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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
We have a great show for you today, folks. We have a bunch of guests and a bunch of news stories to go through. Of course, the trial is ongoing. Did you say that this might be the last week of the trial? I thought it was a four week trial, but it sounds like it might wrap up.
Speaker 2:Are they ahead of schedule? Todd, do you know?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Mike Isaac said it might end this week. Might end I assume just because they're getting through the, like, you know Yeah. Depositions, whatever, faster
Speaker 1:than Yeah. I mean, it seems like Ilya has gone. Mira's gone. Deposition from
Speaker 2:Sam Sotir. And
Speaker 1:Siobhan Zillis. And then Sam's on the stand right now, I think. Mike Isaac is live tweeting it, so we'll run through that. Sam Altman took the stand in the OpenAI versus Elon Musk trial this morning. Just as a reminder, here's what's at stake per The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1:Musk is suing OpenAI and its leaders, Altman and Greg Brockman, for allegedly manipulating him into giving tens of millions of dollars to a nonprofit organization only for them to turn the AI lab into a for profit venture. Musk is also suing Microsoft, OpenAI's largest investor, for aiding Brockman and Altman in their alleged deception. So big turning point in the trial was last Wednesday when former OpenAI CTO, Mira Moradi, and former board member, Helen Toner, gave testimonies about the events leading up to the November 2023 failed board coup that were critical of Sam Altman's leadership style in candor. They call it the blip where Sam was out and then back very quickly with a couple other people stepping into CEO for just a few days. But last week, OpenAI's side began to land some punches on Musk.
Speaker 1:Earlier, testimony from Siobhan Zilles and, Greg Brockman also had already suggested Musk was not just defending a pure nonprofit vision. He explored scenarios where OpenAI might become a part of Tesla, where Altman might help lead Tesla AI, and where Musk could retain deep control. Brockman also testified that Musk supported a for profit conversion if Musk could control it, according to including a version tied to raising money for his Mars ambitions. Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutzkever took the stand. Satya largely buffed OpenAI's side defending Microsoft's partnership with the company and saying that Musk never contacted him to complain about the deal violating any agreement Musk had with the with with with OpenAI's nonprofit despite Musk having Satya's number.
Speaker 1:Ilya testified that he spent a year compiling a 50 page document documenting Sam's manipulative behavior, but also said he never promised Musk that OpenAI would remain permanently nonprofit. Also, it came out in the trial that Sotzkover's stake in OpenAI is probably worth around $7,000,000,000 which probably complicated how the judge and jury feel about his own motivations. So the story is, since Maradi is first, the trial became a referendum on Altman's trustworthiness, then it became a referendum on whether the twenty twenty three board was brave or incompetent, then Microsoft came in and tried to make it look like it was the stabilizing partner. Now Altman has to personally answer the core questions hanging over, the whole case, whether OpenAI's evolution was a necessary adaptation to build frontier AI or a betrayal of the nonprofit mission. Musk says he funded.
Speaker 1:The trial is expected to conclude this week. Max
Speaker 2:Zeph pulled out a quote from Ilya explaining why OpenAI has a for profit. And he's yeah, was playing I don't think intentionally playing into the meme potential, but certainly that's how it played out. Elias said under oath in a federal court, if there's no funding, there's no big computer. Max S says in the running for quote of the year.
Speaker 1:If there's no funding, there's no big computer. And you need big computer if you want big AI. Sam Altman takes a stand in Musk versus OpenAI. Mike Isaac has a live blog going on X under Rat King. Let's run through some of what Mike Isaac is finding.
Speaker 1:OpenAI begins questioning Altman much in the same way that the plaintiff side had questioned Elon Musk, establishing Alt that Altman, like Musk, has been enamored with AI for years and wanted to build inventive things with it. This is a very interesting tidbit from that original like that viral quote from Sam where he's like, AI will probably destroy the world. That happened in 2015, and it was an answer to a question of like, what do you think the key problems to solve are? And then the next sentence in that quote that always gets clipped out is like, And I'm starting a company. Well, it's more of a nonprofit to work on this problem exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But that doesn't make it in. But so they were clearly both very interested in building beneficial AI, although they ultimately butted heads. And they were also very worried about Google. Altman email from 2015, been thinking a lot whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI.
Speaker 1:I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it's going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first. Altman said Musk once said he would potentially pass control of OpenAI to his children upon his death. I would love to know more about what that means because if you fracture it into, like, 20 different children at a certain point, like, that can create a whole different dynamic of, like, succession. Right?
Speaker 1:There's an old email that says Altman might have joined the board of Tesla as part of old AI discussions. Also came with a nascent threat of Musk doing this AI work inside of Tesla. Very it would be a shame if you didn't accept my offer sort of moves. The Tesla offer is interesting, says Mike Isaac. Musk's offer Musk offers a board seat.
Speaker 1:Altman says it was something he felt was to assuage concerns that Altman would have no direction over the development of AI if it were folded into Tesla, but Altman also said it appeared to be a nascent threat. If Altman had not accepted the idea, according to him, Musk hinted that he may have done work developing AI on his own at Tesla regardless. And Mike Isaac gives some more context here. He says, this sort of talk is fairly commonplace these days on the battlefield that is Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, has in the past made overtures to companies he's interested in acquiring, though he is often more explicit about his intentions.
Speaker 1:If you don't take the deal, we'll come for you. Tony Soprano vibes. Altman is criticizing stack ranking of engineers across AI labs, something Musk loves to do across his companies apparently, and something very common across big codes like Meta and Amazon. And also Microsoft is known for the, for the stack ranking. They almost like invented it or or certainly popularized it, throughout the '90s and 2000s, I believe.
Speaker 1:Altman says AI engineering labs need more psychological safety. You have to be willing to let a researcher go off and try something random in the corner, very bottoms up. This is where the deep research project came from and a bunch of other AI breakthroughs came from. Altman says there was a meeting at Tesla during the evening about folding OpenAI into Tesla for AI research and then a long, long period of time with Elon showing us memes on his phone. And apparently, the court reporter asked Sam Altman to repeat memes on his phone loudly.
Speaker 1:I don't know why they didn't hear it the first time, but, Rat King, Mike Isaac is laughing at this. I am going to have Sam Altman stating memes on his phone into a booming courtroom mic playing inside of my head on repeat for the week. Memes on his phone in all caps. Getting hungry. He only had a banana this morning.
Speaker 1:Mike Isaac is suffering. His stamina points are draining. And he says, LOL, email between Altman and Siobhan talking about how to handle Musk and Altman telling him about a Microsoft investment. So Microsoft's going to invest. How how should we tell Elon?
Speaker 1:Altman narrates the email verbatim. Hopefully, it's easy. Cross fingers emoji because you have to read it out. So really funny to hear cross fingers emoji in the court record. Altman is going through his real first postmortem of his firing, appears to have gone through all five stages of grief multiple times over the course of five days.
Speaker 1:What are
Speaker 2:the five stages of grief? Stages of grief. Cope, seethe.
Speaker 1:Cope, seethe, mold. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Yeah. That is actually cope, seethe, mold, munt, something. The five day period is what is referred to internally at Open Eye as the blip since it was a brief intermission for what it's worth.
Speaker 1:He said Altman said, I had poured the last years of my life into this. I was watching it about to be destroyed. There was something appealing about going to work at Microsoft. I was also very angry, hurt, and upset. It felt like an incredible betrayal.
Speaker 1:It was definitely one of the hardest times of my life. Altman finally broaches the issue of his widely rumored untrustworthiness. Clearly, there were misunderstandings in a breakdown of trust, he said, but with what comes of a bit of a practiced humility in his voice, quote, I was not trying to deceive the board. I feel badly for the misunderstandings, but that was never my intent. This goes to the heart of how Musk's counsel has tried to portray Altman across the entirety of the trial, a fundamentally slippery operator who says one thing to one party and something else entirely to others.
Speaker 1:OpenAI's rebuttal to that line of thinking has been to depict a board of directors at OpenAI rife with dysfunction. And as Microsoft Satya Nadella put it earlier in this week, directors who are operating from amateur city. Interesting. Taking shots at the board. Okay.
Speaker 1:Sam is giving a full jury Sam treatment, again, to bat back against Musk's picture of Altman as a serious liar. If I knew how difficult and painful this was going to be, I never would have tried, but I'm very glad I did. Opening eyes done. Cross examination begins. Stephen Molo, lead Musk counsel, who has the flare for dramatic, will probably give us fireworks.
Speaker 1:And this is continuing. Says, oh my god, Molo, are you completely trustworthy? Altman says, I believe so. Molo says, do you always tell the truth? Wow.
Speaker 1:This is getting heavy. It's all about Musk's counsel painting Sam as a liar. Brutal. Altman is on the defensive, but taking more of a muted tone with some attempted humility in his voice It's very clear contrast with how Musk appeared combative on the stand. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Cross examination is basically Musk's lawyer, Molo, reading off a list of questions saying, Hey, bro. Do you remember? Do you remember all this messed up stuff you did? And Altman saying, No. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Not true. No? Absolute chaos. Well, you can follow along mikeisac. He has a whole thread, he's live posting.
Speaker 1:And I believe that there's a New York Times live blog as well that you can follow along with.
Speaker 2:Should we be Can talk about SPVs? Cover this?
Speaker 1:Yes. Let's move over to SPVs. Special purpose vehicles
Speaker 2:Posts are ranking
Speaker 1:the valley right now. People are raking in the dough with SPVs. Yeah. So Not everyone's happy
Speaker 2:about it. Yeah. We can actually pull go down a little bit and pull up this post, which has since been deleted.
Speaker 3:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:The post said a few days ago, simply brokering an anthropic secondary deal made me more money than my entire net worth from working in my twenties. This is insane. It is especially insane because this is not legal. It is insane to post
Speaker 1:Oh, is it not legal?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you need a broker dealer license to broker securities
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's right. That's right. Well, I mean, she didn't say that she doesn't have one. She might.
Speaker 2:Very, very unlikely. It's it's very burdensome. It just the compliance Yeah. To actually get your own broker dealer. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Even there's people that I know that just do secondary transactions. Yeah. They don't even have their broker dealer license. They work under a firm
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That does. They basically cut, like, contract with a firm. Yeah. So they're kind of like in an almost like a real estate agent working under a bro like
Speaker 1:I'm I'm smelling an intern challenge. Tyler.
Speaker 2:Get your broker dealer
Speaker 1:dealer's license.
Speaker 2:Figure out a way to use AI to bring down the compliance burden.
Speaker 1:Slash goal. Throw that slash goal down. Don't me
Speaker 2:or Broker
Speaker 1:the other guys.
Speaker 3:X high.
Speaker 1:X high 5.5 codex. Yeah. And try and try and get your broker Yeah.
Speaker 2:So and Let's so
Speaker 1:see what it does.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Turns out that if you want to broker securities Yeah. Transactions Yeah. It is there's a big regulatory burden
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For good reason. Right? Yeah. We're talking about, you know, transactions that are
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:At the scale of high end residential real estate in this case. Yeah. You know, if if this individual was maybe getting like a 5% fee
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:On the deal Mhmm. Paid in cash, who knows? It could
Speaker 1:have you know? Wait. The the there is another take here, which is that there's the term brokering, which requires the broker dealer license. But there is also the format where you set up an SPV. The SPV takes in money from an investor and then buys secondary from someone who has the right to sell it, maybe an investor who is not subject to the the form that we saw Anthropic put out.
Speaker 1:Right? And in that case
Speaker 2:We'll get to that.
Speaker 1:We'll get to that. But hypothetically, there are SPVs that they are not technically brokering the secondary deal, but they are facilitating it. And they do take a fee. Right? Because SPVs often have fees associated with them.
Speaker 1:And that does not require a broker dealer license. Right?
Speaker 2:So it's possible. The the straightforward interpretation of the Post Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is that
Speaker 2:they had some sort of side letter, which was like, if I can find you yeah. I can find you a buyer. If I can find you a buyer for a 100,000,000 of your shares, you give me $5,000,000. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:That that happens a lot, but it it usually and hopefully is happening through through
Speaker 1:Legal channels. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Dealers. So Oh. This seemingly prompted both
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I think this is what started it. Right? This must be what's out. Because that post really really matter.
Speaker 2:More specific language
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:On their site saying, Anthropic said unauthorized, Anthropic stock sales and investment scams. Yeah. And said you know, basically saying, any transfer or sale of Anthropic stock or any interest in Anthropic stock that has not been approved by our board of directors is void and will not be recognized on our books and records. Mhmm. And so, yeah.
Speaker 2:Typically, yeah. Typically, like, these are there there's so many ways to, like, transact Yeah. Without informing the company. Sure. Right?
Speaker 2:Common one would be, you know, futures contract.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Basically selling the right to the investment and the future performance.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so I think the futures, the economic exposure enthusiasts or the futures contracts teams would say that, well, we didn't there was no sale of the stock. We didn't transfer the stock. And it's not a direct interest in the stock. And so it doesn't need to be approved by the board of directors.
Speaker 1:And the board of directors would say, absolutely not. That doesn't count. You think you found a workaround, and it doesn't count in this world.
Speaker 2:But Yeah.
Speaker 1:That is going to be, you know,
Speaker 2:is there's there's these sort of digital asset equivalents Yep.
Speaker 1:Like people Some of put out comments.
Speaker 2:Basically, meme stocks around Yeah. That that are trying to track overall interest or the Yeah. Overall valuation of these companies. They sold off, which is funny because I don't believe they're actually tied to any Yeah. Real underlying equity.
Speaker 1:And and even So it's purely sentiment based. And even and even in the case that they were, like, saying that they were tied, it was typically, like, in 11% to 5% of the fund in Anthropic or OpenAI or SpaceX. And and they were, like, already well disconnected from the fundamentals of book value. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I'm I'm trying to think through how this plays out. And overall, I think the reaction from the Internet was being more dramatic than maybe maybe is necessary. Because already, if you're, let's say, an early investor in Anthropic, and you, at some point, sold your shares, you didn't go to the board and get permission, but you structured some deal to sell your shares. You get your shares back.
Speaker 2:Is so Win win. Wait waiting. Well waiting for that. On one hand, party, if you bought the shares or you sold the shares, neither party is that incentivized to go to Anthropic board and be like, hey, I'm really sorry. We did this.
Speaker 2:It was against. Because on one hand, there's probably some scenario where the investor or the Anthropic employee could get their shares voided or reclaimed in some scenario. So they don't necessarily want to do that. The investor is like, well, I bought these shares, and now they're worth a lot more. So let's just be chill and let this play out, and we'll all forget about it.
Speaker 2:Right? But there is a scenario where the seller tries to then make the case of, oh, actually, I'll just give you the money back because now the stock is appreciated so massively.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:There might be a weird But what ends up happening is there's this legal tension, tension between both these parties. And then there could be some incentive. Again, the person that bought the shares at a lower valuation wants to just let it ride. But then somebody might be like, well, I kind of would happily ride up another 20 x or something But like then if this starts going if once it goes into like an actual complaint or a lawsuit, then it becomes public. And then you have this third party in there, is anthropic, which is like gonna just be like, hey, like you guys have been messing around.
Speaker 2:Like this isn't this isn't cool. This is against against, you know, multiple sort of agreements and and terms. So anyways, it's going be very messy, right? Because there's This already blog been
Speaker 1:post is also these blog posts are not new rules. It's merely they are publicizing rules that are probably already Exactly. In the stock
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because if you invested earlier, you're an employee, you should know all this, It isn't a surprise, right?
Speaker 1:Well, it's possible that very early investors don't have transfer restrictions for some reason. I don't think so. It's pretty standard.
Speaker 2:No, you always set this up as a company because imagine you have an early angel investor and your company does well, and they just sell it to somebody who you don't like. Like, part of the reason to be private is you can I just mean like control
Speaker 1:who every deal is unique and every deal gets negotiated points? And there might be at some point when some investor and employee was like, I'm not joining unless you give me this. And they're like, Okay, yeah, we'll pay you less, but we'll give you this. There's always horse trading, double trigger, single trigger.
Speaker 2:But it would be People think it would
Speaker 1:be for different reasons. Maybe one you. Percent. Agree
Speaker 2:agree with you. Knows how many transactions there's actually been? I don't know. There could be like, when you actually look down through all the trees of SPVs and SPVs A lot. There could be, what, what A lot.
Speaker 2:10 over 20,000
Speaker 1:It's not, individual like, taxicab driver telling you about the SPV that they got into yet, but it's close to it. I mean, there was the story of the guy who was like selling his house for anthropic secondary. Right? Like, there's a lot of examples of this. Like,
Speaker 2:people Oh, that's are got to or imagine imagine the the the, like, record updates.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You'll be able to look at the deed or whatever and be like, oh, who's the new owner? Oh, you work you're an early No. So that that whole transaction doesn't really work.
Speaker 1:Oh, And that's extremely public.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Doesn't make It's way
Speaker 1:more complicated. Yeah. Well, let's break it down for the Frog and Toad fans, the children in the audience, because Frankie over at Paradigm put it in terms even a child could explain, potentially a four or five year old. So if you're familiar with just Frog and Toad and you don't know anything about all the buzzwords we've been dropping for the last five you can think about it this way. Frog and Toad, the loved children's book.
Speaker 1:Frog put the shares of Anthropic or OpenAI in an SPV. There, he said, now we can transfer these shares freely. But Anthropic can still exercise its transfer restrictions, said Toad. That is true, said Frog. The Frog and Toad, it's a great one.
Speaker 1:Ankur says, if Anthropic deems all secondary sales of Anthropic stock should be voided, does that mean the original buyer retains financial interest even after selling it away? Lawsuit territory, yeah, there's going be a messy thing. People have talking about unwinding SpaceX AAA or SPVs for a long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's going to be a billion dollar that's going be almost a billion dollar industry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we need to get the Macrium clip up again. It goes viral every time we talk about SPVs. What does Mike Isaac say? He says, yeah, look all the Privcos draft this language to scare employees who don't know better from trading on secondary markets and from buyers seeking those shares. And yet SPVs find a way.
Speaker 1:Funny to see the saber rattling in Twitter accounts doing hyperbolic posts, though. And so it'll be interesting to see like how far does the legal implications how far do they actually go? Well, over at a different AI lab, Mira Moradi, who is just was Mira on the stand? She was actually testifying in person, was she just, video deposition?
Speaker 3:When I saw her, which was last Wednesday, it was just deposition. Oh, just I don't believe she actually has testified in the trial
Speaker 1:It was Siobhan that was on the stand.
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 1:Got it. Okay. Well, Mira is cooking over at Thinking Machines Lab, TML launch interaction models with a delightfully concise YouTube video that we should play, so that we can watch this. Miramaradi says on X, Today, we are sharing our work on interaction models, a new class of model trained from scratch to handle real time interact natively instead of gluing it to onto a turn based one. Let's play the video.
Speaker 4:Hey. I need your help with something today. You ready?
Speaker 5:Absolutely. I'm ready. What's up?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we're giving an announcement today, and I've got two of my friends coming to help. Every time one of them enters the frame, I need you to say, friend.
Speaker 1:Look at those speakers.
Speaker 5:Got it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely insane setup, audio file. Cool.
Speaker 4:So we've got a new system for full duplex audio and video, which means that, you can stream input into it in real time and it can respond to you even while you're speaking to it simultaneously. How does that sound?
Speaker 5:Sounds like a solid setup. Full duplex with real time interaction is super useful.
Speaker 1:It seems faster than the original voice mode, which was lamented by the viral Instagram Reel producers.
Speaker 4:Can you translate in to in English in real time for my friend and for audience?
Speaker 5:Absolutely. I'll translate as you go. Today, we're taking a look at our preview model.
Speaker 1:I saw or I heard about a version of this in China that's a mask that you wear that translates everything you say out of a speaker on the front. And I was hearing this, I was just like, why is this not in America? This seems so sick. Right. Like we hear about the AirPods, but then you so the example was a mom in China teaching her kids English.
Speaker 1:And so she basically wants to be talking to them in English constantly, But she doesn't know enough English to teach them. But she wants them to learn. And so she will, I think, wear Put on the mask. No, it's literally a Bain mask.
Speaker 5:It looks Exactly a Bain mask.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You Yeah. Merely adopted English. She was born in it or born in the AI translation minds. So she wears this Bane mask that does the live translation out to her kids. Her kids speak back to her in English.
Speaker 1:Smart headphones translate
Speaker 2:Do have like metal that wraps around?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I couldn't find it. I was listening to it on a podcast, so I didn't have any visuals. But we got to find this thing and get a pair in America. Because in theory, we could do the whole show speaking Chinese to each other, and the audience would hear Chinese.
Speaker 1:But we would be hearing English that we talk to each other. Woah. Isn't that cool?
Speaker 2:Powerful.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I would be hearing English on a massive delay probably. But I would be speaking Chinese as it comes out of my Bane mask. And and it was just a whole story. The whole the whole thrust of the The New York Times daily was like the optimism of of AI optimism in China around AI.
Speaker 1:Just tons and tons of examples of everyday people being like, oh, yeah, AI is amazing. I'm teaching my kids English. They're going to have a great life. And like, I would not be able to do this before and now I can just do this. And there's like so many examples of that and it's the exact opposite.
Speaker 2:The moment Jordi gets a live translation button, it's over. Yeah. We're not that far away from me being We're working
Speaker 3:on that right now actually. Wait. But what? Yeah. For
Speaker 1:Are serious? I I
Speaker 3:guess But
Speaker 2:it doesn't work.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Guests.
Speaker 3:For that mask, I would actually be very surprised if that's, like, real or or at least if the audio sounds very good. It'll be because, like, you you can just look at, like, okay, what are the best, like, real time translation models? What are they, like, API prices? They're, like, not super cheap. So you can't do it locally, which means it's somehow in the cloud.
Speaker 3:Right? And and just, like, even the best models are there's still some delay, and they're just basically now getting to a point where it, like, sounds like a real person, not like super computer Yeah. Like, nice audio.
Speaker 1:It has a it has a clanker dialect.
Speaker 3:Okay. So yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 1:But But just
Speaker 3:like getting the the latency down is like extremely difficult. Because people have been working on this for, I mean, this
Speaker 1:like You don't think you Google can do it on device at all? What if you basically At
Speaker 3:some point, can, but I think it's still like very
Speaker 1:Phone ASIC for this one model. You take the Lama three version of it. You bake it down. The huge battery pack. You're wearing a whole jetpack full of batteries to power the h 100 in the back.
Speaker 1:It's on device inference, but they didn't say how big the suit is. You have to wear the Kinects for the mass. Like Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's like you you have to avail a whole rack.
Speaker 2:It's like the Nathan
Speaker 1:for you.
Speaker 2:No. It's like the Nathan for you, the
Speaker 1:chilly suit. For sure. It's an NVL 72 that you're just, like, dragging behind you like a washing machine. Anyway, GameStop is going to need to level up if they want to successfully take over eBay because eBay has rejected GameStop's $55,000,000,000 takeover bid. The online marketplace, that's eBay, called the cash and stock proposal, quote, neither credible nor attractive.
Speaker 1:The New York Times has a story here. The online marketplace rejected the proposal. This news should surprise no one since the odds it would accept GameStop's brash offer were infinitesimally remote. There is another media deal going on right now. Byron Allen is buying BuzzFeed, investing $120,000,000 in the digital media company and will become the CEO.
Speaker 1:This is a very interesting story because I don't know how familiar you are or the audience is with Byron Allen, but he had a fascinating career where he was originally he jumped straight into late night talk show host. He was he he became a late night talk show host and then eventually had this very interesting business where he would buy
Speaker 2:Zero to
Speaker 1:Yap. Basically. He would buy the rights to broadcast on TV in certain slots, in certain hours. And then he would independently go sell advertising against the programming that he would put together. And so the money would flow from the advertiser to him, and then he would pay to air his content on traditional TV.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Very interesting.
Speaker 2:So he was on the hook for the airtime, basically. But any difference
Speaker 1:was But he was paying for the airtime. Then he eventually bought the Weather Channel and a number of other sort of traditional over the over the air TV stations and sort of grew. He's also will be taking over the time slot from, I believe, Stephen Colbert post that changeover with a show called what is it? Comics Unleashed. It's a roundtable conversation.
Speaker 1:It's sort of just a podcast with a bunch of comics. Allen Family Digital, a company associated with Mr. Allen, will pay $120,000,000 for 52% stake. And this is a huge jump from where BuzzFeed was trading. I think BuzzFeed was trading around like 40,000,000 to $80,000,000 market cap or something.
Speaker 1:So it's like almost a 3x premium. And we can get into the share price in a minute. But I'm sure there will be more developments on what happens with BuzzFeed as
Speaker 2:Yeah, so curious what the plan is. I don't think it's a good good brand at this point. Certainly has name recognition. Yeah. But I don't know anybody that wakes up in the morning and
Speaker 1:Home page
Speaker 2:is says, yeah. I gotta know what BuzzFeed is talking about today. Granted, there's probably a lot of people. Yeah. And Byron is a a media tycoon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So now, that's why I'm curious. Like, what is what's the play here?
Speaker 1:No. Think you see opportunity.
Speaker 2:If you if you had a $120,000,000 to just build a new media property
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You wonder, hey, what what could you actually do? So is it is there some massive audience that's still sneakily more engaged? Maybe he sees a pivot to prediction markets.
Speaker 1:Oh, I don't know.
Speaker 2:You know, don't know. Like, we're
Speaker 1:we're for a BuzzFeed today. Let's check it out. Buzzfeed.com. 50. Why would you put that thing in writing photos that prove people are the worst?
Speaker 1:That's the number one trending article in BuzzFeed. 41 celebs people used to love and now can't even stand to look at. 22 they really go they love the listicle, and they're getting longer. I was joking about five key reasons. That would never make that cut at modern BuzzFeed.
Speaker 1:22 stories about boy moms and their sons that will make you cringe into oblivion.