Capital One Acquires Brex for $5B, Davos’s $500M business, Apple’s Siri rebuild | Diet TBPN

0:02First, Davos is winding down. We're finally getting the final surprise guess. Elon is the big one. Elon had to come in. He had to come in. The last buzzer beater gesture match. How do you think that works? Do you think he just has like an open invite and then he makes the call like a few hours before and just says, oh, it's going well, I'll be there. And then they just throw him on. He said, but don't announce it. I think Elon calls up JCal and says, hey, save me a seat. Save me a seat. And then they figured it out from there. I think when you're tracking to be the world's first teen air, they kind of have like a, they just have a stage set up.

0:35Apparently the events go really, really long. Some of the interviews go at 10 p.m. Some start. It's like a full tilt across multiple event spaces. There's different houses. All In was doing something at the Freedom House. They had a really cool interview with Satya Nadella that I watched. Tech was out in full force, and that's what I wrote about today in the TBPN newsletter. Fun fact, Davos makes half a billion dollars a year in revenue. It's a nonprofit, an NGO, a think tank, but you think of what I'm thinking, Jordy? For-profit conversion. That's right. Let's make it happen. Let's make it happen.

1:09It's an old, old organization. Klaus Schwab, who you probably know as the face of it, he was the founder. He started Davos in 1971, the World Economic Forum. And he was pushed out last year. Yeah, so it's been on the ropes. My thesis is that Davos is back. It was a really good year. I think tech is going to double down on this. But the first decade, it just sounded like it was an amazing party. One person in 1981 told Time magazine that, the forum offers a delightful vacation on the expense account. What a great line. So it's been a rough decade for Davos. Liz Hoffman teased the concept of an inverse Davos index in semaphore, which I thought was sort of funny.

1:51And she sort of wrapped up a few times when the consensus at Davos wound up being like woefully wrong and so she went through a few things first was that everyone got together at Davos there was an economist who went on stage in 2008 and said it is inconceivable repeat inconceivable to get a world recession it's like the one thing like not mincing words not hedging at all just like my prediction is that we will never see a world recession and of course we did the Davos crew they also missed brexit and the rise of MAGA Davos in 2020, it's always in January in 2020, it was January 21st to 24th and there was really no talk of a global pandemic or being worried about that.

2:33There was one panel about sort of risks from antibiotics or something but they certainly weren't talking about the coronavirus and just a week later Bology posted that famous going viral post on January 30th saying like hey I'm tracking this I've been tracking this for a while and this seems really serious and a lot of people in tech were already tracking it. So there was this disconnect between like you go to Davos and you hear like the number one thing this year is the metaverse apparently they did a big metaverse push and then the year plays out and it's a wildly different story it seems like they're maybe moving move the internet I certainly wouldn't say the internet has forgotten about the iconic line you'll own nothing and be happy yeah but I haven't seen it so much over the last week a lot more focus on yeah it's interesting that line was all about just financialization and was really I like I like to think it was about enterprise software.

3:25Yes, yes. Like, hey, you're no longer - We're moving away from box software. Exactly. To SaaS. You're going to own nothing, but you're going to be happy. Yeah, you don't own this particular version of Turbo Puffer. You pay for consumption. This year feels like a big turnaround. Dario Amadei, Demis Hassabis, Satya Nadella, all their interviews have been going viral on the timeline. In California, there's been a bunch of articles written about what they've said at Davos. There hasn't necessarily been a huge reversal in the positions of these tech leaders. They're saying things that they've been saying for a year or two, sometimes more.

3:59But there's some feeling like when you say a line like we could have 20 % unemployment in two years, it just sounds different when you say it directly to a bunch of world leaders, a bunch of global elites, a bunch of international executives, than when you say it on a tech podcast that's a little more insidery, a little more inside baseball. So it just hits different and then it's also an interesting reflection to hear like the Satya Nadella all-in interview had Had an interesting like almost like high low aspect to it where Satya was talking about very specific details of co-pilot implementation what the future of the workstation could look like whether people will be Running you know sidecar use.

4:42Yeah, so he's going in a lot of detail there and then he's also zooming out and reiterating what he told other business leaders just about the general wave of AI adoption that's still pretty early on the global stage. And so it's felt like there's two different conferences going on. We've read this from a take from a couple different people where tech leaders are talking about research progress, employment impacts, sovereign AI, data center build outs, and then the politicians are talking about Greenland, Venezuela, and trade deals. But even Even though there's like this bifurcated vibe going on, it still feels like a win-win because the tech industry is getting their messages into the global stage now where in an audience that will ultimately determine how quickly this technology rolls out and how it will be regulated.

5:29And I imagine that the tech industry is driving a lot of growth for the World Economic Forum because every company, you've seen the Palantir House, there's a lot of different tech companies that have really gone big on sponsorship, gone big on their presence. And I imagine this will get bigger. OpenAI was sort of notably absent, or not absent, but didn't take over the stage. And you would imagine that next year, given the vibes around this one, that there will be more of a presence from basically all the big tech companies. We had an opportunity to have a presence there, and we didn't think that it fully made sense for this year, just given historical...

6:06Yeah, travel and stuff. Yeah, travel was a big factor, And so I think Davos is back. I think it's time to ski. And congratulations to everyone that's been having fun and making waves in Davos. There's a whole bunch of videos that we should go through. Midnight Capital has given us some instructions. He says, or they say, listen to this, then watch the second video. And this host over at Fox Business has given us a run for our money in the costume department. Maria Bartiromo knows how to dress. This is a fantastic outfit. Is the space getting more competitive for you today? Our space is incredibly competitive.

6:39I've got a lot of competitors. It's hard to imagine. You know, Google has been here for a while and they're excellent AI company for a very long time. And they're an incredible company. But we have competition from all sides. And? Well, we just have to run fast, you know. And then Midnight Capital says, watch this. You know a company has an insane monopoly if they're trying to convince you that. I think that's where we're going with this. You're giving away the punchline. Play the teal clip at the London School of Economics. The people who have monopolies pretend not to have them, and the people who don't have monopolies pretend to have them.

7:16And so it gets kind of confusing. If you're Google, you will never say that you're a search engine. You will say you're a technology company, and technology is a vast, incredibly competitive space. If you're in a completely competitive business, let's say you're trying to open a restaurant in London, and you will say, well, this is totally different from any other restaurant. It will be the only British Nepalese fusion cuisine within a five block radius of the LSE. I studied. Yeah, Jensen studied and said, you know what, it's incredibly competitive. Of course, he's also going through an acquisition with Grok.

7:48And it seems like the Grok deal will go through. Like I have so much competition, I had to spend$20 billion on a team. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, please define my market as also including CPU and also including ASICs and and also including everything else that could possibly compete with NVIDIA. The journal had a good summary of some of Jensen's points of view. Yeah, what did he say? Out of Davos. NVIDIA CEO says AI needs more investment in defiance of bubble fears. Jensen called for higher investments to further spread the technology across developed and emerging economies. Quang described AI as a five-layer cake consisting of energy chips, cloud infrastructure, models, and application.

8:26He said AI's applications, how the technology is used in a specific industry, is the most critical layer of that cake, as it is where the economic benefits lie. Sectors like energy or semis, both key to developing and harnessing the technology, are already growing thanks to AI. But he said more investments are needed to ensure the benefits of the technology spread to more industries across both developed and emerging economies. The AI bubble comes about because the investments are large, and the investments are large because we have to build the infrastructure necessary for all of the AI layers.

8:54I think the opportunity is really quite extraordinary, and everybody ought to get involved. He's open for business, folks. Me defending my vibe-coded CRM I made in one shot with GPT-4O. Sometimes he's too slow, for sure. And he's to be reformed, for sure. But which is predictable, loyal. Sometimes. You're a loyal. That's a great speech. He is on one right now. I love it. What was the story behind the glasses? Somebody, I saw some meme that, I think he suffered an injury or something. and some people would say do an eye patch but he went with the sunglasses it's fantastic rock star yeah he looks like a rock star let's play this clip from elon musk at davos the lowest cost place to put ai will be space and that'll be true within two years maybe three three at the latest three at the latest three at the latest that's a bad aggressive time yeah blue origin launched satellite internet to rival SpaceX and specifically to rival Starlink.

10:00Bezos backed Blue Origin is launching a satellite network for enterprise data center and government customers, TerraWave. The company aims to begin deploying the first of 5 ,408 satellites in the fourth quarter of 2027, so a little under two years. The service will compete with Starlink and it will also compete with Amazon operated Leo, which is interesting. Bezos is entering an increasingly crowded satellite internet market that's currently dominated by Starlink. Starlink has more than 9 ,000 satellites in orbit and roughly 9 million customers. We got to do some more research on the Chinese Starlink equivalents.

10:39They have Guo Wang, which is their state-led effort, trying to get to 13 ,000 satellites by 2030. Currently, they have around 150. And then there's Qian Fan, which currently has around 100. They're trying to get to 15 ,000 by 2030, and they're more commercial-focused. So it'll be interesting to track. And you would think that the Blue Origin news, the news that Starlink has a second competitor, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos, major players. Well, what does that do for AST Space Mobile? The stock is up 14 % today and it's up 24 % over the last five days, 35 % over the last month. And 100 % over the last six months.

11:32Elon also gave some timelines for Optimus humanoid robots at the World Economic Forum. He said, by the end of next year, we will be selling humanoid robots to the public, to the public. Not just enterprises. You're going to be able to just buy one of these the way you buy a Cybertruck or a Model S Plaid. That is a very, very aggressive timeline. But he has been buying the parts to actually manufacture them. And, you know, what does selling to the public mean? Does it mean a thousand deliveries, 10 ,000 deliveries? Having an Optimus that is just on staff here that can just go hit, like if I can hit a button and have the Optimus hit the gong physically, that would be fantastic.

12:12Yeah, priceless really. Yeah, priceless. There's really no amount of money that we wouldn't pay to be able to get that kind of experience here in the Ultradome. We've seen like Boston Dynamics, we've seen with the Chinese humanoid companies. You can do cool things with these, with One X and whatnot, Even if it's tele-operated, even if it's prescripted, like there are... The technology does work. It's more just like, how impactful will it be? How expensive is it? How reliable is it? Is the battery one hour? Has he spoken about tele-operation? No, I don't think so. Seems like he'd just be generally against it.

12:47Yeah, I mean... On principle. I know that... Don't the Tesla robotaxis do some tele-operation? I think in the test zones, there was like the ability to take over on that early demo. So I don't think he's dogmatic about it, but he certainly is, you know, if you're against LiDAR, you got to be against Tragically Sane says robots replacing humans hitting the gong. Okay, never mind shut it down. I'm full-leddite now. Let's move on to this clip from Satya Nadella at the All-In AI Summit. Best line I would say for PCs or computers was to say if you it's a bicycle for the mind Bill had a line which I liked as well, which was, it's information at your fingertips.

13:26We kind of need now a new concept metaphor for how we use computers in the AI age. You have one? And the one I like actually came from the CEO of Notion, which I like. Incredible product. You haven't bought it yet. But it's both management, basically, a manager of infinite minds. That's a nice way to think about it. If you remember, Jobs had the best line, I would say, for a PC. I love that. I've been the manager of infinite minds. How many minds are you managing, Tyler? Right now. Right now, it's probably like four, because I have every LLM. Okay. Actively running. You've got to get those numbers up.

14:06Yeah, I've never really used multiple cloud instances yet. Okay. Yeah, it's interesting. Like, the manager of infinite minds concept, obviously, that essay from Ivan, CEO of Notion, And it went viral over the holidays. I think a lot of people in tech read it. Having Satya Nadella there, just further popularize that concept, bake it down into a repeatable phrase that can prepare people for what's coming, adapt. That is valuable, and that's what we're seeing here. Anyway. It'll feel like you're playing StarCraft now. I like the StarCraft analogy. The StarCraft analogy is real. Zerg Army. Let's pull up this video that was posted by the New York Times popcast.

14:47John Karamaka, hosted this video yesterday. Somebody sent it to me and I was so confused because there's only about a hundred of these Rugby's out in the world. And we kind of knew exactly, we kind of, like everybody on the team, like kind of sent them out. So I was, I first thought this video was AI generated. It did, and it's about AI, so let's play the video. Okay, so yeah, it's about Bruno Mars. And if we, I don't know if we can scroll back to the beginning, is that possible on Instagram Reels? if you re-post. But yeah, if you zoom in here, he's dancing. And the dancing, this part, I was like, maybe this part's AI.

15:23But then when he sits down, you can see that he has a microphone, a lav mic, clipped to his collar. And so everything about this says, this is not AI generated. This is real. And the hand motions are so accurate. And they're occluding the logos. And he just looks extremely Yeah, it's great. So Dylan messaged John and we figure out that John accidentally purchased fake TBPN merch online. Be careful. But at least he's still looking great. Yeah. So yeah, it works. Silver lining. Yeah. I mean, our saga to battle the fraudulent merch, the knockoff merch has been incredible. This site popped up and we assumed, okay, they're not going to take payments, certainly.

16:11They're definitely not going to print and ship anything. And we'll be able to get this taken down in two seconds. And I actually sent them an email saying like, hey, I assume you're a fan. Just so you know, we don't want this out there. I'd be happy to talk to you about maybe working together or something. But can you please just not use our brand and our trademarks and all this stuff out there on the Internet without without talking to us first? Like, let's have a conversation about this. Did not get a response. Not a fan. And I think some other people on the team were like, yeah, John, that was never going to work.

16:44And they were right. And you tried to go golden retriever. I did. I did. I was like, I'm going to I'm just going to assume the best. I'm just going to assume this an over eager fan or someone who just is entrepreneurial kid who's just trying to just. No, this is a Canadian. We know it's a Canadian. We know it's a Canadian. Anything could happen up there. Dodd in the chat says, you guys have a good line of Shopify. I assume most of them are hosted there. No. They keep finding a way. And at this point, they are, in fact, taking people's money and shipping fake product now and fooling people that are discerning.

17:16And apparently it smells kind of funny. Uh-oh. Which is a big issue. The real merch is coming. The real merch is coming. We've been sampling a bunch of different things. Of course, of course, Shopify. We need to put out like a Maduro style bounty. Oh, no. Private credit investors' cortisol has been spiking because they are cashing out in droves. Redemptions by individual investors in funds soared at the end of 2025 after performance declined, reviving questions about suitability. This is from Matt Wurz in The Wall Street Journal. He says, for the first time since the start of the private credit boom, large numbers of individual investors are trying to get their money out.

17:55Several of the big funds eligible to wealthy individuals receive requests from about 5 % of shareholders to cash out at the end of last year, well above the normal volume, according to the SEC. One managed by Blue Owl got redemptions for about 15 % of its shares. The rising redemptions come at an awkward time for private credit fund managers and for the Trump administration as they push for new rules that would democratize private markets by encouraging their inclusion in 401k retirement plans for all Americans. Private fund managers, including Apollo Global and Blue Owl, blame fear-mongering about a recent spate of corporate bankruptcies.

18:29This is the whole cockroaches back and forth with Jamie Dimon and some of the folks in the private credit world, Blackstone, Apollo, Blue Owl. Individual investors are falling into a similar pattern, a familiar pattern of selling out when an asset class underperforms expectations. These investors got really surprised when their dividends went down. The business development companies, they typically make high interest loans to mid-sized corporations with junk credit ratings, using the interest income from those loans to pay dividends. A handful of these funds have cut dividends because the yield on their loans are falling in lockstep with benchmark interest rates.

19:08For more dividend reductions will follow, Dodd said, likely prompting more redemptions. Total returns from five of the largest private credit funds aimed at individual investors declined to an average of about 6.22 % in the first nine months of 2025, compared with 8.76 % in the same period. 2024. Breaking. SpaceX is set to hire Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Morgan Stanley to lead its IPO. That's a whole host, a murderous row. The IPO is expected to be valued as much as$1.5 trillion, making it the largest IPO in history. But the community knows put it in the truth zone because Saudi Ramco's IPO in 2019 sported a valuation of 1.7 trillion.

19:50Well, there's other news about Anthropic. The revenue run rate for the end of 2025 was 9 billion, up from 4 billion in July 2025. What an incredible growth. Iconic, Lightspeed, and Menlo are set to join the new funding round from TechMeme here. This is maybe a deceleration. I was debating this with Tyler. I mean, they went from 100 million to 1 billion. They 10x'd. Then they were going to 10x it again. So everyone was expecting 10 billion. And 10x it again. And they landed at 9 on run rate. Did they predict 10 billion? I don't know. I actually don't know the exact quote. I think Dario was pretty loose about it.

20:31He was just saying that we've seen incredible growth. Yeah, he was saying we went a full order of magnitude from 100 to a billion. We're going to do a full order of magnitude again. Is it a full order of magnitude to go from one to nine? And he said he only expects like three or four more, you know, 10Xs. He said that? No. No, no. I specifically remember him saying like, we cannot keep that level of growth going. He said it would be pretty crazy if that, I don't think he said we can. Oh, okay. He said it would be pretty crazy. Yeah. There is other news from the information. Amir says that Anthropics inference costs on Google and Amazon servers were 23 % higher than the company projected.

21:09Of course, when you're growing so fast, you're probably willing to pay more for inference just to make sure that everything stays online. Better to service the demand and not get that frustration, you know, people hitting rate limits, et cetera. Yeah, I think later in the summer, there was a lot of news about how the Anthropoc API is like always down for issues. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there was that. And then there were also some like FUD type articles about negative gross margins, about margins being really, really bad at these labs. Where's the value accruing? Is it all going to accrue to NVIDIA?

21:43Last month, Anthropic projected it would generate around 40 % gross margins from selling AI to businesses and application developers, but I think that gross margin came in a little bit lower. But there is so much more that they can do to optimize. They're buying TPUs now. They're going to build new data centers. and also there's it does feel like we're going to enter a world where inference is load balanced across a variety of semiconductor stacks and so for really fast things you might be going to a grok or a cerebris or you know you might for more basic stuff you might be going to a legacy model that's cheaper to inference and all of that might be blended together into something that's more profitable.

22:27Apparently yes Google DeepMind is signing a licensing deal. It really is the licensing deal economy that we're in. Last year was the press release economy. This year very much the licensing deal economy. Hume AI, which builds emotionally intelligent voice interfaces, and they're gonna hire CEO Alan Cohen and seven of their engineers. I never thought of Google as particularly behind in voice interfaces. Certainly, it's an important part of the stack if you have an app that people are chatting with and talking to. Obviously, Notebook LM was sort of a viral success, but I do really wonder about the longevity and the retention.

23:14News from Sam Altman. Oh, yeah. He shared today, we have added more than$1 billion of ARR in the last month just from our API business. People think of us mostly as ChatGPT, but the API team is doing amazing work. That's fantastic. I mean, we saw they just did a huge deal with ServiceNow. They're definitely cooking. They've been cooking for a long time. They have an enterprise go-to-market motion that's definitely working and somewhat disconnected from whatever the hot story of the week is. People are pretty funny in the comments going, Brother,$1 billion of ARR at a$5 billion valuation? You're going to need to make that MRR.

23:49Obviously, this person misread Pose, which is an added$1 billion in the last month. The rumor, Google is spinning out the TPU team into a separate entity under Alphabet umbrella to sell hardware to third parties directly. It could happen. Someone calls it a cross-chain atomic swap. Waymo, it's like, did they need to raise money at the Waymo level, right? Sometimes it's helpful for a company to have its own. Alphabet structuring and how they report out earnings. Apple is revamping Siri as a built-in iPhone, Mac, and chatbot to fend off OpenAI. And there's an image here. What is this? The Google Gemini AI chatbot on a Galaxy S25 Ultra smartphone.

24:33So Apple plans to revamp Siri later this year by turning the digital assistant into the company's first artificial intelligence chatbot, thrusting the iPhone maker into a generative AI race dominated by OpenAI and Google. The chatbot codenamed Kempos will be embedded deeply into the iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems and replace the current Siri interface according to people familiar with the plan. Users will be able to summon the new service the same way they open Siri now by speaking the Siri command or holding down the side button of their iPhone or iPad. The new approach will go well beyond the capabilities of current Siri for even a long-promised update that's coming earlier in 2026.

25:13Today... John, say Siri again really loudly and clearly for anybody that's watching on their TV at home or in their office. The feature is a central piece of Apple's turnaround plan for the AI market where it has lagged behind Silicon Valley peers. The Apple intelligence platform had a rocky rollout in 2024 with features that were underwhelming or slow to arrive. Campos, which will have both voice and typing-based models. Tyler, what's that sound like? Typing? You're going to be able to type to Siri. Back and forth. An app. Let's go. Wait, can't you type to Siri? No. Right now, you can't? I don't know.

25:48Maybe, but you don't have an app. You don't have a place to store all your conversations, which was my take. Embracing the chatbot approach represents a strategic shift for Apple, which has long downplayed the conversational AI tools popularized by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. Executives have argued that users prefer having AI woven directly into features, something Apple has done with its writing tools, Genmoji, Emoji Generator, and notification summaries, rather than standalone chat experiences. That's not an unreasonable take. And in the long term, I wouldn't be surprised if the AI woven in the features, like the AI that's in the Photos app is better than, okay, I got to open up the chat app and ask it to edit this photo and import the photo from my photo.