In short
TBPN Podcast Episode Notes: Diet TBPN - October 31, 2025
Episode Overview This episode recaps favorite moments from the TBPN show, providing insights into recent earnings reports from major tech companies and other relevant market discussions. Conversations are lively, blending humor and critical analysis of the tech landscape as it relates to earnings and investment.
Key Topics Discussed
Halloween Themes
- Hosts' Costumes:
- Ilya Siskover (Mark Andreessen)
- Tyler (Sam Altman from WWDC 2008)
- General Tone: Light-hearted banter surrounding Halloween and its relevance in the tech industry.
Market Overview
- Global Economy & Tech Sector:
- Discussion on the reliance of the global economy on trillion-dollar tech companies.
- The performance of these companies is critical to economic stability.
Earnings Reports Recap
- Amazon:
- Performance: Significant profit jump (39% net profit increase).
- Context: Previously perceived as lagging in AI narrative; now positioned strongly with positive growth in AWS.
- Microsoft:
- Performance: Positive earnings, yet stock dropped 3-4% after hours.
- Commentary: Satya Nadella may have received more credit for AI advancements than Amazon or Google. Highlights Microsoft’s adaptability with AI integration across platforms like Excel.
- Meta:
- Performance: Top-line earnings beat expectations but significant net loss ($12 billion).
- Impact: Concerns over Zuck's vision for the metaverse; mixed confidence in core business amidst high spendings.
- Tesla:
- Performance: Mixed results with earnings missed but revenue beat.
- Future Outlook: Ambitious plans for full self-driving technology, compared with competitors like Waymo.
- Apple:
- Performance: Earnings beat expectations, but sales in China declined.
- Analyst Take: High P/E ratio (40) with low growth raises concerns about long-term sustainability.
- NVIDIA:
- Performance: Core AI operations running smoothly.
- Critical Viewpoint: Questioning the direction of investments in data centers and humanoid robotics.
Other Noteworthy Discussions
- OpenAI's Financials:
- Discussion on OpenAI's reported losses as investments rather than traditional financial losses. Insight into how these capital expenditures shape overall financial health.
- Palantir Lawsuit:
- Legal issues highlighted as the company sues former employees for allegedly stealing trade secrets.
- BlackRock Concerns:
- Addressing fraud allegations linked to loans made to businesses involved in questionable practices.
Light-hearted Commentary
- Snack Choices in Office: Humorous take on the unpopularity of hard-boiled eggs as snacks, suggesting alternatives like taking a steak to work.
Key Takeaways
- Overall Sentiment in Tech: Despite mixed earnings results, core tech companies continue to show resilience and capacity for growth, particularly in AI.
- Investment Perspective: Importance of understanding the difference between losses as investments versus traditional financial losses.
- Future of Tech Companies: Continuous scrutiny on strategic directions (like metaverse investments by Meta or space endeavors by SpaceX) indicates a complex landscape where confidence among investors varies significantly.
Conclusion The discussion encapsulates an engaging mix of humor, analysis, and industry insights, reflecting on the implications of earnings in a rapidly changing tech environment. As the hosts wrap up, they signify a return with more discussions in the upcoming week.
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Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Mag7 earnings recapping what's happening in the public markets, the trillion dollar tech companies that have been powering and holding up the entire global economy. Will they continue to hold up the global economy? So far, the answer is yes. I'm glad the chat is enjoying the costumes. Jordy, who are you today? You got to be living under a data center to not know who I'm dressed up as today. None other than Mark Andreessen. Spitting image. Spitting image. How am I doing? I think you look great. Of course, I am Elia Siskover. If you are watching the recording of this at some point in the future, I recommend whenever I'm talking, put it on 3x speed.
0:36to get the full mark experience. If you're not taking Halloween this seriously, what's going on? You've got to be taking it seriously. Tyler, are you taking Halloween seriously? I'm taking Halloween extremely seriously. Well, who are you? Sam Alman at 2008 WWDC. Trump cut China tariffs after he met up with Xi Jinping. The U.S. agreed to lower a fentanyl-related tariff on Chinese goods to 10 % from 20 % after China promised to crack down on chemicals used to make the often deadly drug. Precursors. Precursors. Beijing also promised to ease some of the controls it imposed on exports of processed rare earth minerals for one year.
1:13China dominates the production of the minerals, which are needed to make everything from smartphones to submarines. Wow. The bigger news in tech world, of course, is earnings. Amazon posted a big jump in profit and revenue. Net profits surged 39 % and revenue rose for the third quarter. The last earnings, they were sort of left out of the AI narrative. All the other hyperscalers in their cloud businesses telling great stories about acceleration and growth. And Andy Jassy was a little bit on the defensive. Well, now he's back on the offensive. They beat on the top line. They beat on the bottom line.
1:46They also beat on AWS Revenue. They were, you know, proud member of the Lag 7. The Lag 7? I mean, not the Lag 7, but they were the lagging part of the Mag 7. It's a pleasure to introduce you to a new meme. Alphabet up 247 % over the last five years. Amazon is still only up 62 % even after the pop this week. So the only thing better than Halloween is Halloween AI edition. In case you missed it, tagged Ilya and Mark. And of course, no AI here. We did this one the old-fashioned way. Microsoft. What's your Microsoft take? Top-line beat. Earnings beat. Stock traded down 3 % to 4 % after hours. It's recovered quite a bit since then.
2:30Satya, in my view, has already gotten a lot more credit for the company's opportunities in AI than Amazon and even Google. People have known about Google's strengths, but the big questions around search have held back performance to date. There are so many companies that are trying to build Excel plus an agent on top of it, which is exactly what Microsoft is also doing with Excel with Copilot. And they're model agnostic. They're going to be able to bring in any kind of intelligence that they want. And so it's also fascinating because they have access to opening eyes IP. Slack was very much the same thing where Slack was this product that was so much better than the alternatives.
3:06Like if you, I don't know if you ever used like workplace chat pre Slack, but it was. I was basically born on Slack. I never knew John was so ripped. There's been some other comments. Yeah, baby, let's go. HGI has been achieved. Let's go. Let's talk about meta. Yes. Top line beat, earnings miss. Massive miss, like a$12 billion. People are not talking enough about what happened. It is crazy that you could be operating such a big company and just be like, oops,$10 billion. I mean, think of how they've been spending. This is like, you know, I'm sure Meta and the executive team, it's like after a weekend bender checking like your credit card statement.
3:47Okay, so apparently it was a one-time tax charge related to the Big Beautiful Bill Act. What? Is that why the stock traded down 10 %? Is it specifically because of this one-time tax charge? I think it could be a little bit of vibes in the mix. The Timeline loves the core meta business, but doesn't have a lot of faith in Zuck. People thought Bezos, who had a similar level of control over Amazon, was crazy to spend like he did building AWS. And he was ultimately completely vindicated. People thought Mark was crazy going all in on the metaverse in VR. So far, that part of the business has not shown any signs of being ROI positive.
4:21Reels is now a$50 billion revenue run rate business. Let's go. So Tesla beat earnings, missed, beat on revenue, missed on earnings. The stock reaction was down about 4 % after hours. If Elon goes straight shot to the full self-driving equivalent for humanoid robots, basically no teleoperation, the project should be years behind what's going on with 1X, I would imagine. Just like the Waymo dynamic, Tesla's going full moonshot, full send. No one debates the fact that Tesla's robo-taxi fleet is a year or two behind Waymo's right now. Now, the Tesla bull hope is that you come from behind and start compounding because you have just structurally better costs, way more manufacturing, more of a flywheel on the actual data and the training.
5:07Elon Musk on data centers in orbit. SpaceX will be doing this. He's going to do data centers in space. It's easy to be bullish on space right now. But if you're investing in different categories, you have to imagine that if there are adjacent opportunities besides Starlink for SpaceX to do, they will enter them if they are large enough categories. And it's also just fascinating to look at the space industry versus the automotive industry. The automotive industry is the most brutally competitive, challenging business where Elon is having to compete with every car manufacturer in the world. In space, it's like, you know, you can imagine that being not a perfect monopoly.
5:45certainly having every possible advantage in order to dominate in that category when the time is right. Apple beat top line, beat on bottom line. China sales declined year over year. If you've been paying any attention to Apple, you know that their China business is slowly going away. iPhone revenue, they missed just by$300 million. $50 billion. John, your take, you said, sort of the inverse meta. Core business not at risk due to AI, but not investing aggressively. Consumers seem happy to just open an LLM app. Good take. I said Apple's trading at 40 times PE with very low growth. This feels steep, even if I don't think they're threatened by AI in the near term.
6:33We should close it out with NVIDIA just to finish this little earnings wrap up. John, your take was on top of the world, but is the head that wears the crown heavy? Core AI factory build out going flawlessly, but unclear why NVIDIA is pushing data centers in space, humanoids, quantum computing, mumbo-jumbo. Maybe it's real. Maybe just forward of the same old AI story? Yeah. I said, I don't think Jensen would be just chugging beers on camera in Korea if he was having a rough one. He is the most value-creative founder CEO in human history. No one's created$5 trillion in any capacity. I'm sorry, but no company generating the cash meta is with the margins it has should ever be raising money.
7:15Of course, they announced another bond sale yesterday morning. Don't pay every AI scientist like they're Shohei Otani. Yeah. When I hear that they're setting up a big data center and they're raising debt for that particular deal, I don't have like red flags flying off in my mind. AI is not a bubble. Enterprise AI is very strong. Nearly 150 enterprises each process 1 trillion tokens with Gemini models for a wide range of apps. And then they say, wait, that's less than a million bucks per year per enterprise or 150 million of annual revenue, i.e. 0.3 % of GCP annual revenue. What percentage of GCP annual revenue is AI, is Gen AI?
7:57Sometimes the hyperscalers don't know. Tyler, what you got? A trillion is just like not a lot at all. It's just not a lot. OpenAI is doing like on just on the API, like something around like 250 trillion a month. If it's a trillion over the past like year, even if it's 150, I mean, That's like, that's pretty bad. This was crazy. I wasn't sure if this was fake news or not, but on the Coinbase earnings call yesterday, Brian Armstrong went, there was a prediction market that people were betting on which words he would say during the earnings call. And he waited until the end and he just read through and read off every single word that he had missed.
8:35Because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call. And I just want to, you know, add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking, and Web3. We've had prediction markets created around different interviews we've done. And it is wildly distracting when I'm looking at the chat and people are like, say this word. Say that word again. It's crazy. Say it three more times. Here, Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost$11.5 billion last quarter. They have the least profitable business in the world. Who's losing more money than OpenAI?
9:08These are not losses. These are investments. So if I raise$10 million for my startup, and then I'm like, okay, I'm going to buy an office building for$5 million, that's not negative 5 million earnings. That is negative 5 million cash flow. I've lost 5 million cash, and I don't have liquid cash anymore. And so I would assume that a lot of OpenAI's losses are actually investments in CapEx one way or another. The first half of 2025, they're going to do 3.5 in losses. So this is basically double that. Palantir sues former employees for stealing company secrets. Company alleges pair violated non-competes to create copycat AI firm.
9:54The two employees, they're accusing them of stealing confidential data to build a rival company called Percepta, backed by General Catalyst. I would not want to steal from Palantir. Bad idea. That seems like one of the worst companies to steal from. They will find you and they will kill you. BlackRock stung by loans to businesses accused of breathtaking fraud. An entrepreneur tapped private credit funds to finances, telecom businesses. AV in the chat. Large-scale fraud is actually a sign of good times. I mean, that's true. Please, Mr. President, respectfully let us buy this truck. Let's go. Yeah, I don't know if these trucks are blocked.
10:30either blocked in the U.S. or just you would have to import one yourself. I think this one from Toyota internationally sells for like 10 to 20 grand. Like it's very cheap. If I ran a company, my first act would be to ban hard-boiled eggs in the office. Hard-boiled eggs are really an insane snack. It's not more protein than a steak in a bag. You got to go Chesky mode. Throw a steak in the bag and take it with you everywhere. Like I wouldn't have a problem with somebody going in if there's like a cigarette smoking area, like a back alley and you can go into the back alley and scarf scarves uh uh hard-boiled eggs that seems reasonable am i gonna go home and trick-or-treat with the kids like this no i do not want to traumatize my young children yeah i will be uh dressing up as something else but we will see you back here on monday we'll talk to you soon wait
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