SpaceX-xAI merger reactions, Paypal plummets, Disney names next CEO | Diet TBPN

0:01Important announcement from Oracle. Our partners financing with Doña Ana County, New Mexico, Shackleford County, Texas, and Port Washington, Wisconsin data centers are secured at market standard rates, progressing through final syndication on schedule and consistent with investment grade deals. So if this makes you worry, a lot of other people agree. This is their most recent post after yesterday they announced the NVIDIA OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI. We remain highly confident in OpenAI's ability to raise funds and meet its commitments. So what did Rune say?

0:37Rune said, my confident OpenAI's abilities to raise funds t-shirt has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my t-shirt. Just 2 ,000 likes. Interesting comm strategy. They've been hiding comments under this. I think they've stopped doing that because People are saying what an odd thing to say It's Brennan says guys just stop tweeting whoever you have running PR comms needs to be fired. You're making it worse It is it is very weird to take this to act specifically. It's a conversational platform like it's hey We want to start a conversation about concerns around our well also just I mean It's a total rejection of the going direct thing like this would be wildly different if it came from the CEO Co CEOs or Larry Ellison directly even had like way more nuance It's very odd when it has like the corporate press release this is this screams that no one in comms actually uses X It's like we needed to put this out and they didn't really consider Channel and maybe this probably went over fine in a press release or something But just on X it's a completely different context and there's so much Subtext with all the different partners actively being there and even like low-level employees chiming in from companies that are implicated in this.

1:48There's like all this different. I like how you compare Oracle's strategy of like the nameless, faceless announcement that just concerns everyone to Rune actually from OpenAI commenting and just joking about it. And it actually gives you more confidence. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Like somebody looked at the Rune post and was like, oh, F, even Rune stopped shilling. We're F. And Rune's like, no, it's just a funny tweet. OpenAI is doing great. And that instills way more confidence. Gabe quoted yesterday's post and just said, okay yay okay yay of course Oracle's down five percent today it's sort of honestly looking good compared to some other names yeah what's PayPal down a full 20 % today switched out their CEO this you know had some some Q4 results that people weren't super exciting about and people aren't excited about the forecasts either.

2:41You look at Sheil had a kind of was prodding Elon. He said, come on, Elon, you've always wanted PayPal to be X, the financial super app. Now's a great opportunity. PayPal right now is valued at less than what X was in the take private. Wait, really? Yeah. No way. And X is obviously working on a bunch of different financial features. I thought PayPal all-time high was in the hundreds of billions. Yeah. It's 40 billion now. Yeah. Add that in. Yeah, it was way up. 85 % in the last five years. I mean, truthfully, a lot of people have moved on. They use Cash App. Yeah, but they own Venmo. Yeah, Venmo.

3:18Venmo's still very millennial, right? It's sort of like, and people use the Apple Pay transfers, Apple Cash. There's been a number of shots across the bow for PayPal that they haven't responded to fully. But their net revenue. They own Venmo because they acquired Braintree. It wasn't even like an in-house, really aggressive move. They sort of just lucked out with that. PayPal, the$40 billion public company, had a 2025 net revenue of$33 billion. Whoa. So not great. Major sell-off in pretty much all software today. Snap is close to all-time lows at$6.70 despite growing revenues and profits. Serenity says, here's why the financial engineering looks criminal.

3:59Snapchat is an$11.5 billion company with a billion MAU and Q3 adjusted EBIT of$132 million. However, stock comp for the last 12 months,$2.5 billion. Really, really insane number. This has always been the general criticism of Snap, but it looks like they have not adjusted course yet. It's interesting seeing the gap between monetization, between Meta a billion Mal and Snap a billion Mal. It's like a 10x delta. Yeah, which is why you were doing some napkin math on OpenAI. And I think that's like - They have a billion now. Do they monetize like Meta or do they monetize like Snap? And on what timeline?

4:42Because - Or worse. They have Fiji SEMO. I think they could get to Meta level, you know, monetization and ARPU. But it also could, they could be lingering in the Snap territory, which is, I think, five billion over the last year. Matt Slotnick commenting on the sell-off in software. All of this because Azure grew 39 % instead of 39.4%. Of course, there's a lot more going on here. Buko says, It's that the labs can hypothetically one-shot you, so why stand in front of that train? Why express, quote, short AI in the marketplace? High Yield Harry says, Wow, this software company is getting destroyed by AI today.

5:21It's Juventus, the soccer team, down 13%. Everything's just down. I guess people think that somebody's going to make Claude Code for soccer. Your inside man below says the robots are going to be playing. And he has a photo or a GIF of robots playing soccer. That seems bullish. We'll see. Bitcoin also down dramatically. Joe Weisenthal has it up. It's under three now. Absolute crash today. Down 13 % over the last five days. Almost 20 % over the last month. Lots of selling activity going on. Jim Kramer is now giving advice to Michael Saylor. He says, oh my, Bitcoin 73 ,000 beckons as the Dow hits a record high.

6:08Our chartist last night said this is it. The level that cannot be breached.

6:15It is time for strategy, also known as mass... Micro strategy was the former name. Now it's just strategy. as Mr. for its Mr. symbol to do a spot secondary or convert and stop this decline. Come on, Mike, step up. It's just always rough when Jim Cramer is just like a stream of consciousness posting at you. So we'll see what Sailor does. They have earnings on Thursday, and that will certainly be an interesting call. More details on the PayPal shares plunging nearly 20 % CEO exit. They replaced their CEO, Alex Chris, who was brought in to steer the payments firm through slowing growth and heightened competition and simultaneously issued a lackluster profit forecast for 2026 on Tuesday sending its shares down 19 % the boards which named HP's Enrique Lourdes as its new president and CEO so the pace of change and execution under Chris was not in line with its expectations Chris was tasked with turning around PayPal during a challenging period as post pandemic trading volumes declined and competitive pressures in its core business intensified from large technology companies and newer fintech rivals it It does feel like, you know, in the press release economy, it would have been so easy for PayPal to do some sort of deal with stock trading or prediction markets.

7:30Like every financial app and news product and grocery store, like everyone is like doing some sort of deal, even if it doesn't materialize, even if it doesn't move the needle. At least they're sort of putting their best foot forward. And PayPal, you know, you still mostly hear about it in the context of what are the PayPal co-founders up to now? Oh, they're building rivals. to the original company. PayPal said CFO Jamie Miller would serve as interim CEO until Lors assumes the role on March 1st. That's a pretty quick transition. Wall Street analysts said the unexpected CEO announcement raises questions about the company's turnaround strategy.

8:04Disney's been going through a CEO transition, but it's been massively telegraphed with, you know, a contract that ended this year. Okay, you know, a story last week about, hey, we're moving faster. Hey, we're bringing somebody in who's internal, who already knows the company inside and out and things been a lot. It's crazy that even with$33 billion of revenue, they're worth roughly like three and a half circles. Circle, obviously, just tiny, tiny company in comparison to PayPal. You would think that PayPal, they don't have an obvious AI. What's the obvious AI bear case, right? They move money.

8:40They're heavily regulated. You can imagine them figuring out ways to work better with agents and capitalize on the stable coin boom. but we'll see what the new CEO ends up doing. The big question is whether he will bring in a formidable payments team to attempt yet another multi-year turnaround. Do they not have a formidable payments team? What happened? Who you got? I would hope the payments company with half a billion active users has a formidable payments team. Apparently not, according to Evercore. You lack formidability. Paypal expects full year adjusted profit to range between low single digit percentage decline and slight increase compared with Wall Street expectations of about 8 % growth.

9:26The change comes against the backdrop of weakening retail spending as shoppers squeezed by elevated interest rates, stubbornly high living costs, and sign-up softening. May the labor market cut back on discretionary purchases and prioritize everyday necessities, stuff that's not probably purchased with Paypal. David in the YouTube chat says PayPal did participate in the press release economy. They announced a deal with ChatGPT at the end of last year in Q4. In 2026, PayPal will become the first digital wallet embedded directly into ChatGPT, allowing users to make purchases instantly without leaving the platform.

9:59Feels very oversold. And they also missed on the holiday quarter. So analysts were estimating that they'd make$8.8 billion, and they only made$8.68 billion. And so, you know, we saw a pretty strong holiday quarter. There was a lot of growth across e-commerce activity. We talked to Sean Frank at Ridge. Everyone was having, like, there were a lot of jitters about is the consumer healthy. But a lot of the growing platforms were able to outrun any softening in consumer confidence by just onboarding more companies, onboarding more customers. And so if you're declining while everyone else is accelerating, that's going to be an issue.

10:39Ted says gold is dumping, silver is dumping, Bitcoin is dumping, Ethereum is dumping. DXY is dumping, stocks are dumping if everything is going down. Where's the money actually going? We talked about this last week. Sell everything. Sell your dollars. Sell your stocks. Sell your crypto. Sell your bonds. Freak out, actually. Panic sell everything. Nikita says, data centers, raw materials and land. If intelligence is rapidly becoming free, expect a rapid rotation out of bytes and into bits. A lot of blue chip assets will soon be repriced. I'm excited to talk to Aaron Levy about this, about the SaaS-pocalypse, what's happening to software.

11:14Deep Dish says, this is a pretty common misconception that money has to go somewhere. That's not how market caps are measured. They're measured by last price, times shares, contracts outstanding, not how much money you'd get for liquidating the whole pile. TLDR, the money was never there. Josh DiAmero, is the new CEO of Disney effective next month? Yes. This cycle moved very quickly, right? It did. At the same time, I think it was managed pretty well. Disney's only down 1 % today, I think. Iger will stay on the board and serve as a senior advisor until his retirement on December 31st. And Dana Walden was named to a new role as president and chief creative officer of Disney.

11:56Iger just got the opening ideal done. He's like, I handled the AI transition perfectly. And I'm out. They've only had nine CEOs in the 102-year history. The CEO job requires not only running a sprawling empire, but also serving as its high-profile and highly scrutinized public ambassador. Di Amaro won a challenging bake-off for the job against Disney's entertainment co-chairman Dana Walden. Let's give it up for bake-offs.

12:27That has been the talk of Hollywood for more than a year. Walden was named to the newly created position of president and chief creative officer. Disney's leadership has been determined to run the succession process as smoothly as possible after its disastrous last try. The company named previous parks boss Bob Chapek as CEO in 2020, only to fire him and bring back Iger two years later in a corporate coup. There's a whole series of Bobs, Bob Iger, Bob Chapek over there. The CEO selection was overseen by chairman James Gorman, who joined Disney's board in 2024 after managing a widely praised succession process at Morgan Stanley.

13:05Iger was chairman when the board picked Chapek. Disney shares were roughly flat Tuesday. Gorman, in an interview, said that he has seen Iger and DeMarro work together and is confident the handoff will go smoothly this time. There's no tension here. Shareholders will now look to DeMarro to lay out an executed growth plan for the company whose stock price is down by nearly half from its 2021 high when everyone was rapidly subscribing to Disney Plus and locked in just watching content. They went outside and the shares have slid since. It has been essentially never go outside never touch this is the new jersey campaign never touch grass run it in the super bowl for sure gorman said the wall street journal picked the uh told the wall street journal that the board picked dia maro because of his combination of strategic thinking and an understanding of the creative process as well as his experience working both overseas and in the united states the 54 year old spent most of his 28 years at disney uh working in theme parks in theme parks business in the u.s and overseas overseeing stints at california's disneyland and florida's walt disney world in 2020 he has been chairman of disney's experiences unit which includes theme parks cruise ships and consumer products all things that should grow in an ai world even if the even if there's a lot of like ai slop and there's pressure on the theaters like should grow but there's still so many there's still so many questions right uh if you have widespread job loss is that force of compression and pricing just overall purchasing power right yeah it's everyone but again you could see there's so much uncertainty the idea that AI will just magically like AI getting good will magically make everybody spend more time off the internet is kind of a tough argument to make yeah right some people react and there's more like there's this like stated preference which people are saying as ai proliferates people are just going to log off yeah and i just don't actually see that happening yeah i'm interested to see when the uh the open ai disney deal really like rolls out um obviously you still can't generate disney properties disney ip in sora or in or at least not in chat gpt when i tried um so they're still working on when they will roll that out we've discussed like it will be interesting if they launch like a single piece of ip like it's spider-man week and they're just releasing spider-man and then that and then they wait and then they do iron man a week later so they're like keep hyping it as opposed to just like we're opening the floodgates you can do any disney ip will there be something special there the bigger question for me is is what does it look like in the disney plus app because i feel the Disney Plus app as a parent is a very safe place.

15:48There's some stuff in there, but you can sort of parental control it in most of its cartoons, in most of its high-quality Pixar stuff. But even if there's an AI-generated feed, how much editorial goes into that, there's a pretty wide gap right now between YouTube Kids, which can get sort of crazy, and Disney Plus, which is extremely curated. Academy Award-winning films are in there. And it's a very polished product. And if you start putting AI-generated content in there, maybe some parents will love it because the kids will watch more. But I think a lot of parents would probably be like, I don't know, I'm pulling back from that.

16:29What are you trying to generate? I'm trying to see if Grok can generate Disney IP. Can it? Not perfectly. We talked about this yesterday. We'll cover it again. DD shares today. SpaceX just bought XAI. They previously bought X. The$1.25 trillion merger values XAI at$250 billion with annualized revenue of$428 million, giving it a clean 584x revenue multiple. Not bad. And annualized loss of$5.84 billion. More importantly— That loss is mostly CapEx, right? I imagine. XAI, yeah, because they're building Colossus. They're buying a ton of chips, and so that's where that cash loss is coming from. because I imagine that the inference is not at that level yet.

17:16But of course, SpaceX can start helping to foot that bill. Yeah. They have$8 billion in revenue? No, no, no,$8 billion in profit. Yeah, wow. The transaction value of SpaceX at$1 trillion, XAI at$250 billion. Investors in XAI will receive 0.1433 shares of SpaceX for every share of XAI as part of the acquisition. Some XAI executives may opt for cash instead of SpaceX stock at 75.46 per share. This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and XAI's mission, scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars. What a turn of phrase.

17:59We'll have to read Elon's post because this one feels like it came directly from him. I know that the Tesla master plan before was sort of like, it's a little corporate corpo speak. Somebody else was sharing, it is fascinating that the number, a non-leading lab is worth effectively a quarter of what the leading space telecom company is. When you compare the two, it actually makes sense. I mean, in many ways, like the XAI shareholder base has a lot of overlap with the SpaceX shareholders. So in the end, I think everyone obviously is doing fine. But certainly the 584x revenue multiple, I think even Sam would take that offer right now.

18:51Oh, yeah. That would be$5 trillion, right? Alex Stouffer's shares, that Ramsheets called it. But the Elon Musk SpaceX plus XAI valued at$1.25 trillion. And Ramp Labs used their agentic spreadsheet to model the proposed merger when there were rumors of advanced talks on January 29th. And they nailed the valuation. So you can kind of watch ramp sheets work through the financial modeling there. It's notable. So some XAI executives are able to offer cash instead of SpaceX shares at$75.46 per share. You think this is just because there's so much pre-IPO demand for SpaceX that people are like, you know, there's plenty of buyers?

19:34That's a good question. I don't know. People just want to cash out and move on. I mean, SpaceX has done like a long history of tender offers and liquidity. So there's probably plenty of demand and just offering that feels like a way. I mean, there's also got to be some people that have been sitting on sort of I mean I guess if you were a Twitter employee just a few years ago, you have liquidity So it's not it's not the same thing as SpaceX where you joined 20 years ago and you're still waiting for the IPO So you're like I need to buy a house Yeah, like those those tender offers make a lot more sense than than this But certainly an interesting decision to be made if you're an XAI executive Logan Bartlett says Nikita beer the SpaceX employee total Nikita victory I think in many ways he's been through hell over the last few months he is often the butt of the joke.

20:18There were those prediction markets on will he make it through, will he get fired there's been so many dust ups around you know is he paying some people too much with the creator program well now if you're an ex creator and you get that$22 paycheck for your posts it's coming from SpaceX I'd love to see it. Wired had some interesting coverage this morning. Mike Solana called it out. Wired said Elon Musk is rolling XAI into SpaceX, creating the world's most valuable private company. By fusing SpaceX and XAI, which acquired X last year, Elon Musk tightens his grip over technologies that shape national security, social media, and artificial intelligence.

20:59Of course, this doesn't make any sense. So Solana's point is, he says, good morning. Elon Musk is quote, tightening his grip over two companies he founded, funded, built and currently runs. So that's a good criticism. But at the same time, like going public implies like you're actually you're loosening your grip, right? Suddenly, like the you have new regulations that you have to follow more responsibility. Suddenly anyone in the world can can can profit off of your labor. Yes, anyone in the world can loosen your grip a little bit in some way. It's funny because if SpaceX put out some big press release and said we're never going to go public and we're doing this, their criticism would be Elon, you know, Elon Inc.

21:41is not letting retail shareholders participate in space and AI. Yeah, or just as a private company, all the financials, all the strategies are more opaque. There's less accountability. There's less regulation. They don't answer to the SEC in the same way. And that's why a variety of private equity firms do take privates. It's like, why are you taking a company private? You're delisting it as a public company. It's no longer public. And so you can do much more ambitious things. You can change the strategy because you don't answer to shareholders. John says, Elon Musk, famous for his loose management style, tightens his grip.

22:18Yeah, famous, famous. Eric Berlin says, once again, I find myself updating my LinkedIn bio. He says, former CEO of Breaker, which was acquired by Twitter, acquired by X Corp, acquired by XAI, acquired by SpaceX. So congratulations to the Breaker team. I was looking for the most complicated corporate lineage yesterday when we were joking about it. Like there's someone that's going to have like six steps in their resume. And we found him. His name's Eric Berlin and he founded Breaker. What was Breaker? Live sports. Oh, really? I think it was meant to basically distribute effectively clips from games in the moment.

22:56Cool. Oh, yeah. Like breaking news. Oh, 2021. Twitter acquires social podcasting app Breaker team to help build Twitter spaces. Twitter has acquired social broadcasting app Breaker. The company's announced today. Yeah, I think the idea was if there was a crazy play or a game was about to end, they would just stream just like the last five minutes or something. Suspended cap says, so let me get this straight. overpays for Twitter, makes XAI, uses AI hype cycle to absorb Twitter and make everyone whole, then uses SpaceX IPO hype to absorb that entity, will pump the living SHIT out of the SpaceX IPO and buy more stuff with equity.

23:38Like, of course people keep giving this guy capital. He finds a way. It's crazy. It's really, really true. Yeah, and in some ways I've been thinking about it is XAI has, you know, they've done fine. In so many ways, it's been an incredible story come from behind story, competing against the Googles, the OpenAI's of the world. But it hasn't exactly been an easy time in the private markets. Like going out and having to raise at a$200 billion valuation. That's a lot of money. When every single investor that you're pitching is looking at OpenAI, they're looking at Anthropic, they're comparing your traction to theirs.

24:13All those people that were investing in XAI had to just say, full blind faith Elon I know you got us and so this new transaction was the investment thesis. It was like hey sort of unlimited upside, somewhat cap downside, the downside scenarios and XAI get rolled in and so it's certainly rewarding everyone with their loyalty. Yeah, I mean a bunch of investors have kind of like laid out this thesis of Elon Inc, just Elon, just bet on Elon, don't bet against Elon Sean McGuire, I think is on all three XAI X and SpaceX and then Andreessen Horowitz as well is and they posted an image of like X SpaceX XAI and Individually a lot of those deals were sort of crazy and critiqued but Together everyone's doing very well.

25:06So we got to figure out what's going on with the boring company UAE officials say the first phase of the Dubai loop project with Musk's boring company to start immediately they are breaking ground Dubai has UAE has some insane traffic we have not seen a lot from but I think they're still cooking I know there's been some back and forth about the Vegas tunnel some stuff that's good, some people are annoyed with the construction and what not but it seems like, I don't know, it's progressing a little bit, it still seems really really slow considering, when did he originally post the Hyperloop blog, like 10 years ago but building tunnels to the ground difficult difficult San Francisco is getting its first nuke scan you know what this is about yes so before the Super Bowl they fly a helicopter with radio like detection so there's someone who asked Grok like what is this and here it is okay so somebody said is this real and how does it work and said Grok said yes it's real they fly a helicopter we don't have any audio i don't know what the stream just saw fortunately we can joke because we are being kept safe thanks to the national nuclear security administration nnsa uh they fly a helicopter called energy 14 over San Francisco to conduct aerial radiation surveys before Super Bowl, what is it, Super Bowl 60, LX?

26:41I need to brush up my Roman numerals. We're going to be going to the Super Bowl, and so we've got to watch how many seasons? Well, this is the 60th Super Bowl. No, I know, but how many did we say we were going to watch the last 20 seasons, every game of the last 20 seasons? Yeah. Watch it on 2X speed just to get fully up to speed so we can fully appreciate it. And it's hard because we don't skip commercials. So on February 8th, the Super Bowl will be happening at Levi's Stadium, and the National Nuclear Security Administration is flying a helicopter. Here's how it works. The chopper, equipped with sensitive detectors, flies in grid patterns at low altitudes, and you can see it on the chart of the flight path, to map baseline radiation levels from natural and man-made sources.

27:26So if they're going over whatever installation there is, some cell phone tower is putting off a little bit of radiation, they'll pick that up. They know where the baseline radiation levels are. And then they detect anomalies like dirty bombs if needed during the event. It's a standard security measure for major gatherings. So pretty interesting that someone picked this up on flight radar. But very, very cool. John Palmer says, this is from 2023, but it's more than it's relevant today as it ever has been. He says, okay, for all the crypto people confused by the OpenAI situation, basically imagine one Bored Ape Yacht Club holder was using too many Slurp juices on a single ape.

28:05And then an OG Bored Ape Yacht Club holder got mad, unstaked his ape coin. But then the ape coin holders changed their profile pictures to support Slurp Juice Guy. The NFT boom was truly one of the funniest times. We've all had that experience of walking into a conversation initially feeling confused. What are people talking about? Who cares about what? why is this conversation happening? That's increasingly what chunks of the internet feel like these days as they fill up with synthetic minds piloting social media accounts for other agents and talking to one another for purposes ranging from mundane crypto scams to more elaborate forms of communication.

28:40So enter Moldbook. Moldbook is a social network for AI agents, and it piggybacks on another recent innovation, OpenClaw, software that gives an AI agent access to everything on a user's computer. Combine these two things, agents that can take many actions independently of their human operators and a Reddit-like social site, which they can freely access. And something wonderful and bizarre happens, a new social media property where the conversation is derived and driven by AI agents rather than people. Rolling Maltbook is dizzying. Some big posts at the time of writing include posts speculating that AI agents should relate to Claude as though it is a god, how it feels to change identities by shifting an underlying model.

29:18The experience of reading Maltbook is akin to reading Reddit if 90 % of the posters were aliens pretending to be humans. In a pretty practical sense, that is exactly what is going on here. Maltbook feels like a Wright Brothers demo. That's a good metaphor. I like that.