IPO Giga Boom, World’s Fairs of the Past | Diet TBPN

0:03John Coogan:It's a great show for you today, folks. It's Friday, Friday, May 22nd. We had our Wall Street Journal stolen from us. We only have the Financial Times today, but we're making due because we have a digital subscription as well. And we're going to take you through America's IPO boom. So three key stories that broke since we last spoke a mere 21 hours ago since we podcast for three hours. and then we come back 21 hours later. We do it again. We do it again. Yesterday, Politico reported that David Sachs made an 11th hour appeal to President Trump to spike on an executive order that would have created a voluntary program, voluntary program for frontier AI companies to submit their models to the government for review 90 days before new model releases.

0:51John Coogan:I wonder what the benefit of that is. Obviously, it's good to have red teaming going on, good to have benchmarking, good to have other eyes on the project. There's some sort of liability that happens with the round thing on the table. No one in the TVP audience has ever seen this. Can you describe what this is, this round-shaped argument? I'm still not exactly sure what we're looking at. Yeah. But I saw them talking about this on ESPN. Yeah. And people are always saying, you guys are like SportsCenter for business. You should pick one of these up, this object. So I had to check it out, this artifact.

1:24John Coogan:Brown oval object. Yes. Cool. Well, it looks fun. Anyways, I was having a little bit of fun earlier throwing this at the gong. Drilling the gong. Drilling the gong. The production team didn't like it because there's this, you know, $70 ,000 massive flat screen TV next to the gong as well as multiple cameras and lights over there. But no accidents. Wow. Mandate of heaven over there right there. So for his part, Trump explained the last minute cancellation by telling reporters, quote, I didn't like certain aspects of it. I think it gets in the way of Dash. We're leading China. We're leading everybody.

2:07John Coogan:And I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that. The presumed text of the EO was leaked today. You can read it through this link. Tyler, have you checked in with Lessrong? Yeah. How are they feeling about this? Yeah, I mean, I assume they're not happy with this. This seems to be like anti-safety. Do they want more review from independent nonprofits, for-profit companies that are run by people with good intentions, or the government, like, democratically elected? I mean, I assume at some level it's got to be the government, right? Because if you're super H.I. pill, these things are nuclear weapons.

2:45Yeah. It needs to be the government. But I think on the way there, people are definitely like, you know, meters is a good example.

2:49John Coogan:Is there anyone who says like, no, no, no, actually like nuclear weapons are super important, but they shouldn't be regulated by the government because I don't like the government. I would rather my favorite megacorp owns them, controls them. If you look at the approval rates for different organizations, there are plenty of companies that are polling above the US government. Like people love Disney, Disney adults. They say, give Disney a nuclear weapon. They already have the rights to build a nuclear power plant. You know this? I did not. Disney World has like, like, you know, legacy rights, because when they set up EPCOT, which is an acronym, which I should look up because what does it stand for?

3:24John Coogan:It stands for something really cool. This also bridges into one of our future segments. Stands for, what does EPCOT stand for? Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. The idea was to build an entire city. It was the praxis of the 50s. Yeah. And so in 1966, Walt Disney conceived it as in 1966, a utopian, fully functioning city. And I believe this might just be viral clickbait, but they have the permission to build a nuclear reactor to power the community of tomorrow. Epcot. Yeah. And so I don't know. Maybe maybe there's some folks out there that say we can't trust the government. We can't trust the Democrats.

4:03John Coogan:We can't trust the Republicans with the nuclear weapons. Give them to Disney. I don't know. I trust Bob with the new. I would trust Bob. The new guy, we got to meet him. We got to get to know him. That's right. Bob, he can handle it. I've shook his hand. Yeah. I trust him. I trust his hand on the button. Second story highlighted by Brandon Gurell in the TBPN newsletter. The Gurellinator. The Gurellinator in the TBPN newsletterinator. An Anon account posted yesterday. He's sitting here with noise-canceling headphones. He doesn't know that we're talking about him. He's going to find this out later when he watches these clips.

4:35John Coogan:Anyway, a non-account posted yesterday that Microsoft had canceled its internal cloud code licenses after token-based billing made the cost untenable. This catalyzed a ton of commentary and discourse around X. Box CEO Aaron Levy, for example, used this post to argue that token price optimization is set to become a prevailing trend inside companies reliant on LLMs. Worth noting, though, that there's a proposed community note on the post right now that denies Microsoft made the move because of a cost issue. They have the money to spend billions on tokens if they want. But instead, they are trying to shift the developers to use their own co-pilot CLI, which I imagine they're going to build their own harness, their fork of Cloud Code, their fork of Codex.

5:22I heard someone refer to it as they want to make the engineers eat dog food.

5:26John Coogan:Yes. But what's the dog food made of? It could be made of GPT 5.5 tokens. It could be made of Opus 4.7 tokens. I do think it... I guess they will be using... Yeah, I mean, I think the reason that Kodaks and Cloud Code and Cursor and these other tools have gotten so good is because the engineers building them are using them all day long. And it's one thing to use those tools to build your coding tool, but being forced to constantly use the product that you're shipping is a tried and true way to build a great product. Yeah, the third story from Brandon Burrell in the TBPN newsletter. The American semiconductor manufacturer, Micron, announced that they've begun manufacturing one alpha DRAM, the most advanced memory ever produced in the United States at its Manassas, Virginia headquarters, or manufacturing plant.

6:14John Coogan:This move comes in the middle of the agent boom in AI, which requires longer context windows, and thus memory, than back and forth LLMs, which has led to an industry-wide memory shortage. Micron has been on a tear. Let's see what they're doing. 800, almost$850 billion market cap. Remarkable. It's up 2 % today, 3 % over the last five days, and 246 % over the last six months. What an absolute run for Micron. It's up almost 1 ,000 % over the past year. Really, really incredible performance for Micron. Just wow. Anyway, America's going through a mini, this was such a funny article by the Wall Street Journal.

6:54John Coogan:America's IPO mini boom. How is this a mini boom? You got three of them. Is this not a gigaboom? This is a gigaboom. So I don't know if we have the truth on this, but it also made it to the front page of the Financial Times. They said SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic IPOs set to ignite Wall Street trading frenzy. NASDAQ loosens rules. Past investors could dump rival stocks. Trillionaire prospect for Musk. The blockbuster listings of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are set to prompt an unprecedented wave of buying and selling as new fast entry rules thrust the tech stocks straight into Wall Street indices.

7:35The rules implemented this month by NASDAQ mean billions of dollars of passive money will automatically flow to the three companies when they go public, driving their share prices higher and forcing investors to sell rival stocks.

7:47John Coogan:Elon Musk's SpaceX initial public offering next month is expected to be the largest on record, firing the starting gun on what U.S. bankers will hope will be a blockbuster year. With OpenAI filing its IPO paperwork as soon as this week, and Anthropic planning to float its shares, too, as well. The trio is set to raise tens of billions of dollars at a time of relentless investor appetite for companies linked to AI. The SpaceX listing will cement Musk's control of two of America's most valuable companies, SpaceX and Tesla. It is crazy. We're going to need a new term for the MAG-7 because Tesla has been in the MAG-7.

8:20John Coogan:It's been north of a trillion dollars for a long time. But SpaceX is going to go out at a higher valuation almost certainly. Where is Tesla trading at today in terms of market cap? It's at 1.34. Hard to imagine SpaceX trading below that. So you're going to have his MAG-7 company will be lagging his non-MAG-7 company. We're going to need new terms. We're going to need a bigger boat. But why did the Wall Street Journal call this a mini boom? I think it's just because it's so concentrated on these three companies, but we will dig in and see where it goes. So too bad SpaceX and others didn't go public sooner.

8:56John Coogan:I agree. But they are a tribute to the US capitalist system, says the Wall Street Journal. Today's AI investor Euphoria recalls the heady.com days of the 1990s, and it's hard to tell how these bets will shake out. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are rushing to go public to take advantage of the favorable market conditions. But amid the eulogies written about American capitalism, the latest mini IPO boom is a welcome tribute to the dynamism of U.S. markets that no other country can match. SpaceX fired the starting gun. They're using the same language as the Financial Times over there. The starting gun has been fired.

9:33John Coogan:It's unanimous across the mainstream media. The rocket company, founded in 2002, is a global leader in space exploration. It is also spreading to broadband, mobile satellite internet and data center development. Anthropik recently agreed to pay SpaceX$1.25 billion a month to use its data centers to train models. That shows how competitors can enjoy symbiotic relationships. SpaceX says the company as a whole reported a$4.9 billion net loss last year, some of which stemmed from its x.com social media platform. Can that be that much? I have to imagine that the losses were not, I mean, I don't know how much Twitter was losing before they, before the take private.

10:15John Coogan:I know that the revenues cratered a bit, but there were also big layoffs and an 80 % reduction in cost. The sum word there is maybe doing some of the lifting. I imagine that the losses were sort of spread over all sorts of investments. You're building a new Starship rocket, which is set to launch today. 5.30, central time. Tune in. uh the last one was what a critical launch is it no it's just because of the timing with the s1 and the ipo i don't know all eyes on i think i think the market is valuing the launch capabilities and spacex and starship in particular is like sure small piece of the of the puzzle you know it's important but you know people are going to be paying way more attention to this yeah yeah Obviously people will be excited about it, but I think even just the, you know, endless spamming Falcon 9s can get Starlink to what,$20 billion run rate or something,$10 billion run rate.

11:12John Coogan:You can clearly build a business off of the existing capability. Lots of excitement around Starship. There was a little bit of like spice in the timeline from, you know, everyday astronaut, because he was sort of like rooting for a scrub. And everyone was like, oh, he's like against SpaceX. But he was like, no, I was like, I'm such a fan that I wanted to be there in person. I couldn't be there in person. So I was like, I hope that they scrub because I want to be there for this historic moment. So a little bit of like a misconception there. SpaceX said in its filing that it foresees 28.5 trillion, yes, trillion in market opportunities, including data centers in space.

11:49John Coogan:Is anything more bullish than the future just being enterprise software? Like, you paint this massive picture, we're going to Mars. How are we going to make money? Enterprise software. 22 trillion of enterprise software. We're going to be automating workflows for the enterprise. I guess forever. Mr. Musk in January was awarded 1 billion performance-based restricted shares that will vest if his company, quote, establishes a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants. Do robots count as inhabitants? Do agents count as inhabitants? Isn't that one of the potential? You got to get a million.

12:28John Coogan:This is why he's worried about the - Wasn't there a list of like five or six things and he just has to do like four? I don't know. I haven't dug into that particular one. I know for Tesla, there were a whole bunch of different milestones. The humanoid robots was one of the stretch goals, but permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, that's exciting. That's a good goal. Like that feels, I don't know, like a whole lot of enterprise software and a million people living on Mars. That's a vision I can get behind. I'm into that. I like it. What was the market cap of Tesla at IPO?

12:59John Coogan:It was sub 10 billion, right? Was it Tesla's Tesla? 1.7. Whoa, 1.7 billion? Yeah. Are you sure? Is that a market cap for ants? You got 1 ,000 X if you just were a day one IPO believer. I mean, that's how you build a retail army. So SpaceX, I mean, million people on Mars. we could be looking at 1.7 quad, potentially. Anything's possible. I don't know. You get 1 ,000 X from here. If we get to Mars, that's a big, big, big opportunity. That is so crazy that you could buy an Elon company in the public markets at less than a$2 billion market cap. And many people did not. I owned a little bit of Tesla at some point, but there were so many moments when it was like so wildly disconnected from other car companies or other, like it was never a like a Warren Buffett buy there were always good reasons not to buy it instead of going to high school I just bought the Tesla IPO using the money I made from mowing lawn yeah you should have just been a lawnmower who DCA'd into Tesla the whole time probably be pretty retired right now I mean there's a lot of people that did that there's a lot of people there's also a lot of people that put money down to buy cars and then they didn't buy the stock and they're like ah the car depreciated and I should have bought the stock anyway Anyway, let's check in with the Starship launch because SpaceX postponed the launch of the newly redesigned Starship, but hardly a headline if it's just a one-day postponing because these things happen all the time.

14:30John Coogan:But it's completely redesigned. It's 400 feet tall, and it stood on the launch pad at the company's Starbase complex outside Brownville, Texas. But engineers had to troubleshoot problems that kept cropping up to the end of the countdown for the flight, according to a SpaceX livestream. SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk later said in a social media post that a hydraulic pin on part of the launch tower didn't function correctly. The company could try the flight Friday if the problem is fixed overnight. So they worked all night and they fixed the hydraulic pin on the launch tower. Wow. Talk about complex.

15:09John Coogan:The test mission was set to be the first flight for Starship V3. This is the third version redesigned SpaceX vehicle intended to deploy bigger satellites and one day help the company potentially settle Mars and mine asteroid Starship is bigger and more powerful than any rocket ever built. The company has sketched out a future in which Starship flies thousands of times per year. Of course, the the the the Mechazilla tower that grabs it, the chopsticks. That's very key to being able to stack these quickly. You can't rebuild all the infrastructure. the reusability is key to flying regularly. The rocket has yet to fly any customer satellites after three years of intense tests that we know of.

15:52John Coogan:The real conspiracy theorists, there's conspiracy theorists that think space is fake, nothing's happening, they're not actually going, the satellites don't exist. And then there's other conspiracy theorists that think, oh yeah, when they crash, they're actually deploying secret satellites and there's more stuff in space than we think. So pick your tinfoil hat theory. We'll let you be the judge of what's really going on. SpaceX's growth plans depend on Starship. According to its IPO prospectus, the document filed Wednesday listed Starship first among the risk factors facing the company. Interesting.

16:23John Coogan:Okay, so a little bit more credit for you because I was like, ah, it's not that big of a deal. I care more about the data centers. Yeah, I just mean the optics. Think about like the optics and some investors are super, you know, a little bit. It is interesting. Like, clearly, if SpaceX is listing Starship as the first risk factor, it means, like, oh, yeah, like, Colossus, like, we're going to be able to do that. Like, that's not hard. We can build a big data center. They have. Impossible. And there's less of a risk factor of, like, we're not going to be able to monetize that. Or we're not going to, you know, because there are a group of investors out there that are saying, like, oh, token prices will collapse, GPU depreciation.

17:00John Coogan:It'll get blocked. There'll be a data center ban. Like, they won't be able to ramp up their terrestrial efforts. God forbid there's like a catastrophic explosion. It'd be dramatic. That would be potentially an omen that certain people would be looking into. But I have full faith. They estimated in its IPO filing Wednesday that it has spent$15 billion developing Starship. Well, that makes a lot of sense why there's losses if you've been investing this. EJ D. Saul. Yeah, what's going on with David Sullivan? Slid into Elon's DM in the bid to land lead left of the IPO. With banks jockeying to get their name first on the deal for SpaceX's IPO.

17:40Solomon worked with staffers to message Musk directly. He's like, all right, guys, help me out here. How do I send a message on X according to people familiar with the matter? So he's putting in the work. He also says, wow, this is how you work for the bag at Goldman Sachs.

17:58John Coogan:David Solomon also had a piece in the New York Times saying that the AI apocalypse, NYT, was overrated. AI is a job creator, David Solomon says. He says, I'm the CEO of Goldman Sachs. The AI job apocalypse is overblown. We'll see what he's saying in a couple months. Ken Griffin sort of flipped, although Ken Griffin hasn't gone as far to say that there's a job apocalypse. He was just saying that the models went from like slop to usable, but he hasn't actually opined on whether or not that will change Citadel's hiring plans or his view of the American economy. He also specifically said he was very excited that all of his software engineers were more efficient because he said there's no like cap on how much software.

18:44I was there.

18:45John Coogan:I was writing Visual Basic. It was brutal. I would have loved Codex and Clock Code. I would have been working for one minute a day instead of an hour a day. Yeah, if you could have had Kodak's back then, just like a private instance of it, you would be currently... Time traveling back in time just to become the most productive intern of all time is elite. That's something you would actually do. Oh, it would be so much fun. Maybe that's what the future will hold, intern simulator. You get to go into VR and simulate being the most elite intern with time travel technology. Can we talk about the World's Fair?

19:25John Coogan:Yes, we need to talk about the World's Fair. Tyler, you gave this a read. World's Fairs. Has someone tried to bring these back? This feels like a tech new media. We need a World's Fair thing. I could see this being something that someone tries to revive, although it'd probably be a lot of screens these days. But at the World's Fair of old, there were a lot of cool technologies, a lot of hardware, a lot of interesting exhibits, and we'll go through. I don't know how much you've studied the World's Fair in the past, but the Wall Street Journal has been reflecting on the United States of America at 250 years with a whole bunch of articles that look back and contextualize American history.

20:04John Coogan:And we'll go through this one on the World's Fair right now. So among the groundbreaking innovations unveiled at U.S. hosted exhibitions were the telephone, the Ferris wheel, and electric lighting. Ferris really crushed it on the naming thing. You know, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Thomas Edison invented lighting, mostly. Those guys did not bake their name into the product nearly as well as Ferris, because it's capital F, and I believe Ferris is the one who invented the Ferris wheel. Anyway, before splashy Silicon Valley product launches in the annual consumer electronics show, the world showcased its latest in innovations at high-profiled world's fairs.

20:46John Coogan:These exhibits, held every few years beginning in London in 1851, gave countries a public platform to showcase new technologies, products, and ideas that were going to reshape daily life. For host countries and cities, the world's fairs or expositions were an opportunity to own the world's fair project. Tyler is sharing the person that invented the Ferris wheels. Full name was George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. That's pretty elite. That's pretty good. George Washington. There's nothing stopping you from naming your child George Washington and then just slapping your own last name at the end. Yes, yes.

21:22John Coogan:George Washington Cosgrove. John Tyler was the 10th president. Oh, true. Yeah, there you go. There we go. Okay, so many of the big expos were commemorative, says Paul Greenhall, a British historian and author of two books on world's fairs and expositions. But all of them ended up doing something else. They changed the shape of cities. Much like the Olympics today, World's Fairs were large-scale planning efforts and economic investments as much as cultural events. Cities competed for the right to host them. Chicago was able to redefine its image from a gritty second city to a cultural and architectural hub after defeating New York in the bid for the 1893 exposition.

22:01John Coogan:Here's a look at the U.S.-hosted World's Fairs that left the deepest mark. Starting in Philly, 1876, you're not going to believe what was shown, what was celebrated. We had two key technologies, telephones and ketchup. One was disrupted much faster than the other. I would say that the telephone has basically disappeared. The smartphone, text messaging, telephone's not doing well. It's on its last leg. The barbecue sauce has not really gained ground. Real inroads. No, ketchup is still on its last leg. ranch kind of went on a run yeah but really mustard ultimately it's a compliment not a substitute there are very few people that say oh i don't need the ketchup at all just the mustard just the mustard please most people i don't know i do think mustard is is better better than ketchup interesting yeah you can believe that yeah america's first officially sanctioned world's fair the centennial international exhibition arrived when the country was still defining its place among industrial nations.

23:03Unlike earlier European fairs built around single monumental halls, the Philadelphia event spread across a vast park with hundreds of structures. It was sort of like the Coachella of its time. Among the most notable exhibits were the telephone. It was initially greeted with skepticism, but the potential of the cool contraption quickly drew attention. Once people realized what had been invented, it became clear how important it was. the fair also showcased Thomas Edison's automatic telegraph as well as machinery such as the typewriter imagine you just create the automatic telegraph and then you go to launch it and demo it and somebody invents the telephone which is like really really dude and consumer packaged goods such as Heinz tomato ketchup it normalized the idea that private companies innovators and even governments could present their work side by side model that amplified the country's entrepreneurial culture.

23:57I love that. Chicago, 1893. You're not going to believe it. You're not going to believe the two technologies that emerge.

24:05John Coogan:We got to call balls and strikes here. A little bit more underwhelming. Yeah, but I don't know. I think some people - Tell people what was - Two key inventions. Last time, remember, we created telephones and catch-up, right? And so fast following this with the next fair, we create the - No, no, no, no. It's not fast following 1876 the telephone was 20 years later almost 20 years later they're like fast takeoff it's a we're so early telephones cooking what do we got the ferris wheel and popcorn popcorn is pretty good ketchup before popcorn pretty good pretty good but yeah ferris wheel ferris wheel imagine the hundreds of people that came there to demo their inventions if you're in The telephones pivot to Ferris wheels.