthropic slams on the brakes, there'll be a pileup of companies behind it, because Anthropic, they're making $100 billion per gigawatt of compute. That's why they're able to pay SpaceX, say, $50 billion a gigawatt, the spot price for compute.

That's why SpaceX is then able to pay $30 billion to NVIDIA for chips for the buildout. That's why NVIDIA is able to pay TSMC, Micron, SK hynix, and all the way down. It's the entire food chain. So if there is a wobble—

If somebody slams on the brakes—

If the pace car slows down—

—we get the pileup.

—the whole race is gonna feel it. But it's still better for those numbers to come out on a quarterly basis—

I think it's such—

—in a vetted, GAAP-compliant way.

So, Gavin, as we're sort of saying here, there's a kill switch, there's a brake, whatever you wanna call it. Is there enough space, is there enough distance between the cars to not have a pileup?

In other words, if Dario does slam on the brakes, if there are headwinds, does everybody go slamming into them? Or is there enough room for the entire industry to say, "Okay, yeah, we're gonna go just 20% slower. We're gonna go 30% slower"?

It's very simple. If he's slamming on the brakes—

Yeah.

—because there's not demand, there will be a pileup. Okay? But there's—

Oh, there will be a pileup. There's not enough room between the cars.

Yeah, if it's because of demand. Now, if Dario's getting passed by SpaceX or OpenAI—

Okay.

—or an American open—

—or Zuckerberg or Microsoft—

—or an American open-source champion—

—cloud, Azure, yeah.

There won't be a pileup. But I do think the Anthropic S-1 is gonna be really important.

Mm.

And I think it's gonna break a lot of people's brains. The reason is, I think there are a lot of macro and value investors who are very confidently making these prognostications about AI with the assumption that tokens are subsidized.

Anthropic is generating cash, and this fact is kind of known in the world. I've actually never really spoken to Anthropic, but it feels like there are enough signals that, if you're to read the tea leaves of what has been said in public, they're generating cash.

They’re profitable. Open-source tokens are profitable. Anthropic is profitable. OpenAI, if it’s not generating cash, will be imminently. SpaceX, same thing. And when I hear these macro and value investors who are ignorant—they’re very smart, but they’re ignorant of the facts—

Mm.

—and they’re making an assumption that tokens are subsidized, and this is all going to collapse in some circular-financing bonfire, they’re just wrong. The overwhelming majority of tokens are profitable for everyone in the chain. Everyone. And I think the Anthropic S-1 is going to make that clear.

But when I listen to these macro and value investors talk about AI, it’s a little bit like me saying, “You know, I’m very bearish on the world economy because oil’s at $500 a barrel.” If oil were at $500 a barrel, that would be a good reason to be bearish. It’s just not. They’re just wrong. The simple fact is wrong.

They’re paid in some ways to be doom-scrollers and merchants of doom. I can tell you one framing of this that I’ve been working on: the number of people employed in the United States—like 150 million or 160 million—and what their collective salaries are: $10 trillion, $12 trillion, whatever it winds up being.

There is no world in which I don’t see corporations and people in the economy spending 5% or 10% of the salaries of their employees on the equivalent in tokens. In other words, somebody makes $80,000 a year on average. You will spend $8,000—10% of their salary—or a minimum of $4,000 to make them more efficient.

We have an analogy for this. It’s SaaS software and computers on their desktop, mobile phones, et cetera—just their general use of technology. If you put those numbers together, you’re looking at a trillion dollars in AI spend just in the United States. It’s obviously going to happen.

And if I’m wrong and it’s half—if it’s $500 billion—well, that’s where these companies are trending, and that’s not even talking about the rest of the planet. I think we’re going to be fine, folks. All right.

Agreed.

Let’s wrap up here. I’ve got 2 more stories I want to get to. We’ll go lightning-round here. There’s a very interesting story coming out of New Jersey and New York around Amazon.

New Jersey’s AG sued Amazon last week. They’re arguing that the company is cheating, basically, by hiring drivers through subcontractors. This has been well known. It’s called DSP. This concept of delivery service partners is a very clever, perhaps too clever, way for Amazon to shield itself, according to these lawsuits that are starting to pile up.

If an Amazon driver crashes, there is liability, and it gets Amazon out of some things it might have to pay for if they were Amazon employees. On Monday, New York City Mayor and friend of the pod Zohran Mamdani jumped into the fray. He is throwing his support behind it, and he did one of his big-grin Democratic Socialist videos that he’s now becoming famous for, demanding through municipal laws that will require Amazon to hire the drivers themselves.

Quote: “Corporations like Amazon build billion-dollar business models by insulating themselves from accountability through a system of exploitative subcontracting.”

This has been an issue for a long time. There have been, tragically, a number of deaths because these subcontractors are put under massive pressure, and people get killed when they run into people because of them operating in the real world. And because the drivers are technically employed by the DSP, Amazon claims, “Hey, we’re not the employer, so we’re not on the hook, and we don’t have to get into union bargaining or labor obligations.”

So, Sacks, I’m curious about your take on this in terms of the overall surge in people believing in socialism now and believing that corporations are cheating on the margins. Is Amazon cheating here? Is this too clever, and maybe they need to roll this back? I’m curious about your opinion because it’s getting momentum, and it’s going to be one of the big issues in the midterms and obviously in 2028.

Well, this is a practice that’s widespread. It’s not focused on New York. I think Amazon’s been using these networks of independent contractors as drivers for a while. And what they say is that if you deny them the ability to use these independent contractors, it will raise delivery costs.

There was a study that showed that the average household could pay hundreds of dollars extra if you change this. It would slow down service. It would put thousands of jobs at risk at small contractor businesses. And Amazon says that it could lead them to shift operations outside the city.

Also, one thing that this DSP model does is enable rapid scaling for peaks—holiday surges, dense urban routing, lower costs. It’s a much more flexible arrangement than if everyone were just an Amazon employee. So this is how the market has evolved.

I think maybe when they started, Amazon probably was doing everything themselves, and they started to decentralize it to these networks of small businesses, these contractors. It actually ends up creating more jobs. It creates more entrepreneurship. I think these DSPs employ thousands of people in New York City. Those jobs would be threatened if you basically made them illegal. So I think this is a case where they should just let—

Where do you stand, Sacks? Where do you stand on it?

I would just let freedom of contract and voluntary exchange—

Okay.

—prevail here. And look, this market structure evolved for a reason. The workers liked it. The DSP owners liked it. Amazon liked it. These are mutually beneficial arrangements. I don’t see the reason why Mamdani has to insert the city in the middle of this.

Gavin, do you have a take here?

What I would do if I were Amazon—and I’m sure they will not do this—is just put a surcharge. “Hey, this is the Mamdani fee. This is the Zohran Mamdani fee that is being imposed on you.”

Loads of people use Amazon, not just wealthy people in New York. Lots of people use Amazon. And this is the Zohran Mamdani fee as a result of this ill-advised policy. I’d have it as a line item in every bill because that’s what it’s going to result in.

When you compare Amazon’s service to anything the government provides, it’s insane how efficient Amazon is. You order your thing, and it can be there the same day. Or, at worst, it gets delivered to you the next day. It’s unbelievable how amazing Amazon’s service is.

It’s optimized for low prices for consumers, and we’re going to basically get in the middle of that and have the government get in the middle of Amazon’s driver network? What city service does Mamdani provide that remotely is as efficient as what Amazon does, that he now is going to tell them how to run their business? It’s insane.

If you look at what Starbucks did when Schultz was running it, he gave people a job worth having, and he took pride in taking the lowest-paid people in the organization and giving them a living wage. That living wage is somewhere around $20 or $22 in these cities.

These DSP drivers are actually paid quite well: $18, $19, $20. But this was not created in the free market, as you’re saying, Sacks, and it was just what everybody wanted. No. This was created explicitly to benefit Amazon and to take the burden of these employees and put it onto the American taxpayer, and they are getting called out on it, rightfully so, by New Jersey and New York.

I believe—and I’m a long-term Amazon customer; I’ve been a Prime subscriber since the beginning—that it would be a de minimis cost for them to make these employees full-time employees. You’d still have some DSPs to scale up and down, sure. But this is an opportunity for them to make those frontline workers part of the Amazon family.

It would cost but 25 cents per delivery in New York to move them from $18 or $19 an hour to a slightly higher pay rate, maybe $21 or $22, and give them benefits. This is an easy thing to do.

What our industry has a crazy blind spot for is that it looks for efficiencies. Amazon is the most efficient company in the world, to the point of being abusive to the most vulnerable members of our society and being against the esprit de corps of capitalism. This is a level of capitalism that needs to be self-corrected for, and I think the government's going to have very valid arguments here. They should not take their employees' benefits, unemployment, food stamps, and health insurance and give that to the public to do.

I think it would be amazing for Amazon to get ahead of this, because this'll be what the Democratic socialists, also known as socialist communists in my mind; this is a very valid argument that will sell with Americans who believe that this group of people is being taken advantage of and that we can easily afford to pay 25 cents more per package delivery.

Yeah, Sacks, you’re right. It might add $1 a delivery.

And these socialists are going to point this out in the next 2 election cycles to the point of absurdity, and it's going to play. Socialism is playing. Socialism is making inroads, and it's infecting people's brains, and it's up to capitalists to say, “You know what? We don't need to be as cutthroat and don't need to be as clever.” So that's my message as a long-term shareholder in Amazon. I have a very big position in Amazon, and I keep increasing it every year.

They should do the right thing here and get ahead of this so that they can say, “Hey, we are an incredible employer,” as opposed to, “Hey, we really are trying to hide and move these expenses around.” That's my only point on it. I'm not a socialist, not a cuck, and not interested in messing with capitalism. I think they got a little too clever here. That's my only point, and I think they should do the right thing here and treat those—the most vulnerable employees and the lowest-paid ones—

Now I know why you put this on the docket.

What's that?

Now I know why you put this on the docket, so you can get on your soapbox.

No. I put it on the docket because it's one of the top news stories, and I put it on the docket because we talk about socialism every week, and we talk about all the virtues of capitalism. There are downsides to capitalism where we can get too clever and then try to take expenses—

Well, let me ask you a question. I think we spent too much time on this.

Yeah.

But let me ask you a question.

Yeah, please.

You said—

Go ahead.

—that you want Amazon to employ all these drivers. By the way, they don't necessarily—

Not all of them. I think they should employ a bunch of them.

I know. You said you wanted a bunch to still remain with the DSPs.

I think the DSPs can happen—

So how do you decide which is which?

I think they could proactively do that. It's a great question. Andy Jassy could proactively decide, just like Schultz did—

Well, Mamdani wants to get rid of the DSPs, and he wants to make them all employees.

I think there's a compromise here, which is that there are DSPs to scale up when there's demand during the holidays. That seems like a great idea, but I think he should get ahead of it.

But as soon as you acknowledge—

Yeah.

—that the DSPs are better because there are more flexible working arrangements that people want, why are you meddling in this arrangement to begin with?

That's actually not true. The people who work in the DSPs—the DSPs themselves, the people who own those fragmented, very small companies that go out of business the second they get in an accident to shield Amazon—those employees would very much like to have Amazon equity. They would love to get RSUs, and they would love to get health care and benefits.

I don't know. I don't think you can speak for them. Some of those drivers work for Uber—

They're trying to—

—a lot of the time.

I actually can.

And they toggle back and forth between being a driver for Amazon and being a driver for Uber. They like the flexible working arrangements.

You're actually misinformed here. You're incorrect. These are people who are working full shifts. They're working 8- to 12-hour shifts. I think it's actually 10- to 12-hour shifts. They're exactly the opposite.

I don't think you can speak for all these workers.

They can speak for themselves, and they are organizing, and Amazon has been trying to break the organizing efforts when they try to unionize. This is a tool for breaking that by forcing them to be part of the DSP. That's the game on the field, Sacks.

Well, you already acknowledged that you think the DSPs should stick around, so that's not—

I think a portion of them should do that, and I think Andy Jassy and the team at Amazon should get ahead of this because it's a bad look. It's not in the best interest of capitalism to be this cutthroat. I think he should do it proactively. I don't think he should be forced to do it.

It's the same way Schultz said there's an opportunity here to make baristas have a living wage and have benefits, and it was one of the best things Starbucks ever did. That's really what capitalism should start thinking about: What is our role? What is our role in driving the move to socialism amongst young people? This is one of the reasons people are starting to believe in socialism, because they believe that companies like Amazon are cheating a little bit on the margins and maybe trying to take the expenses that they should incur and put them on the American taxpayer. And you know what? Mandami and New Jersey are going to win these lawsuits. I predict it now.

Well, look, JCal, that all sounds really nice, and I want to save capitalism as much as you do. If Amazon doing that would really save capitalism, then I guess I'm game for it. But I'm not sure it will. What we do know it will do is raise the cost of packages by about $5.20 per package, and it will cost families $664 more per year, and it puts something like 5,000 jobs at risk.

So there are real costs in terms of doing things the way that you're saying. When people are wearing their hat as voters, yeah, they fall for the socialism stuff, but then when they're consumers, when they're wearing their consumer hat, they just want to pay less for packages. They will hate the fact that packages cost $5 more. And like Gavin said, they should put the Mamdani surcharge on their orders. And it's not 25 cents; it's $5.20 per package. $664 per household per year in New York. That's crazy. That's a real cost. Talk about cost-of-living adjustment. That's a huge cost-of-living adjustment.

8. Grok Joins the Frontier Race

JCal's had internet issues, and we're just moving on. Gavin, last issue: What did you think of Grok Bot? What did you think of the releases that xAI made this week? I guess it was Grok Bot, and then also Grok 4.6, right? People were saying that it is close to the frontier or at the frontier, but a lot cheaper. So I've been maintaining, as of even last week, that we were down to a frontier lab duopoly with Anthropic and OpenAI. Was I wrong about that? Is this number 3? Is it more flexible and fluid than I thought?

Yeah, I think it is. Can we show that graph of the Pareto frontier? This is pretty wild. On the left, what this shows is quality, or intelligence, on the y-axis and cost on the x-axis. You want to be in the upper-right quadrant. You just want to be on the outside of this, and you can see how disruptive Grok 4.6's pricing—

Right. So as you move right on the x-axis, it's getting cheaper.

It's getting cheaper.

Normally, we get—

Yeah.

—the y-axis is the capability, and it's getting more and more capable as you move up.

Exactly.

But they invert the x-axis so that as you move to the top right, it's better, right?

Exactly. I mean, this is on CursorBench, and xAI—SpaceX, almost certainly—has the right to acquire Cursor. They're working with Cursor, so maybe this is grading your own homework.

Right here on the right, this is from Databricks, which just raised money at $190 billion. This is a very real company that is very sophisticated, and you can see that even on this, you're well ahead of Fable 5, which I think most people would agree is the gold standard. You're higher quality at a slightly lower price.

So I think with Grok 4.6, the numbers are the numbers. On X, I think we put it down. We do have to wait and see the vibes, but I think it's pretty interesting. DHH, who I think created Ruby on Rails—

David Heinemeier Hansson. Yeah.

Yeah, he posted something really positive. Basecamp—

37signals. Great article.

37signals, Basecamp, yes. He posted something really positive. You saw the Databricks evaluation. You saw our Mercor evaluation. So I think the early vibes are really good, and these benchmark scores are bearing out in the real world.

Elon has caught up, in other words. If you were to attribute why he's caught up, it would really be 2 reasons. Number 1, he bought Cursor. He's got that team. They're a dialed-in team. Number 2, he reshuffled the management of xAI and brought in his killers from SpaceX. Yeah, Gavin, those are the 2 reasons.

Absolutely. He brought in the SpaceX aces along with the Cursor aces and some new people, and it's—

And he did that in 6 short months, Gavin. Never count Elon out. He's frequently late, he's never wrong, and he tends to overdeliver when it does come. That's to his own admission. He's like, “I'm always late, but we get it right eventually.” Yeah.

Absolutely, and this is still a relatively small model. It's a 1.5 trillion-parameter model. A larger model, Grok 4.7, that should be significantly more capable, is coming out in a few short weeks.

Grok Bot also seems just as important. It feels like another OpenClaw moment for AI—for this kind of personalization of AI, of democratizing AI, making it easy for—

The same thing that Zuckerberg said in his manifesto.

He wants to create—

Absolutely.

…bots for everybody.

Yes.

And that's what Claude CoWork and Claude Tag both do exceptionally well, as well as Hermes, Perplexity Computer, and OpenClaw.

I can admit, for me, some of those are—and I try to be very technical, but Grok feels—

Too hard to use. Yeah.

Not too hard to use, but it feels much easier to use for—

No, no, Grok is—

Other people and non-coders.

…much easier to use, is my point.

Grok is much easier to use. Yes.

OpenClaw and Hermes, you need to be—

Hermes?

Hermes, yes.

Are they buying a scarf?

Yeah, that's what I called them.

They're buying ties. Ties.

They're Hermès. They're just like the freedom.

That's very funny.

If you've ever had that Chanel, it's like that.

Yeah.

Sacks, your and our wives order some Chanel once in a while, and they bring it for us. It is pretty amazing that in 6 months they caught up. But Sacks, this creates a tension.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

This does create a little tension. He's hosting Anthropic. He's catching up to Anthropic. What do you think about that tension—that he's their Amazon Web Services, Elon Web Services, at the same time he's competing with them increasingly?

Well, what I love about it is that he's creating these huge compute clusters, right? And that gives him the ability to train a big model, a big, potentially frontier model. You can think of that as the call option to catch up and become a true frontier lab.

Mm.

But if he fails at that, he's got the put option of just selling the compute at spot, at pretty attractive prices, to the frontier labs.

Yes.

Both sides have a 90-day cancellation, which means that if the spot price of compute goes up, he benefits. If it goes down, by the way, it could hurt him, because either side could renegotiate within 90 days, right? So basically, Elon is able to charge spot minus 90.

Mm.

So that's the risk, but it all goes back to what we were talking about before, which is: do you think that compute will be supply-constrained going into next year and the year after? And if so, that's a very advantageous dynamic for Elon, because again, he's very close to charging true spot for his compute, but he can also essentially reroute it to his own service if he's able to take the lead.

Yeah. And just—

Can I say what's interesting? Sorry to interrupt, but I talk to a lot of investors about SpaceX, okay?

Yeah.

And what's just amazing to me is everyone will have a nuanced view on Starlink. Maybe they're skeptical about Starlink Direct to Cell. I think the plan to use these distributed Starlink satellites, effectively almost—you know, we'll call them small cells, femtocells—is interesting.

Everybody will have a nuanced view on orbital compute. Whether they're bullish or bearish, they will have a view. They'll have a view on terrestrial compute. Very few of these investors talk about Groq at all, and it is Pareto-dominant on a lot of measures. We have an existence proof that Anthropic went from whatever it is, $1 billion to $50 billion, really fast.

And if Anthropic is worth $2 trillion per the FT, $3 or $4 trillion, maybe—

According to yourself—

It'll never settle—

On a previous episode—

It'll never settle out.

Yeah.

I said I thought that was a market-clearing price. I didn't say—

Yes.

That's where I thought it was worth. Maybe people should start to consider Groq when they think about SpaceX.

SpaceX has so many ways to win, and I think that's the higher bet here. We're obviously all talking our book here. The folks on this podcast are among the earliest investors in SpaceX.

I was part of leading a small part of—

Fantastic.

—the second round at $10 billion. Hey, there is one thing that broke during the show that we should—

For sure.

—for sure talk about, and that's that Silver Lake may be buying Workday. Workday's up 17%. And if this is true, this is, I think, a significant moment for the stock market.

Software has been in a death spiral that really started, and probably troughed, 3 or 4 months ago. But it was in a tough spot for 12, 15, 18 months, and the return of a private-equity bid for software really changes the investing landscape.

I don't know what the potential buyers of Workday are thinking, but I do know that the rise of open source and the increasing competitiveness of open source is a godsend for the American software industry. It is an absolute godsend.

Yeah, if you want to throw up a 5-year chart of Workday, you can just see it. A world where you have 1, 2, or 3 dominant frontier models—I mean, you can just see the stock went from, yeah, we'll call it 300, straight down to 100 in a really short period of time, and even with this bid, you've only recovered a little bit.

But a world where Anthropic, OpenAI, and maybe even SpaceX are the only model providers that dominate the model layer, that is a hard world for software. If I were to guess why the private-equity bid for software might be coming back, it's because they see what's happening with open source.

Pretty amazing. And that is the backstop, isn't it, Sacks? We've talked about this. If nobody in the public markets wants to own these companies and private equity sees a way—we talked about Bending Spoons, I think, last week, a whole bunch—there is now, I think, I don't want to call them bottom feeders, but what would you call them, Gavin? Sharp acquirers of money-printing businesses that want to extract even more revenue from them.

Yeah, Sacks, this is a good turn of events, that there is a buyer for these companies.

Absolutely. What Silver Lake is saying is that they've been oversold.

They've been oversold, yeah. And so here they go. There must be some value in that. If you use AI to run these, I think that was the thing Bending Spoons is doing really well. They get rid of 80% of the employees and then put the 20% who are left as AI-first employees, and they figure out how to get all of this incredible revenue. There's your breaking news, Gavin Baker. Amazing.

Thank you.

You're tied right now. I looked at the metrics before we got on today. You're now tied with Brad Gerstner in terms of ratings. You and Brad Gerstner are neck and neck and tied for fifth Bestie, which means one of you will drop to sixth Bestie if this continues, and we'll see. Brad Gerstner may be on next week, so we'll see which Bestie takes the fifth slot.

David Sacks, great to see you. Maybe we'll see you around later. Maybe we can get a steak. You want to get a steak later? I got Thursday night off here. I got a hall pass tonight.

Oh, okay. All right.

Yeah, maybe we can go get a steak. This has been an amazing episode of the All-In podcast for August 14th. So see you next time. Bye bye.