Three-Headed AI Unicorn

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1:36Emily Peck: Hello! And welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg, here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times.

1:50Felix Salmon: Hello.

1:50Emily Peck: Here with Emily Peck of Axios.

1:53Felix Salmon: Hello, hello.

1:54Emily Peck: And literally here in an absolutely swanked out Bloomberg podcast studio with Max Chafkin of Bloomberg. Hey. Max, introduce yourself and tell me about this whole amazing situation that we're in.

2:10Max Chafkin: Yes, I am a writer here at Bloomberg and Businessweek and the co-host of the Everybody's Business podcast, which is a weekly podcast that tapes here. We model ourselves on slate money in every way. and yeah, in this very nice studio.

2:25Emily Peck: And you record in this very nice studio, which we have co-opted this week for Slate Money and many thanks to Bloomberg for letting us do that. We are going to talk to you about this astonishing piece that you have in the latest issue of Business Week all about Enron, which is amazing and everyone should read it. We are also going to talk about the H-1B fiasco that happened this week, but we are going to start by talking about the financing of artificial intelligence and whether it's all circular clusterfuck, I believe is the technical term. Are you allowed to say clusterfuck on Bloomberg Podcasts?

3:01Emily Peck: We like to keep it clean. Yeah, yours is clean.

3:03Max Chafkin: We say F. Cluster F.

3:06Emily Peck: Are you allowed to say clusterfuck?

3:07Max Chafkin: I think so, yeah. We've got to check with Apple. I'm not sure.

3:10Emily Peck: Ah, there you go. Always check with Apple. In any case, we have all of that and a sleep-loss segment on the 0.01 % rule, which is kind of awesome. Coming up on Slate Money.

3:29Emily Peck: So, Max.

3:30Max Chafkin: Yes, Felix.

3:32Emily Peck: Before we talk about your amazing Enron story, we should talk about the big business and finance news of the week, which is that, let me see if I've got this right. NVIDIA is investing$100 billion in OpenAI, so that OpenAI can then give the money to Oracle so that Oracle can then give the money to data centers who can then give the money to NVIDIA.

3:54Max Chafkin: Yeah, I mean, it seems like to simplify it, NVIDIA is putting$100 billion into OpenAI so OpenAI can give$100 billion or something close to it to NVIDIA.

4:05Emily Peck: And correct me again if I'm wrong, but$100 billion is actually a lot of money still, right?

4:11Max Chafkin: Big, big investment round, right. These are numbers that, I don't know, even a few years ago for a private company would seem enormous.

4:19Emily Peck: When I joined Axios, I tried to get a word minotaurs going.

4:24Max Chafkin: I think I vaguely remember this.

4:26Emily Peck: Do you remember the unicorns?

4:27Max Chafkin: Yeah.

4:28Emily Peck: Do you remember when it was really amazing that a company could be valued at a billion dollars? And all the companies that were valued, the private companies that were valued at a billion dollars were called unicorns. And then there were like hundreds of them or possibly even thousands. and eventually I decided what we needed was a notch up from a unicorn, which was a minotaur, which isn't a company that was valued at a billion dollars. It was a company that had raised a billion dollars. And that was many, many fewer. Raising a billion dollars was crazy. Now we have companies raising a hundred billion dollars in a single round.

5:02Max Chafkin: So on one hand, the reason that the numbers have gotten so big is because these AI startups, As most people know, they run on these data centers. The data centers are very expensive. You have to build them. You have to buy these wildly expensive chips to fill them up with. But I don't know. There have been suggestions that this deal in particular, as well as a couple of the NVIDIA investments and AI companies, sort of look like what I think is called round tripping. This would be an accounting trick to essentially goose your revenues, make it look like you're making more money than you are. I don't really understand where the line is there, although that seems like an interesting question to me.

5:37Max Chafkin: The other thing to me is just like this whole AI bubble feels like a lot of companies sort of doing business with each other. Like it's all this self-dealing. It really feels like if we're looking for a sign that this is a bubble, this is a sign that this bubble.

5:52Elizabeth Spiers: If there are three Militaurs passing money between each other, is that technically a Cerberus? Do we have a term for that?

5:59Emily Peck: I love it. It's a three-headed unicorn.

6:01Felix Salmon: I mean, Max already kind of said this, but I feel like I just was trying to wrap my head around it last night. It's like, I give Felix$100, he gives me$100 back, and then I give him$100, and he gives me$100 back. And then in our accounting of our wealth, we keep adding$100 plus$100 plus$100. We never subtract. And that kind of seems like a little bit what's happening.

6:23Elizabeth Spiers: It feels like self-dealing, but it's not the same company that owns all three entities. They're just passing the same money back and forth, which is kind of like just very expensive high-end customer acquisition, right?

6:35Emily Peck: Well, I mean, it's what used to be known as vendor finance, I think, to a certain extent. And in principle, I don't think it's obviously problematic unless and until you reach this point at which every$100 billion of revenue gets valued by the stock market at$1 trillion or$3 trillion or something like that. And so you wind up with this 20, 30, 50, 100x multiplier effect and NVIDIA being worth$4.5 trillion or whatever it's worth this week.

7:06Max Chafkin: One of the stories I read about this deal said that a comment from OpenAI or maybe it was a background comment from OpenAI and said they're not buying the chips from NVIDIA. They're leasing them. And it's like, how does that? I'm not totally sure why that would make it. I mean, maybe that makes it better in an accounting sense or whatever, but it seems like the same basic problem, which is like you have this service that no one really knows how valuable it is. And yes, there are a lot of like venture capitalists that really think that large language models are going to bring in trillions of dollars and usher in a new era of intelligence or whatever.

7:41Max Chafkin: But it really seems like, for now anyway, most of the money is just coming from other AI companies or software companies that are so bought into this idea, either because of Wall Street or because of some other reason. None of this feels organic to me.

7:56Emily Peck: This week, I published a little essay on Bloomberg.com about pricing compute, which is a lovely little sort of corner of auction design, which gets into, I think, what you're driving at here, which is that there are two different problems that the AI revolution needs to solve. One is the problem that computer scientists have been working on for decades, which is, you know, number one, how do we build chips which are as sophisticated as the B200 from NVIDIA? And ultimately, how do we get to AGI and does that, you know, all of the sort of like hard science questions around artificial intelligence?

8:38Emily Peck: And then the other question, which is actually really much more urgent, is the financial one, which is, you know, McKinsey is out with a report saying that total investment in data centers over the next five years, which is not very long, is going to be$7.9 trillion. And that is an amount of money that just is almost impossible to comprehend in terms of like investment. There is really hard to find that much money on the planet. and the kind of financial engineering and financial ingenuity that you need. I mean, do you remember when Sam Altman was doing his rounds of various Gulf states going, can I have a trillion from you and a trillion from you?

9:16Emily Peck: And eventually we will have enough trillions. Like if the AI revolution is going to happen, and that's a big if, but it sort of seems to be on that path, at least for the time being, then we are going to need all manner of financial legitimate and ingenuity in order to coral the sheer magnitude of dollars that it requires.

9:38Max Chafkin: That's an enormous if.

9:40Felix Salmon: A really long piece from July from Ed Zitron that I had chat GPT summarized for me, not going to lie, basically said that no one's really making money from AI yet except for NVIDIA. So of course, NVIDIA is, you know, putting money back into open AI to help it someday make money to keep it alive. But it does seem like a problem that an industry we're talking about costs trillions of dollars so far hasn't shown much promise in terms of generating revenue beyond me using chat gpt to summarize an article to explain why chat gpt

10:14Emily Peck: isn't that valuable and the revenue associated with that is like zero right right i love ed

10:20Elizabeth Spiers: zitron and i enjoyed his critique but he also i think makes a little bit of a category error in that he's talking specifically about LLMs and generative AI, which is only one part of AI. It's the most, I think, prominent and public facing because most consumers understand how that works. But we're not talking about machine learning, which has been around for much longer than open AI. So I think when we look at who NVIDIA is selling to, yes, it's open AI and these companies that are working on generative, but I think they're in a less vulnerable position because people buy GPUs for things that are not generative AI.

10:54Elizabeth Spiers: If open AI implodes, NVIDIA still has a business and those data centers still have some purpose.

11:00Emily Peck: And let's not forget that even if the entire AI verse just kind of implodes, guess what? All of those NVIDIA chips will all just get rerouted to doing what they were doing originally, which is crypto. So much more useful.

11:14Felix Salmon: In addition to the sort of closed loop critique of this particular deal and really of the whole AI boom in general, that it's just like a few big companies plus NVIDIA just like passing money back and forth between each other. There's also like antitrust things to talk about with NVIDIA, which I guess no one cares about anymore in this year of our Lord 2025.

11:33Emily Peck: I would love to talk about this though, because this is the first thing that sprang to my mind when I saw this deal, which is the way in which NVIDIA is using its astonishing cash flows to basically lock in every single major player into its own ecosystem. And that$100 billion comes with strings attached. And the strings are not just you are going to buy NVIDIA chips, but it's like you are going to use the whole NVIDIA programming languages and support structures. And basically what it means is that even if you want at some point in the future to buy someone else's chips instead of our chips, And even if someone else's chips are better than NVIDIA's chips, you're basically not going to be able to do that because you're so locked into the NVIDIA ecosystem.

12:23Emily Peck: And so I feel like NVIDIA has basically at this point managed to get itself a real monopoly. Everyone and their mother is out there building AI chips. Amazon is doing it. Google is doing it. Apple is doing it. None of them are actual real competition for NVIDIA because NVIDIA has all of the customers sewn up. I do think it's a monopoly. But as we have discussed on this show, being a monopoly doesn't seem to be illegal anymore. Like making acquisitions to become a monopoly is illegal. But just like growing naturally into monopoly them seems to be something that the FTC and the FCC don't really care about anymore.

13:04Felix Salmon: No, definitely they don't care about it anymore. I was thinking about it. I'm trying to make sense of it in my brain. just like if I had a deli or a restaurant and I wanted to have like a case where I sold soda and then Coca-Cola came along and was like, we will give you the money for the case. And the case has to be exactly like this. And then the case was such that only Coca-Cola bottles fit in the case. And then they were like, we're going to give it to you for free basically. And it's fine. And then over the years, they just keep raising the price though. Well, it's not free anymore. It's a dollar per soda.

13:37Felix Salmon: Now it's$2 per soda. And then you have no other options. You must buy the Coca-Cola and put it in the case. And they just become more and more powerful and they make you sell all kinds of other stuff and buy all kinds of other stuff you don't even want, you know? And then you have a caffeine addiction and it's just downhill. Have I gone off the rails? But I was just trying to make it, you know, relatable example.

13:59Emily Peck: This is why sleep money would be nothing without you, Emily.

14:01Felix Salmon: It's the model. It's how you do your monopoly. It's 101 stuff. And we get mad about it down the road. And then, you know, the federal government sues Google and there's a whole lawsuit that we have to talk about for like five years. But you could just stop it now. But no one ever does. But here we see it happening.

14:17Emily Peck: I feel for your inability to sell Pepsi.

14:22Felix Salmon: It tastes just as good. I learned this in the 80s. That's just wrong. It does. Have you taken the Pepsi challenge?

14:31Emily Peck: Oh my God, the Pepsi challenge, I have a whole thing about that.

14:34Felix Salmon: What?

14:44Emily Peck: Slate Money is brought to you by Apple Card. Hey, you could be earning 2 % daily cash back on that purchase. And that one. And even that one. That's because Apple Card users earn 2 % daily cash back on every purchase, including everyday items you buy online or in-store when using their Apple Card with Apple Pay. Not an Apple Card customer? You can apply in the Wallet app on iPhone. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, terms and more at apple.co slash benefits.

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18:25Emily Peck: Hey folks, the shutdown clock is ticking again. Yep, the US government might just shut down. Trump is threatening mass layoffs across the federal government if Republicans don't get their way. At least one Democrat says this is blackmail and is probably illegal. Senator Chris Van Hollen has talked exclusively on What Next Plus about his party's next move. So listen to What Next host Mary Harris. Find out what it is. I have heartache right now because I believe, well, I am the only foreign-born person on this here show today. But not only am I foreign-born. I also had two H-1B visas in my youth.

19:12Emily Peck: h1b visas are dear to my heart and what brought me to america and what made me the man i am today and now howard lutnick is on the warpath basically trying to effectively abolish them and i think

19:25Elizabeth Spiers: this is sad yeah i thought you were going somewhere with the pepsi challenge i wanted to know like he

19:30Felix Salmon: has a take on the pepsi challenge like it's been seven years i've been talking to him i think and

19:35Emily Peck: i didn't know he had a take on the pepsi challenge my take on the pepsi challenge very quickly is that if you put a slightly drier drink up against a slightly sweeter drink and ask people to do a blind taste test they will always pick the sweeter drink this also explains a huge amount of which wines score the highest in blind tasting and why sweeter wines generally score higher however the revealed preference of people in day-to-day life is not necessarily for the sweeter drink that how we actually live and what we actually like is not always the sweeter thing. And that there's something very artificial about blind taste tests that makes sweetness much more salient than everyday life.

20:23Emily Peck: And so that is why people actually prefer Coke to Pepsi in everyday life, but they prefer Pepsi to Coke in blind tests.

20:28Max Chafkin: Pepsi's sweeter.

20:29Emily Peck: Pepsi's sweeter?

20:31Felix Salmon: Thank you, Max. and this is what made Felix the man he is today that's why they gave him an h1b visa yeah like we need your skilled talent at assessing coca-cola and pepsi and your knowledge of sweetness and

20:46Emily Peck: drinks we need that in the united states i got an h1b visa i came over here working for a tiny little web company called idea and they were paying me thirty thousand dollars a year to write words on the internet. And this was not a high skilled job. But like, it was a job that frankly, no right thinking American would have wanted to do. So they gave it to me. And or it was like an English company. And they just kind of knew who I was. And they were like, why don't you go over there? Because we trust you. Like, this was back in the day when people just didn't worry so much, I guess about like, you know, foreigners stealing our jobs or whatever.

21:25Emily Peck: Maybe I did steal someone's job. Should I feel guilty about that?

21:28Felix Salmon: So I think we should just back up and say last week, Friday night, the Trump administration put out this executive order saying H-1B visas would now cost$100 ,000 a piece. Wasn't clear if they meant retroactively or going forward.

21:43Emily Peck: Well, Howard Lutnick gave a press conference in the Oval Office standing, like looming over Donald Trump and saying, this isn't just$100 ,000, it's$100 ,000 per year. and then everyone just kind of agreed that he hadn't said that but now he's out there saying it again even though everyone's saying that he didn't say that yeah they put out um an official executive order basically saying every single person who has an h1b needs to pay a hundred thousand dollars when they come into country and so like everyone on planes was getting off planes people were trying to get back into the country before the deadline only for the white house to go you know oh psych we didn't actually mean that we just meant like new h1bs if you have an h1b It's fine.

22:23Emily Peck: The whole thing was rolled out with maximum chaos.

22:27Felix Salmon: It was a mess. Every lawyer I spoke to this week was like, I didn't sleep all weekend. I was just on the phone to companies were freaking out. Everyone just absolute chaos. This is not how you do policy in the United States. It's really shocking.

22:41Emily Peck: This is no way to run a railroad.

22:44Elizabeth Spiers: Trump only has one policy tool, though, and it's everybody give me money. You know, it's always some incarnation of that. And what's astonishing to me is that he sort of it's almost like he started from the question, how can we destroy American economic primacy in less than four years, and then went and did everything that you would do in order to do that. Let's destroy higher ed, let's start trade wars. And now let's make it impossible to recruit top talent from other countries.

23:10Emily Peck: This was definitely one of the big sort of fault lines back when, you know, a million years ago in what, February, when there was this big fight between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon about like who was going to control MAGA was H1Bs. was like, should American companies be able to hire the most talented individuals they can to make America great again? Or should they be prevented from doing that so that Americans who aren't particularly talented or not as talented can get jobs? And I think that the Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon side of the argument has clearly won.

23:49Felix Salmon: Elon Musk himself an H-1B visa holder. And another lady called Melania.

23:54Emily Peck: She was on H1B as well? I thought she was on O.

23:58Felix Salmon: I was reading yesterday H1B in 1998 when she was modeling.

24:02Emily Peck: Me and Melania, we were like hanging out in the H1B club in 1998.

24:06Felix Salmon: Class of 98.

24:07Elizabeth Spiers: Which one of you is modeling again?

24:11Felix Salmon: No, but seriously, I was thinking about it because I recently covered FTC wanted to do a rule, click to cancel rule. And, you know, they put out notice and comment. They got all this feedback from industry. It got challenged in court and a court just knocked it down because industry didn't have enough opportunity for feedback. And then the Trump administration on Friday night is like, everyone has to pay$100 ,000 for these visas starting immediately. And that's OK. And talking to lawyers in the industry, they're like, we don't know if anyone's going to even challenge them in court over this because they're too afraid of this administration.

24:45Emily Peck: Someone is going to challenge them in court. There is a lawyer who is going to be able to find a plaintiff somewhere.

24:50Felix Salmon: No, there literally is a lawyer on LinkedIn looking for plaintiffs right now. Like I've seen his posts and all the lawyers are like, we're just waiting for the suit. But it's not like Amazon is the biggest user of H-1Bs, but you don't see them out there saying anything about this.

25:03Emily Peck: The suit will never come from the biggest employer of H-1Bs. The suit will come from like IDEA or some tiny little company that has one H-1B. And the suit will win in at least two lower courts and may or may not make it up to the Supreme Court. And I don't know any lawyer who thinks this is legal, right? I mean, this looks very illegal on its face. And I think, honestly, that's one of the reasons why the big H-1B employers have been so quiet. It's just because they're low-key waiting for this to just go away in the judicial system somewhere. And then the other reason is just like there is no equity in complaining about Trump in public.

25:42Max Chafkin: I don't think it's just that there's no equity in complaining, although that's true. I think it's that the big H1B holders can afford this. Like, it's just not that much money. And although it will disrupt their businesses to some small extent, they can afford it. It's like these tiny startups, the ideas of the world, who can't. And like, those are the people, like the venture capitalists who back these startups are the ones who are complaining about it for the most part. Reed Hastings was like out on Twitter praising it. And Reed Hastings. Wait, what? Yeah. He said, you know, this is a great system because it'll, he said it was going to eliminate the lottery, ensure that the companies that are hiring H1B holders are actually targeting sort of talented employees or whatever, rather than just trying to depress wages.

26:27So let's unpack this a little bit, because kind of hidden amongst the noise was actually not a bad idea, which was separate, entirely separate from the$100 ,000 thing, which was we

26:42Emily Peck: are not going to make H-1Bs a lottery anymore. or we are going to make it basically, we are going to give the set number of H-1Bs, which is going to stay the same. And instead of just handing them out randomly by lottery to everyone who applies, we are going to hand them out to whoever the most skilled applicants are. And, you know, we can have a whole philosophical debate about whether the most skilled applicants, you can use as a proxy for that, like the highest paid jobs. But that's broadly where we're going with this one way or another. And I think saying like we are going to try and funnel these H-1Bs to the most skilled applicants is something that seems to me to have been relatively uncontroversial, but then just got completely swamped by this$100 ,000 thing.

27:27Emily Peck: But you can do the most skilled applicants thing without doing the$100 ,000 thing. That is not necessary at all.

27:32Felix Salmon: But then you can have, like you said, a whole other debate about what a most skilled applicant is. It's my understanding that a lot of people coming out of university, graduate students and those with bachelor's degrees at the beginning of their career who are trying to stay in the United States, secure these H1Bs and then go on to become very skilled workers. workers but initially you know this is just a way of of developing talent like and that is sort of it feels very american to me to like not to be charging six figures for the privilege of working in america growing your talent founding a company and all of this to max's point while you know

28:11Emily Peck: amazon and other big companies will be perfectly happy to pay 100 might be perfectly happy to pay $100 ,000 to get a very skilled employee, they're not necessarily going to be very happy to pay $100 ,000 to get someone straight out of college.

28:25Max Chafkin: I feel like we need to say also, or I need to say, that it's not like the H-1B system was a great system. No, it really wasn't.

28:31Emily Peck: It was a terrible system.

28:32Max Chafkin: You know, I think it's really true to say that this policy is going to harm Silicon Valley. It's going to harm the innovation engine of the United States, maybe even harm the economy at large. But what H-1B was, I think, at a lot of companies was basically a scheme to hire workers at below market wages and essentially to undercut the Silicon Valley workers who, during the era when this program became much more popular, were demanding increasingly higher wages. Remember there was that story, it was like 10 years ago, about Apple and Google colluding on not poaching each other's employees. It basically became a situation where this is just a way for like meta and amazon and apple and so on to pay way way way less for entry-level tech well

29:19Emily Peck: i mean it was partly that but can i just like spin that a different way which is that it was a way for these big companies to get these skilled workers not very expensive or not as expensive as American skilled workers to work in California, in Washington, like in the United States, rather than having to employ them in Ireland or in Bangalore or, you know, wherever they, you know, would otherwise have to employ them. I think the ultimate truth of the matter is that these individuals are going to end up being employed by these companies one way or the other. And the only question is, are they going to be employed by these companies in America and become taxpaying Americans and contributing to the American economy?

30:08Emily Peck: Or are they going to be employed by these companies in India and become taxpaying Indians and contributing to the Indian economy? And I don't know which one Donald Trump would prefer.

30:17Felix Salmon: And Canada too. A lot of companies, I mean, the lawyers I spoke to this week, they said all their clients are thinking about ways to move these jobs to other countries. And that's a loss. I mean, even if you are underpaying H-1B visa holders in the United States, They're still contributing to the local economy and a broader sort of job ecosystem in the company. If you have an engineer and you're employing them in an office, you're going to need staff around those engineers in that office. You know, everyone's going to go out to lunch. Everyone's going to buy real estate, blah, blah, blah. This is how we grow economies.

30:47Felix Salmon: If all of a sudden you put that engineer and you put him back in Canada, then Canada gets all those benefits and then the United States doesn't.

30:54Elizabeth Spiers: I also just Occam's razor, though, I think none of this was really thought through by Trump. You know, he's just sort of reverting to his usual everybody needs to give me money role. But also the Bannon position is just that he doesn't want immigrants generally in the country.

31:09Emily Peck: Stephen Miller has been violently against, or I should say vehemently against, legal immigration from day one. This is clearly an attempt to reduce legal immigration. we also saw this week another yet another rollout of the famous trump card so like if you don't want to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a h1b you can pay a million dollars for a trump gold card or five million dollars for a trump platinum card and the clear messaging from the white house is basically if you want a green card you are going to need to pay either one million or five million dollars all of the other ways of getting a green card are going to disappear and we're just going of funnel you into one of these two things and if you don't have a million dollars or five million dollars then you're shit out of luck and immediately someone in the oval office when you know howard lutnick was announcing this was like wait does that mean that spouses of american citizens can't get green cards anymore without paying a million dollars and lutnick was like oh yeah i hadn't thought of that this is not thought through but elizabeth is absolutely right that it all just comes down to basically, historically speaking, there were two different ways that rich countries did immigration.

32:21Emily Peck: There was the American way, which is based on family ties. And then there was like the Canadian or New Zealand way, which is based on skills and that kind of thing. And now Trump is coming up with a third, completely different way altogether, which is just whoever can afford to pay a large amount of money. And no one has really tried this before. And again, Again, I'm not sure that this will pass legal muster, especially the platinum card, which

32:47Max Chafkin: you don't have to pay taxes.

32:49Emily Peck: If you pay$5 million, then you get basically an exception to this universal rule that American residents have to pay tax on their global income. You get like an asterisk and you don't need to do that. My favorite thing is not only do you have to pay$5 million, you also have to spend no more than 270 days a year in the country. they're forcing you to spend three months a year out outside the country if you have enough income

33:16Elizabeth Spiers: there might actually be like an arbitrage play there where you change your citizenship and then get a visa to come back for a year well i mean just not to pay taxes so yes and and again this

33:27Emily Peck: isn't really thought through that right now it is extraordinarily expensive to renounce your citizenship once you have it i don't know whether that might change but no this is very much an attempt to basically reinvent UK non-DOM status, which turned out to be a complete disaster in England, and just saying like, yeah, we want that class of people in America. My guess is it will be found on constitutional, but I've said that in the past. And you can't trust the Supreme Court to be the bulwark here.

33:59Felix Salmon: It's just really remarkable if you just like zoom out. The Trump administration clearly values rich people over everyone else and is structuring policy that way too. The people worthy of consideration are people who can pay a million dollars,$5 million to be here. Everyone else can buy refugees, buy poor people, people in university. And at the same time, you're seeing like, you look at the consumer spending, like Mark Zandi has been doing all this work showing that like over just about half of consumer spending now is being done just by the top 10 % of earners or something in the US. It's just like we're sort of barreling towards this very unequal, very gilded era, it seems like to me.

34:42Felix Salmon: And I was in a conversation this morning where someone was saying, well, as long as the spending keeps going, the economy is going to be fine and like the market really likes it. But if underneath the spending and the market really liking it is just like an economy that really is just completely favoring the wealthy, that's not good long term for politics, for social cohesion. Like there's a lot of problems happening.

35:05Emily Peck: Yeah, but it's good for the rich.

35:07Felix Salmon: But it's actually not in the long term. I think it will, it comes back to bite you. You're right. Remember the French Revolution? I'm old enough to remember. I remember the Pepsi Challenge, the French Revolution, when they shot those Russian people in the turn of the last century. I remember it all. And I'm telling you, in the long run, it's not good.

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39:08Emily Peck: Investing involves risk. Okay, I feel like I really need to cleanse my timeline at this point. So Max, can you tell me about Enron?

39:19Max Chafkin: Yes. So I guess it was at the end of last year. Probably some people saw this, but there was a social media campaign. Someone got the trademark to Enron, which is this really cool logo that was designed by Paul Rand, legendary graphic designer. And they bought up all the social media handles and they announced that they were back. There was a launch video. It is really funny because it looks exactly like any corporate social responsibility ad. Sort of could be like an ad for a chemical conglomerate saying, you know, those cancer-causing chemicals weren't so bad. But it's Enron. And what kind of proceeded was this, to me anyway, very funny social media campaign, kind of poking fun at the way corporations talk to us.

40:02Max Chafkin: And I did a story about it for Business Week, where I work. And it was fun. The guys behind it did the birds aren't real conspiracy theory. Are you familiar with that one, Felix?

40:11Emily Peck: Birds aren't real was fun. But then when you were writing this, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't have great ability to put myself in the mind of a high-flying Business Week reporter. But you were thinking to yourself, why did they go to all the trouble of actually buying the trademarks? They could have done all of this just anyway and used the logo and no one would have sued them. It wasn't like there was some like trademark holder of Enron.

40:38Max Chafkin: I actually asked that question. They didn't and they didn't buy it. They just filed the trademark because the trademark had expired. Like as you're guessing, some of the media reports, it was written up as a purchase, but it was really more like a filing fee. I also think parody kind of allows you to basically do, if you've seen the Nathan Fielder, Nathan for you episode, Dumb Starbucks, this is Dumb Starbucks, but with Enron. And the thing that made it weird and kind of a mind bender for me is I went in thinking like, okay, this is going to be a fun story. These are some guys who are really good at memes, really good at social media, and I'm going to write about them.

41:12Max Chafkin: And about halfway through the story, I got a call from a tipster who was like, it's actually all falling apart. There was this crypto launch. Everybody lost money. And indeed, basically, Enron, the parody, sort of turned into Enron like a bad cryptocurrency. I'm not going to use the word scam, although some people have used the word scam.

41:35Emily Peck: Like on a scale of one to actual Enron, obviously the real original Enron was much bigger, but they both kind of collapsed in a spectacular fashion.

41:46Max Chafkin: Exactly. That's what made it so fun for me. So what's weird is I think that the guys behind this, as I report in the story, they both basically left the project out of frustration with their crypto investors. essentially launching a cryptocurrency and trying to turn this satirical project into like a get rich quick thing, basically turning it into a thing that they were trying to satirize. But I don't know, to me, it was like, it actually made the satire somehow even better because like, it did the thing.

42:18Emily Peck: I need to unpack this just a little bit because one of the defining questions of the 2020s is are memes real? And we talked about LeBouBou's last week and they are real and potmart that makes l 'ububus is worth 50 billion dollars and it is a real thing dogecoin has a capitalization in the hundreds of billions of dollars it's a real capitalization gamestop is a real company with real revenues basically just staying aloft on pure power of meme and this ability to turn something funny and stupid into something real is like a defining feature of where we are today. And I feel like the Birds Aren't Real guys were doing a satire, but then the crypto backers were like, well, great, satire is something that is real and we can monetize.

43:13Max Chafkin: Well, I think you're absolutely right. And I left one part of the story out, which is that they also tried, and I don't think this was forced by the crypto backers, they tried to sell energy in Texas as well because Enron, partly because of the original Enron, Texas and many other states deregulated their energy markets. So now you buy electricity from a different company. It doesn't necessarily have to be the same company that makes the electricity. It doesn't necessarily have to be a utility. It could be like Ryan Reynolds or whatever, like a Mint Mobile situation. And they filed an application to do this.

43:45Max Chafkin: And the Texas Public Utility Commission, I think part of what led to everything sort of falling apart and me getting this tip and everything, is that the Texas Public Utility Commission denied their application on the grounds that people should not have to sort satire from reality when buying electricity, which I think is reasonable, but I also think is a funny line to draw. If you're like, this is the one thing we're not going to accept in Texas when it comes to electricity, it's satire.

44:13Elizabeth Spiers: Was there a point where these guys were basically saying, okay, we're going to satirize this sort of, I mean, Enron wasn't technically a Ponzi scheme, but like a Ponzi scheme. And then somewhere in the process, they're like, actually doing a Ponzi sounds like a good idea. You know, where did they decide that they were going to turn it into something that might actually be a business?

44:31Max Chafkin: I think it's more like what Felix is saying. The crypto investors just saw a meme and memes are monetizable. I think it was as simple as that. They thought these are two funny guys. They're able to capture attention. We can turn that into something real. And to be fair to the people who launched this cryptocurrency, if you tried to buy it, There was like a big fat disclaimer being like, this is a parody. Any reference to energy is a metaphor. You know, like it was a long disclaimer saying, do not buy this if you're trying to make money. But of course, that's like what people do. And Coffeezilla, I don't know if you all have seen any of his videos.

45:07Max Chafkin: He's like a crypto investigative journalist. He's sort of one of the most important. I can't believe I'm saying this. Like one of the most important investigative journalists during the kind of FTX, like the collapse of all these crypto scams. He did a really good video about Enron. And his point is essentially like, you can't have an ironic scam. It's not funny because an ironic scam is still a scam. And I think there is this sense that it's just gotten harder to do satire today than it used to be. Partly because of context collapse and the way that there's just no way to know for sure if something is satirical or something is not.

45:44Max Chafkin: but also because of the weird thing that, Felix, you just talked about, where memes suddenly equal money or whatever. And so I think this was just a doomed project because you actually can't start a fake Enron without becoming a real Enron.

45:57Felix Salmon: I was thinking about this and I watched the video, you can't ironically scam people. And this is ironic because it was just satire, but then it turned out to be the thing it was satirizing, whatever. But then I was thinking like, this whole thing is an experience. Going through the process of learning that birds aren't real, I'm watching a little video where they say that the birds land on the power lines and that's how they're charged. So amazing. I loved it so much. If I had been more like hip to what was happening at the time, I would have absolutely bought a T-shirt, right? So fast forward to the Enron thing.

46:31Felix Salmon: Also like fun and entertaining and initially free. But then like maybe you start selling some shirts. You market the satire. How is selling the coin different from marketing the satire? I guess because some people got in early and took a bunch of money out of the whole thing. But it's like people are just paying for an experience.

46:50Max Chafkin: It's pumped up fun.

46:52Felix Salmon: They just have a lot more money now and they pay a lot more money.

46:54Max Chafkin: You know what I mean? I think you're mostly right. I mean, the thing is, the crypto launch is funny in a way. I mean, it's funny as long as you're not the, we're laughing at it. As long as you didn't buy in early and see your paper fortune collapse. I will say they sell a puffy vest. It looks like an authentic Enron vest. I didn't buy it because I don't want to waste.

47:14Emily Peck: How much is it?

47:15Max Chafkin: It was$70.

47:16Emily Peck: But if it was$35, you would have bought it.

47:18Max Chafkin: I was really tempted. But the birds aren't real stuff just makes me laugh. And the Enron thing, you're right. It's funny. And I do think.

47:25Emily Peck: Can I just like, I just want to jump in here and say, I didn't see anyone quoted in your piece. And in general, crypto is, and meme crypto in particular, but crypto in general, is an area where people lose a lot of money all the time. and if you jump into 20 meme coins you expect to lose all of your money 19 times out of 20 if not 20 times particularly the enron especially the enron like if no one went into the enron meme coin thinking i am certainly going to make money on this they went into the enron meme coin going i will probably lose all my money but there is a chance i will make money and this is why no one was that upset that they lost money yeah i don't know that that's true and i think i

48:11Max Chafkin: even think calling them meme coins, I sometimes worry that we're doing a disservice to our audiences, a journalist, because are they meme coins? I feel like shit coin was a better way to describe it and a way to describe it that didn't start to do this alchemy where you start to think that there's value here. And I think it's very easy in the same way that's easy for people in casinos to go in knowing on a rational level that they are not going to win. But somewhere as they walk from the Pan-Asian restaurant to the craps table, start to convince themselves that they are going to win and then can ruin their finances like in an evening.

48:46Max Chafkin: I think that kind of thing happens here more than anyone in the crypto industry would like to admit. And I don't know what we're supposed to do about it as journalists, because like you said, it's all there. The risks are all there. There's no secret about it.

49:00Emily Peck: I just think that losing money in crypto is a consumption good. You know, it's what people do for the lulls. And if you wind up making money, then ex post, you can consider yourself to have been investing. But if you end up losing money, then hey, that's what makes it so painfully ironic.

49:16Elizabeth Spiers: But I think there are two things that sort of complicate this story in particular. One is that I think if they'd been a little bit less clever and elaborate about what the satire was, there would have been less confusion around it. Like there are pieces of it where you're like, oh yes, this is definitely a joke. You know, they said the Enron stands for energy, nurture, repentant, opportunity, and nice, which is hilarious.

49:36Max Chafkin: Connor was like, that was the giveaway.

49:38Elizabeth Spiers: We did that because we were like that. We're trying to give it away. Yeah. And then the other thing, because they did go off on these tangents and consider doing a real business, trying to resell energy. I feel like that might have confused a little bit some of the people who were buying the meme coin. Like maybe there is some value behind this, or at least in as much as you ever have value behind a meme coin.

49:58Max Chafkin: I liked the idea of a utility provider that would just be like a big middle finger to all utility providers. Because I think a lot of people hate their utility provider just like they hate their cable company. And that would be a thing that probably some percentage of irony-pilled, disaffected young people would go for. They'd just be like, Enron, give me electricity.

50:18Emily Peck: Everyone who wants to keep Austin weird, the last five people who want to keep Austin weird, they would have started buying their energy from Enron. and it's sad that failed really because if we don't have memes, Max, what do we have?

50:31Max Chafkin: The crypto investors still own it. It may not be too late. And in fact, after my story came out, the Enron Twitter account tweeted, if you're confused, that's the point. So it could be another act here. We don't know.

50:56Emily Peck: numbers round elizabeth you have a number my number is 1 million and that's dollars and that's

51:03Elizabeth Spiers: how much i told my 10 year old son that i would take to eat some ice cream off the ground and where this came from we're learning about willingness to pay right now and expected utility and so ford has been asking me would you do this would you do that and because he's still he's 10. He has a sort of very odd idea about how much things cost. Like our car could either be $500 or 5 million and there's nothing in between. But you can show him any given Pokemon card and he can give you a precise monetary value for how much it's worth on the resale market. But while we were doing this experiment, he started developing these sort of fungible items for negotiation where he came up with a price for like how much 15 more minutes of staying up late is he would pay me$20 if he could stay up 15 minutes later, which was more than I thought he would land on.

51:55Elizabeth Spiers: But if I said, will you give me one of your$20 Pokemon cards? He said no. And then we had to talk about fungibility and whether that made any sense.

52:04Emily Peck: I'm so glad that your 10 year old son is learning about fungibility. And I'm so sad, honestly, that he doesn't have a million dollars of liquid wealth to pay you to eat ice cream off the floor because you would be a millionaire right now.

52:17Elizabeth Spiers: Well, I asked him how much he would need to be paid and he said 2.2 million. So his threshold is higher. And I don't know where the two came from. I'd do it for like 500 bucks, by the way.

52:28Felix Salmon: I think I would do it. Yeah, I would do it for probably$500, but it depends spoon or like, is it like a smooshed cone of ice cream and you have to like lick it? Cause then I'm going up to like a thousand.

52:39Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah. We didn't

52:39Felix Salmon: discuss the particulars you know and then what kind of ground are we talking about is it it was

52:45Emily Peck: on the sidewalk at the moment like this is like a brooklyn sidewalk if it was a staten island sidewalk then that would have been a whole different kettle of fish exactly yeah it depends on the neighborhood the flavor and the flavor definitely depends on the flavor if it's pistachio no my number is 8.9 billion which is also a dollar amount which is the current valuation of a sports ball team called the chicago bears a stake of 2.35 percent of the chicago bears got sold by like a minority investor to a couple of the existing sort of majority investors at a valuation of$8.9 billion. And I'm like, you guys already own the team.

53:30Emily Peck: You already control the team. Why do you need to buy an extra 2.35 % at this crazy valuation? It's the highest valuation ever seen in the history of sports or something, and I don't understand. It makes no sense to me at all.

53:43Felix Salmon: Maybe they want to make more money when they sell their steak or something? I think that's it.

53:47Emily Peck: Yeah, they just want to say, well, look, we valued ourselves at$8.9 billion, so therefore whoever was selling it to should be willing to pay even more than that.

53:56Max Chafkin: I mean, it's been a really good way to make money over the last 20 years, buying a sports franchise, if you can get one in the United States. They seem to only go up in price. There's a fixed number of teams. Media rights have gotten more and more expensive. All these private equity guys are getting in. Probably when the platinum card comes out, they're going to be a bunch of foreign investors to help bid up those prices. Oh, by the way, I should mention,

54:18Emily Peck: we got a wonderful email this week talking of platinum cards. Last week, we talked about the Amex Platinum card and how is it possibly worth$900 a year. Pro tip, be active duty military. If you're active duty military, there's some kind of law that says that you don't need to pay the annual fee for credit cards. And so all of the active duty military types are wandering around with Amex Platinum cards and getting all of the lounge access and the free Ubers and everything. And they're like, yeah, and I don't need to pay a penny for it. It's awesome.

54:49Felix Salmon: I love that.

54:50Emily Peck: I love that so much. Emily, what's your number?

54:52Felix Salmon: My number is 40, 40%. That is the share of office worker adults who say they've encountered work slop in the past month.

55:06Emily Peck: Is that part of the snack program at Bloomberg?

55:11Felix Salmon: Work slop is the term that these researchers from Stanford and a company called BetterUp came up with who did the survey. And it means just like all the AI generated stuff that workers are now sending to each other, emails, slide decks, docs generated by AI that someone then who receives it has to either pass along to someone else or actually read, go through and fix, or maybe not even, maybe just send it on to the client who has to then deal with it. But it's apparently becoming a bigger problem. I know this because I published the story and then people wrote to me and were like, it's so bad.

55:45Felix Salmon: It's so bad out there. I get so much of the slop. So there you go.

55:49Emily Peck: AI is eating the world and turning us into slop.

55:52Felix Salmon: Oh, and I guess the point is AI is supposed to make work more productive, but this is actually not doing it. Sloppier. Yes. It's just making more work for other people.

56:02Emily Peck: Okay, Max.

56:03Max Chafkin: All right. My number is 16, which is the number of hours that attendees to Peter Thiel's Antichrist lecture series, which is off the record, will be spending at the Antichrist lecture series. That includes four hours of lectures, four hours of Q &A, and then eight hours of mingling with Antichrist enthusiasts and eating canopies. Is Peter Thiel giving these lectures? He is, yes. They're off the record, and there have been a bunch of articles written about sort of like talking to people who have gone to the lectures and so on. And I've been following this because i wrote a book about peter thiel the cotrarian and just to spoil it for folks and now this is based on the he's talked about the antichrist on the record in other venues and there's some details from these talks coming out but basically his theory of the antichrist is the antichrist is anyone who wants to regulate his investment portfolio so like

56:57Emily Peck: so wait hang on a second you've just destroyed my my priors i thought that he was like pro antichrist i thought he identified with the antichrist i think he's there's a little bit

57:09Max Chafkin: of a winking thing there he's i don't think he's unaware that there's a vibe that he gives off uh but no his idea is that the antichrist is basically the out of control left and that they are going to form a one world government to rein in ai and nuclear energy and all of these awesome futuristic technologies that if we would just let them go would lead us to a glorious future but people are going to stop it.

57:34Emily Peck: That's so mundane and sad. I would not spend 16 hours learning that.

57:39Elizabeth Spiers: I would pay a million dollars to avoid that.

57:42Max Chafkin: There was an amazing article in the SF Standard, which is like a startup newspaper in San Francisco, where they like just waited on the line for the Antichrist lecture series and interviewed some of the attendees. And they were all awesome.

57:55Emily Peck: Did people have to pay to attend these lectures or was it like a lottery or?

57:59Max Chafkin: They were selling tickets. It is not clear to me whether anyone actually paid. It's unclear to me what the ticket price is. I would have done that as the number if I knew the answer. In this line, there was one guy who said, I don't know if he was doing a bit or what, said he owns a sperm racing company where men race their sperm. There was... Oh my God. There was another... If that doesn't exist, it should. There's another guy whose whole thing is he wants to put like a 10-foot tall silver cross on the moon. I feel like these are the fans Peter Thiel deserves. There were also a bunch of Satanists who were just like, yeah, maybe the Antichrist is here.

58:39Max Chafkin: Again, I felt like all these people were just, were maybe like left-wing plants designed to undermine Peter Thiel.

58:47Emily Peck: I'm telling you, like everything is ironic. Everything is a meme. Nothing is real. Peter Thiel has finally achieved the greatest thing that anyone can achieve in this life, which is to become an ironic meme.

58:58Felix Salmon: I'm so confused because I didn't pay any attention to this. And when I saw Antichrist, I thought it was like a religious thing. And I was like, oh, that's so interesting.

59:07Elizabeth Spiers: Well, it is originally, but he's glommed on to some Christian nationalism stuff and he likes the metaphors.

59:12Felix Salmon: So it's just a marketing and it's just a thing where a rich guy says he doesn't like regulation?

59:17Max Chafkin: Well, yeah, but he has a bunch of scripture quotes to back it up. Like, so, so, yeah. Is he religious? He is religious. I would say that his version of Christianity is very different from what, like, what the kind of commonly understood version of Christianity is.

59:35Emily Peck: Well, I mean, I know roughly about as much about Christianity as I do about American football. But in my mind, the overwhelming majority of living Christians do not believe in the Antichrist. This is not a part of mainstream theology.

59:51Elizabeth Spiers: Well, but the powerful religious right, which is most white evangelicals absolutely do. And I think he's capturing political momentum there because he wants them to support his political agenda.

1:00:03Felix Salmon: Can one of you just tell me what is the Antichrist? I know it's not regulation, actually. In theology, is it Satan?

1:00:13Elizabeth Spiers: Is it the devil? No, it's supposed to be a sort of world leader who's an incarnation of evil who comes back, and it seems like they're part of the church, but they're not. There are a lot of descriptions of the Antichrist that make the Antichrist sound a lot like Donald Trump, ironically.

1:00:30Emily Peck: There was a period in like the 9th century or something where there was like a pope and an anti-pope. But this is definitely, we are getting off the court, like competencies and slave money here. And then they like preachy Friday and you don't know who's who. I'm just going to wrap this up at this point because otherwise it's going to spiral out of control. I have way too many people to thank for this one. I'm sitting in a room in the Bloomberg HQ with a lovely chap called Magnus who made all of this possible, along with Shana Roth and Jessamyn Marley, but mainly all of you lovely people who write in on SlateMoneyAtSlate.com.

1:01:09Emily Peck: And above all, Max Chafkin of Bloomberg. Thank you. It's been amazing to have you on the show. And I feel like now we are pod mates. We can do this more often. Love it. Thanks for listening. And if you just press try free at the top of the Slate Money show page in Apple Podcasts, you can get an Apple-exclusive two-week-long extended free trial of Slate+. If you're not an Apple listener, that's okay. You can visit slate.com slash money plus to get access wherever you listen. And we'll be back next week with even more Slate Money.

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