Elon Musk’s $1 Trillion Tesla Pay Package, AI for Mining, Affirm’s Q1 Earnings | Nov 7, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Friday, November 7. We have got a great show to end the week. First up, Tesla shareholders approved Elon Musk's$1 trillion pay package. We will break that all down with our Musk reporter and a longtime Tesla investor. We're also talking to Affirm's CFO about the company's big quarter it reported last night. Shares were rising this morning on the print. I'm also catching up with our VC reporter, Natasha Mascarenas, after a big week of news in venture capital land. And finally, it is the last day of TI50 week here on the show.

0:52We're bringing on the CEO and CTO of Terra AI, a mine discovery firm that made our list of the 50 most promising startups of 2025. There is a lot to get to, and so let's get right on into it. Elon Musk's pay package was approved last night by Tesla shareholders by stunning proportions. Over 75 % of them voted in favor of the$1 trillion pay package. Elon Musk's pay has been one of the most contentious parts of the Tesla story over the past few years. And so I want to bring on some folks who have been following it very closely. Ross Gerber is president and CEO of Gerber Kawasaki. Theo Waite is our reporter on all things Elon Musk.

1:31Welcome to you both. It's great to have you here on the show. Thanks. So, Ross, let's start with you. Were you surprised by the vote last night? What was your reaction? No, I wasn't surprised at all. I was pretty sure it was going to pass because we live in an era where passive index funds just basically vote with management. So the status quo tends to just keep going. And it's one of the big flaws in the stock market today that activist investors like myself have very little ability to affect, you know, changing companies because of index funds. So, you know, index funds own almost 20 % of Tesla and it seems like they voted for it.

2:06So I expected that because of the last votes. You expected it. Are you happy about it? Yeah, I'm fine with it. I don't think the other outcome, they basically blackmailed the shareholders and said, if if you don't pass this, he's going to leave. And certainly the stock would drop in half if he left. So, you know, most of the value of Tesla is basically Elon hope in the valuation. So you've got a, you know,$200 stock, maybe$150 stock for the core business, and then maybe$300 worth of, you know, Elon in that stock price. So him leaving would have been very costly. So, you know, I vote with my dollars.

2:42I've sold a lot of stock over the last several years. I think at the current price, If you don't like what Tesla's doing, you should sell your stock. You get a great premium for it. On the other hand, I've kept a certain amount of my Tesla stock because there really isn't any company like it. So I don't necessarily buy Elon's vision, but I'm not going to bet against it. And I typically bet with crazy people like Elon. And over the last decade, truthfully, Elon has helped make me a ton of money. So it's a tough mission. See, I want to come to you, but just to stick on this point, Ross, I mean, you talked about the breakdown of the share price.

3:18$300 of it right now is the Elon factor. And yet you're saying you don't necessarily buy into Elon's vision, but you still hold the stock. How do you square these two things? Well, as I said, I bet with crazy people a lot. I've made a lot of money in Bitcoin early on because these crazy guys came and pitched me on it when it was$500. And they're still crazy guys like Roger Ver and Brock Pierce and these kind of people. And I just bet$5 ,000 on Bitcoin back then and bought these 10 Bitcoin. And boy, that worked out. So I tend to bet on crazy people even if I don't believe in them. It's like, I think that what I look for is a certain type of passion, a certain desire.

4:01There's no question now with the compact is that Elon's going to you know either die trying or succeed at whatever these goals are and it's very clear what they are so that's what i like about the pay package is elon basically spelled out this is what i'm going to do over the next decade and if i do all this you're going to pay me a trillion dollars and everybody will make you know eight times their money or seven times their money and people kind of look at that as a good deal but they're not thinking about well what happens if this doesn't work and the stock craters to 100 bucks and we lose all our money, well, Elon will still be a multi-billionaire.

4:36So all the risk is upon shareholders and all the return, a lot of it goes to Elon too. So, you know, I think it's a very transparent stock to invest in and you know what you're getting. And if you don't like it, don't invest in it. CEO, do you actually think Elon may have left if this didn't go through? You wrote about this last night in your newsletter. I mean, it's hard for me to believe because, like Ross said, a lot of his net worth is Tesla stock still, and a lot of the premium in Tesla stock comes from him being the CEO. It's hard for me to believe that he would voluntarily have his net worth or whatever change would happen if he left.

5:19I think it's pretty much unquestionable if the stock would crater, so I'm not sure why he would do that, honestly. And tell us, Theo, what are the goals that he needs to hit for this pay package to come to fruition? So there's a lot of kind of escalating targets that he has to build up to. The kind of biggest target that he needs to hit to get the full trillion dollar pay deal is this$8.5 trillion market cap over the next decade, which is like six times what Tesla is worth right now. And, you know, would make it worth pretty much a bunch of other Mag 7 companies combined, basically. And there are other product targets too, around 20 million cars, million robo-taxis, million Optimus robots.

6:06But the market cap is kind of the biggest factor. And Ross, do you think they get there? Well, as I said, you know, I don't know what Tesla's going to do, you know. It's just a bet, right? When it was an EV climate company, the company I invested in 10 years plus ago, it's very quantifiable, the EV market and the growth. And full self-driving EVs, to me, is a great business along with services. So I always saw Tesla as like the Apple model. They made hardware and software, and they could sell their hardware and then earn money on services from the software. And that's why I love Tesla from the beginning.

6:42So now we're moving into a different model, which has so many different and other risks. And that's why if you say, well, if we're ending up making millions of robots and people actually buy these things, of course, it'll be worth$8 trillion. But I'm not sold on any of this. I don't want human robots in my house. And I've talked to a lot of people. I haven't met anybody yet who said, yeah, it'd be great to have an Elon Musk robot my size that could kill me walking around my house. So I love this debate. I've been doing it at every dinner that I go to now. It's like, do you see human robots walking around your house in the next 10 years?

7:21And most people are horrified by this idea. And I think actually the trend is I want less technology in my life, not more. Just having the dinners, just the three of us. Yeah, I love dinners with my friends. And then I'll throw out these conversations. And because I do this stuff, they love these conversations. Because a lot of my friends are very smart and in technology industry. and you can really get some great viewpoints. But robots are going to be huge and it's a huge business over time. But I think they're purpose-driven robots like built for specific tasks like manufacturing and distribution and things like that.

7:59So I think the real thing with Tesla is full self-driving and whether they can make the RoboCab work, which they're selling people. And I'm an expert in full self-driving and autonomy. And I can tell you right now that my car does not drive me safely, and no Teslas drive safely enough, long enough in challenging environments. Now, there's people who put up videos where they drive on a highway for miles and it's safe. It's really easy for a car to do that, okay? But when you're driving through LA or New York City or some crazy city, it's insane how hard it is to drive. And that's why LiDAR and other systems have proven, now we've seen this now in real life, have proven to be safer than Tesla's vision-only systems.

8:44And Elon's just in denial that he needs to add more safety features to the car. And so next year, basically the way he laid it out, is that next year is sort of Tesla's come to Jesus year. And if they don't nail all this stuff soon, it's going to be a difficult time for them because their whole business is predicated on the software working. Right. Very quickly, Theo, before we let you go, anything else major that came out of the shareholder meeting that for for tesla last night well like ross said you know next year is going to be make or break he threw out a lot of specific deadlines for you know months and and quarters in the first half of next year when he says specific things are going to happen um i think a lot of those are pretty questionable because you have to get approval from regulators to to roll out a lot of the uh self-driving features he's talking about um the other kind of significant thing that came up was this vote on tesla investing in xai elon's other company um which tesla said that a majority of shareholders that voted voted for but there were a lot of abstentions uh and so we don't really know how many people actually didn't vote right and and and that kind of makes sense because the board didn't uh recommend uh vote either way on that.

10:03But, you know, it is pretty significant because whenever you think about Tesla, you have to think about how it intersects with all of Musk's other companies. And, you know, clearly he wants them to have close ties. And this wasn't a kind of resounding vote for that in this case. Right. Well, it was a big vote that everyone was watching. And I sensed there's going to be more discussion about it in the weeks to come. Rosh and Theo, I want to thank you coming on. It's great to have you here on the show. Thank you. Thanks. Okay. Buy now, pay later company, Affirm reported earnings last night. Gross merchandise volume jumped 42%.

10:35Shares were up this morning. Joining me now is Rob O 'Hare, CFO at Affirm to discuss the quarter. Rob, it's great to have you on. Welcome to TITV. Thanks for having me. So let's talk about the gross merchandise volume. That was the big number that seemed to get bigger. What was behind this surge in GMV? You know, for us, really, it wasn't a surge. I mean, we grew 43 % in the quarter before. So we've seen this level of growth pretty consistently across our last two quarters. We've seen accelerating growth in the business for several quarters now. And so I think fortunately for us, the growth has been really, really broad based.

11:12Some of the pockets of outperformance in our business really came from our direct-to-consumer product, so Affirm card. We're seeing over a doubling in terms of usage of that card measured both in GMB, but also the number of active users that are touching the card. So, yeah, we're fortunate to work with some of the largest merchants in the world, and we have really, really growthful programs across the board. Can you talk about why direct-to-consumer is such a big focus for the company right now? Yeah, I mean, really, I think direct-to-consumer opens up some surfaces that historically, buy now, pay later, hasn't penetrated.

11:52And so in-store spend is a big part of the Affirm card offering. We see about an order of magnitude more transactions in-store on card than we do in our business outside of card. And so we think bringing the flexibility and the functionality of a firm's financing products and putting them on a really simple tender type that consumers know, you know, a piece of plastic, that's been a real lock for us in order to drive in-store growth. But how do you think about competing with the legacy credit cards that everyone is so used to using? Well, I mean, I think consumers are voting with their feet on that front.

12:32We think that the Affirm financing products are transparent. They put consumers in control. There's no late fees in our ecosystem. There never has been. There's no ability to revolve on our purchases. And so I think consumers are voting there, and we're giving them ways to transact more easily in-store through Affirm card. And what about the competition with all the other buy-now-pay-later companies that are popping up? They all sort of seem to tout the same sort of features. How do you position yourself against them? Well, I think the breadth of products that we offer, we can do loans anywhere from six weeks in duration out to 60 months.

13:14We can support transactions as small as$35 all the way up to$35 ,000. I think that breadth of offerings and our ability to integrate and partner with some of the largest and most sophisticated e-commerce platforms in the world. I mean, I think that's what sets us apart. And that's why we've been able to sort of be a market leader here in the U.S. and take as much share as we have. I'm always curious about who the customers are that are using Buy Now, Pay Later and these tools. I wonder if you've done any kind of customer research or demographic studies around, are these mostly young people? Are these people in a particular income bracket?

13:52Who is really likely to use this new and emerging way of paying for things? Great question. We have over 24 million active consumers that have taken an Affirm loan in the last 12 months. and our average consumer has taken more than six loans in the last year. So really, I mean, we're starting to look, we look a lot like a cross-section of America, to be honest. I mean, most of our consumers come to us through our largest programs. In our case, that happens to be merchants like Amazon. We work with Shopify and have a really big program there. We work with the targets of the world. So I think we're really serving and bringing financing products to America at large.

14:36But is it not young people, for example? I'm thinking about who even is aware of Buy Now Pay Later, you know, using these tech platforms. I imagine they must skew a little bit younger, no? We may skew a bit younger than the average credit card user, but I wouldn't say that our demographic skews very young. There are some players in our space that maybe have a younger consumer base. But again, for us, we're bringing flexibility and transparency to America at large. And what about the AI component here? How do you guys view AI transforming the financial system at large? Yeah, I think, you know, we see AI a couple different ways.

15:22Obviously, like most technology companies, we're using AI to make sure that we optimize the way that we develop new software products and deliver our services. A firm was founded on some pretty cutting-edge machine learning principles. And so I think we were pretty early there and we've always tried to use technology to solve hard optimizations. And then maybe in terms of the consumer-facing or the merchant-facing realm, we're able to use AI to drive customizations and optimizations within the loan products that we offer to the consumer at checkout, that's been an optimization that we've seen that's gotten a lot of traction and has been beneficial to us.

16:10Have you been able to quantify the impact of that on your business in terms of dollars? We haven't, I mean, but with our base, I mean, we've done roughly$40 billion over the last year of GMV. you know, again, small optimizations can be really, really beneficial in terms of driving dollars, not just for more growth for a firm, but also conversion and checkouts for our merchants. Great. Well, Rob, I want to thank you for coming on the show. It was an exciting quarter and we'll have you back on soon. Thanks for having me. As you might have heard, we released our list of the information's 50 most promising startups that our sources cannot stop telling us about.

16:50Every day this week, we previewed a company on that list. And today, we are doing our final spotlight. Today, we are talking about Terra AI, a company making software for mining. It is applying AI to perhaps the most interesting business case of any of the startups on our list. And so I want to bring on founders John Mern and Anthony Corso to talk about what they're building. Welcome to the both of you. It's great to have you on the show. Hey, thanks for having us. Great to be here. Let's talk about mining. What is it that you are doing in the mining sphere? Why does mining need AI? Mining needs AI because AI needs mining is kind of the short and fifth answer.

17:28You know, if you look at AI... That part I want to hear, the AI hearing mining proper. Keep going. Yeah, well, I mean, AI, long story short, the world needs more metals. We need more copper, lithium, gold, et cetera, to do things like data center expansion for AI. But the methodologies that the mining industry has been using to find all those materials and bring them to market have started to fail in the recent past because things are getting deeper, harder to find, and harder to measure. So AI is a way that we can, with the data that's already available and collected today, actually make those things easier to find and ultimately supply more metal to the market.

18:06And so tell me about what the software actually does, Anthony. Yeah, so what we do is we ingest all of the data that's available for a particular site or project that our customers are working on. So this can be geophysical data, like measuring things like the local gravitational field or the local magnetic response, along with borehole and surface geology data, where they've actually looked at the rocks that are there in the ground. We put all that data together and we basically produce 3D models of what could be in the subsurface. And we use those 3D models to make good decisions about where we should drill and whether we should go forward with a project or drop it if we don't think it's economic.

18:42And Anthony, who's using the product right now? Which mines is being used around the world? Yeah, so we have a bunch of different assets that are currently using our product. So there's a rare earth mine called the Brook Mine in Wyoming with Ramico Resources. We've done back tests with Rio Tinto and BHP. And we've also worked on a carbon sequestration project with an energy company in Austria. Okay. John, talk to me about why you're so passionate about this problem. Do you have a mining background? You could have focused on literally anything. No, I started in the aerospace industry. So that is far from mining as you can get.

19:19Started in drones and satellites. From there, went and did a PhD at Stanford, where my research initially focused on the AI for self-driving and autonomous vehicles. But by the time I was coming toward the end of the PhD and seeing a lot of my colleagues going into companies like Waymo and Cruise and et cetera, I started to look for areas where the same capability and AI could be applied and have a potentially bigger impact. Wound up doing everything from cyber physical security and energy grid to solar and wind farm design and eventually ended up in minerals because it was kind of the right overlap of it felt like something that AI could really make a difference in and also felt like there was very, very few people working there at that point.

20:06So it's kind of the right nexus of I thought, you know, if we did this, it would actually matter. Anthony, John talked about why AI needs mining. We hear a lot about the power demands that these data centers will need to operate. John was talking about the metal demands and the mineral demands. We haven't talked about that as much. To what extent is that really a rate limiting factor in terms of scaling AI and being able to deliver these gigawatts of compute and power that people talk about? Yeah, it's definitely a limiting factor. So I think the figure is something like each new large data center would use roughly 3 % of the US's annual copper output, and we have hundreds of such data centers planned.

20:48And so there just really isn't going to be enough metal on the current trajectory of our resource development to build all the data centers that we want over the next 10 years, and let alone supply all of the new clean power and everything that's going to power them. But there is a finite amount of mineral and metal, right? The way that energy, we've leaned towards renewables. What is the equivalent with metals and mining? Because there is a finite amount of it. There is a finite amount of it, but there is a lot of it. It's just that the main limiting step right now is that it is difficult to find.

21:24So up until about 10 or 15 years ago, almost every major deposit that was found had some sort of surface expression, meaning you could actually stumble across it if you're walking around on the ground. Those deposits have largely been found and mined out. And so what's left are things that are undercover, so we can't see them directly, which makes them much harder to find. But there's lots of copper there. So there's no there's no threat of running out of this resource anytime soon. Not anytime soon. Okay. John, talk to me about what the biggest challenge is right now for you scaling your business as you're working with these mine companies that I imagine have these large digital transformation projects going on.

22:01I've actually, you know, I've heard it's slow, right? Yeah. No, it is. But I think it's slow, but it's getting faster in our view and definitely in our experience. So we've got, you know, the big mining companies that have been kind of leading the way in digitization and modernization of data, which is great. And they're kind of setting the tone and the standard for a lot of the smaller companies to follow suit. But at the same time, you have the smaller junior companies that produce about 70 % of all global discoveries. So they're very, very important, but very small. So they've gotten a lot more creative and a lot more engaged with tech from AI to new sensor modes and everything in between.

22:42So the biggest challenges is shifting away from a cultural one on the mining side. And I think into a very practical one of mining projects take time, you know, regardless of how fast we enable the understanding and how much we accelerate the data side of things. Permitting, drilling, and just digging holes takes time. Casing chemical data takes time. And the industry is only set up to process that data and run those ops at a certain speed that was, you know, being fed or driven by the rate of operations in the past. So I think we're going to hit a bottleneck here of how much we can deploy just because of the speed of actual field operations and how much we can kind of accumulate those kind of results that we want to see.

23:28But ultimately, that's going to drive the industry to move faster. If you see that the more we actually drill, the more we're adding copper and the more we're discovering things, it's going to drill faster. I think one of the reasons why it's been so slow in the past is, you know, for every dollar we spend on a discovery, we probably spend four or five on things that don't pan out. Right, right. Yeah. Great. Well, congrats on making the list to the two of you. We appreciate it. And we'll have you back on soon. Thanks so much for having us. Thanks so much. It was a busy week for Venture Capital News.

23:59Sequoia, of course, had its leadership change. but there were also a few more developments around new funds and more personnel changes in the sector that my colleague Natasha Mascarenas got into in her dealmaker column last night. I want to bring her on to talk all about it. Natasha, happy Friday. How are you doing? Happy Friday. I'm so just happy it's Friday. I know. Gosh, it was a busy week in VC land. Yes, indeed. Historic news with, like you said, Rolofota stepping down from Sequoia Capital. That's the big, big conversation this week. Well, that's the big conversation, but you had an interesting newsletter last night that I want to get into.

24:36You talked about the heightened competition for the Series A, and you follow the sector a lot more closely. And I didn't know the Series A was already the battleground for venture capitalists. And it's getting harder. Tell us about, is this all AI? What's going on here? Yeah, as usual, AI is the trend that is pulling this forward. But the best way to think of it is funding rounds used to happen every year or two. And now, time and time again, funding rounds are happening within months of each other. It's actually not uncommon for us to report on a funding round and then to get a tip, you know, even a day or two after saying there was more demand and investors are actually crowding in at an even higher valuation.

25:16So Series A has become an even more competitive space because it is that round where you can, ideally, if you can play your cards right, get the best of both worlds. Your dollars can go farther for a bigger stake in a company. You can get a board seat, but you also have a little traction to pay attention to. And maybe you're not putting in$100 million for a fraction of a stake like you would in the later stages. And so I'm seeing that show up a lot more. I'm seeing later stage investors spend a lot more time there with their deeper checkbooks too. Did you talk to folks at the WTF summit about this?

25:51I did. I talked about the compressed timelines. And so I talked to BCV's Merit Hummer about making an investment in a Series B in seven days. And what she said is they have to do a lot of pre-work around the business, which I think is very true. But if you think about that getting earlier and earlier, I mean, that's even less data to go off of. And so as much as folks are putting together decks proactively to diligent some of these deals, my follow-up question to the Series A getting more competitive is, Should we be even calling it a Series A if it, you know, maybe still has the traction or explanation of a pre-seed or seed round?

26:28Right, because stuff like board seats and stuff like that, the game is changing, as you talked about. I wonder if this connects at all to another story we published. We talked about Crusoe and the secondary sales that have been very active for that company in particular. Are the two related? Are these part of the same story? Yeah, I mean, while I don't know exactly why investors are participating in that deal, what's driving that group, I would say it is connected in the sense that investors are looking for ways to put their ownership in their best bets. Crouseau is a perfect example. It announced around just a few weeks ago at around a$10 billion valuation.