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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.
Of course, oil is it's gushing all over the timeline, all over the Financial Times, all over the Wall Street Journal. Let's go through the timeline and see how people are processing the news of the Strait Of Hormuz and the oil price spikes.
Speaker 2:I'll read the actual quote. A guy Brian said, if you wanna diminish the Iranian threat, if you wanna make sure this ends with complete capitulation, show some guts and go through that straight.
Speaker 1:That seems very, very risky right now. Stay safe out there if you are in a shipping vessel. There are some crazy twists happening. So apparently, ships in The Gulf are declaring themselves as Chinese vessels to dodge attack. At least 10 vessels have changed transponder messages in an apparent attempt to avoid becoming targets.
Speaker 1:Clutch of vessels trapped in The Gulf under enemy fire are adopting a tried and tested ruse to avoid attacks. They're changing flags, using transponders to declare themselves to be Chinese. There's always been a very odd tug of war between how ships identify themselves because often, for tax reasons, they're bought in one country, operated by individuals from another company, but they fly a different flag to be able to go from one place to another, and it's all based on, like, the port systems. I don't fully understand it, but it is very interesting. At least 10 ships over the past week have altered their destination signal to read Chinese owner, all Chinese crew, or Chinese crew on board.
Speaker 1:About 1,000 ships are currently shut inside The Gulf and its immediate surroundings with a cumulative value of $25,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:And I don't know I don't know if you've seen some of the the maps that show I have. The Strait.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:Where it it looks like nothing is actually moving through. Yeah. I think in actuality, a number of the ships are actually turning off their transponders. Oh. So you can't see the movement.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because they're basically moving a little bit Mhmm. Going through the straight.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then turning back on
Speaker 1:and forth. I wrote about what oil what oil prices mean for the AI build out and data centers. It's just sort of interesting to dig into the deeper supply chain of artificial intelligence, but there are some posts that we should go through around the oil story. So crude oil is five standard deviations above its fifty day moving average. Statistically speaking, this occurs every nine thousand five hundred years.
Speaker 1:So the last time would have been about six thousand years before Moses parted the Red Sea. Imagine what that did to shipping in the area. Fanciful.
Speaker 2:Pull up this clip from Landman.
Speaker 1:I haven't seen Landman. Have you watched it? Is it good? Let's
Speaker 4:Well, You want oil to live above 60, but below 90. Mhmm. And don't get me wrong. We're still printing money at 90, but gas gets up over $3.50 a gallon, it starts to pinch. It hits a 100.
Speaker 4:Every product in America has to readjust its price. $78 a barrel. That's about perfect. Yeah. It brings enough profit to keep exploring, but don't sting as much at the pump.
Speaker 4:Less course here in California. I mean, they tax the shit out of it out there. It could be $45 a barrel and it's still $4 a pump. I don't know how those son bitches do it out there.
Speaker 1:It's movie day. 2020. TBPN again.
Speaker 4:A barrel of oil was worthless. This place became a ghost town. And nobody's immune. Kids have to quit college. Trucks get sold or repoed.
Speaker 2:How old were you when you discovered that gas is really expensive in California, not just because there's a lot of demand for it?
Speaker 1:I mean, I discovered it when I was filling up in Montana and it was like $2 a gallon and it's like $5 a gallon here. That was pretty wild. The first major gas price shock that I noticed was Hurricane Katrina in my life. I think it was in high school. Because I was too young
Speaker 2:I was talking about I was talking about just the fact realizing that it's so expensive Yeah. Because of the taxes that California puts on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because it's nice to drive around here. Put the top down, the weather's good. So they're like, yeah, you're gonna pay. You're gonna pay more for the joys of driving an internal combustion engine car.
Speaker 1:Now, the price in California is aggressive. I don't know the structure of the prices, though. Is it percentage based or fixed? Because that affects how much the price will move based on oil price shocks. So because if the price per barrel doubles, but the but the tax is flat, you don't feel it as much here as you do other places.
Speaker 2:So I'm pulling it up, but you can run through this.
Speaker 1:It's the largest supply shock by a factor of four. So the Hormuz blockade, which is current, 20, million barrels were lost in supply. The Iranian revolution in 1978 was 5,600,000. The Yom Kippur war embargoes in '73 was 4.4. The Iraq Kuwait war was 4.3 in 1990.
Speaker 1:The Iran Iraq War in 1980 was four point zero, and then the Ukraine Russia invasion in 2022, which is the last time that oil spiked over $100 a barrel, was one to three, so an absolutely huge supply shock, and I'm sure it will have a lot of implications all over the economy. With triple digit prices, here's what's going to happen now, says PolicyTensor. Markets will scream when they open tomorrow. VIX will surge to levels beyond what we saw in April. The sell off will continue for some time as intermediaries shed risk, and the markets are red.
Speaker 1:They have been screaming today. The VIX futures curve already has inverted, bid up by dealers looking for insurance. This predicts a massive sell off. The pressure on this captured White House now now beings in earnest that's kind of sort of oddly written. Anyone can tell them that if this persists for very long, it will destroy the Trump presidency and gut the GOP for a generation.
Speaker 1:The controlling factor here, as I told you over and over again, is that The United States does not have the military means to reopen Hormuz. There's no military solution in sight. This means that not only does Iran have the strategic upper hand now, it means that Iran enjoys the unambiguous strategic advantage. All they need to do is keep the thing closed until he capitulates. I put my neck out far to call this in advance.
Speaker 1:And someone told him yesterday I was in the minority, perhaps even a minority of one. No longer. I was correct. Just calling a shot. The blob heads and scribes were incorrect in their assessment of the strategic situation, and now markets won't price to reflect reality.
Speaker 1:We briefly touched on Scott Sumner's blog post on Substack at the end of Thursday's show, maybe Friday's show. We didn't get a chance to read it. I actually read through it earlier today, and it's pretty interesting. Basically makes the case it has a very controversial tendency to freak out, and the thought is that he's doomposting. Maybe it's about AI.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's about this particular conflict. He is more just reflecting on this dynamic between when the market freaks out, it acts as a moderating effect to policy. And so he gives a number of examples around like tariffs.
Speaker 2:Or more specifically the admin.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Like like like the tariffs caused this massive circuit breaker, 5% sell off in the market, and then that was internalized and very quickly adjusted. And there were a whole bunch of different carve outs to sort of like create soft landings. And so he's actually what he's getting at is that after the fact, a lot of people say, look, you didn't need to freak out because the taco happened.
Speaker 1:Trump always chickens out. The the the actual proposed policy effect didn't go into didn't go into effect. And his point is that, well, it's precisely because people freaked out that it didn't go into effect. So freaking out is good in Scott Sumner's mind, at least. Anyway, I love this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We have a solution.
Speaker 1:We have a solution. If if you're feeling the pain at the pump, pivot and get a horse. That oil at 110, the urban horse is the only option. Pulling up to the gas station on a horse is is truly elite. I I do wanna know, what's the TCO on a horse with the food and the stables versus, you know, just keeping a what is that?
Speaker 1:A Ford Taurus in your I I don't know. That's something else. Yeah. In your garage. The horse really mogs at the at the gas station in particular.
Speaker 1:Right? Because it's just making everyone feel so stupid. Yeah. We gotta go back. One horsepower is all you need.
Speaker 1:Nick Carter says, seeing a lot of nonprocessed trusting panic ins on the TL. And and then he followed up by saying, that's what I thought because the oil prices spiked up and then they fell down. And we did not get $120 a barrel oil. We got exactly $100 which was still
Speaker 2:Not like it's way, way, way too early to celebrate or
Speaker 1:anything. Yeah. Exactly. Unreal numbers about Germany's nuclear power generation. So if you scroll down, look at this curve.
Speaker 1:This is truly the the bell curve meme or something like that. JPMorgan estimates that had Germany not phased out nuclear power, the country would have generated 50% less electricity from fossil fuels and 84% less electricity from natural gas in 2024. Electricity prices in Germany would have been around 25% lower, and the country would have imported half as much electricity. And just complete rise and fall of nuclear power generation in Germany. One of the craziest graphs.
Speaker 1:You don't see graphs like that very often in new technologies. Typically, you see s curves or you see exponentials. No one considers the models get better and then they get dumber. That's certainly the funniest outcome. Goldman Sachs sent a note to investors saying if oil prices increase by $10 and remain elevated for three months, US year over year headline CPI inflation would likely rise from 2.4% in January to 3% in May.
Speaker 1:Those are small numbers, but we're looking at an oil price increase of maybe $30.40 dollars over the baseline, potentially higher. We don't know where oil is going to land. And so you have this weird tug of war right now with the Fed where if oil prices go up, inflation goes up, the Fed has a mandate to curb inflation. That means higher interest rates. At a time when the labor market is shedding jobs, you would expect a Fed rate cut or a lot of people are optimistic about a rate cut.
Speaker 1:Trump certainly wants rate cuts. But if inflation is climbing, there's really no solution other than keeping rates high or or even raising them further. So a real jam in terms of federal monetary policy, Fed monetary policy. Here's Art Cashin at the opening bell. This is a historical video.
Speaker 1:When was this? This was a long time ago. Let's play this clip.
Speaker 5:This may be it. First, let me start out. Moratorite Salutamis essay, and you know that's the gladiator salute. We, who are about to die, salute you. So it's gonna be a tough morning.
Speaker 5:This may be it.
Speaker 1:We were about to die.
Speaker 2:Salute you.
Speaker 1:Insane insane aura for you know, CNBC really doesn't get enough credit for being so innovative in terms of broadcasting and entertainment. Really, some of the some of the greatest clips
Speaker 2:I love that. One of the one of the top comments. This is an old clip. Yeah. Obviously.
Speaker 2:Sleep brother.
Speaker 1:It's probably from the nineties. So Zero Hedge says, you know, with oil at a 111 total panic, and memetic Sisyphus shares eclipses. Half of this site for the last week has sounded like this.
Speaker 6:Let's Producers are telling me there is breaking news. The Asian financial markets have just opened to a huge sell off, and we're gonna switch to that story right now. Good. I'm glad I'm here. Your thoughts, Tracy Jordan, on how this is gonna impact Wall Street.
Speaker 6:Larry, I'm not an expert, but I do have a strong opinion. New York as we know it will no longer exist tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Producers are telling
Speaker 6:me there is Is this from Thirty Rock? That's so good.
Speaker 1:That's so funny. Oil came way came way in from its overnight highs, says Joe Wiesenthal. And the quote post is, Chris
Speaker 2:Paul hits a huge three to cut down the lead to 42.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Absolutely brutal. My essay this morning was titled, why is no one talking about oil? Of course, everyone is talking about oil. Oil discourse gushed onto the timeline this weekend.
Speaker 1:Crude prices spiked to nearly a $120 a barrel as a broadening war in Iran threatens both transportation routes and production. The geopolitical and economic analyses are flowing, but what does this mean for AGI timelines? And a lot of people in the AI world are sort of tuning all of this out because they see recursive self improvement, AGI, ASI, the build out, as more important. And I just wanted to sort of reality check the AI supply chain to understand how does oil actually affect data center construction, AI production token pricing? Like, is there any effect?
Speaker 1:My conclusion was that it's it's very moderate, but there are some interesting effects in the financial markets that are probably the bigger takeaway. But it's still interesting to hear about, like, yes, oil actually is used in the production of AI, at least a little bit. Power has been at the forefront of the AI pushback. Like, everyone's worried about these local energy prices, these electricity prices increasing near the data centers. But pain at the pump might become a bigger story as gasoline prices spike, and that has been pain at the pump.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's been the most tangible sign of inflation. It moves so quickly. You know, one one jitter in the economy.
Speaker 2:And it's a huge component. You know, people on the coast, people in tech don't have a good sense for this. Right? If gas gas for a lot of people, gas could quadruple Yeah. And it wouldn't they wouldn't really notice it.
Speaker 2:No. No. But if you actually look into the average American, how gasoline fits into their budget Yeah. It's a meaningful component of their monthly budget. Yep.
Speaker 2:So they feel it super intensely. And It's variable Yeah. Cost.
Speaker 1:There are there are so many different ways where a lot of Americans go on driving vacations. That obviously is directly impacted by gas prices. And then also just psychologically, there's something about filling up at the gas tank where you see the number ticking up, and you're doing that on an every week basis or so, that it's just so visceral. It's this thing that you have to stop and then go experience and watch the money flow out of your account, like, in real time. It's very it's very visual.
Speaker 1:It's very interactive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I remember I remember I I I must have been probably 18 at this point where I would just go and I would like, for a long time, I just put I'd I'd, you know, prepay for
Speaker 1:a certain amount I got $20. I got 20 I let's see how much I got.
Speaker 2:And I felt like really Yeah. Like, I felt like the king of the castle Exactly. I just put my card down and let it it run up Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Far it go.
Speaker 1:No. But in AI circles, the discussion's been much more focused on RSI now is the new acronym that everyone's focusing on, not AGI. AGI is here. We know artificial general intelligence. We passed the Turing test.
Speaker 1:But can they recursively self improve? Are they RSI? Are we in RSI now? Is it a coming? Is this gonna be a fast takeoff?
Speaker 1:Is this gonna be a slow takeoff? Well, something's taken off. Dylan Patel said being in SF is like being in Wuhan right before the pandemic. Something is happening. It's gonna hit everywhere, but so few people know it.
Speaker 1:So he's sort of echoing that something big is happening.
Speaker 2:The irony is that that George Hotts hitting the timeline to raise money Yeah. Makes me more bullish on acceleration. Yeah. Right? Because if not, he's obviously not historically been a huge fan of venture venture capital.
Speaker 1:Well, he's not raising from traditional VCs, he said. So he said, this is from Tiny Corp. If Tiny Corp was raising $20,000,000 at $200,000,000 valuation, who'd be interested? Business model is basically this. Buy an $11,500,000 building with five megawatts of power, link in our Discord, wait for AMD to launch the RDNA five ninety six gigabyte cards mid-twenty twenty seven, preorder 3,000 cards.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, can negotiate for $2,500 each, build $520,000 tiny boxes with six of the cards each box, run all the Chinese LLMs, make $600,000 per month revenue selling tokens on OpenRouter. Market depth is there. This is 1% of OpenRouter. Improvements to TinyGrad yield revenue improvements. Due to how power is priced in Oregon, it's only like $50,000 for the electric bill before the four megawatts, before they price for peak, not usage.
Speaker 1:We get like 3C kilowatt hour power, dollars $0.03 per kilowatt hour. We can also make $100,000 per month leasing colocation space to Comma. Building and cards paid off in three years max, investment made back, low risk of being undercut since we're using consumer GPUs and running the cheapest colo you can believe. If someone chill wants in, I do it. I'm not going to hype fake tech, but demand for tokens is going to skyrocket.
Speaker 1:Look at the OpenClaw install numbers. With crazy good optimizations, we could potentially get 3x more from the machines. We have electricity three for 3x more machines, 5.4 revenue per month, then continue to scale from there, custom chips, etcetera. He's starting a neo cloud. Are you starting a yeah.
Speaker 1:He's gonna be serving tokens. There is an immense amount of desire for this binary moment. This is the singularity. This is API. This is ASI.
Speaker 1:The RSI is here. This thing is happening right now, and there's before and after, and everything has changed. And and and he just doesn't see it that way, I think. I think he sees it much more like the Internet, the mobile phone, like other technologies that have been rolled out,
Speaker 2:Yes,
Speaker 1:there is like a before and after, but you can only really define the period by maybe a decade, and you need a few decades to understand that moment. It's very hard to go back. There is like the iPhone moment and there is like the first launch of, I don't know, AOL. Like, I don't even know what the iPhone moment of the Internet was just because it was sort of a slow rollout. It's clear that the AI industry continues to grow and continues to need more and more power and compute, as we've seen from George Hotts' new project.
Speaker 1:That means large data center campuses. But if they're not in random office buildings that George is picking up for on the cheap, they're probably going to be built with construction equipment. So what does this mean? They they don't just drop from the heavens. They require building, which requires oil.
Speaker 1:But how much oil? And is oil a serious and is a serious oil shock enough to impact the AI build out in a meaningful way? Spoiler alert. Basically, Live GPU clusters in The United States do not use much oil directly. Only 0.6% of US electricity in 2024 came from petroleum.
Speaker 1:We're much, much more dependent on natural gas. Something like 42% of US electricity is natural gas. And so America ramped up natural gas production significantly over the past two decades. A lot of that was in reaction to the wars in The Middle East. Hey, we need to be less dependent on foreign oil.
Speaker 1:We need to be energy independent. And so you have the fracking boom, the natural gas boom, and that's where a lot of our fossil fuels come from today, I believe. Data centers only consume a single digit percent of U. S. Electricity, so you're looking at 0.6% of a few percent is like the actual impact.
Speaker 1:So the short term impact of high oil prices should be very limited on AI. When you're talking about building new capacity, building new data centers, oil is a little bit more involved. So diesel powers, trucks, trains, boats, barges, generators, pumps, compressors, excavators and tons more construction equipment. Petroleum is also broadly used for plastics, polyurethane and solvents that all work their way into the data center supply chain. The biggest problem is delaying already tight schedules because of narrowly available components going out of stock.
Speaker 1:The price of oil goes up. There's one marginal factory that can't produce one ingredient that goes into the rack, and that slows things down. You have to wait a week while you find another supplier, that that stuff can add up to just a little bit of a delay. This happened during COVID, and the AI industry was already experiencing something similar with transformers. And so you don't want products getting stuck in transit or going out stock.
Speaker 1:But the bigger problem and the one that people should be talking about, and I think you were debating with Dan Primak at Axios about this, is macroeconomic. So higher prices, higher oil prices lead to higher inflation. If the Fed has to raise rates to control inflation, capital formation for mega projects gets a lot harder. So JLL has this estimate. The next 100 gigawatts of data center capacity could require about $870,000,000,000 of new debt financing.
Speaker 1:And so using this rough number, every extra 50 basis points of borrowing cost on $870,000,000,000 is $4,350,000,000 in annual interest expense.
Speaker 2:Question right now is the hundreds of billions of dollars of of sovereign AI projects in The Middle East. Right? I think a lot of those people are gonna be like, do we wanna send, you know, billions of dollars of of GPUs?
Speaker 1:Over there? And then also the money coming here is another thing where you might wanna spend it elsewhere. Have you been noticing that it's been hotter in Los Angeles?
Speaker 2:I have.
Speaker 1:Downtown Los Angeles is forecasted to approach a 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday and Friday.
Speaker 2:Which is why Not good. We're gonna do the
Speaker 1:We have a
Speaker 2:new segment for you today. We're doing the weather on TBPN. We have our very own Ben.
Speaker 1:Hey, Ben.
Speaker 3:Hello, guys. How are you?
Speaker 1:We're doing great. Tell us about the weather.
Speaker 2:What's happening?
Speaker 3:Well, I wanna start off by saying, as you can see, the weather today for the low low today is gonna be 75 degrees Fahrenheit up there. Mhmm. High of a 100 degrees Fahrenheit down there. Mhmm. But there's something I actually wanted to point out that I saw and I thought that was quite interesting.
Speaker 3:As you can see up here, there's a localized low pressure area up there and a localized high pressure area right down there, if you that rain? The issue with that's not normally an issue, not a cause for concern, and it's not very common for this time of year. However, today, later in the afternoon, these two areas are gonna collide. They're gonna hit each other.
Speaker 6:No. Really?
Speaker 3:And what that's gonna cause is a barometric pressure inversion.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:It might sound a little bit scary, but I guarantee there's no cause for concern. All that means is that hot air rushing in from the West is gonna collide with that cold air rushing in from the East, and it's gonna cause a bunch of turbulence in the sky moving all the airwaves around and oscillations in the sky. However, I wanna add one more point. A byproduct of this effect is that all that humidity that dropped after that hot air moved to the bottom is gonna raise up because the water cycle, you know, evaporation and stuff. It's gonna raise up into the sky into those clouds.
Speaker 3:It's gonna cause big clouds in the sky, and eventually all that water is gonna fall down onto the ground. We're gonna have big rain later in the afternoon.
Speaker 1:Wait. It's actually gonna rain in LA?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It might sound crazy, but I just want it for all you guys at home. I definitely try to step outside with a jacket today, maybe a hoodie just in case the
Speaker 2:rain comes. Shot.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm I'm fact checking you right now, and the weather app says it's gonna be sunny all week. Is this just complete fake news?
Speaker 3:My team Those are the numbers my team gave me.
Speaker 1:Complete fake news.
Speaker 3:No. No.
Speaker 1:No. This is the fakest news I've ever heard.
Speaker 3:All that
Speaker 2:John. John. I'm I don't trust your app. I trust the weather.
Speaker 1:Apple says it's not gonna rain Yeah. Listen. The entire month. There's zero Transatlantic rain. Did you look at the Transatlantic current?
Speaker 1:No. The transatlantic current Zero inches today. Zero inches Zero inches on tomorrow. Wednesday.
Speaker 2:John, you're really gonna you're really gonna trust an application Yeah. That was probably vibe coded yesterday over Ben who's doing the weather
Speaker 1:How did he get here? What happened here?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I gotta no. If you look right here, you can see a localized high pressure area. That's a
Speaker 1:localized And this is an overeager weatherman who's just looking for drama in the most boring weather market in America, which is Los Angeles.
Speaker 2:I think I think this is the most important story in the world.
Speaker 1:This is ridiculous.
Speaker 3:You guys can look at the jet streams. They're coming in from the West
Speaker 1:I don't wanna hear any more mumbo jumbo about jet streams.
Speaker 2:Get out
Speaker 1:of You're done.
Speaker 2:Great work, Ben.
Speaker 6:Thank you, Ben.
Speaker 2:This is the future of the weather. Yes. You have a weatherman who gets into a live altercation with one of the other hosts. We need to talk about the wealth of Sundar Pitch AI.
Speaker 1:Pitch AI. Sundar It's new pay
Speaker 2:deal worth up to 692,000,000. Is this, like, 10
Speaker 1:times what Tim Cook's making? No. It must be over over time. Right?
Speaker 2:I mean, Cook's making around 70 a year 70 a year. Combined.
Speaker 1:So if he works for ten years, he makes what Sundar makes in three? We've been advocating for this. So this is good.
Speaker 2:For
Speaker 1:this. But yeah. No. No. We're we're we're in support.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Google has increased Sundar's
Speaker 1:You know potential pay to
Speaker 2:692,000,000 over the next three years.
Speaker 1:You know that Tim Cook dropped this in the Apple board members group chat as soon as it hit. He's just like, dude, this is the this is a cool article. You should
Speaker 2:read this. Drops it in. Just drops it? Bots.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:The bulk of his package comes in performance units Yep. With a target value of a 126,000,000 split evenly into two Mhmm. Tranches. It could pay out as much as twice the target or a quarter million if it outperforms significantly or nothing if it lags behind.
Speaker 1:Gotta beat the S and P 100.
Speaker 2:Pichaiwal received Waymo stock with a target stock in Waymo with a target value of 130,000,045 million in Wing Aviation. That's their their
Speaker 1:drone delivery platform.
Speaker 2:Platform. Again, both can pay out up to 200% of the target.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If he delivers and the and the company does well, he should he should be richly rewarded. Stick a fork in it. Turn out the lights. Hasta la vista.
Speaker 1:Say it any way you'd like. The simple truth is the Mag seven trade is over. Finito. I love, Barron's writing. Dead.
Speaker 1:The collective stock market outperformance of those seven tech icons, Alphabet, amazon.com, Apple, Meta Platforms, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Tesla is now a thing of the past. The group may still do okay, and some of the individual stocks may even kill it, but the slam dunk, set it and forget it, run circles around the market era of the Mag seven is gone with the wind. Actual argument was the growth to value narrative, the loss of cash flow as they increasingly invest in CapEx. The the the financials will look very different. There'll be margin compression, that type of thing.
Speaker 1:It's not an unreasonable take, but it is it's just funny, the the way it's written. Sundar Pichai took over as CEO in August 2015. He's going on eleven years in the seat. Google's market cap has increased almost sevenfold from $500,000,000,000 to $3,600,000,000,000 briefly topping $4,000,000,000,000 in January. This surge has made the Indian born 53 year old former McKinsey consultant a billionaire.
Speaker 1:He joined in 2004 and made his name developing the Chrome browser and leading the Android division. He had been criticized for being too slow to adopt AI at the search giant, allowing OpenAI to release the first hit product, ChatGPT, in late twenty twenty two, but has since bounced back, releasing cutting edge AI models and integrating the technology into its dominant search engine. Yes, he's done very, very well on that front. Pichai has also navigated a duo of antitrust cases brought against Google's search and App Store businesses, avoiding the worst case scenario of forced breakup. A third lawsuit is pending against the advertising network.
Speaker 1:Pichai got last got a stock award in December 2022 worth 218,000,000, which was structured in the same way. His earnings are topped up by his personal security costs, which rose to 8,300,000.0 in 2024. Earlier in the week, he sold 32,500 Class C shares at an average price of $3.00 $3 worth roughly $10,000,000 The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates that he has sold about $650,000,000 in stock since becoming CEO. They still own along with his wife, he owns 1.7 1,670,000.00 shares of Google, worth half 1,000,000,000 at the latest stock price. And Google's founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page still control the company through their ownership of supervoting class b stock, which gives them 56% of decision making power.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Think you gotta give Miami time.
Speaker 2:Paper hands? Oh. He sold 650,000,000 of stock.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. He he sold that, but he's oh, and he only owns half 1,000,000,000. So, yeah, he sold more
Speaker 2:than Hopefully, he put it all
Speaker 1:into video.
Speaker 6:Shy. Paper
Speaker 1:hands was but he's getting topped up. And he's diamond handing the new he he's diamond handing
Speaker 2:new just brand. Saying. I'm just saying, looking at the stock charts since 2015 when he became CEO Yeah. Would have done pretty well just to This whole not do anything and trust trust his own process. Hey.
Speaker 2:Owner of Four Loco is exploring a sale of a of a storied alcohol brand, sources say. The parent company of Four Loco, the canned alcoholic beverage that became a college campus sensation in the late two thousands Mhmm. Before being reformulated under regulatory pressure, is exploring. I cannot believe they nerfed Four Loko. You can just imagine the trajectory of The United States if it hadn't been nerfed and then
Speaker 1:Straight downward. Really? Yes. It was so bad. It was so the impact I thought people
Speaker 3:were having, like, heart attacks.
Speaker 1:Yes. It was terrible.
Speaker 2:Not really?
Speaker 1:Four Loco was a 24 ounce can, so twice the size of a normal alcoholic beverage.
Speaker 2:Trey, the birthday boy says it was amazing.
Speaker 1:It was amazing. Okay. The original formulation was twice as big as a normal can of Bud Light or Miller Lite or Coors Light, your normal beer, something that you would grab. And then instead of it being 3.2% alcohol or 4.5% alcohol, It was like 10% alcohol. It was the strength of like wine almost.
Speaker 1:And so a single Four Loco was like four or five beers in one can. And then they also added like two hundred milligrams of caffeine. You would become incredibly intoxicated and inebriated, but then also incredibly stimulated from all the caffeine. And that spelled doom for many people. People would be very high functioning, but completely inebriated and discombobulated.
Speaker 1:And so they would, know, get into all sorts of trouble or
Speaker 2:The discombobulator.
Speaker 1:It was the it was the discombobulator. It was also wildly illegal from an FDA perspective. You can't mix alcohol and caffeine in a single product. That's just a rule.
Speaker 2:They're looking to and potentially will capture somewhere around 400,000,000 on the sale.
Speaker 1:The brand value. So people it's hilarious that they're working with JP Morgan
Speaker 2:on this.
Speaker 1:That's wild.
Speaker 2:Here's what the CMO had to say. For over a decade, our sales have been the leading have been leading the flavored malted beverage market by embracing bold innovation, unconventional marketing, and a risk taking attitude that delivers results year after year. I think that's a good place to call it.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Goodbye. Cheers.