Elon’s go-to banker leads SpaceX IPO, SaaSination, Bejing’s robot Boom | Diet TBPN

0:00There's a whole bunch of interesting news. We're gonna talk about Michael Grimes today what Apollo's doing some new humanoids out of China. There was one piece in the journal that I wanted to read for you. Streamer Braden Peters suffers awkward encounter with Arizona State fraternity leader. Video of the interaction has drawn widespread attention. Braden Peters, the online streamer known as Clavicular, found himself at the center of viral attention this week after a brief in-person encounter with a fraternity leader at Arizona State University left him visibly diminished. This is news just today.

0:31Video of the exchange, which has circulated widely across social media platforms, shows Mr. Peters appearing noticeably uncomfortable as the unnamed fraternity member dominated the interaction through sheer physical presence and social confidence. Viewers noted that Mr. Peters, despite his considerable height, appeared to shrink during the exchange, struggling to maintain composure as the other man controlled the tone and pace of the conversation with apparent ease. The clip has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times now, with commenters largely agreeing that Mr. Peters was in the parlance of his own audience thoroughly outclassed.

1:08Neither Mr. Peters nor the fraternity leader could be reached for comment, but we'll be following that story, of course. Anyway, moving on. Michael Grimes, he's Elon Musk's banker, and he might be the most important person in the SpaceX IPO that's probably going to happen this year. Kevin Kwok summed it up. He said, Michael Grimes moving back to Morgan Stanley is the strongest signal so far that at the SpaceX OpenAI Anthropic IPO Jubilee. It's a real thing. We're gonna dig into it. A lot of people are actually very familiar with Michael Grimes. He took Facebook, Google, Tesla, Uber, Spotify, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Workday, and literally hundreds of other tech companies, public.

1:45He's been in the industry for decades. He has a reputation because he becomes a customer or a user - Oh yes, that's a fun fact. Of the different products during the bidding process. Yes, yes. He talked about playing Farmville. How many hours did he play Farmville? He didn't say how many hours he played. At some point, we'll have to ask. He just said played hours of Farmville in the lead up to the Facebook IPO. To understand the IPO thesis, the investment thesis for Facebook at that time, you had to believe that other businesses would be built on top of Facebook, so you had to understand Farmville.

2:18Yeah, so you would expect him to spend hours talking to Annie for the SpaceX IPO. For sure, for sure. Yeah, definitely. He also actually drove for Uber before taking Uber public in 2018. And so he likes to dig in. He also has just a very perfectly aligned background for tech and tech banking. So he did the traditional investment banking thing. He was at Solland Brothers, then Bear Stearns, then Morgan Stanley. But before that, he studied electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley. And so he was never really boxed in as this pure finance guy. And there's this interesting full circle moment where, you know, many people could comp Elon Musk to Howard Hughes, who started Hughes Aircraft and sort of created like the aviation boom.

3:03And Michael Grimes actually interned at Hughes Aircraft in the space and communications group back in 1985. And what is SpaceX? It's like a space and communications company. And so you have this like very full circle moment, which I thought was cool. He's like truly a deals legend. He did a brief stint with the Commerce Department, and people were wondering, like, is he going to be able to stay out of going back to deal land? Like, there's so many good deals on the table right now. You've got Anthropic. You've got OpenAI. You've got SpaceX. Well, there's also deals in the government. There's deals in the government, but it's just a different environment.

3:35You know, there's so much red tape. And famously, at Morgan Stanley, Michael Grimes was set up in a way that he, at least reportedly, was not really required to deal with all, like, the firm-wide strategy, what's going on with the rest of Morgan Stanley, they were like, go hunt. Like, you're a killer. Just go do whatever you need to do. Go fish. Go fish. They sort of cleared the agenda to just let him go do what he did best. And he obviously was extremely successful at that. He got pulled back to Morgan Stanley and he got a promotion. So now he's the chairman of investment banking, which is, I guess, higher than co-chair of global technology banking, which sounded like the top.

4:13But there are levels. And he's even higher now. And it makes sense if SpaceX, you know, they're on track to raise$40 billion in this IPO. You know, nothing's really confirmed yet, but that feels reasonable in the range. So what are the investment bankers gonna have to do? They're gonna have to talk to literally everyone with money and the investment banking fees could be like$400 million. Right now, people are thinking those will be split across the four lead banks, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JP Morgan and Goldman. Either way, you got to get ready for the roadshow of a century. It'll be interesting.

4:42What will Michael Grimes do to prove that he's ready to go to space? Will he go to space personally? I want to see some stunts. I want to see stunts pre-Rodgian. Elon, I fell in love with Ani. We're starting a family. Put Michael Grimes in the rocket. Let's do it. It's so much easier to underwrite the deal if you're like, I've been to space. It works. It's nice. I've driven for Uber. I've played Farmville. This is the best technology. Going to space is better than playing Farmville or driving Uber. What if he says, put me in the mass driver? And this was sort of a surprise to people. People thought, okay, Elon has run the AB test.

5:17He took Tesla public. He kept SpaceX private. He had a much better time with SpaceX doing secondary sales and fundraisers very easily. He could do whatever he wanted, really like much more control. Tesla, he's getting sued by shareholders, all these different things like regulations, SEC stuff, like it's a headache, but the stock's doing really well. And at a certain point, maybe you cap out what's possible in the private market. So all of a sudden, Elon says, I'm going public. I'm merging everything together. I'm going now. I've made the decision. This week's Grimes put himself back in the middle of the action and in line to reap millions of dollars of fees.

5:50Morgan Stanley said Monday he was rejoining the bank as chairman of investment banking, a promotion from his previous role as head of global technology investment banking. SpaceX has long been considered a golden goose by IPO bankers. It skyrocketed to a 1.25 trillion. Let's give it up Continue laying eggs. Interesting, there's all this news about the XAI co-founders leaving, but you're post-acquisition. Of course the co-founders leave, right? That's pretty normal. Well, I think the reason that people care is because it was happening for quite a while now. Do they need to just be near the frontier, or do they actually need to be doing research to advance the frontier if they wind up?

6:30Like, should you think about XAI more like a neo lab that's trying to solve continual learning or some unsolved problem in AI research? Or should you think about them more like a hyperscaler, like an AWS or like a CoreWeave or like a Lambda, like a NeoCloud that's just like capacity and more of an engineering task? And if they're able to build Colossus and then build 10 more Colossus and then build a bunch of space data centers and they just have a lot of capacity, like who knows, maybe they wind up working with Anthrop. I mean, I forget at what point last year we started talking about that possibility.

7:05Yeah. But as the consumer products and the enterprise products have kind of fallen behind or failed to fully catch up. I don't know. I'm seeing a breakout in Grok in the comedy category on Instagram Reels. You can go check them out. There's some funny, funny interactions. It is really wild. Yeah, you really have to find the different modes in the product. Yeah. But finding the different characters, going to the unhinged setting. It is about five times more unhinged than I would expect. Totally, totally. A product like this to be. Yeah. Talk trash about Elon. It goes all over the place. Honestly, some of it is genuinely funny, though, which is like high praise.

7:40It's a new benchmark for AI. It is sort of like doing, it's a cheat code. Well, yeah, part of humor can be truth-seeking, right? Truth-seeking or just saying what no one else can say or be unexpected. You don't expect the computer to talk like that. But sometimes people can't say that, you know, there's certain topics you can't say the truth. The unhinged mode is certainly truth-seeking. It's certainly unhinged as well. Will DePue shared a little hack for everyone who's into Chipotle. We reposted a clip that is truly evergreen. Jordy, quote, I used to get 90 % of my calories from Chipotle at certain times in my life.

8:18It was something I would look forward to. But the last time I pulled over to get Chipotle, it was like, this is going to be rough. The quality has degraded. I'd rather fast than eat Chipotle. Taking shots at Chipotle. Yeah, a couple of the younger guys on the team. like what's wrong with Chipotle and I started shedding tears explaining how back in my day there was the pure when I was a boy yeah it was more fresh than the farmers market but will has a good hack he says I bought a Chipotle hat on eBay once and I walked to the Chipotle in Ann Arbor and wear it when I went and they would just give me the employee discount every time I didn't even ask it was a$2 hat and I saved$7 my$15 order every time thinking outside the box.

8:58He says, I used to be so into budgeting in Chipotle that I'd measure everything in Chipotle meals. Rent was four Chipotle meals a day. A nice hat was two Chipotle meals. I also grokked it, and in case this is fraud, it was more than six years ago, so past the statute of limitations can't get me. On second thought, I need to atone for my sins and repay Chipotle the$21 I stole from them by purchasing$21 of their stock. I am sorry, Chipotle. Another resignation has hit the timeline. The co-founder of XAI is out. You want to read through it? Yeah. So he says, I resigned from XAI today. This company and the family we became will stay with me forever.

9:34I will deeply miss the people, the war rooms, and all those battles we have fought together. It's time for my next chapter. It's an era with full possibilities. A small team d 'arm with AIs can move mountains and redefine what's possible. Thank you to the entire XAI family. And Elon, thank you for believing in the mission and for the ride of a lifetime. Some of the executives at XAI were offered cash instead of staying around. And so it's possible he just said, cool, time to move on. This isn't looking good, and it's the original XAI co-founders. There was one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

10:09There's three remaining, Elon plus Manuel and Toby. Jack Clark here, he said, people leaving regular companies. Time for a change. Excited for my next chapter. People leaving AI companies. I have gazed into the endless night, and there are shapes out there. We must be kind to one another. I am moving on to study philosophy. This was like in reference to, there was an anthropic researcher that just left, and it was like this whole essay, and then he ends it with this poem. Yeah. Yeah. People get deep at these companies. Head of Anthropic Safeguards Research just quit and said, the world is in peril, and then he's moving to the UK to write poetry and, quote, become invisible.

10:48Other safety researchers and senior staff left over the last two weeks as well, probably nothing. Yeah. Yeah, there's multiple factors going on. You can't discount the fact that many of these people maybe made something in the range of$100 million in the last two years. And if you're AGI-pilled enough, you believe that that will be, you know, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many lifetimes worth of wealth. And so why not go to the UK and write poetry? There's obviously a more dystopian sci-fi vision where when this period of our lives, you know, gets turned into Hollywood blockbuster movies, this will be a moment where the safety researchers start peeling off and going all over the world to write poetry.

11:34I just want one co-founder researcher to leave and be like, look, I got an allocation of an F-80. I got a bust down coming. I'm good. I'm Gucci. I don't need. I quit. I quit. it. Moving on. Apollo says it avoided the pain of PE peers by steering clear of software holdings software. I never heard of it. What's that? I don't touch it. You know, people are saying the sasspocalypse or sassmageddon, but assassination was right there. And I don't know why we're not just calling it the assassination. Isn't that bad? I think assassination would be like sass is assassinating something else. Okay. But it's like your fun got assassinated.

12:19Assassin. I would think it got killed by a SaaS. Yeah, I guess you're right. Apollo says fees rise as company reports record quarter for deployment of capital. The group's decision to avoid heavily investing in software companies during an era of soaring valuations will bolster its growth as investors move their money to firms that avoided a sector now threatened by AI. Private capital groups would see a dispersion of returns depending on their exposure to software companies following growing fears of AI disrupting many IT businesses that triggered a recent sell-off. Apollo would benefit after largely avoiding such deals within its private equity portfolio and curtailing leading to the industry over the past decade helping to bolster its performance of versus many rivals he said during earnings call I expect that we will be along with a handful of other managers prettier than we have been historically.

13:10They cut its exposure to software loans as it grew increasingly bearish about the sector's prospects in the wake of rapid inroads made by AI. The decision appears to have been validated by a recent sell-off in software stocks and the loans of many large IT companies amid rising AI fears. Monday.com had earnings and the stock went down 21 % after they flagged AI agents as a competitive threat on their earnings call. Issued weak guidance as it grapples with rising concerns that artificial intelligence is disrupting software business models. I imagine it's seat-based right now, monday.com, and they have to transition to some sort of consumption-based, some sort of usage-based, something outcomes-based, I suppose.

13:52Yeah, you'd think at least some would say, like, we actually love the seat-based model in the era of agents. Every agent will require a seat. You know, again, you might have 100 employees, but then a bunch more agents. Maybe you can't charge nearly as much on a per seat basis but we'll see how this nets out. Yeah it seems pretty easy just to be like you have one agent that goes into the software and does everything that it needs to and then brings it out to your organization. It's like I need to use the tool. There's one agent whose sole job is to pull it. Yeah everyone gets a prompt box and then that agent has one seat and uses the tool and brings you back the results.

14:29Foucault Capital is out for blood. Oh yeah. He said you worried about stock-based comp. me these businesses only need half their employees. Oh so he's bullish. I believe he thinks that the the saspocalypse is overstated. Headcounts for assorted companies, Salesforce is at 87 ,000, ServiceNow 32 ,000, Workday is at 23 ,000, Zooms at 12 ,000, DocuSign famously large at 8 ,000, OpenAI is at 7 ,000, Okta is at 7 ,000, UiPath is at 5, Sprinkler is at 4, and Anthropics at 4 ,000. The flip side of this is that the companies do need employees to go deploy AI. Correct Tabuco, I have a strange amount of conviction that they could cut up to 40 % and not impact growth.

15:08Bucco says in fact it would accelerate. KPMG is trying to force its auditor to accept less money since accounting work can be significantly automated by AI. But KPMG makes money from accounting. So this looks like a company accidentally announcing to the world that its business model is under attack. Matt says auditing can basically be done by AI So why should we pay for it? It's not a crazy thing for most companies to think or to say to their auditors, but it's a crazy thing for an auditing firm to say to its auditor. That is wild. KPMG should be paying Grant Thornton more. In these crazy AI times, everyone needs to pay more for trusted human auditing.

15:44We'll go first. I guess that's what Grant Thornton said. It seems like they'll have to switch to value-based pricing too, like everyone else. And the value, even if it can be one-shotted with a prompt by some, you know, super intelligence is non-zero. It is very valuable to have an external party verifying your work and the numbers that you're reporting. So the other dynamic is you have like basically legacy, you know, the big brands in the space. They adopt maybe a more Coke and Pepsi model where like Coke and Pepsi both could, you've talked about this, get an insane price war, cut down, compete on price so aggressively that there's just no money to be made anymore.

16:22but they have sort of like somewhat of an equilibrium where it's not really in any group's interest to compete prices to zero. Coke and Pepsi, it's a duopoly, not an oligopoly. So there's no third player that can be, oh, we're 5 % of the market. There's so much to gain. Let's go be the bull in the china shop. Just doesn't happen. And then also there's lock-in around the brand. And then there's also lock-in around the distribution because Coke and Pepsi have trucks that go to every store where it needs to be distributed. auditing might not be the same structure. Let's pull up this clip of Gerstner on CNBC.

17:00...to the degree it is, as we've discussed on numerous occasions, is it overdone? At times you've said yes. The last time we were together, you said something like 90 % of the companies, the software companies that were down the way they are, deserve to be. Those, I think, were your exact words. Where are we here? So when you and I were together on January 6th, I said, you have to understand the difference between earnings and revenue and stock price. OK. And what's happened in software is hard for people to get their head around because the stocks have been cut in half. But that's not what the market is discounting, Scott.

17:33The market is looking into the future and saying in the past, three years ago, I could I could buy 35 years worth of sales forces, free free cash flow into the future. Give them 35 times free cash flow because I had that level of predictability. It was like a government bond. It was a sure thing. You definitely were going to get those. And then we have AI do what AI has done over the course of the last several months. And people just said something very rational. I can't see as far into the future. So I'm going to pay less for the terminal value. I'm going to pay less for those future free cash flows.

18:05So the only way that reverses, Scott, is those companies have to accelerate their core revenues and show that they are beneficiaries of AI. I think the real SaaSpocalypse might not start until you have some of the labs public and people can actually really rotate out of software fully and say, I don't want to own this thing that I don't fully understand how AI is going to impact it when I could own the disruptor, the AnthropX, the OpenAI. Yeah, people were asking, where will the$50 billion come from? Where will the$100 billion of capital come from? And we see this in China, too, where one company will go public and you actually see a drop in the previous Baidus or whoever the legacy company is because there just isn't that much liquidity in the market.

18:47So it needs to come from somewhere. Yeah, I just don't know how the narrative around SaaS flips positive because the models are not getting worse, right? They only get better. We actually need to see some type of – like SaaS would benefit from a model plateau, right? It's like, hey, there's sort of a set of capabilities. SaaS companies can deploy this. But if the models just keep getting better and better and better and agents get better and better and better, where's the bottom for SaaS other than some type of minimal free cash flow multiple? Well, it's like refocusing on a narrative that has durability even in a world where software R &D is essentially free.

19:29I guess what I'm saying is like, if you see a business actually really accelerating, growth accelerating, then it's possible to get excited about that one company. But it's hard to get excited at any point about SaaS broadly because the models are just going to keep improving. And that just seems to be more and more of a threat. Yes, but within SaaS, there will be companies that reveal to the market and correctly message that they are, in fact, like AGI resistant because of ad networks, because of lock-in effects, because of regulatory moats. there will be a number of categories that emerge. Like when we talk about the payment rails, those feel like, yes, you could maybe vibe code it, but are you going to vibe code your bank charter and all these other things that you need to do and get all the customers, like the distribution, the lock-in.

20:17So I think within SaaS, there will be things that are pretty easy to just rip out and replace with something directly like a model. And there will be other companies that are old and are legacy, but you're just like, oh, yeah, that's actually, that can't be assaulted by a model. It's impenetrable because it's actually a different thing. And so those companies will wind up sort of rebounding, I would imagine. This is one of the most underrated observations in tech right now. If AI commoditizes software, what's actually safe, regulated, liability-bearing businesses, someone has to be on the hook.

20:49Oh, sure. Anything touching the physical world, hardware, manufacturing, energy. That's the kind of Tesla narrative. Yeah, these are the subcategories of things that are sort of SaaS businesses now, but will reveal themselves as being not actually that asset light. Proprietary data sets. AI makes your data more valuable, not less. Marketplaces and businesses with network effects. Operationally intense businesses. The bad businesses become the best ones. And cybersecurity and physical security. More AI equals more attack surface. You know, it's the famous Bezos quote, your margin is my opportunity.

21:25And so small company comes in, sees high SaaS margins, can actually go attack them now. Instead of needing to raise a billion dollars and do five years of R &D, they can raise 10 million and do one year of R &D and have a competitor that's ready to go head-to-head on a battle card against an entrenched public company, SaaS company. And maybe they're only earning 30 % margins instead of 60 % margins, but they're happy with that because, hey, it's a new business, and they started it from nothing. And if they make$10 million, they get to take a lot of that home and stuff. And so she'll says the greatest rebrand in enterprise software history is calling consulting revenue forward deployed engineering.

22:03I do wonder if a year or so from now, we'll see companies that, you know, these companies that went from one to 10 or one to 20 million in revenue really quickly. It just turns out like, hey, like they were just kind of like they were doing about 10 million dollars worth of engineering work. And it wasn't actually again, a lot of them are setting it up. where like, hey, we're going to come and build a bunch of software for you, and then we're going to charge on an ongoing basis or based on usage. But still, I'm sure there's some examples where it really is just like effectively consulting or you're running like a software development in agencies.

22:35Yeah, it's funny. Thinking about OpenAI, I think they're at 8 ,000 employees. And wasn't the report that they're hiring something like 800 forward deployed engineers? So you're going to have a 10 % of an AI lab that's focused on AI research, carrying cancer, is going to be like four deployed engineers and you have to imagine that was basically zero you know five years ago i think the forward deployed engineering is going to be important like the the ai diffusion question it's a lot of sticky systems a lot of people that don't have time the fact that we see these these uh these like spikes in attention during long weekends and holidays it's like that's when people have time to go do the new project and stop doing the the same system again and again and again and a forward-to-flight engineer comes in the organization and just is able to do that hard work that you don't have the slack capacity for.

23:25China is going all in to beat the U.S. on humanoid robots. Beijing is showering companies with support but some fear a bubble. And they're getting taller. Chinese humanoid robots are getting taller very very quickly. The Unitree G1 is the robot that most people think of when they think of Chinese humanoid robot. The The Unitree G1 has 23 joints and it's four feet, four inches tall. That's something you can drop kick across the room. It's probably pretty safe, but they're getting taller. The UniX AI Panther has 34 joints and is five foot three. The UB Tech Walker S2 has 52 joints and it's five nine.

24:04We're getting short King status now. Then now the AI Square Robotics Alphabot 2, 5 '11". Wait, that could be some regulation that I could get behind. Yes. All humanoids should be capped at a certain height. Yeah. So that if any people out there are a little bit on the shorter side, they get to feel tall. Yeah. But in general, the average person should mog the robot. Yes, yes, definitely. On Dorkesh, Elon said the Optimus is 511 as well. 511. Yeah. That's a very reasonable height. China's going all in to beat the United States on humanoid robots. Of course, they have a ton of industrial advantages.

24:40So Elon Musk has been telling investors for months that Tesla's optimist humanoid robot will revolutionize the world and create a new mega industry. But most of it could belong to China, he has warned. China is an ass kicker. Next level, Musk said in January. To the best of our knowledge, we don't see any significant competitors outside of China. China is moving quickly. Shots fired at figure. Figure and 1x. But humanoid robotics companies are sprouting up from Shenzhen to Suzhou. There's 140 different companies. They got a market map over there. We have five and they have 140. They're tapping a vast ecosystem of parts suppliers and engineering talent.