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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.
The big news
Speaker 2:Big news, Drew.
Speaker 1:Is that SpaceX ran, like, absolute crazy after hours last night. Yeah. I I kept getting push notifications and thinking that that can't be right. And then I would double click in, check a little bit, and I would say
Speaker 2:Yeah, the headlines are crazy.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so the big one is
Speaker 2:There's SpaceX so many of just like, it's passing this company, passing this company, passing that company. And you're like, woah, this is a crazy, crazy So
Speaker 1:SpaceX
Speaker 2:Bigger than Amazon.
Speaker 1:Sits comfortably in the top five Five. Company. Got NVIDIA at 5,000,000,000,000 Pass
Speaker 2:Alphabet and Apple right around $4.04 and a half. Then Microsoft and SpaceX neck and neck just shy of $3,000,000,000,000. And it basically makes their Cursor acquisition free. They paid $60,000,000,000 in new stock for the company. And their market cap SpaceX's market cap than quadrupled and added more than 4x the price
Speaker 1:of a Cursor acquisition. So I believe they had until q four to actually pull trigger on the Cursor deal. Yeah. Like, they built in a window.
Speaker 2:They did now.
Speaker 1:I bet you there were some terms that weren't public that that Cursor would have wanted to make sure that they got in as quickly as possible. Sure. Sure. Because the stock's running, want really well. Yep.
Speaker 1:Who knows where SpaceX will net out? I mean, thought we'd be at $2,400,000,000,000 by the middle by basically the last hour of trading on Friday. Yeah. I was incorrect at the time, but it's obviously, you know, continued to run. And there was another scenario where SpaceX could have effectively acquired Cursor at an even at an even higher valuation, but I think it's a great fantastic outcome for the Cursor team.
Speaker 1:Obviously, you know, OpenAI is a big Cursor investor. Thrive, a sixteen z, CodeTwo, and and others that that I'm I'm fortunately forgetting. But
Speaker 2:Who was Rembrandt saying about this? He said it's the biggest in the past five days, we've seen the biggest VC backed IPO ever and the biggest VC backed strategic sale ever. We've never had a an M and A of a VC backed company, young startup, north of 50,000,000,000. Like, 60,000,000,000 is so, so big. We sort of lose sight of it because we're talking about a trillion dollars for this company, 3,000,000,000,000 for that company.
Speaker 2:But 60,000,000,000 is beyond a home run. Yep. And it happened in an m and a, which is crazy.
Speaker 1:And Yep. There's I I would assume a a large number of the retail investors invest investing in SpaceX Yeah. Were not necessarily even that familiar with Cursor up until today.
Speaker 2:I did see that. So if
Speaker 1:you're waking up today, you're like, wait, SpaceX just acquired one of the hottest AI companies in the world with billions of dollars in revenue. Like, this is so bullish. Obviously, a lot of the more institutional investors or people that had been following the company privately were well aware that they had the option to do this, that they would almost certainly take it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The takes are all over the timeline. Quinn Thompson says, this is brilliant corporate finance. Use your newly printed, low float, retail inflated currency to acquire real businesses ahead of the lockup expiring, probably the most creative, accretive way to sell as much equity as possible into IPO pump. I wonder what acquisition is next.
Speaker 2:That's very interesting. Nick Carter fights fires back and says, you think the people buying the equity would also be aware of this, and that's good point. But the question is, like, are there more acquisitions in the pipeline? Because Tesla has not done a lot of acquisitions. Elon's always been a build, not buy operator or founder.
Speaker 1:But Tesla itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a very different scenario. What I'm talking about is, there there are companies Meta is very acquisitive, Google, Apple. Apple's, like, on the smaller side, but they still do deals more frequently. It would be very interesting if we're seeing, you know, one deal a month, and he's sort of putting together the pieces of buying up NeoLabs and compute capacity and NeoClouds and rolling everything up.
Speaker 2:That would just be a completely different operating philosophy. But given where the stock is, given how smooth this deal went, and where the where where the market cap of SpaceX is, it's not the craziest thing. It would be a big pivot in his in his strategy, though. Business Insider has a deep dive on Cursor's wild ride. Michael Truell didn't pay himself for years.
Speaker 2:Interestingly, Cursor once made up 40% to 50% of Anthropix revenue. That is a crazy gyration in the market. It just shows you how quickly things are changing. Went from, you know, it's all Cursor. That business is just funneling to Cursor.
Speaker 2:Cursor's the front door to this business. Then it's like, oh, it's all these hyperscalers that are spending $1,000,000,000, half $1,000,000,000 a month. And so the the whole the whole landscape is changing. Nothing nothing tells that more than Anthropic telling Cursor that Claude Code was just a research effort. This goes back to the Dylan Field, like, where they consistently candid?
Speaker 2:Or maybe they really just did think, hey, yeah. This is just a research effort like, you do you. And then realized later like, woah, woah. We need to be a player in this. We cannot be in the middle of this situation.
Speaker 2:So we gotta do our
Speaker 1:own thing. Honing the end customer relationship. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so wild, wild ride.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Similar similar to, I I think, the messaging to Figma Yeah. Canva around Yeah. The Dropbox design tool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's tricky. Every AI company is is a general use They're using it for everything. There's questions about like, will you maintain value if you're in the token path? Do you need to be like, do not build a company that depends on the models getting better.
Speaker 2:But if the models get really, really good, like, what can't they do? And so, constantly, we see every company competing with every other company as, you know, every hyperscaler has an LLM at this point, and every SaaS product has other products because they can launch features faster. And so the the competition is heating up across all these different companies.
Speaker 1:Next time we have Michael on the show Yeah. We got to ask how he paid the bills for all those years.
Speaker 2:He's doing crashing on couches or something?
Speaker 1:Gotta ask. Taking out massive loans against the company, maybe. Ryan Peterson says with yesterday's 20% SpaceX pop, Elon made more money than Warren Buffett made in his entire career.
Speaker 2:These headlines are going to get crazy because I I mean, I I see some of them getting community noted, but it's a single day will move more than like all of Bill Gates' currents net worth, that type of thing. Those headlines are gonna pop off consistently. The crazy one is like, there's going to be down days. Like, there's going to be just
Speaker 1:random Elon lost more money today than any person
Speaker 2:in the industry combined. He lost more money than Brazil makes in a trillion years, you know. And because, like, whenever the big numbers get contextualized, it's always very entertaining. It was up another 14% after hours, though. But the numbers are staggering when you're in the $1,000,000,000,000 club.
Speaker 1:JB says, is this everyone's first IPO? It's silly now as it approaches Amazon valuation. Well, we passed that. But the float is low until the lockup of nearly every retail investor on earth wants to be involved. You're get gonna stupid moves.
Speaker 1:Then the float opens up and all the retail people are stuck for years. What does that mean?
Speaker 2:Just say
Speaker 1:So many times. Just say you haven't seen the mass driver demo, buddy.
Speaker 2:Or or the next data center. I mean, that's the really interesting thing with Cursor. There's all this debate over like, they have a deal with Anthropic. They have a deal with Google. Cursor obviously wants to compute.
Speaker 2:But talking to Gavin Baker, it sounds like there might be a lot more terrestrial compute coming online in the very short term, and that is valuable. They're monetizing this very effectively. And so you could see a short term revenue ramp just driven from sort of the boring neo cloud stuff that monetizes really well, and then that provides you know, it's like the model three. It's it's it's gonna be the economic engine that provides the capital for data centers in space, mass driver on the moon. All that stuff needs fuel for the fire.
Speaker 2:Anyway
Speaker 1:Ad Ludlow has some data. SpaceX, the current approximate price to sales is 150
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:X. Amazon is 3.6. Microsoft, 9.2.
Speaker 2:See, people read this as a bear SpaceX take, but imagine if Amazon started trading at SpaceX's price to sales.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It'd probably be like a $100,000,000,000,000 company. This is from In Germany. Eagle. Yes. And the
Speaker 1:Gourmet This Air reporting is NAP specs are official.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:$2,195 all in one AR glasses that Evan Spiegel has dubbed the next computer.
Speaker 2:$2,200. That's almost Apple Vision Pro numbers. That's expensive. It's gonna be a lift. I feel like it's a lot.
Speaker 2:It it it seem it seems like a lot of money. It's gotta be Pro
Speaker 1:starts at $3,499. Yeah. So a bit of a jump. But this is a product that seemingly is trying to compete in the realm of like a it's a it's a mobile device. It's naturally a mobile device.
Speaker 1:The Apple Vision Pro which Yeah. Obviously, some viral images on launch of people walking around with it.
Speaker 2:I'm just thinking about like, there are a lot of Apple fanboys who buy every
Speaker 1:Get this. What? Get this guy on right now.
Speaker 2:What?
Speaker 1:Pull him up.
Speaker 2:Hey. What do you say? Hey. Are you buying the Snap specs? $2,200, are you spending your paycheck on that?
Speaker 3:I mean, they they I think they actually do look really cool. I I don't know. Like, I was looking at some of the product demos earlier. Some like, the game features look really cool. There's, like, ping pong.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:$2.2.2 k is, like, a little pricey, personally.
Speaker 2:But if you can watch Lawrence Arabia from Stockton ish. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. We bought it if we traded you your phone
Speaker 2:for
Speaker 1:for a pair
Speaker 2:of these for a
Speaker 1:week, you demo would you demo them for a week? No phone. No phone. You you do,
Speaker 3:like, texting on it? Can you call?
Speaker 2:I think need a phone.
Speaker 1:You can go without texting for a week.
Speaker 2:You have Lawrence of Arabia. You don't need
Speaker 1:a phone.
Speaker 3:That's true. Can watch Lawrence of Arabia, like, you
Speaker 2:know, on daily show. Is it? Snap, specs, battery life. Specs, battery life. I gotta I gotta
Speaker 1:So what happened? Wasn't there some conversation that specs might spin out?
Speaker 2:Up to four hours. That's Lords of Arabia right there with a little intermission.
Speaker 1:I remember correctly, there was some like rumors Yeah. That that specs would be spun out. Yes. Yes. One article.
Speaker 1:That has not happened.
Speaker 2:I don't think so.
Speaker 1:And so the stock is down 7% today.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I don't know. The the the the trick is that you have Apple fanboys who of, you know, they have a lot of Apple fans, but some of them are wealthy. Some of them buy every product. They buy a new phone a new iPhone every year.
Speaker 2:They buy the top of the line MacBook. They have the Mac Studio and the Mac Mini just for fun. And, like, that's a whole class of consumer for Apple. And so when they come in with something that's a little crazy, like a $10,000 gold Apple Watch, like, they'll sell a couple of them when they come in with a $3,000 VR headset. Like, a couple of people will just be like, yeah, I'll give it a try.
Speaker 2:When you're talking about a new company entering hardware, Meta, I think, did a better job coming in with, like, yeah, it's just a pair of sunglasses. You need a pair of sunglasses anywhere, anyway. We put
Speaker 1:a camera in it.
Speaker 2:We put a camera in it. It's a $100 for the version that you know and love, the Ray Ban Wayfarers that don't have a camera in them. Ours are add a couple 100 extra bucks. It's still something you could give as a And
Speaker 1:you can afford to lose money on every single device collectively forever. Totally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so and so it's a lot easier to get into that, like, meta ecosystem just saying, yeah. Throw a camera on my on my Ray Bans. I'll give it a try. Maybe I'll churn.
Speaker 2:But if it's collecting dust in the in the cabinet or in the in the sock drawer, you're a lot less like, really got burned. And like the Apple fanboys that, you know, a lot of them took them back, but they're like, yeah, that was still like a cool experiments mix up me because I I gotta watch.
Speaker 1:Tyler, once you're back in town
Speaker 2:Wait. What was that?
Speaker 3:Lord of Rings extended cut.
Speaker 2:I think that's Is that even longer than that? Hours? You can't watch the whole thing.
Speaker 1:Truly. Once you're back in town, let's pick up a pair. Yeah. Tyler can live with them. We won't say a week.
Speaker 1:We'll say forty eight hours.
Speaker 2:Exclusively. Exclusive. You're Do everything.
Speaker 1:We take
Speaker 2:I think you need the phone to to to do anything. I think a lot of the compute
Speaker 3:forty eight hours, I I think is actually like not very hard.
Speaker 1:That's just a digital weekend.
Speaker 3:You're down? I could do a week. I could do a week.
Speaker 2:That's like 10 showings on Lawrenceville.
Speaker 1:I'm not asking you to do a week. If you wanna do a week, we we can do it. Okay. He's doing
Speaker 2:I'm here in I'm here in four weeks. I'm here in a full month now. Four weeks.
Speaker 1:Alright. It was great to see you, Tyler. We miss you.
Speaker 2:Great to
Speaker 1:see you.
Speaker 2:I'll see without you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It really is John and I were kinda messing around Not
Speaker 2:quiet in
Speaker 1:here today. And we realized when Tyler's not here, there's there's nobody super close by to laugh at our our bad jokes. Yeah. Bit rough.
Speaker 2:Spiegel called the specs both very, very wearable and highly capable, which he said gives Snap an opportunity in a market that's focused on either very large and clunky headsets that are super capable or very lightweight glasses that really don't do much. So it is interesting. I was reading the coverage in, there there there's some videos here in Upload VR and it shows sort of the the process of this. The HoloLens one from Microsoft 2016 was five eighty grams. Snapsbacks are 132 grams, so they are light.
Speaker 2:Now the Meta Ray Ban display is 70 grams, so about half as heavy. So these are heavier, but they're nowhere as heavy as a hollow lens or a real VR headset. And it checks a lot of the boxes on field of view, and we'll see we'll see what the developer ecosystem's like. I hope someone comes up with some interesting thing. I hope that there's a y c company that builds on top of this exclusively and and has some sort of breakthrough user interface experience, some some killer use case that comes from the community Yeah.
Speaker 1:Got to wait to see how many of these sell.
Speaker 2:Yes. That will be will be great. Going to
Speaker 1:need I mean, even with a million a million sold, that's not a very big user base.
Speaker 2:It's a of money. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start.
Speaker 1:Over on x, Daniel's advocating for banning social media for 60.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. The inverse of The UK's project or The UK's initiative to ban social media for under sixteen over sixty five. I think that would ruffle some feathers. That would probably be pushed back on more by the social media companies because the purchasing power from 65 onward is so high.
Speaker 2:There's so much wealth with the boomer generation. That would actually be very devastating to Facebook and YouTube and TikTok even. The young folks, I think all the social media companies have an incentive to get those users as early as possible, keep them on the platform. But I think more than anything, they want a level playing field. So Conor Hayes can duke it out with every other social media site as soon as someone turns 16, try and acquire them, try and get them on board.
Speaker 2:But we'll see as that rolls out and where the guardrails are set.
Speaker 1:John Frank, everyone is doubting Meta. Spenders are mad at bugs and model changes. Investors think they're missing AI, like the AR saga all over again. But as a large ish customer who will spend something like a $100,000,000 with them this year, Meta is working and no ad space comes close to their level of scale. Don't doubt the Zuck.
Speaker 1:It the fact that you can buy that you could have one SpaceX or two Metas for the same price is pretty unbelievable and certainly not something that most people would have guessed even a year ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It is a crazy, crazy situation. At the same time, rockets, they're inspiring. And social media is
Speaker 1:sort Totally. I mean, I can see I can see what we got here.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's still surprising.
Speaker 2:But, yeah. Obviously, fantastic business. And, people are probably need to, you know,
Speaker 3:reality check with Sean Frank because he's in the trenches.
Speaker 2:He understands the business better than most. So thank you for tuning into TBPN today.
Speaker 1:We'll see tomorrow. It's an honor and a privilege.
Speaker 2:Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. We'll see you We love you. Tomorrow. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:Cheers.