The A.I. Billionaire Class

0:09Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

0:20Felix Salmon: Hello, hello. With Elizabeth Spiers of New York Times. Hello. We have a, let's say, a tech-heavy one today because everything is big tech these days. We are going to talk about Facebook, or Meta as it's properly called, and its new plan to issue shares which don't carry any voting rights. We're going to talk about Elon and his plan to merge SpaceX with Tesla. We are going to talk about Airbnb, which I guess still considers itself to be a tech company, and their attempt to stop hosts from imposing unreasonable restrictions on guests. We have a Slate Plus segment on the kids who thought that life was better in Europe and then found out the hard way that it wasn't.

1:07It's all coming up on Slate Money.

1:40We'll see you next time. Terms apply.

1:44Felix Salmon: Slate Money is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Listen to Washington Wise, an original podcast for investors from Charles Schwab, to hear the stories making news in Washington right now. Host Mike Townsend, Charles Schwab's Managing Director for Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, takes a nonpartisan look at the stories that matter most to investors, including policy initiatives for retirement savings, taxes and trade, inflation concerns, the Federal Reserve, and how regulatory developments can affect companies, sectors, and even the entire market.

2:25Felix Salmon: Mike and his guests offer their perspective on how policy changes could affect what you do with your portfolio. Download the latest episode and follow at schwab.com slash Washington Wise or wherever you listen. There was some fun corporate shenanigans, governance shenanigans going on over at Meta in recent weeks. Meta, you probably know, is the company that used to be called Facebook. And then one day Mark Zuckerberg woke up and thought to himself, it's all going to be about the Metaverse in the future. Do you remember those days when everyone was excited about the Metaverse and he changed the name of his company to Meta and he changed the ticker symbol of his company to Meta?

3:09and he could do that because he has complete control of the company. He can do whatever he likes, and if you remember back to the IPO of Facebook, it's not just Mark Zuckerberg who has complete control of the company, but it's also his heirs. The Zuckerberg family can control Meta in perpetuity according to the way that it's set up with the super voting stock. Turns out Mark Zuckerberg really cares about this, And for the first time, I think, in the history of Facebook as a company, or certainly Facebook as a public company, he started getting worried about his control. And the reason he was worried about his control is that Facebook, like everyone else, has moved on past the metaverse, is now all into AI, as are we all.

3:58welcome to the AI world and AI is very expensive and Facebook needs to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to be able to pace the frontier or whatever he's doing in AI and in order to do that he's going to have to sell stock and if he sold stock that could actually start diluting his share and so thus began an epic fight in the boardroom at Facebook. Emily pick up the story.

4:26Felix Salmon: So at the same time, this saga is happening for this because the company needs to raise all this capital to make a bet that surely will go better than the meta bet did, right? It can hardly go worse. Can't go worse. I mean, I guess if it ends in the extinction of humanity, that would be worse, right?

4:45Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, I guess so. I mean, not for Zuckerberg, because he'll be in a bunker in New Zealand or something. But for us, yes.

4:51Felix Salmon: Well, at the same time this saga is playing out, another saga is playing out. The poor billionaires in California are fighting tooth and nail against something called Proposition 40, which would be a one-time tax on wealth. Now, Zuckerberg is not fighting it, unlike some of his billionaire cohort, colleagues, friends, other bros. But he is worried that he'll have to sell stock to pay it, the billionaire surcharge. and he also realizes that he has the option of leaving California to avoid the tax like Sergey Brin already has done and I guess a few other billionaires. So he goes to the board and he's like, you're moving too slow figuring out this whole how not to dilute my control thing and I'm just going to leave California.

5:42I'm going to put my house on the market. I'm going to put it up for sale on Zillow.com and everyone's going to be like, Mark Zuckerberg is leaving California. and that would be really bad for the stock and you wouldn't want that, would you? I'm not sure this was a real threat, to be honest. I don't think it was at all.

5:58Felix Salmon: Nice stock you got there. It would be a shame if it went down because I moved to Texas.

6:03Elizabeth Spiers: You guys don't think it was a real threat? Producing my own wealth. No, because it wouldn't be very difficult for him to move to Texas. When Elon puts a bunch of hard manufacturing things in Texas and moves SpaceX to Texas, I think there's a better reason to do that. But with Zuckerberg, so much of Meta, their talent base, everything is there. If he relocates, even just himself, he's still going to spend all of his time in California. And it's hard to make a residency argument. Plus, I don't think he wants to live in Texas. No, I don't think he wants to live in Texas. I think he was anticipating that he'd probably just move to his massive spread in Hawaii and pull a Larry Ellison, who seems to be able to run companies from Hawaii, you know, without too much difficulty.

6:49I agree with you, Elizabeth, that I think it was a bluff. But then again, it's a bluff that the board had to take seriously.

6:57Elizabeth Spiers: Do they have a choice? I mean, he's got so much of the voting control already. I have trouble imagining a scenario where the board would go against something that Zuckerberg was really invested in having. And so, well, I mean, this is exactly what we just, if you read the filing, the SEC filing that details what happened, the board members did actually get to the point of saying, like, we're going to have to resign. Our job is to represent the interests of all shareholders, not just Mark Zuckerberg, which is true. And they have, like, a corporate fiduciary duty to all shareholders. And if they thought it was going to be bad for shareholders, for Zuckerberg to move to Hawaii or wherever, then it did actually, like, they would have to vote against it.

7:42Now, ultimately, he has voting control, so he could push it through anyway, but he would have to push it through over the objections of the board. And so eventually, they wangled this sort of last minute deal, which involves creating a new class of non-voting stock. You might remember that Google already has non-voting stock, this class C shares. And everyone with voting stock, everyone with a share of Facebook will get an equal number of shares of non-voting stock. And then Mark Zuckerberg will be allowed to sell some proportion, I think one fifth of his non-voting stock to pay the billionaire tax if he has to pay the billionaire tax.

8:22And then he's like, well, that's fine. It's just money. I have plenty of money. What I'm not doing is losing any of my votes. And what I care about is my votes.

8:29Felix Salmon: One of the pieces we read said he would still have majority ownership. It was going to go from like 60 to 53. So wouldn't he still have control then at 53? Like, what's the issue? Felix? The issue is that 61 is a nice, comfortable level of control and 53 is a little bit too close for comfort. Like if he does need to wind up selling stock or if he winds up hiring a new CEO, let's say he wants to stop being CEO and he hires a new CEO and the CEO wants something, actual voting stock rather than non-voting stock, then he has to issue a bunch of new stock and all of this kind of stuff. Everyone slowly gets diluted over time in general, Even if all you're doing is issuing regular shares with one vote per share rather than super voting shares, eventually those one vote per share shares add up and then you get less and less control.

9:21So that's a big drop from 61 to 53.

9:24Elizabeth Spiers: So his supposed tax bill is going to be about 12 billion because this is a one-time 5 % wealth tax. He'll have access to 20 billion more from the class C stock that he's getting. But a lot of this argument seems to be predicated on the idea that he would have to sell Facebook stock specifically as if he doesn't have a lot of other holdings that he could sell without presumably other holdings that are invested in the stock market that he could sell without diluting his voting share in Facebook at all. This is all assuming that to a first approximation, 100 % of his wealth is in Facebook stock. And I'm sure you're right, that's not true, that he does have some wealth in things that aren't Facebook stock.

10:08But I think it's also reasonable to assume that he probably doesn't have$12 billion of liquidity lying around that he could rustle up in the event of a tax bill that isn't Facebook.

10:20Felix Salmon: It seemed like it was like a convergence of events because reading, I thought Shira Oviday had a good breakdown in the Washington Post. And this all started with, like you said, Felix, Meta needing to raise more cash for the AI build out and discussions between Zuck and the board of like, we're going to issue equity, raise more money, and we have to do it pretty soon because it's getting harder and harder to raise capital. So it started out from that. And then like the issue of like, oh, I have to sell shares so you can't dilute me was like. Yeah, that was secondary. It was secondary. It was his negotiating tactic, basically.

10:57So yeah, I think everyone understood that Facebook is going to have to issue some equity of some type. Facebook, up until now, has had two classes of equity. If it needed to issue any equity, that would have diluted Mark Zuckerberg. So he was like, can we create a non-voting class of equity? And I think, it's not entirely clear to me, but I think the board was basically okay with that and said, sure, like, if we need to raise a few hundred billion dollars of new equity, we can do that by issuing non-voting shares rather than voting shares so you wouldn't get diluted. But where they kind of drew the line was they said, when we give you your non-voting shares, because everyone gets non-voting shares in this scenario, everyone, every current shareholder gets non-voting shares, we're going to sort of staple your non-voting shares to your voting shares.

11:44So if you want to sell some of the non-voting, for every non-voting share that you have to sell, you have to sell one voting share at the same time just to make it fair. You can't just like dump all of your non-voting shares and keep all of control. And that's where things started getting a little bit hairy. In the end, I think like 80 % of the non-voting shares are stapled and 20 % are not. But then eventually over time, some of them become unstapled. It gets very confusing.

12:09Felix Salmon: Oh, that's really interesting and very technical. And I wonder what the zoom out is because Gabrielle Zuckman, the economist who's battling for this wealth tax, took to Twitter, took to X.com and said, this is great. It shows that billionaires are like getting ready to pay the wealth tax. And Zuckerberg could pay as much as$12.5 billion. And that's going to get us to our$100 billion goal for this wealth tax. And I'm like, really? I mean, he supports the proposition. So of course, he's going to say, this is great. It's going to pass, blah, blah, blah. But I'm thinking maybe he has a point. Maybe it is going to pass.

12:42Felix Salmon: And that sounds nice.

12:43Elizabeth Spiers: There's some punditry that says that part of the reason why Zuck is just kind of like, OK, this is going to happen. I don't need to put money into this$300 million fund that Sergey Brin and pals are doing to lobby against the wealth tax is that the lobbying against the wealth tax may just be educating the electorate a little bit more about how much money they have and backfiring. So I love that. I have to say I'm taking the under on the wealth tax. Like, whether or not Prop 40 passes, I suspect that the wealth tax is never going to happen. If it passes, which there's a decent chance it will, that, yeah, there will be all manner of legal challenges.

13:25And if it gets as far as the Supreme Court, which it probably would, then I'm quite sure that the Supreme Court would find it unconstitutional.

13:33Felix Salmon: But, well, I don't want to get into a whole side debate about the constitutionality of the wealth tax, but I do want to talk about that definitely at some point. Well, let's wait to see if it passes first. Yeah, but the tide is turning quite hard against the billionaires, I'd say, among Americans right now. I mean, I just covered like the Harvard Youth Poll, which is this survey they do of kids age 18 to I think 29 or something. And they're all anti-billionaire, super populist, tax the rich, like the vibes are. are not on the side of the billionaires, though, of course, the money is. And you see the billionaires doing all this philanthropy now to sort of like do the PR around it, so they don't have to do things like pay wealth tax?

14:15It's kind of interesting. There's not just one billionaire class.

14:19Felix Salmon: There's at least, I would say there's three. Oh. There's the AI billionaires, who are like pure AI billionaires. So that would be like Dario Amadei, the OpenAI Foundation, like Sam Altman, and to a certain extent, Elon Musk, who's like an AI trillionaire. He was never a trillionaire before AI came along, and now he has all of the AI valuation in SpaceX. And they are making various sort of civic-minded gestures at creating nonprofits and giving back and all the rest of it for reasons that we have talked about in the past. we will talk about in the future. We don't need to go into too much detail right now.

14:59That is not the billionaire class in general. Suddenly discovering like philanthropy and generosity, I think that is specifically the AI folks. Then you have like the old like internet billionaires like Sergey Brin or even like Patrick Collison or those kind of folks. And they're just like, no, I have a bunch of money. I don't want to pay a billion dollar tax bill. Thank you very much. I'm going to lobby against it. or I'm going to leave California or both. And that's quite normal. And then you have, I mean, I'm not sure how big of a thing this is, but then you just have the non-tech billionaires, of which there are a lot in the United States and even a fair few in California.

15:43And they, I think, are just kind of like pootling along quietly doing what they've always done. And I don't think the anger against them, like there's a lot of anger against Mark Andreessen, who's like a tech billionaire there's not nearly as much anger against like mark handreason's wife laura arriago who's also a billionaire because i think it's the tech billionaires the tech

16:04Felix Salmon: billionaires specifically is where the anger is you can see it at the at the movie theater for example where there's three movies now um that are basically anti-tech yeah the other thing is

16:13Elizabeth Spiers: people are angry at whoever they consider to be the biggest avatar currently for billionaires so they're not talking about the walton family they're talking about the loudest voices in the room so i I would also put people like Bill Ackman in that category, to some extent Trump. I think there are, you know, especially younger people, they're not making these distinctions about how people got their wealth. They're making distinctions based on whatever stupid shit a billionaire gets up and says that feels very tone deaf or just inappropriate. And so for voters, I think billionaires are a nebulous class.

16:47Elizabeth Spiers: And whoever is the least well behaved of the billionaires becomes the avatar for those people. Well, that's always going to be either Trump or Musk. Yeah. Yeah, probably.

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20:13Let's talk more about obscure technicalities of corporate finance and corporate control, because this one totally rhymes. X helped Mark Zuckerberg put in Elon Musk. X helped Meta put in SpaceX. And it basically reads across. Elon Musk has a very strong degree of voting control of SpaceX in exactly the same way that Zuckerberg does at Meta. Elon Musk does not, interestingly, have the same kind of voting control at Tesla because he wasn't quite as powerful when Tesla went public and he couldn't give himself like the super voting shares that he did at SpaceX. So he just has normal common shares at Tesla and he's always complained about not controlling Tesla and this is a standard gripe of his.

21:01And so now for that reason and for many other reasons, he wants to merge SpaceX and Tesla, which effectively is going to be a SpaceX buying Tesla for stock. And because he can issue non-voting SpaceX stock or single vote SpaceX stock or whatever in return for Tesla stock, basically all of the Tesla stock will become SpaceX stock. And then finally, Elon will achieve his dream of being able to control Tesla just like he controls SpaceX.

21:34Felix Salmon: Finally, Elon will have some power. Thank God. I mean, the poor guy only controls one of his companies. You know, now he gets to control both.

21:42Elizabeth Spiers: I'm really loathe to say this, but I understand the logic about it. Aside from, like, Elon's self-interest, Tesla's been, they're not struggling, but, you know, revenue is down. They're not doing as well as they were. They have a ton of cash. And SpaceX needs cash because it needs CapEx. And then on the flip side, I do think Tesla would get a little bit of a bump, you know, if they did merge, because all that frontier technology that Elon's developing on the X side would accrue in some ways to Tesla, or at least I think from the perspective of the market would. They're both AI companies now, right?

22:16SpaceX makes Grok and frontier models. Tesla makes... Cars. Well, no, I mean, it kind of makes cars. It makes two things that require a shit ton of AI, one of which is cars for the self-driving and the other one of which is robots. He has this thing called Optimus that he wants to build.

22:37Felix Salmon: That doesn't make money though, right? No, it doesn't make money, but it requires AI and it will succeed or fail on the strength of the AI that is built into the robot. So at this point, Musk needs to make allocation decisions about I have these NVIDIA chips. Do I give them to SpaceX to build Grog? Do I give them to Tesla to build Optimus? If it's one company and he can move engineers across back and forth, he can get more sort of kind of economies of scale, but like, you know, develop one AI platform to power both companies. Like, that makes sense. I'm with it.

23:15Elizabeth Spiers: He already does this. He kind of walks engineers between the two companies. And is happy to like informally self-deal. But he has two public companies now, and there is a limit to how much of that he can do. And so now, like, he can go from quietly, informally doing it with a handful of engineers to actually really building it into the deep structure of the company. And yeah, I mean, the question is, who's going to stop him? He controls SpaceX. The boards of both companies are going to do whatever he wants them to do. So the answer to that question is kind of interesting. The only person who, the only entity I think really realistically who might be able to put any roadblocks in the way of this happening is European antitrust authorities.

24:00It's a massive merger of$2 trillion companies. Never in the history of humanity have$2 trillion companies merged. That just doesn't seem very sort of pro-competitive. That does kind of feel like an antitrust, you know, on its face. They're disparate enough. They don't really compete with each other that much. So, like, it's hard to make a strong antitrust case against this. But I'm quite sure that someone will try.

24:25Felix Salmon: My cynical take is that Tesla is used to be Elon Musk's like growth company. The stock price was like very overvalued because of this, the Musk premium that we've talked about and sort of the belief in future growth. But now SpaceX is like the new girl on the block and everyone's like SpaceX. I mean, Musk himself is like, our potential market is the whole economy plus a trillion. You know, he's making these very big growth claims for SpaceX. So it's becoming like the hot growth stock. And it makes sense to sort of roll Tesla up into SpaceX and sort of move on to the next big thing. Kind of like he rolled X into, I don't even know.

25:11Felix Salmon: Into SpaceX. into space into xai and then into spacex just like i don't want to say ponzi but it's not of course not it's all very valuable stuff i mean who doesn't need grok but um yeah it's just like he just keeps rolling the stuff up and and taking money for for the privilege of doing so it improves

25:32Elizabeth Spiers: the vibes of whatever the inferior not product but like whatever company's doing worse in the market that it, you know, pulls the mood up, I guess. Yeah. Well, I mean, so this is the thing. Like, Tesla shareholders are going to have to vote for this. And they probably will because Elon Musk wants it and Tesla shareholders very reliably vote for whatever Elon Musk wants. But at the margin, they're going to want as many SpaceX shares as they can get for their Tesla shares. If SpaceX is doing really well in the market, which actually is right now, it's up like 50 % since early August, then that means the exchange ratio is less attractive to Tesla shareholders.

26:12But it also makes it easier for SpaceX to afford to buy Tesla. So negotiating the exchange ratio is going to be very tricky, I think, to get the Tesla shareholders on board. But ultimately, I think they'll come along.

26:24Felix Salmon: My other hot take is that we are just in an era of conglomerates and big companies. it's kind of interesting because usually i think at a time of a new technology and a lot of like new innovations and inventions and big technological changes you would see like a lot of new new companies like startups getting bigger like what facebook was originally yeah but now we have we have like two mega startups i don't it's weird to call them startups since they're allegedly worth a trillion dollars and then we have all these giant monopolistic tech companies who have decided to like move into the new technology instead of being outcompeted by smaller companies there's less risk of that because they're so big like this is what happens when you let giant companies have big monopolies even during times of quote-unquote disruption and innovation i'm gonna push back on this one because they get bigger i don't think that well okay spacex does have a monopoly on sending rockets into space i'll give it that um it has a monopoly on satellite connected telephony is it's a big company but if that's all it did was like send rockets into space and have satellite connected telephony it wouldn't be anywhere near a trillion dollar company it would be like a 200 billion dollar company at most it is not like a massive giant monopoly in the way that Alphabet is.

27:54Okay.

27:55Elizabeth Spiers: I think what Emily's kind of saying, though, too, is just that we are in a sort of political environment where there is no political will really at all to put guardrails around these companies that are potentially going to become monopolies and seem to be on the road to do it because there's no kind of feeling in Congress or in any part of the government that this is bad. There's no antitrust. Number one, it is just a fact that the way that American antitrust law works, if you grow into a monopolistic position, that's basically fine. Merging your way or acquiring your way into a monopoly is bad, but just competing your way into a monopoly, there's very few laws against that.

28:36But second, I'm just going to come out and say that AI and the AI space is pretty much the most competitive and least monopolistic space that I have seen in a while. There are so many different models. There are all of these new billion-dollar startups that all they do is they point your compute needs at whichever model is cheapest this minute. You have Alphabet, Apple, OpenAI, Anthropics, SpaceX, all competing with each other in this run. To say that any of them has a monopoly in AI, the only real monopoly I can see in AI is NVIDIA. and even that one is being eroded because everyone's building their own chips now.

29:16Felix Salmon: I'm not saying that these companies, these giant tech companies have a monopoly in AI yet. I agree that the competition is intense right now and it's not clear who emerges the winner. I'm saying that there are these big monopolistic tech companies that have so much frigging money that they're at the head of the line in the competition and it's very difficult to compete with them at a time of innovation when there are startups, they just get absorbed by these bigger companies. You see these deals all the time. No, but look at DeepSeek. To just take one example, there's like at least three cheap, powerful Chinese AI models out there that are competing aggressively and they're not just going to get bought up and absorbed.

30:03Felix Salmon: I don't know. I don't know if I agree totally.

30:06Elizabeth Spiers: Like when we talk about antitrust law, we're talking about domestically. One of the things is, it's one thing to say that AI as a giant market, and you're including any company that's developing anything related to AI or using those models, is competitive. I think that's true. But when you look at companies in the U.S. who are developing models, I think there's already a moat. And this is, by the way, I think part of the reason why you have Altman and Amadei arguing that maybe there should be regulation, because that's another moat around, they've already built that infrastructure. and they've already paid for the insane amounts of data it takes to train a model.

30:42Elizabeth Spiers: They have the money to keep funding data centers. Even if you don't want to say they're heading toward monopoly, they're heading toward something that looks maybe more like an oligopoly. They are capable of boxing competitors out so aggressively that I, can you imagine a frontier lab emerging at this point? Yeah, because it has as much power as Anthropic or OpenAI. A new one emerges every week out of China. And I completely disagree that like the only concern of American antitrust is companies that happen to be headquartered in the U.S. If these companies like Anthropic are having to compete against Chinese companies, and they are, and they're reducing their prices aggressively because of that, then that is genuine competition.

31:20Felix Salmon: That's true. I don't think this is a conversation about antitrust law. Like antitrust law is irrelevant in 2026 and probably for a long time. It just is. We learned that over the past six years. Like, I don't think it's worth even talking about antitrust law personally.

31:35Elizabeth Spiers: Well, I think right now I agree with you. Hopefully, you know, we don't know what the political environment is going to look like in five years, ten years.

31:42Felix Salmon: But we know these billionaires are still going to be billionaring. Yeah, and we know, by the way, that Lena Khan was running the FTC for years and achieved very little. So, like, you know, we've tried it. It didn't work.

31:55Elizabeth Spiers: I think she used that office more aggressively than nearly any of her predecessors. What did she achieve?

32:00Felix Salmon: Yeah, and she still achieved very little. I think that's true. I mean, she achieved things, yes, but not, I mean, it wasn't what was promised. I think for what you can do unilaterally, she did achieve quite a bit. We will agree to disagree on that one. I think we table this for another time. If any lean-up people are listening, they could come on and debate us. I just want to add, like, one little grace note to this, which I haven't seen reported, which is that somewhere along the line, Elon Musk announced on his social network that he was going to give one share of SpaceX to every child in America.

32:32This is his form of philanthropy. And if he merges SpaceX with Tesla, then it becomes incredibly easy for him to do that because famously he has this Elon Musk foundation, which is sitting on a metric fuckton of Tesla shares that he donated a million years ago for some tax reason and that has been struggling mightily to actually give away the minimum amount of money it needs to give away each year because it has so much money and Elon doesn't care about philanthropy. So if all those Tesla shares, which are currently sitting in the Elon Musk Foundation, suddenly wake up in the morning and become SpaceX shares, then he can just give those SpaceX shares from the foundation to all of the children and he doesn't actually need to give up any of his shares that he personally owns right now at all.

33:21Felix Salmon: And then all the children will love him forever. Exactly. And then all of the children in America will love Elon because they will all have shares in space.

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35:43It's just like you can just go bing, bing, bing, bing, bing and get through it. It makes email much less overwhelming. and it basically gives you time. It gives you your time back to get things done and to actually do the important thing, which is draft the emails, reply to emails, and write the words. So get out of your inbox and back to what matters. Sign up and get one month of Superhuman mail for free with my link, superhuman.com slash slate money. Sign up and get one free month of Superhuman mail at superhuman.com slash slate money. in a development that basically marks the complete end of airbnb is like invite people into your home and let them stay with you and make friends um is that how people use airbnb friends that was that was airbnb 1.0 remember like remember that in the it was like sleep on someone's couch exactly yeah it was like you're going to the what whichever political convention it was the democratic convention in some city and they're like people need somewhere to stay when people have spare rooms it started as a spare room thing it was not like a you know but that's become left way behind since then they've got into hotel booking and all manner of other things and so now they're basically like yeah if you are on airbnb and you're renting out your home you are a hotel and you have to allow people to treat your home like they would a hotel you can't ask them to like respect your home like they would a friend's house it feels like

37:14Elizabeth Spiers: You are an Airbnb host now. I am, yeah. Where do you stand on this new rule that's very limited in terms of what chores you can ask guests to do before they leave? Where do you think the reasonable limit is? Yeah, you can't ask people to do the dishes, but you can ask them to leave dishes in the sink. You can ask them to, like, throw garbage into the waste bin, but you can't ask them to take the garbage out to be picked up at the whatever. I can tell you that at my Airbnb, the trash gets picked up once a week on Tuesday mornings, and it needs to be put out in order to be picked up. And I'm pretty sure none of my guests want me or anyone else coming along on Monday nights and running around the back of the house and dragging out the waste bins.

38:00I think a lot of this is just common sense stuff that if you have halfway as normal guests and Halfway's Reasonable hosts, it will all work out just fine. But this is Airbnb, and there's a bunch of crazy unreasonable people on both sides.

38:16Felix Salmon: I think it's great. It's not just Airbnb. When you rent a house, like we rented a house in North Carolina over the summer, and it's like, strip the beds, leave the towels here, take the trash out on this night, take the recycling on this night. It's like, I am spending a lot of money to stay in this house. This is not anyone's house. It's clearly a house that is just there to be rented out. Like why? I'm on vacation. Like I don't want to do any work.

38:45Elizabeth Spiers: And you also get charged a cleaning fee on top of cleaning the house. So I've been in at least one of one Airbnb that had an unreasonable list of chores and it wasn't included in the listing, which now Airbnb will ding host for. but we got there and there was like a long manual and it was it was stuff like you know hand wash the dishes and let them air dry and there was a dishwasher sitting right there and I think some of it is a lot of people have turned this into almost their full-time income stream so they behave like people who are being landlords for the first time and they put all the onus on the tenants or the people who are staying there and at the same time I think now Airbnb places especially if they're in you know a city that has some tourism or whatever they're not less expensive than hotels which was part of the appeal in the first place they are less expensive than hotels if you sort of look at the all-in cost of the holiday because especially if you're traveling with kids but even if you're not like the cost of eating out for all of your meals which is what you have to do when you're in a hotel starts adding up if you have a kitchen and you can go to the supermarket and cook your own food that does save you money and i think there are basically two very different types of airbnb these days which is like the two that you were just talking about there's the one that emily is talking about which is the property that all it exists for is to be rented out on airbnb and to bring in a certain amount of money and then there's the like what i have which is like i have a house i like my house it has my stuff in it and my art in it and you know i've put a lot of effort and love into it and i am happy to rent it out for the summer when i'm not there and make some money and that's how it pays for itself but it's still my house right and i like people to respect it as my house and not just treat it like a hotel and so airbnb per force has to basically find a set of rules that applies to both equally because there's no real like clear dividing line between the two.

40:50And so the people who are really letting strangers into their home and saying, you can stay in my home, can you just respect it because it's my home? They do come up with these rules, which is basically it comes down to, can you respect my home in the same way that I respect my home? And some people react badly to that. And sometimes those rules get articulated in a way that can feel very aggressive. it.

41:13Elizabeth Spiers: I do think the sort of stripping beds down and putting that in the, I feel like that's, if you're going to have a cleaner come in, that is something a cleaner could do. And I think that if you're going to charge guests a cleaning fee, you do need to put as much of the chores in that bucket as you can. But the stuff like put the garbage in the bin, because I don't want mice and bugs in my house, that's reasonable. That's asking guests to do the obviously courteous thing. But Emily, you were talking about this, right? You recoiled at the idea that someone would ask you to take the trash out.

41:46Felix Salmon: No, strip the beds, I recoil. I'm on vacation. I do not want to ruin the illusion of wonderfulness by seeing a bare mattress. So I don't want to strip the beds. And the towel thing, it's like I'm paying a cleaning fee. You deal with the towels. They're going to be in normal towel places. I have one more question for you. Because both of you have talked about if I'm paying a cleaning fee, if I'm paying a cleaning fee, I don't charge a cleaning fee. If I don't charge a cleaning fee, does that change anything? I think a little bit does. I'd say a little bit. Yeah. Hotels don't do cleaning fees and they do all the fees.

42:23Felix Salmon: That's now that I think about it kind of surprising. If you want to stay in a hotel, stay in a hotel. That's my general sort of vibe here. Wow. I feel like you're a little bit mad. I'm not mad at Airbnb. I'm mad at people who won't just take the trash out because the trash needs to be taken out. I mean, I'm going to take it out, Felix. I'm not going to sit around in a house with an overflowing trash bin or anything like that. I just, I don't know. I like the idea of like slimming down the requirements of your guests, especially when you're charging a lot of money and you're doing a cleaning fee and all of this.

42:59Felix Salmon: Like, I don't disagree, honestly, with what you said at the outset, which is like reasonable people will figure this out. I'm sure that's true.

43:06Elizabeth Spiers: Do you think some of this is, there are some hosts who charge the cleaning fee and then they don't bring in a cleaner, so they want the basics just done by the guests.

43:12Felix Salmon: I don't know. That would be not cool.

43:27Let's have a numbers round. Elizabeth, what's your number?

43:30Elizabeth Spiers: My number is 3 ,100, and that's the number of Memorial Day flag-making kits that an organization that promotes data centers is sending to 37 schools in Loudoun County, Virginia, a.k.a. Data Center Alley. And they are trying to indoctrinate children into thinking data centers are very cool. And so there are two books that you can download that are children's books about data centers. One called Poly Packets Precious Payload, which sounds a little porny to me. And the other one is about a honey badger who takes a data center tour. It's just called What is a Data Center? But you can download these off the organization's website.

44:11And they're giving out 3 ,100 of these?

44:12Elizabeth Spiers: The flag-making kits come with little data point sheets about the positive impact that data centers have on communities. All right. Emily, without having read one of these things, can you give me one positive impact that data centers have on communities?

44:34Felix Salmon: They hire a few people from the area to work there? Yeah. You should go into PI. You'll be great at this. Thank you. What's your number? My number is 2.09. That is, on average, how many steps it takes to connect the actor Samuel L. Jackson to any other actor in Hollywood. Just 2.09 steps. Is Samuel L. Jackson the new Kevin Bacon? Yes. He's more connected than Kevin Bacon. It turns out that Kevin Bacon is not even very Kevin Bacon. The Pudding, which is this amazing site that does data, these really big data viz projects. They have demystified the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game in, I mean, incredible detail.

45:22Felix Salmon: They looked at a database, something like 160 ,000 actors to figure out who is the most connected. If you recall Kevin Bacon, you're supposed to be able to start with any actor and get to Kevin Bacon in six steps. you know John Travolta was in this movie with guys help me out you know what I'm saying yeah so they went and they looked and they were like actually Kevin Bacon is like ranks 100 on the list he's definitely not the most connected and turns out Sam Jackson is he's had the longest career and he's been in the movies with other connected people and Robert De Niro is number number three and you'll never believe who number two is I won't tell you you'll just have to go see and they even do it over time who was the most connected since like 1980 and it changes around like ned beaty if you remember him from superman one which in my opinion is one of the best superhero movies of all time he was number one for a while which what and then some other character actors you probably don't remember and now it's settled on sam jackson and this amazing data viz which everyone should go look at it they even project who the next samuel l jackson will be using wizardry i don't understand oh yeah we can see the future yes all right my number is 15 which is the percentage by which candy prices rose in 2026 so if you are buying halloween candy this year you are paying 1.15 times what you paid last year wow apparently cocoa beans and sugar and corn syrup are all having supply chain problems right now and it's all feeding into candy prices I did eye a bag of like maybe it was just Snickers Mini or something and it was like $25 oh yeah but Snickers Mini those are good but$25 is like the kids don't deserve Snickers Mini yeah okay no they deserve it those poor kids they don't know enough about data centers but alright I think on that note that is it for us this week.

47:27Thank you to all of you guys for listening. Thank you especially to the Slate Plus subscribers who are going to be able to listen to our amazing Slate Plus episode, which is on...

47:38Felix Salmon: The people that left the United States because they were mad at Trump moved to Europe and then regret it because it's not any better. Amazing story. Thank you for emailing us on SlateMoneyAtSlate.com. Thank you to Jessamyn Molly for producing. And we will be back next week with more slate money.

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