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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.
First, we will tell you about NVIDIA earnings. They crushed highly anticipated. As always, NVIDIA is permanently holding up The US economy, continues to hold up The US economy, the global markets, but it's sold off even though they blew out earnings, and it was a very good quarter. So earnings dropped yesterday after we got off the phone with Doug O'Laughlin from Semi Analysis. Semi Analysis did have some good breakdowns here.
Speaker 1:But the top line revenue came in at $68,100,000,000, up 73% year over year and 20% quarter on quarter. And this beat consensus estimates by nearly 3%. The stock price popped around 3% immediately, but then sold out sold off 5% after at the market open this this morning, making it the stock's worst day since last April. They're now just a
Speaker 2:tiny Was the April deep $4,500,000,000,000
Speaker 1:company. April was DeepSea? Last April? Last April was DeepSea. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense. People were saying you're you won't need a whole bunch of NVIDIA chips because you'll be able to inference cheap commodity hardware and the models
Speaker 2:will DeepSeek was climbing the App Store charts in America totally organically.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There was a lot of weird stuff going on.
Speaker 2:They weren't using a massive bot farm at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I I guess this sort of steel man the DeepSeek story. There was this interesting takeaway, which was that even though the numbers were sort of misreported We
Speaker 2:had it wrong. I think it was January.
Speaker 1:Deep sea was January?
Speaker 2:Liberation Day was
Speaker 1:Oh, liberation day tariffs. Yeah, chip sanctions. But the deep sea lesson was you can distill models. You can get a certain level of intelligence at a much lower cost. And that is real, but the demand on the frontier is just incredible because people are like, oh, I have a strong opinion about 5.3 versus 4.6.
Speaker 1:Like people really care about being on that perfect leading edge for exactly what their use case is. You see this with people having favorite models, favorite flavors all over the place. And so the the demand in the Jevons paradox really just powered right through. What do have to
Speaker 3:say about I was gonna say, like, I think when the deep sea click moment happened, the narrative was not that they were distilling now. It was that they had built like, they had trained a brand new model
Speaker 1:On with very few Yeah.
Speaker 3:Resources. Yeah. There was no, like, sense that they were just, like, distilling
Speaker 1:There was rumors about it pretty quickly.
Speaker 3:There were rumors, but
Speaker 2:the main
Speaker 3:Yeah. Narrative was not that Yeah. Like, they're were they being distilled?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I I think what I mean what what I mean about distilling is that, like, the the truth that came out over the, you know, news cycle was that distillation does get you somewhere near a particular frontier capability and allows you to reduce cost. But there is still another order of magnitude of demand for the next generation and the next level of the frontier, And we have yet to see a plateau emerge for demand for whatever the next frontier is.
Speaker 2:The story of the last year is that there's very, very, very, very little demand for number three. Yeah. There's some demand for number two. And there's an exceptional amount demand Yeah. For the most performant model for a specific specific task.
Speaker 1:So going back to our newsletter today, our earnings recap. After the earnings call, Semi Analysis called the results staggering. I love it. Clean bill of health on gross margin, revenue and the guide is firmly above buy side bogeys, incredibly clean really. They also pointed out what NVIDIA said about supply commitments with $21,400,000,000 of inventory on hand, up from $19,800,000,000 They have $95,200,000,000 of supply locked in with chip manufacturers, also stating, we have strategically secured inventory and capacity to meet demand beyond the next several quarters.
Speaker 1:In other words, we're not running out of chips anytime soon. That's good news for NVIDIA. The second order effect that I think was interesting that Doug O'Laughlin flagged for us was that even if TSMC does scale up magically or they figure out how to build another Fab, Arizona increases capacity, even if NVIDIA has sharp elbows and is able to push out other demand and get all the line time they need to build all the accelerators that they need, soak up all the CPU demand, etcetera, etcetera. Well, then you could still wind up in a weird scenario where NVIDIA has the chips. They are ready to sell them.
Speaker 1:The hyperscalers want to buy them. The AI labs want to inference them, but there's just not enough energy. When does the chip bottlenecks shift to the energy bottleneck? That could be part of what is sort of worrying people because you can see in the timeline we have this chart, Are you not entertained? From Nathan.
Speaker 1:He's taking a screenshot from the Financial Times, and it is just one of the most incredible graphs I've ever seen. You have to wonder if there are any bottlenecks that they will run into. TSMC capacity
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I asked Doug about this. I asked Doug about this. What does NVIDIA do if their customers do have an energy bottleneck? I feel like they'll find a way to still ship the chips.
Speaker 1:I agree. And truthfully, as big of a story data centers are, they're still consuming well under 1% of US electricity. And so there are chips to be moved around. There are new power plants to be brought online. We're actually talking to Doug Bernhauer from Radiant about nuclear power today, and there are so many different ways to solve the energy bottleneck.
Speaker 1:But it is very real world. It is very slow. And if there's a timing mismatch, you could see a little bit of a flat line that I think people might be worried about. So Jensen himself strongly pushed back against the SaaSpocalypse narrative yesterday, which is interesting because he doesn't necessarily have to. Could be out there saying like, yes, all those SaaS CPU workloads, they're all going to be GPU workloads now.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, you should actually sell all your SaaS because the future is inferenced. Like, every app that you use, it's not going to be code that's running on a CPU. It's going to be inferenced on GPU on demand. And demand for NVIDIA should be even higher. Like, he doesn't really have that many bags with the SaaS companies necessarily.
Speaker 1:Of course, they'd be, you know, upset if he was talking trash, but he's not. He's defending them.
Speaker 2:And he buys a lot of software.
Speaker 1:Sure. Yeah. Of course. He said, I think the markets got it wrong on the SaaSpocalypse. This is Jensen Huang talking to CNBC's Becky Quick, pushing back on the fears that AI agents will cannibalize the enterprise software industry.
Speaker 1:Instead, he expects a broad swath of software firms to use Agentic AI to develop their software and boost efficiency. In what he described as counterintuitive, Wang said that AI agents won't replace these software tools but will use them instead. Why even waste the tokens building a calculator when you can just download the calculator SaaS or whatever? I don't know. And this is certainly the true certainly what we've seen with databases.
Speaker 1:Like, certain databases have just skyrocketed in demand because they're the ones that the agents are pulling off the shelf. NVIDIA is such a big deal. It's not just on the cover of the business section, it's on the cover of The Wall Street Journal. NVIDIA results help soothe AI fears. The surge in profit comes as the AI industry's appetite for chips continues to grow.
Speaker 1:Data center hardware, the chips and networking equipment that NVIDIA sells to AI and cloud computing companies accounted for 91.4% of the quarter sales. Terrible news for gamers. Like absolutely the worst numbers you could ever see if you're gamers. Maybe that's why they're they're they're they're launching a short short attack short
Speaker 2:Teenage John would be punching a hole.
Speaker 1:I would be. Maybe the gamers have risen up and they are shorting NVIDIA to try and get them to go back into gaming. Computing demand is growing exponentially. Chief Executive Jensen Huang said, the agentic AI inflection point has arrived. With each passing quarter, the pressure grows on NVIDIA, which at a market value of nearly 5,000,000,000,000 is the world's largest publicly traded company.
Speaker 1:It's no longer enough for NVIDIA to produce good quarterly results. They have to produce perfect quarterly results, Daniel Newman.
Speaker 3:How they
Speaker 2:have done better? Instead
Speaker 1:of net income of $43,000,000,000 in the quarter, they could have put up $50,000,000,000 or $60,000,000,000 or $100,000,000,000 or $10,000,000,000,000 quadrillion. We I wanna see a quadrillion quadrillion dollar quarter, please, Jensen.
Speaker 2:Gavin Baker
Speaker 4:His tenets.
Speaker 2:Gave some thoughts ahead of NVIDIA. Shanu pulled some out. The same point hit on by Gavin in Citadel Securities. It's a good one. Gavin said, the world is fundamentally short both watts and wafers and it may take years to resolve these shortages.
Speaker 2:The shortage of watts and wafers may prevent an overbuild. Hyperscalers would overbuild if they could, but they simply cannot. My best guess is that we would need roughly a thousand x more compute for the unlikely hypothetical scenario described by Satrini to be remotely possible and the time it takes us to get there will give humans time to adjust and maximize the many potential benefits of AI. Citadel said, displacing white collar work would require orders of magnitude more compute intensity than the current level utilization. Even if the algorithms improve recursively, economic deployment remains bounded by physical capital, energy availability, regulatory approvals, and organizational change.
Speaker 2:And do know what the title of Citadel's response was? No. The twenty twenty six global intelligence crisis calling everyone idiots.
Speaker 1:We gotta write an intelligence crisis report now.
Speaker 2:This is the perfect response. Like, very, very detailed.
Speaker 1:The interesting question about like, you know, replacing white collar work versus like augmenting in new things is that the AI labs are obviously selling into enterprises. That's growing a lot. And the revenues are very real, tens of billions of dollars. But when you look to the other startups that have put up really big ARRs, it it it just it I'm trying to square like, Suno just announced that they're selling 300,000,000 in ARR for AI music. And that's a huge number.
Speaker 1:It's it's so big, but it doesn't feel like replacement work yet. It feels like it's just an additive new thing. Like, there were just a lot of people that wanted to pay $10 a month for a cool app.
Speaker 4:Same thing. That was too.
Speaker 2:How many how many nontechnical people had an idea for an app? How many people that weren't musicians Are doing had an idea for a song. Yeah. They never could.
Speaker 1:That and then They're just unlocking
Speaker 2:all this
Speaker 1:And then you see it with like Higgs field too and and all the viral loops and then not Webflow.
Speaker 2:TBPN simulator?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. But the the Capybars. Lovable is one where where huge, huge growth.
Speaker 1:And and it feels like, yes, lovable is, like, going into enterprises and whatnot. But it feels like there's a lot of just, like, net new software developers, website builders that are joining that platform and building stuff, and it feels very incremental. It does not feel very substitutional to me. And I'm wondering how much of the Suno story translates to the AI Lab coding model story as well. NVIDIA stock is falling because it needed to clear an options wall of $200 a share.
Speaker 1:So given a lot of folks were long calls into the print and it didn't clear 200, brokers are selling stock to reverse some sold calls. It's that simple. This isn't fundamentals. It's market mechanics, Gordon Johnson. Samsung Build that.
Speaker 2:Becomes the first Korean company to reach a $1,000,000,000,000 market cap
Speaker 1:Pretty remarkable.
Speaker 2:Over on companiesmarketcap.com. Mhmm. You can see number 12.
Speaker 1:That's your homepage. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Homepage. Yeah. But Samsung passed Walmart.
Speaker 1:I mean, increasingly important. In the AI era? I don't think it's all the TVs. There there there was some interesting stat about, of the $1,000,000,000,000 companies, isn't Samsung like the the most highest margin or lowest margin or something? There there there were some posts from yesterday we didn't get to, but there there was a lot more context on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Ram Capital What this Is sharing. It says, Patriot. And somebody says, I have open clause sending low ball offers on Zillow all day just to make boomers start panicking.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And he says, can you give me an update on the Zillow campaign today? The Zillow update. Listings contacted today, 372. Average offer, 70% below asking. Positive responses, zero.
Speaker 2:Negative responses, 270. One response was violent, but I've reported it to the Tampa Bay Police Department. No response. A 102. Would you like me to keep making offers?
Speaker 1:70% below asking? Just you're selling a million dollar property and it's like, how's that? Can you do 300 k?
Speaker 2:Yep. Let's Let's
Speaker 1:bring in John Palmer. Let's bring
Speaker 2:in John Palmer, our surprise.
Speaker 1:He's live in the TVP in Ultradome.
Speaker 2:Coming in.
Speaker 1:You you know him.
Speaker 2:We're in DC.
Speaker 1:Nice hat. John Palmer. You probably know John Palmer is
Speaker 2:As the being one inch shorter than you.
Speaker 1:Well, he's the face of leg lengthening surgery right now. Right?
Speaker 4:No. They were saying I'm the Goldilocks technology brother.
Speaker 1:Oh. They were
Speaker 4:saying some people were saying you're a little too tall. Oh, okay. And Jordy's tall in his own right, but maybe not But quite sure.
Speaker 2:At this table. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So they they wanted someone right in between. Yes. So I was contacted by by your team and
Speaker 1:happy to I love it. Well, actually introduce yourself since for for those who've been living out in your data center.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Sure. My name is John Palmer. I was a co founder and CEO of a company called PartyDow. Recently announced that we're gonna be joining Stripe So that was a awesome five year journey.
Speaker 4:And also work on a company called Area Technology, which does logo and graphic design for brands like yourself. Yeah. Shout out to the new logo and graphics package. And yeah. That that's
Speaker 2:We are honored. Yeah. Well, we wanted to do we wanted to hang and do some timeline with Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 4:That do
Speaker 2:is a sign of great respect.
Speaker 1:Donald Trump spins the wheel of tariffs and replaces a 5% tariff on Belarusian wheat with a 22.4% tariff on Pakistani jet engines. All stocks lose 2 d $6. Substack Newsletter publishes a story about DoorDash going badly. DoorDash down 862 percent. Global Financial system teeters on the brink.
Speaker 1:And three, Nvidia announces earnings of $100,000,000,000,000 beating expectations by a thousand x. Jensen Huang named new king of earth while his stockholders to form the new permanent ruling class. Nvidia down 3% on the news. Are you are you a day trader guy?
Speaker 4:No. No. Are you an investor? I am an investor.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'm investor. How do you think about the market? Are you
Speaker 2:a businessman?
Speaker 1:What's your strategy?
Speaker 4:I'm an investor. I'm a businessman. I don't I don't know. I think my approach is like pretty smooth brain value investing. Like, good fundamentals.
Speaker 4:I'll buy the stock and hold it for a long time. Okay. Definitely not doing doing a lot of even even intra month trade. It's it's really like long
Speaker 2:term You're not like a one man Jane Street. I'm not
Speaker 4:a I'm not a one man Jane
Speaker 2:Street.
Speaker 1:What about what about crypto? I feel like if you're working in crypto, even adjacent to crypto, there's just so much alpha from seeing essentially like angel investment style opportunities from someone who's building something that's you just know it's gonna be hyped and the token's gonna moon.
Speaker 2:But the issue is that it's like wildly distracting because as soon as you have enough money Is that to invest. I I I think I I think I I don't like doing a lot of like individual stock trading Yeah. Because as soon then then my attention is gravitating towards this that's not actually productive. Yeah. And so
Speaker 1:What do
Speaker 4:you think
Speaker 1:about it?
Speaker 4:I think that's true and I think I mean, obviously, you're trading like perps in crypto, like you better stay on top of it Yeah. Because like there's a moment to exit or if you just hold it long term, you'll probably get liquidated at some point. Sure. So I I just don't touch any of that. You're right though that there are there are like, yeah, weird things in crypto where like someone you know or someone's doing a project and they airdrop a token or something like this and you wake up a week later and it's worth like whatever a month's worth of your salary.
Speaker 4:So I think that's
Speaker 2:I've seen maybe 10,000 posts kind of blaming them entirely Yeah. For crypto price action over the last couple months. Have you been able to find anything that is like definitive? Obviously, the lawsuit came out and they were like we were going back and forth on it because they pulled funds out of this liquidity pool Yeah. Right after
Speaker 4:I don't even think they I don't think they pulled funds. I actually think they sold into the pool. Oh, okay. Which is I guess the same thing. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I Yeah. Don't know.
Speaker 2:But they did it five minutes after. We were saying maybe yesterday or the day before that, okay, it's a public blockchain.
Speaker 4:So in
Speaker 2:theory, they it's not actually a smoking gun necessarily.
Speaker 4:I'm I'm only as informed as you are in terms of the tweets. I haven't verified anything, but yeah. My understanding is that Terra Luna had had a lot of money in this pool, and they had planned to pull a 180 something million out of it. I guess the allegation is that Jane Street heard that this was coming before everyone else. That's like the material non public information.
Speaker 4:And so then also pulled their money or sold it just minutes after Tara did it. You're you're right that it's public. So I guess like, again, not a source of truth here. I'm I'm like relaying second hand of confidence information that I read on on on
Speaker 2:built for for podcast.
Speaker 4:But, yeah. Guess you could say, hey, it was anyone could see that and they just reacted quickest. I I guess what that would come down to is what are the internal ops on moving those funds like that. I would imagine that a fund like Jane Street with $85,000,000 in this pool isn't just sitting in someone's like hot wallet meta mask. Right?
Speaker 4:So they probably would have had
Speaker 2:They could have like some type of protocol or actually software to
Speaker 1:let Yeah. And it still feels like conspiracy theories that Yeah. It feels very similar to the Robin Hood GameStop fiasco where there was like a lot of conspiracy theories about like Citadel purposely tanking markets and the bailing out hedge funds at various points. And Mhmm. I'd I always thought that was just like people looking for scapegoats and a whole bunch of market actors just playing hardball because that's the that's the default structure.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I'm not that comfortable like, yeah, speculating on this either because I'm just like, alright. I saw, you know, posting the timeline.
Speaker 2:Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will assess workers' friendliness and will be trained to recognize certain words and phrases like, welcome to Burger King, please and thank you. It's huge. The AI will be programmed into workers' headsets according to the Verge.
Speaker 4:Think I Chick fil A got access to that technology like a decade early.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Because there's a My Pleasure. There's a thank you. There's a My Pleasure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Apparently, when McDonald's opened in Russia, there's a quote, after several several days of training about customer service at McDonald's, a young Soviet teenager asked the McDonald's trainer a very serious question. Why do we have to be so nice to the customers? After all, we have the hamburgers, and they don't.
Speaker 1:They need to be nice to us if they want these hamburgers.
Speaker 2:Noah Smith is sharing the job postings for software engineers have picked up since Vivecoding became a thing. They've been declining in till the early part of last year, actually. Again, this is why, I mean, we've we've talked about this over and over and over. I feel like there's this like two different narratives being spread on Instagram. It's just like this like labor displacement narrative going super super super hard.
Speaker 2:And then over here, it's just an entirely different world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean Tyler, how how do you interpret the the software engineering number? Have we talked about this yet?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, so I I think I broadly agree, like, so when Dario went on Dorkesh, he had this take where it's like, you go from AI doing 90% of coding to 100%, and then it goes from 90% of like all suite tasks to 100%. Mhmm. And so when you're kind of in the interim period, engineers get super super productive. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But then there's a point where it's like actually it it's like instead of being super high leverage because they're the AI is doing 99%
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Now the AI is doing a 100% and it's actually like it just kind of instantly goes to zero. You should see a lot of like hiring because everyone wants, a vibe coder at the company.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:But then at some point, vibe coding comes so easy that, like, you don't need any any, like, special talent to be able to do it. And then you just have the random person.
Speaker 1:I I I mean,
Speaker 2:even if if if you if one day you're not sitting at your desk, you're like Mhmm. You're kind of the the vibe coder in the coal mine
Speaker 1:in Yeah. The canary. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sure. There is a world where software engineering root postings and jobs are substituted for other roles. Like, you can have someone whose job is like a business analyst, and every day they open Excel and crunch some numbers. And then you could hire a software engineer to automate that task ten years ago, twenty years ago, and a lot of companies did.
Speaker 1:And if vibe coding sort of eats into other things, you could see the rest of white it's like the white collar work could go away because the software engineers are doing it. And then the bigger question is like, you're sort of jumping ahead to like a bull unemployment scenario where no one has a job. But in the world where there are like a few jobs, there I I keep thinking about this thing that Pavel Asperhoff said where if the software engineering jobs go away, like, get ready to compete with software engineers in every category because they're gonna learn financial analysis. They're gonna learn to trade. They're gonna learn to sell.
Speaker 1:They're gonna learn all these things. The those people will still be employed. They'll just be in a different part of the economy.
Speaker 2:Adi Schiffman dropped user interview number three. We're not gonna play the video because it's kind of sad, but Gary Tan said, this is not the happy demo path. Apple or Google would never make this one of their launch videos. It's not what you'll hear about in a TED talk, but it's real. AI doesn't get tired, doesn't ghost.
Speaker 2:A lot to think about with this one. You know, Avi continues to find new ways to break through the noise. Mhmm. But in some ways, like even though this video has been feels somewhat dystopian, you know, this is someone who's struggling with mental health, like actually gets in an accident in the video, it does feel like the most kind of real, raw Mhmm. Experience of AI companionship in this form factor.
Speaker 1:Reflection on, like do you remember his interaction with Paul Graham? He was like, I'm building, like, a hardware device for AI. He he put out, like, some very vague post about his plans. And everyone was like, this is impossible. Like, Apple will crush you.
Speaker 1:They have the supply chain. They have the distribution. They have brand. Like, you will never win in this category. And Paul Graham told him, like, in order to win, you have to do things that Apple would never do be and be counter positioned.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This this type of messaging is certainly in line with, like, the anti Apple. And the breaking news is that Warner Brothers says Paramount's new offer is superior. Netflix now has four days to respond. The call sheet market is, continuing to diverge.
Speaker 1:When we started tracking this, Netflix was up at 50%, Paramount at 40%. Now Paramount is starting to run away with it. They're at 62%, and Netflix is down at 33. Will they sweeten their offer? We don't know, but Netflix has four days to respond.
Speaker 1:More breaking news. More breaking news. What else?
Speaker 2:Square is cutting from 10,000 to 6,000 employees, a 40% reduction. Woah. Let's head over to Jack. He says, we're making blocks smaller today. Here's my note to the company.
Speaker 2:So he says, today, we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company. We're reducing our organization by nearly half from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. That means 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. I'll be straight about what's happening. First off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for twenty weeks plus one week per year of tenure, equity vested through the May, six months of health care, corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help in this transition.
Speaker 2:We're not making this decision because we're in trouble. Our business is strong. Gross profit continues to grow. We continue to serve more customers, and profitability is improving, but something has changed. We're already seeing that intelligence tools we're creating and using paired with smaller and flatter teams are enabling a new way of working, fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company, and that's accelerating rapidly.
Speaker 2:I had two options cut gradually over months or years as the shift plays out or be honest about where we are and act on it now. I choose the latter. Repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. This feels a little bit more real.
Speaker 1:Like what's a trainee was sort of predicting a little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it feels more real than some of these other cuts where they do like a 8% rift.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is a big
Speaker 2:And then say, oh, we're getting Yeah. But going down by nearly half.
Speaker 1:Also, Block has been mostly spared the SaaS pocalypse. Over the last one month, the stock's down 17%. Over the last six months, it's down 30%. It's down 50%, 60%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but still, it's trading at like somewhere around
Speaker 1:It's way off peak. The peak stock price was $263 Now it's at $54 And so there's certainly a question about how they build back.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's 4,000 people, which is a huge number. I ran deep research report to try to find because it's certainly not not the largest layoff ever. Mhmm. But it is the largest layoff as a percentage of the overall workforce in S and P five hundred history.
Speaker 1:Wait. How is that possible?
Speaker 2:So the second largest layoff in S and P five hundred history was Like 30%. Phillips
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:At '22 and a half percent. Woah. Chevron at 17 and a half percent. Intel did 15% in 2024. GM did 15% Yes.
Speaker 2:In 2018. Meta So I guess
Speaker 1:I guess the the Twitter restructuring doesn't count because it was delisted before that happened. Yep. So Twitter went from 7,500 to 1,500. I think you're right. It might not have been in the S and P 500 at
Speaker 2:the time. It wasn't.
Speaker 1:Well, there's some reactions. Will Slaughter, Bama Bonds says in three years, from December 2019 to December 2022, Block more than tripled its headcount from 3,900 to 12,500, unwinding less than half an insane COVID overhiring binge has much more to do with Jack Dorsey's managerial incompetence than whether AI is gonna take your job. And so people are immediately jumping to, is this AI? Is this not? The stock's up 25% on the news, so the investors certainly think it's the right move to make, the right hard thing to do.
Speaker 1:The other interesting thing is that Block, if I'm correct, did a fairly large merger with Afterpay. And I don't know how much overlap in the employee base there was, but it's not uncommon when a merger of those two sizes, 10,000,000,000 to I think the Afterpay merger was in the tens of billions. It was $13,900,000,000 It was an all stock deal. It was originally announced at $29,000,000,000 Afterpay had around 1,500 employees, and so there's a few different things go. Dan Primak says it's stunning in its candor.
Speaker 1:And if you're one of those spared, how could you not be wondering how long until AI comes for your job too? If CEOs get comfortable that this is okay, let alone if they believe shareholders will be rewarded for it, could set off a stunning layoff wave.
Speaker 2:The obvious pushback totally over at Solana's making, he said, didn't Jack have 10,000 people running this website when only 75 were needed even before AI? So again, it really matter whether or not a company is actually getting tremendous efficiency from AI. Every CEO is going to do this. And we've said over and over and over, I'm surprised more CEOs haven't done Yes. Deal on things.
Speaker 2:Salesforce has 76,000 people Mhmm. At the company.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Right? It's basically a city. Yeah. It's really, really sad. Jared Sleeper who has a fantastic episode on Odd Lots about the SaaSpocalypse.
Speaker 2:He says, first of many sad days, painful as it is, Jax did focus service by being decisive. Of course, really sad day. These employees will be able to quickly go and hit the job market, which probably gives them somewhat of an advantage over future layoffs like this.
Speaker 1:If you're not a software engineer, this should be a wake up call to what has happened in the past few months with AI engineering tools. Everything has changed. Now we get to watch as companies learn how to either use these tools in earnest or slowly fall behind, says Dustin Curtis. I'm very interested to learn the shape of the layoffs. Did they lean more software focused or less software focused?
Speaker 1:This is certainly just one company, one example, but interesting to see how this matches with the Citadel rebuttal of the Citrini piece. You get a lot of people are seeing this as, vindication of the Citrini piece.
Speaker 2:Hey. Kim says every media person, please read this before writing your narratives tomorrow. Jack Dorsey is Jack Dorsey. Do not extrapolate. Do not pass go.
Speaker 2:Responding to Will Slaughter's Post that I just Post. Yeah. Square, for context, did around $24,000,000,000 in total revenue in 2025. Mhmm. They've been trading at around 30 even though the business is profitable and growing.
Speaker 2:And so had certainly been beat up, very sad day. Gavin Baker had a post that Kyle Harrison highlighted. He said the fact that Twitter is running well with head count down significantly really matters whether they admit it or not. Everyone in SV admires Elon. A lot of venture funded CEOs are sending emails like this inspired by Elon and taking drastic actions.
Speaker 2:Margins are going up. Says this is the first AI cut and it will send shockwaves. Remember, Jack is one of the greatest founders of all time. He created this platform that we're all on. It has been early to many technological shifts and Block is doing very well as a business.
Speaker 2:So for him to cut 40% head count in this way is a signal to everyone in tech, get good now, become indispensable, work nights and weekends, learn the AI tools, raise your game, where you might not make the cut as an employee or as a company. I know that sucks, capitalism is natural selection. The market is unforgiving because you are the market. After all, it's not like you're buying some random gallon of milk from the store. You're always buying the best product at the best price.
Speaker 2:So too for apps, your customers are are always installing the best piece of code they can get. And because AI is going to create new winners if you aren't the best in your market, someone may become better with AI. To be clear, Block's severance is generous by any measure, twenty weeks of pay, six months of health insurance and invested equity. All of that goes far beyond any typical package. Jack did his level best to cushion the disruption.
Speaker 2:The laid off are a temporary unfortunate class as opposed to a permanent underclass. But had he not leaned into the AI transition, he might have had to lay off more people slowly and over time as faster competitors went after his market share. How would they do that? Sure, AI is not a panacea by any means. But the closer you are to software engineering, the more aggressively you need to embrace agentic workflows.
Speaker 2:The AI companies are already doing that in places like Stripe, Shopify, Coinbase, now Block are pushing hard on this area. There will be overcorrection, but the fundamental technical innovation is real. And you need to either disrupt yourself or get disrupted. I think that's generally good advice. Ace16z says every tech company can fire at least half their people.
Speaker 2:But most can probably do 80%.
Speaker 1:Black belt. Thanks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Much do you think Sattrini paid Square to do this live? Yes. How deep does it go?
Speaker 1:Deep does it go? Your lab's taking a victory lap.
Speaker 2:After being mocked for the last four days. Fed Speak says, on one hand, Jack is a notoriously bad business operator. And on the other hand, it's over. Yeah, the pushback on biology saying Jack is one of the greatest founders ever is simply that, yes, he is one of the greatest founders ever. And I don't think anyone would say that he is the best operator.
Speaker 2:And that's Okay. But sometimes being the best founder means making the super hard decision and having the foresight to get ahead.
Speaker 1:It would be a very weird situation if only Jack Dorsey founded companies Take him said stand an 80%
Speaker 2:Same dude bought Jay Z's title, not the greatest operator.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Take him's white pilling. He's always white pilling. I enjoy him. We have some affairs to attend to, and we will not be live tomorrow.
Speaker 1:But we will return on Monday.
Speaker 2:And I can't So
Speaker 1:mark your calendars, 11AM Pacific on Monday. It will March. Goodbye. Goodbye.