Microsoft Hires Ousted OpenAI CEO & SpaceX Loses Most Powerful Rocket Ever

0:00Tonight on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozma St John host the highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not play play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best idea win! On Brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere tonight on NBC. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. On today's pod, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella went God mode to cap off one of the wildest weekends in tech in decades.

0:41Then we'll tell you whether Elon's rocket launch and Vegas' F1 race flopped or popped. It's Monday, November 20th. Let's ride.

0:54Toby, remember Erin Madsen? We talked about her on the show over the summer. She was a superstar field hockey player at UNC who was hired by the Tar Heels right after she graduated. becoming the youngest head coach in D1 college athletics at just 23 years old. Now she is the youngest championship winning coach in D1 history. Over the weekend, Madsen led her team to a double overtime win in the NCAA finals over Northwestern. So if my calculations are correct, she is on pace for infinity national championships as a head coach. She's just a born winner. I actually saw highlights of the shootout on my TikTok feed natively.

1:30It was electric. So exciting to watch. and I have played field hockey before. They make it look so much easier than when I was playing. It's very hard, very sore glute muscles. It's not the back that gets you. It hurts my back when I watch because they're bending over. Yeah, no, for me, it was the glutes. So congrats to Aaron, though. Amazing, amazing record. Before we start the show, a quick shout out to our sponsor, Brex. Neil, Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and I have an idea for some Thanksgiving Day small talk. Why not bring up Brex? I could see it. Hey, Mom, patch the mashed potatoes.

2:04And also, have you considered that Brex automates expense management for efficiency, speed, and accuracy? Sure, Grandpa. I'll save you some gravy. Just like Brex saves your team time and money so they can focus on doing what they were hired to do. I don't know. I'd probably invite us over. Me too, Neil. Me too. Check out Brex.com today. Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? But with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers, a network of 130 million of them, in fact. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company, seniority, skills, and did I say job title?

2:41See how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Let's get into the show. Neil, forget the Kardashians. Forget the Real Housewives. Silicon Valley has all the drama you could ever need, and it was on full display this weekend. We almost called for an emergency Saturday podcast because, shockingly, OpenAI's board pushed out co-founder and CEO Sam Altman seemingly completely out of the blue on Friday. When I say out of the blue, I mean it.

3:16Not even Microsoft, which invested$13 billion into the company, was notified. But Microsoft wasn't going to sit idly by and let their AI bet get upended like this. And early this morning, Satya Nadella pulled off an absolute business masterstroke. He hired Sam Altman and former OpenAI president Greg Brockman to lead an advanced AI-focused research lab within Microsoft. He did this while also preserving its previous relationship with OpenAI's team, now led by former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear. We'll see how the market reacts this morning, but this will likely go down as a very, very valuable piece of corporate maneuvering as Microsoft remains in the driver's seat of the AI race with Sam and Greg in tow.

4:00Neil, trying to keep up with this news has been wild to say the least. Who came out a winner in all this? Okay, well, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, was paid$57 million last year, and he earned every penny. This was such a remarkable Uno card to play to keep Sam Altman on board. Who knows what would have happened when the markets opened this morning And Microsoft would be left without, you know, with an open AI, which invested$13 billion in complete disarray without Sam Altman, who is its visionary and its leader and the person really behind all of the AI boom that we've been seeing this year, because he essentially oversaw the creation of ChatGPT, which has unleashed this craze that has taken over the business world.

4:46So I think Nadella comes out on top to make Altman a W2 employee at your company, even though he's been a founder so many other places. So the ability to talk to him and give him the assurances that he'd have independence within a$2.7 trillion company like Microsoft is a massive, a genius bit of corporate maneuvering. Yeah, it happened very early this morning. We woke up to the news and we're like, Sia, man, like what a play from him. But this whole thing has been very Steve Jobs-esque because, first of all, the tech community 100 % rallied around Sam Altman when the news first broke. And everyone was bashing the board's decision, calling it a de-evolutionary process or a de-growth process where they're favoring safety and moving slower over moving fast and breaking things.

5:35And so they said it was irresponsible Steve Jobs getting fired by Apple in the 80s. But then also it was just so confusing trying to keep up to date with everything that was happening. At one point, everyone in the industry was just quote tweeting each other's tweets with heart emojis. And then Sam Altman posted a tweet with a first line that said, I love you all, which if you take the first letters of each word, spells out Ilya, which is the name of a prominent open AI board member who many think was behind his dismissal. So people were really reading in between the lines here and trying to figure out what's going on.

6:06That is pretty hardcore. Let's talk about Ilya Sutskever, because he is the guy who is seen to have engineered Sam Altman's firing. And there appeared to be a schism at OpenAI. OpenAI was created in 2015 as a nonprofit with the goal of creating safe artificial general intelligence. It was not intended to make money. And then in 2019, Sam Altman said, we need more investment. We need more money here and took the company in a different direction and went for profit. He burned a lot of bridges, especially with Elon Musk, who was also a co-founder of OpenAI. And so I guess bubbling under the surface, no one really knew about this until the firing took place.

6:43But there appeared to be a major conflict. And this reflects a conflict that has been happening all over the AI industry between the camp that says, this is going to destroy humanity one day. We need to take this seriously and take it slow. And then the Sam Altman's of the world where it's like, we need to go as fast as possible with AI because it will ultimately save lives and also help us reduce the other existential risks that humanity faces like climate change and whatever. So this conflict within OpenAI is just a microcosm of the broader conversation happening around AI right now. It did shine a light on OpenAI's ridiculous corporate structure because you have a for-profit company that is answering to a nonprofit board.

7:28And so, again, that just added a lot of fuel to the fire of the people who are saying that here's a board who have never been founders in their lives. Some of them are from academia. So it really fueled those kind of battle lines of the tech community of should we be pursuing growth at all costs or should we do it in a more safer way? What do you think happens next here? Well, I think Sam and Greg go and build what they've always wanted to build under Microsoft's umbrella. I do think OpenAI is going to have a massive, massive talent drain. A lot of people are likely going to follow Sam and Greg to Microsoft.

8:02So I don't think OpenAI will ever be the$80 billion company it was trying to be. It was trying to raise another funding round. Who knows what Sam and Greg will end up building? probably something similar under Microsoft's stewardess, stewardship, thank you. But yeah, OpenAI definitely comes out of this the loser, in my opinion, because again, these, Sam and Greg, were the heart and soul of the company. So I think there's going to be an exodus. Maybe they're left to pursue their original nonprofit dreams of building safer AI. With no talent to build it. That's the only issue. So yes, go play with your turnbugs.

8:36I think a lot of AI researchers may look at the new OpenAI without Sam Altman and say, That may be something I'm more interested in. There are a bunch of other startups that are focused on AI safety, like Anthropic. That was former OpenAI people that didn't like the direction of OpenAI as well. So it may not be this valuable company, but they could have influence in the future of AI development. So we'll just have to see. OK, Argentina is taking a leap into the unknown. And that unknown is a guy who wields a chainsaw named Javier Millet. Millet was elected president last night, culminating a stunning rise to power for someone who has zero political experience.

9:11Millet has been called an anarcho-capitalist for his radical libertarian views on the economy, and he's got a set of proposals that are sure to shake things up in Argentina with major spillover effects for the rest of the world. And someone to shake things up is what Argentina wanted, for better or worse. The situation is dreadful there right now, with inflation soaring about 140 % and 40 % of the population living in poverty. The country's economy hasn't grown in 10 years for only the second time in its history. And Millet's opponent, center-left economy minister Sergio Massa, Argentines saw more of the same failed policies that brought them to this point.

9:46So they saw the risk of sticking to the status quo as more risky than going with a guy who was even more of an outsider than Donald Trump was in the United States. The bottom line, Argentina just took a drastic rightward turn because they have nothing to lose. Yeah, they definitely jumped into the unknown because it's better than what they had. Some of Millet's campaign promises, he's promised to slash public spending. He also promised to dollarize the economy, which means adopting the U.S. dollar instead of the Argentinian peso. He wants to shut down the central bank, cut the number of government ministries from 18 down to 8.

10:19That's the chainsaw I was mentioning first. He wielded a chainsaw at these campaign rallies to show I was going to cut public spending by a lot. I love the chainsaw is the proper metaphor for that. His whole rallying cry was to take down the country's political cast, which was kind of the Argentinian version of drain the swamp from Donald Trump. So you can see why there was these parallels between the two. Donald Trump actually tweeted, or he truthed on his true social platform. I am very proud of you. You will turn your country around and make Argentina great again. So, again, this is another kind of microcosm of kind of in resemblance of Brazil.

10:56took a rightward turn under Javier Bolsonaro. And now you have Mille coming in. So it's a lot of tension potentially between those two countries is bubbling up, but kind of a shock election. It's unclear what he's going to be able to do to dollarize the U.S. economy and also abolish the central bank at the same time. It's not clear whether you can do that. He's also going to be politically weak technically because he doesn't have a majority in the legislature. So he's not like Joe Biden coming in with Nancy Pelosi at his side to be able to ram through a lot of this legislation. So it's unclear how much of what he wants to tackle will be able to get done.

11:33But he also has, besides the nuts and bolts economy stuff, he has very controversial views on social issues. He has called climate change a socialist lie. He's a wild card in every sense. He's a wild card in every sense. Both economically and socially and politically. So, oh my Lord. It It actually is. I do feel for Argentinians right now because if you are coming in and saying we're going to dollarize the economy, get rid of the peso, the peso is absolutely cratering in value this week going forward because Argentinians are rushing to just shed their peso. So you feel for a country, even though they are looking for change in some way, but right now it's definitely a rocky time for them.

12:13This week is going to be crazy. I saw interviews with shop owners and people who sell on e-commerce sites saying, I'm not going to list any of my products because I have no idea what the currency is going to do. It's going to fluctuate like crazy. I think the markets are not open today in Argentina, but when they do open, it's going to be wild. We're going to see crazy fluctuations in government bonds and in their currency as investors try to figure out what this new administration will actually do. Because it is promised some of the most radical change we've seen in decades in South America. OK, before we jump into the second half of our show, we're going to take a quick break.

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13:51SpaceX's Starship Flu in the Las Vegas Grand Prix wasn't a total flop. Those were the two big events over the weekend we had our eye on, so let's check in and see how each one went. First up, the second Starship launch attempt was supposed to take 90 minutes and send the rocket to space and back, but it only made it about eight minutes before blowing up once again. Elon and co hailed it as a success though because it did technically last longer than the first test flight in August, which also ended up blowing up. The problem back then was the super heavy booster and the Starship itself never separated.

14:23This time they did before Starship eventually had another rapid unscheduled assembly. Most importantly, they did not blow the launch pad to smithereens this time around. Again, this is rocket science, so you can't make an omelet without blowing up a few rockets in the process. But is an eight minute flight and a separation between the boosters a success, Neil? Absolutely. I woke up Saturday morning And I was I remember that there was this launch. I was in bed and I opened up the phone and I watched it for like 15 minutes. I get so hype about this. I know that there is a debate over whether this was a failure or progress or anything like that.

14:58But I see it as amazing. I mean, watching this Starship go and I, you know, for eight minutes, it's it's really impressive. I like the approach of just, you know, obviously I'm not funding it, so I don't have to care about the the money involved. but I think the move fast and break things approach is the right way to go about it. So every time this thing lasts longer in the air and I watch all of those 33 Raptor engines firing at the same time, it gives me goosebumps. I love it. They did all fire at the same time, which was a big problem with the first launch. Some of them weren't firing. So that was a big win for them.

15:34Technically, the rocket did make it to space too. It reached an altitude of over 90 miles above earth while the boundary of space starts around 62 miles. Obviously, there's some gray area there. And then the innovation that, yeah, literally, the innovation this time around was this thing called hot staging. It's where the upper stages engines start firing before Starship and the super heavy boosters have fully separated. This concept isn't new at all. They've been using it in NASA since literally the 60s. So it is interesting to see them kind of returning to one of the first techniques who's ever used to space to try to get this futuristic, massive 400 foot tall rocket up to space.

16:09And we should remind people why this is important is Starship is supposed to be the lunar lander for NASA's Artemis mission back to the moon in 2025. And it's expected by SpaceX to eventually take people to the Mars and deeper space. But when you the timeline of this for the moon is 2025. And when you watch this thing explode after eight minutes, you're like, you're like, are we really going to be using this in two years? Like, can we actually make that much progress where we're really OK with putting humans on this? Yeah, I know. I always think that in the back of my mind, but hopefully they figure it out.

16:42Tough week, though, for Elon in general. I mean, obviously his rocket blew up, but also a bunch of advertisers left X after he interacted with an anti-Semitic tweet. IBM pulled roughly a million dollars in ad spending. Apple, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Lionsgate followed suit, suspending all advertising on the site. So while SpaceX had a relatively successful weekend, it was anything but for X as it's facing another advertising crunch right now. Elon has a habit of interacting with anti-Semitic posts on his platform. And this one he endorsed. This one said that the Jewish people have a dialectical hatred of white people.

17:19And he said, you have said the actual truth. So it was not murky. It was pretty clear what he was saying. And he denied that he's anti-Semitic afterwards. You had people like Bill Ackman and Ron DeSantis coming to his defense. But a lot of this is becoming indefensible because it is a repeated pattern. And you have the CEO of X, Linda Iaccarino, who's coming under a lot of fire from her peers to resign because how can you stand by what the owner of this platform is doing? So it was reported over the weekend that a bunch of media buyers, a bunch of media executives met with Linda Iaccarino and urged her to resign and say, how can you stand by this?

17:57She's been put in such a tough spot at every corner. So interesting to see how she'll navigate going forward if she resigned or not, or if she tries to court those advertisers back again. Let's now talk F1. The much-anticipated Las Vegas Grand Prix happened, and it went pretty well. After so much hype, disgruntled locals, and disastrous Thursday qualifying session, F1 needed a perfect race to save face, and it got pretty close to that. there are a total of 86 overtakes including one in the last lap in the battle for second place in the end max verstappen from red bull did end up winning like he always does but the course was fun the sphere was doing its sphere thing and a night race in vegas was a spectacle it seems like f1 is leaving vegas on a bit of a high right now but neil as our resident f1 realist how do you think this weekend i'm willing to eat my words i know on friday kyle and i talked about we previewed this and we were pretty down on it and I was airing all of my laundry with F1 about how viewership was down and it was off of this COVID high that it had been.

19:02There were all these complaints about what was going on in Vegas and you know what? Turned out pretty well. I'm willing to change my stance. I don't think this generally changes the overall trajectory of it, but I think Vegas put itself in a position. It signed a 10-year deal with F1, so this isn't going anywhere and I think people are leaving on a bit of a high after after watching this race even though i don't think anybody on the east coast watch it because it was at 1 a.m yeah that part was was really bad also some fans filed a class action lawsuit against f1 after they were kicked out from viewing areas on thursday night remember there was that huge problem with the qualifying session a a valve popped up it made a huge delay they had to repair the track and then by the time they fixed everything all the fans had to go home and so they didn't get to watch anything so it again it was a rocky weekend to say the least but it was their first time doing this they have nine more years to perfect it i do feel so bad for the f1 teams though because they have to be 12 12 time zones to the east and abu dhabi for the final race of the season just five days later so i can't imagine i think our sleep schedule is difficult but can you imagine being an f1 racer and having to reorient your body 12 time zones away the logistics of f1 are very cool i watched a youtube video on I think three years ago when it was becoming pretty popular.

20:18I encourage everyone to just type in F1 Logistics on YouTube, and it's all about how they move their infrastructure from. It's truly one of the most global sports because they're competing in everywhere from Vegas to Australia to the Middle East to Europe to Latin America. So it is an amazing logistical feat. I encourage everyone to go watch that. Okay, let's head to our winners of the weekend where Toby and I will share two things that had an even better weekend than Satya Nadella. I won the pre-show Frisbee golf round, so I get to go first. And my winner is U.S. Infrastructure. That's because a busy one-mile stretch of I-10 in Los Angeles has reopened for the commute this morning, just nine days after it was closed due to an arson fire, causing all types of traffic headaches.

21:02Just last week, Governor Gavin Newsom said it would take up to five weeks to fix the highway, so they repaired it way ahead of the original timeline. And that reminded me of what happened earlier this summer in Philadelphia, when I-95 was damaged and the city fixed it in just 12 days, also way ahead of schedule. So, Toby, I can think of three possible explanations for this. Either America's regained our infrastructure mojo, politicians are getting very savvy about setting a low bar, or the people in power just don't want to give you any more excuses for not coming into the office. I think it's a combination of all three, but how do you feel about L.A.

21:38beating Philly? Remember how much we celebrated Philly? You're like, wow, what a great infrastructure. and they and they nabbed him by three days here how do you feel about well i don't know the extent of the damage i've never repaired a highway before all i know is philadelphia came together much more as a city than los angeles did i mean you had gritty there you had the fanatic so philly seemed to have a lot more civic pride than los angeles regarding this highway and i think it reflected the the supremacy of philadelphia over los angeles lots more brotherly love is what you're saying gotcha all right my winner of the weekend is Casey McIntyre.

22:12Casey recently died of ovarian cancer, but before she passed, she did one of the most baller things you can ever imagine. Casey had great health insurance through her company, so was able to fight her cancer debt-free, but was well aware of the fact that others weren't so lucky. So she arranged to buy up other people's medical debt, then destroy it after she passed away in a celebration of her life. It turns out this is totally a thing you can do. Buy up debt for pennies on the dollar than work with an organization like RIP Medical Debt, in Casey's case, to wipe it out. As of Saturday, around$200 ,000 had been donated to RIP Medical Debt in Casey's memory, which would wipe out approximately$20 million of unpaid medical bills.

22:55I can't think of a more selfless way to leave your time on Earth, Neil. I also didn't really know that this was a thing that you could do. Me neither. This is crazy, but it seems that Her story was she had really good cancer care at Sloan Kettering and looked at other people who were lower income and didn't have insurance and weren't able to and saw their medical debt ballooning, which is a thing. I mean, there's, I think,$125 million,$195 billion in medical debt total. We talk a lot about student loans, but this is also a massive problem. And she did something. You said baller. I mean, that's the best way to describe it.

23:31It is so incredible what she did. and you can also look at what happened. You said, why do we even need this in the first place? The U.S. has the highest healthcare costs in the world. So whenever these stories come out about people being super charitable and generous about helping others pay off their medical bills, you also, oh, it's a time to reflect and say, why is this an issue in the first place? Yeah, just think about the decision people with cancer are put in. Should you pay your mortgage that much or make another payment towards your medical bills? Do I want to extend my life for a couple more years or months or should I just leave my savings to my children going forward?

24:03So it puts you in an incredibly difficult position. So to do this as kind of your final, she called it a celebration of her life, changing the lives of so many other people. I would highly encourage everyone to check out RIP Medical Debt because you can go and donate to Casey's cause and also to anyone else's cause there. So just an incredible organization and an incredible story. That's my winner of the weekend. I checked this. I checked last night and it was over 300 ,000, well over 300 ,000. So that's equivalent to$30 million. Okay, let's head to our week ahead where the only thing that really matters is Thanksgiving.

24:36So let's start there with some data on Thanksgiving travel. It's going to be a record-setting holiday for airlines. Airports are expecting to screen 30 million passengers between November 17th and the 29th, the most ever. The Sunday after Thanksgiving will be the busiest of any day with 2.9 million very full passengers returning from their travels. The good news, prices are cheaper even than pre-COVID times. Thanksgiving flight deals averaged$248 for domestic round trips compared to$271 last year and$276 before the pandemic in 2019. What inflation? Oh, my gosh. I always see these stats, and I always feel the pain of seeing the flights home.