Meta Buys Manus for $2B, Apple’s 2026 Rebirth, Elon Musk’s Failed Goals | Dec 30, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Basfritia. It is Tuesday, December 30th. We are kicking off the show with our AI reporter talking about Meta's big Manus acquisition announced last night. We'll then speak with a CoreWeave and OpenAI investor about how he's thinking about neoclouds and about OpenAI's business going into 2026. We are also kicking off the first installment of our prediction series. The information is publishing a set of long-form articles on what we think will be big stories in 2026. And today's focus will be on Apple revitalizing its AI strategy. And we will wrap with a look at the goals that Elon Musk set for his businesses this year and whether or not he actually reached them.

0:58It's going to be a fun show. So let's get right on into things. Meta is closing out the year with some M &A. The company is buying Manus, the AI agent out of Singapore, operated by a company called Butterfly Effect. Meta is paying$2 billion. Here to talk about that deal is our AI reporter, Stephanie Palazzolo. Steph, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Great to be here. So I remember everyone freaking out about Manus. I think it was earlier in the year. It was the agent. People said, oh my God, it can do everything. I can ask it to do whatever I want. What actually was it good for doing?

1:35And I mean, what happened to it? Because I seem to have heard of it and then kind of stopped, right? Yeah, so essentially Manus is an agent that can take over a user's browser to do tasks like, you know, booking travel, analyzing stocks, making research reports. So kind of just another example of a computer using agent, which we've heard a lot about this year and last year. So as you mentioned, it really gained popularity earlier this year. But it's definitely not the first or only agent out there to go viral. And so I think what made Manus different was that a lot of users thought it was a lot better at doing more complex tasks that might take multiple steps without meeting a lot of human prompting.

2:22Why do you think Meta did this deal? Yeah, so I think the first part is, you know, obviously Meta hasn't been having its best year when it comes to AI. So I think part of this is like, as you've seen in recent months, it is just really in acquisition mode right now. it is picking up any startup that has really good AI talent, which Manus is definitely an example of that. I think second, the idea of agents has obviously been a very big one, both this year and even last year. And so a lot of people think that agents are kind of the holy grail of AI. So being able to have these AI bots, I guess, that can take action on behalf of users on our computers or our devices.

3:03And so Madana said that it wants to continue operating and selling Manus' service, but it also wants to integrate that technology into its business as well. So you can imagine, for instance, a small business owner on WhatsApp using Manus agent technology to respond to customer questions through the WhatsApp app. I think it is interesting, though, just because this, you know, I think on one hand, agents are super hot, but I don't know if this deal was the most natural one in my mind. Why does, I mean, social media agents, right? Like the thing that stood out to me was from the press release. I mean, they talked about Manus' traction in market research and coding functions, which are two areas that, I mean, unless, you know, I know that they must have internal coding that this might help with at Meta.

3:55But I actually feel like, it's more of a talent play. And I wonder how much, to what extent these leaders at Manus and at Butterfly Effect actually baked their way into Alexander Wang's group. I wonder what you think. Yeah, I mean, it's 100 % a talent play. I mean, these folks from Manus, I'm sure, are definitely going to make it into Alexander Wang's org at Meta. And yeah, I agree. It does, you know, initially seem a bit strange just because so much of, you know, Meta's business, whether that's Instagram or Facebook, is centered around human users looking at content. And so that doesn't necessarily seem supernatural for an agent-type product that might be doing research or be writing code, for instance.

4:41But I think at the very least, to your point, this is a big talent get for Meta. I want to turn to a newsletter that you published today. you recapped the biggest stories in AI in 2025. And I seem to think that for 365 days, there were probably 366 big stories because it seems like every day there was just a barrage of news. I want to focus on three inflection points that you talked about in your story. And there was more than that. But the first one came at the start of the year, which was DeepSeek. I wonder what you think the DeepSeek market mayhem, what lasting impact that had on the AI sector and how you think that sort of changes the AI story going into 2026.

5:33Yeah, so I'm sure we can all remember the kind of DeepSeek moment from January this year. I think what was most interesting was, as you mentioned, initially there was so much fear around this moment of people wondering, oh my God, is Chinese AI going to surpass American AI? is there something terribly wrong with American AI companies because how could this you know Chinese startup develop a model that performs so well for so much cheaper than what we've heard from American AI companies but I think you know throughout the year I think a lot of this story has come out and there's obviously a lot more nuance than I think what we originally thought so for instance it probably took a lot more money to train these models than what was initially thought about the DeepSeek models.

6:21But there definitely have been some lasting impacts. I think, you know, first, Chinese AI is definitely a very strong competitor in this space. And even now we see, you know, China is dominating the open source AI space. So any developer or company that's using open source AI is probably using a Chinese AI model, which I think is very different from what we thought at the beginning of this year because a lot of people, you know, there's no way American developers would ever think of using a Chinese model and that just definitely hasn't been the case. And so I think, you know, China's definitely in the AI race and that's something that we've learned many, many times this year starting with the DeepSeek moment.

7:05Well, I also feel like it not necessarily woke people up to open source, but it feels like people started paying attention more to it. And, you know, I mean, we've had, for example, we had the CEO of Pinterest on the show talking about their affinity for open source, and Meta obviously is working in open source. I seem to feel like people started to focus more on that since DeepSeek. I don't know if I'm reading it wrong. Yeah, I mean, open source AI has been a focus for a very long time, but I think there definitely was a doubling down. post-DeepSeek. And I think after DeepSeek came out and became so well-known, a lot of other Chinese companies also came out with open source models.

7:50And so that was good for a lot of developers because now you have so much more choice. It feels like every month or so there's a new model coming out that's beating all the others. And so, yeah, it's been great for open source developers because they have access to so many more options now. So the second inflection point that I want to focus in on is the rise of Google throughout the year. And remind us, I mean, you know, in one or two sentences, what do you attribute the success of for Google this year and all the traction that they've been getting with Gemini? Yeah, I mean, I think it boils down to two things like resources and distribution.

8:30On the resources side, obviously, Google has a ton of compute, a ton of people to throw at these very difficult problems. And so that is one thing that has going for it. I think on the other end, it has distribution, obviously, through so many products that, you know, hundreds of millions, billions of people use every day. So, for instance, like even if you're not a user of the Gemini chatbot, you probably see and interact with Gemini every single day by using Google search and seeing the AI overviews answer. So no matter what, you know, you're interacting with Gemini, with Google models. And I think that has been a really big boon for it this year as well.

9:12Do you think that Gemini overtakes ChatGPT in 2026 in terms of usage and active users? That's a good question. I think a lot of this boils down to just, you know, how much is Google willing to just completely revamp its existing products with AI? So I think right now, for instance, like, yes, I see AI overviews at the top of my screen when I make a Google search, but a lot of the experience is pretty similar. Like, I would kind of need to go pretty out of my way to reach AI mode, which is like the more conversational kind of AI search option that Google provides. So yes, right now I'm interacting with AI models from Google, but it's not really like the main experience.

9:57I think Google kind of just went crazy and was like, we're getting rid of the Google search experience and we're just going to completely, you know, change it out for the Gemini chatbot. I think there's definitely a possibility that, you know, they could match or even beat Chat2BT. But I think as long as they're kind of being a little bit more conservative, kind of keeping those experiences separate because they don't want to, like, mess up the experience for consumers, I feel like there's a pretty good chance that they might still be behind in 2026. Although I think the gap will definitely narrow a lot.

10:29It feels very much like a business school case study, which is that you very much could win in terms of usage tomorrow if you just swapped out the button, as you say, right? I mean, you know, we've seen these screenshots of people saying, well, you know, if the Google search button was just Gemini or if AI mode was everything. I mean, yeah, sure, you could pass ChatGPT tomorrow, but then the business school case study is what happens to your core product, obviously, which is certainly an interesting tradeoff to think about. The third story I want to talk about is these circular financing deals.

11:03We saw a bunch of them, whether it was the OpenAI, Oracle, an NVIDIA triangle. There's also NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Anthropic. You made a point in your newsletter that I thought was kind of interesting, which is that these circular financing deals weren't actually new as of 2025. We've actually been seeing them for a few years now. Yeah, exactly. I think this has become a really big topic in the news this year just because of the sheer size of some of these deals. We see them, in some cases, hundreds of billions of dollars. But yeah, this has been going on for quite a while, ever since, you know, 2019 when Microsoft made its first investment in OpenAI.

11:42That was at least partially made up of cloud credits. But yeah, I think, you know, this has definitely reached like new levels of just the sheer size of these deals this past year. And that's something that is definitely new. And do you think we see more next year? For sure, yeah. I mean, I think this will definitely continue into the new year. I do think that there is more uncertainty around these deals now and more questions around these deals. My colleague Anissa wrote a really great story about how we're going to see more data center delays in 2026. And so I think if we continue seeing these delays or maybe even some cases where a party might back out of a certain deal, that could bring this kind of circular funding deal story crashing down.

12:29But I think at least, you know, for the first half of the year, this will definitely keep on going. Great. Well, Steph, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Stephanie Palazzolo, our AI reporter here at The Information. Okay. Continuing with our 2025 recap, NeoClouds were one class of companies that got a lot of attention this year. Suro Capital holds a big chunk of its fund in CoreWeave, one of those exact companies. I want to bring on Willie Lee, a principal at Suro, to talk more about where he sees that space going. Willie, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. Hey, Akash. It's great to be here.

13:05So I'm excited to talk all about Suro's investments in Neoclouds. But very quickly, I mean, we saw this deal yesterday, Meta acquiring Manus. What did you make of that deal? So I think it actually ties very well to what you're talking about with the Neoclouds and compute spend here. So if you look at what Manus' announcement was when they passed$100 million in ARR, you can see some components of the token usage as well as the virtual computer usage that the company was using. So they announced that they did over 80 million of virtual computers instances. And then they also did over 147 trillion tokens over their lifetime so far.

13:49I think that speaks to a lot of the compute usage that you're seeing directly within the AI world right now is this explosion of token usage, even within startups, showing trillion token usage. And I think it speaks to the demand we're seeing here at Cero for a lot of these companies that are just hungry for compute to make AI work. So you're saying that, I mean, this speaks to the compute usage that Manus has. I just wondered if you had any thoughts on, you know, fit with Meta, how you could see Meta using agents. I mean, you know, we're all making predictions here. Any brainstorms over on your end?

14:31Look, I think when you first see the headline, it's a bit of a head scratcher, right? Because, you know, their use case is not really within the core competency of what you would expect Meta to do. Right. It's social media, largely. Right. But so there's a couple of points that I think is worth stringing together, Kosh. And I think it's a couple of the acquisitions they made during the year, whether that be voice AI on enterprise that they've been doing. And then they've also obviously been one of the leaders within open source models. And I think when you think about open source models and the use case for it, one of the greatest use cases for is on-prem deployments for enterprises.

15:10And I think what you're seeing is meta starting to tiptoe within that area of expanding their enterprise tooling. And I think that Manus is a great example of how they can combine their massive hyperscaler type compute backdrop with what they're trying to actually accomplish within the enterprise open source world there. So I think those combinations is really what they're trying to start to form. But yeah, go ahead, Akal. No, I think that's a great point. And I actually, I didn't think too much about the enterprise buildout that Meta had been embarking on in AI. And so I think that's a good point.

15:48I want to turn to your investment in CoreWeave at Suro. So the company holds a significant chunk of its fund in CoreWeave. And I want to get to the business of Neoclouds. But very quickly, I mean, so you're an investor in CoreWeave through an SPV. Is that right? Correct. Yeah, we're with Magnetar, exactly. Walk me through a little bit of this business of SPVs. I seem to be hearing the term a lot more. Why is it helpful for investors to use SPVs? What are they typically used for? Is this just a way to get access to investments? I mean, help me understand it. So I think what you're seeing within the growth stage investment sphere is a tightening of allocations to certain rounds.

16:29And so you'll see some companies which, and maybe a tightening of allocations is one part, But really, it's that the companies are very focused on execution and investors are having to step up and having to bring the funds. And they want to share some of that work with VCs to bring those funds in. And so you've seen this creation of SPVs in proliferation, especially as these rounds have gotten larger to fill in these types of rounds. And so, yeah, go ahead. Do you think that SPVs become more common in the next year or two? So I think it will become increasingly common. What has been very apparent, I think, especially as you've seen, if you're in New York and you've seen some of the news around SPVs is there's obviously been an arrest within selling pre-IPO SPV stakes.

17:20And so I think it shows some of the dangers of trying to do this as a retail investor. Soro, as a company, has really been trying to provide retail investors access to the private markets. And I think showing the complications of the SPVs in the world there just gives more credence to what Soro is doing, which is trying to provide that curated private market access where we are handling really the diligence of some of these complicated SPVs and the companies. And I think that's a really hard expectation for a retail investor to be able to do all that type of work, which is why you need to have people who really understand this type of market, who understand SPVs, double layer, single layer, and the complications that come with that, because it is an increasingly, I'd say, complex space, and they are becoming increasingly common.

18:07So let's talk about CoreWeave. You know, we've been talking about neoclouds on the show and the bull case for these AI specialized cloud providers is that just like you said, I mean, there's so much demand and the market is growing so quickly that, hey, sure, there's competition, but there is room for neoclouds to come in and maybe not steal share necessarily, but at least generate enough business to be sustainable. That's the bull case. What do you think is the bear case for these neoclouds? Look, I think for the bear case is that you see a huge increase of efficiency within the GPU space. And I think that you'll see a commoditization of the ability to deploy these things where, you know, these hyperscalers can build entire demand on their own.

19:02Now, I don't think that's what we're seeing. I think what we're seeing is even further complication of these setups, because the technology is moving so fast. And how do you rack these efficiently? And you can see in Manus, and some of these other companies trying to optimize compute efficiency is sort of the golden goose. It's their margin, it's how their performance on their product goes. And so I think we are still at the very beginning stages of being able to optimize racking and compute. And all these aspects that the neoclouds have really shown that hyperscalers have struggled with this a little bit.

19:39And so they've found a huge niche providing that type of compute and optimization. Let me ask you a bit of a provocative question here about CoreWeave. Do you think there's a chance that the company gets bought in the next 18 months? I mean, from my view, I seem to think that why wouldn't a cloud provider just snap up a business like CoreWeave to help consolidate these things? Sure, it's certainly possible. I think what you would see is that there's only a handful of suitors that might be interested in trying to buy sort of a diversified cloud approach. You see, you know, Google or you see Microsoft really focusing in on a specific model that they want to support.

20:25And I think, you know, you have Amazon, which is broadening a little bit more on, you know, trying to be a little bit more agnostic on which models they're supporting and optimizing for that type of infrastructure. And so I think you would maybe have a suitor that might be interested in that type of diversified compute infrastructure. Others might not be as interested, but it's certainly possible that a company might be interested in how optimized CoreWeave has been at a scaled approach to compute. And I think there's not that many companies that have really got that sort of scale down, the ability to provide compute at sort of massive LLM scale.

21:03Now, last question for you. You are also investors in OpenAI. What do you think is the biggest risk for OpenAI going into 2026? Look, I think that OpenAI is in a really great position in terms of their consumer segment. They are clearly the de facto leader for consumers to experience what it is to use an LLM. Now, I think one of the things that they're trying to figure out and which Enthrothic has shown that they have a lot of traction there is on the enterprise side. And I think OpenAI is continuing to lean into the consumer side. I think that in 2026, one of the focuses that they'll try to start to do and hopefully that will show continued traction in is being a strong competitor within the enterprise.

21:52And that's such a huge segment. And we've seen the tip of the iceberg with coding adoption. I think you'll continue to see other areas in which it'll be a battlefield and it'll be very competitive for the LLMs to try to, you know, compete on different aspects of the enterprise. And I think OpenAI trying to compete and showing that they can win on the enterprise side, too, will show that, you know, the sky's the limit for the valuation for that type of company. Great. Well, Willie, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Willie Lee, a principal at Suro Capital here on TITV. ITV. Okay, we are kicking off our 2026 prediction series today at the information, which means over the next few days, our reporters will be publishing long form predictions based on their extensive reporting.

22:39Today's prediction is that Apple will reverse its AI slump. I want to bring on Aaron Tilly, our Apple reporter who published that piece to walk us through his thinking. Aaron, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Yeah, thanks for having me. So 2026 is going to be the year of Apple and AI, according to Aaron Tilly. I'm really excited to talk about this. Why do you think that this is going to happen? So, yeah, the way I'm thinking about it is that Apple, so Apple is going to look smart, I think, with their sort of slow and steady approach. That's the way I think about it. And the way I think it's going to be, primarily it's going to happen because the markets will likely continue to turn on sort of the massive data center build outs we've seen with the rest of the tech industry.

23:34And Apple is really the only one that stayed out of that mess. So I think their approach is going to be, they're going to look smart, how they've taken that, you know, not really jumped into the fray there. And, you know, they're going to deliver something in AI that's going to be better than what they had before. And that's going to be enough. I don't think they need to be an AI leader, but just their slow and steady approach is going to look like the right one. Okay. So a lot of this rests on this Siri update that everyone is waiting on. I wonder what you've heard from your sources in terms of progress on this Siri update.

24:15Are there things that you're hearing we can expect? Talk a little bit about that. yeah well i mean they're they're currently testing out an internal and external ai models to power this this improved siri um i think they're going to rely on external models to get this uh to improve a lot of its capabilities uh and i think that's going to be the right approach because Apple has fumbled time and time again with trying to develop something in-house and it really struggling to master a lot of what they need in AI, which is massive compute and massive data sets. And those are two things Apple doesn't have.

25:00So I think relying more on external models was just going to be an inevitability to delivering a better Siri, a better AI experience. And so They're going to lean on that, and I think that will fix some of their problems. Now, one of the things that we've talked about on this show with you is the fact that whatever Apple does, it still makes most of its money on its hardware, obviously, and its iPhones. One of the questions I have for you is, okay, so let's say the Siri update comes out. It's great. Let's say Apple looks smart. Like you said, they've taken a slow and steady approach. They rely on these external partners.

25:41I mean, how much money does this really generate for Apple in the next year or two? Because, I mean, it's not clear to me that people are going to be buying more iPhones, even if Siri is working better, right? Yeah, I don't think it's going to result in some massive wave of growth in the iPhone. I do think they'll develop a strategy where they can make money off of third-party AI. I mean, it's the ecosystem play for Apple where the app store and selling access to their billion users and their billions of devices out in the world that they're going to find some sort of service revenue that they can make money from.

26:25Do you have any ideas on how they could do that at all? Just integration with different AIs. You can choose your AI. You can choose your potentially, this is, I understand, some amount of discussion, potentially choosing your own AI agent powering your Apple. So maybe not necessarily Siri and having, you know, having and making money by offering that access. So just, you know, just somewhat similar to the App Store just through AI. And we obviously know that services is, I think, the fastest growing category of the business. And so that certainly would help it out there. Last question for you.

27:14You didn't talk about this in your predictions, but we've had these executive shuffles at Apple, people stepping away, new people coming in. Do you foresee more of that happening in 2026? Or do you think that they've kind of done their shuffling? I think we're going to see more. I mean, so in February, Apple will be holding its annual shareholder meeting. I think there's going to be some big board changes. Its chairman, Art Levinson, he's going to have to step down now that he's 75 probably. And there's going to be a new chairman. I think there's going to have to be some sort of clarity Apple offers in terms of its succession plans with its CEO.

27:54I don't think it's happening imminently like some do. I think it's still potentially a year or two out, but there's going to be some board changes in Apple. I think it would be smart to provide clarity there to its shareholders and to its employees because there's just a lot of questions swirling around this company and where Tim Cook stands as its CEO. Great. Well, Aaron, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Aaron Tilley, our Apple reporter here at The Information. Okay, Elon Musk was also a central part of many of the biggest stories in Silicon Valley this year. In many ways, Tesla's automotives business took a bit of a backseat to other grand ambitions that Elon has pursued.

28:38My colleague Theo Waite has a column out this week looking at the broader goals that Elon has set for his businesses this year and how they shaped up. I want to bring on Theo to talk all about that. Theo, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Good to be here. so very quickly uh did you see the xai christmas lights in memphis over the holidays i haven't made it over there yet but i think they're still running okay yeah after this well i encourage everyone to check out our our episode that we taped on christmas eve for more context on that let's talk about tesla's automotive business so they've got the fourth quarter delivery figures coming out this Friday, what should we expect?