TWiST News: Bitcoin, Saylor's Microsoft Pitch, and the Delaware-Tesla Fight | E2054

0:00it makes sense for microsoft to be powered by digital capital bitcoin's the best asset you can own now Now, wait, we have to stop there. Jason, you said it's correlated to the stock market. And yet, here, we have Michael Saylor saying that it is an uncorrelated asset. Talk to me about that. Remember, during COVID, we had this spike. Everybody got stimmy checks. Everybody was buying NFTs. Everybody was buying stonks, GameStop. You know, all this, like, Coinbase, Robinhood, all these stimmy checks, prize picks. you know people doing betting online poker whatever everything boomed because there's a lot of cash in the system and then everything came back down so it you know chamat said this says this over and over again like he thought it was going to be an or correlated asset turns out to be a correlated one okay fine it's correlated so this is not true this week in startups is brought to you by open phone create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop.

1:01Twist listeners can get an extra 20 % off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform, giving you one source of truth. Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning for free at netsuite.com slash twist. And Micro One. Micro One is an AI recruitment engine to hire world-class engineers fast. Visit microone.ai slash twist to get 10 free AI interviews and two weeks free per hire. All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis.

1:42With me, my new co-host, Alex Wilhelm. And we are here doing This Week in Startups. We do it live. And we were just talking before we got on the program of how much we love we love youtube and music but we can't share that community now is just telling alex um how much i love a youtubers i just want to give him a shout out here and then we're going to talk about the economics in our little banter here at the top of the show we got a lot to get to a michael saylor and microsoft there's something going on in south korea apparently martial law uh what else is on the docket really quick before we do our banter tesla and the delaware chance to record twiz 500 updates service titans ipo range chinese evs ladies and gentlemen we have 8 000 things to get to but let's do this first let's do this first uh this is a fellow youtuber now that i'm getting into youtube his name is doug and um he does something called the daily doug he's a classical composer and you know my favorite band is dire straits okay and he goes in here i'll just look for i love this is one of my favorite features in youtube is when you hover over the timeline you can see the spikes that's where people went back and played it multiple times so here he's talking about uh tunnel of love one of my favorite songs by dash rates definitely top five you should listen to it um and here he's reacting to a video of it there happens to be a video of this version of tunnel of love and he will so off we go to the fairgrounds so he's Talking about the lyrics, Doug will talk about the notes.

3:19Relative minor. And he rocks out, and he'll smoke a bowl. Good job. I love it. It's fantastic. And look, he dances a little bit. And at night, I put the girls to bed. Yeah. And I will. You know, wife goes to bed, whatever. I don't have a scotch anymore. Not in my bag. But I might have a cigar. I chew on a cigar. Might have something else. and just rock out i love it i just was thinking to myself youtube and this whole unemployment thing and ai we worry about ai taking jobs we worry about youtube i gotta think doug is making a hundred thousand dollars a year doing these videos at a minimum he's making tech camera i gotta think now a classical and he's still doing his classical composing just does like a 10 minute video 20 minute video every day yeah um absolutely fantastic it go look for the deli doug go subscribe to me he's got 419 that's nice the other thing i'll just end on this and i want to get your take on it is i don't like to give charities because i find them inefficient and i read all the stuff maybe i'm wrong people can tell me if i'm wrong but i like to give money directly to people doing the work but it's hard to do this tips i would like a service where i could tip anybody in the world and this is built into youtube so i gave him a hundred bucks when he was doing the live stream because i clicked on subscribe and as you can see i have all of his notifications on and i have notifications for youtube on for a couple of channels fan tv where i give tips um and then this one where i'll give a tip once in a while and instead of giving i still give some money to charity every year but i give thousands of dollars a year in tips on youtube and i just started doing it on tiktok because i think that this makes the world better and i'm part of the whatever one percent one percenters in the world and so if everybody gave a dollar and if like the whales like me give a hundred and you know there's some stuff in between i i frequently when i'm in austin or whatever my daughters i'll take a hundred dollar bill i like or 50s i like 50s for some reason i'll keep 50s in my wallet i'll keep it in my pocket and i'll ask my daughters like when we see a live musician if they're really good and we're at like cafe or something they're playing so you put the 50 bucks in and man people lose their mind right because it's so much more money than they're expecting to get singles maybe a five dollar bill not a 50.

5:45five sometimes they get a 10 sure i'm sure 20 occasionally but i'm like a 50 or a hundy i'm coming over the top because instead of giving a ten thousand dollar donation which i'll do to kimball musk's charity has a really great charity i give to every year global green um i give to mark knofler's charities every year i give to a couple of charities every year i try to steve cv van zandt um has um a music charity where he's teaching kids music rock and roll it's a rock and roll charity uh you know from the sopranos and the street band we're springsteen anyway i'm just really bullish on new jobs being created like this one where people say oh my god people in the music industry can't make money this guy's making at least 10k a month i got a thing maybe more just doing what he loves talking about music yeah it's interesting how much more money there can be in inside revenue streams inside the world of music i mean the best example of this is rihanna and um help me out here fenty i believe is her beauty and clothing brand enormous and rihanna has not dropped an album in 6 000 years we're all starving she's crushing it good for her on the micro scale in youtube in particular there's a band called suicide silence and uh one of the guitar players has a show called like the Garza show.

6:59I think his name's Garza. And it's just like, it's kind of a Joe Rogan for heavy metal, if you will. And this is all the time. His bands come through town. They sit down for an interview, talk about touring, economics, music, and so forth. And it's, it's awesome. And I bet you that show does pretty well for him when his band's not touring. So I love the idea of having alternate revenue streams. And I do love Jason, a low budget stream of one nerd enjoying themselves. And Doug, as a classical composer, I think it's okay to call him a nerd. clearly having a blast and so shout out to him for finding something that he loves i love it it's just great give us a thumbs up if you're watching our youtube click the subscribe button click on all and you get in here uh you're like denier and goodfellas something's saying to me because of my glasses yeah thank you i take it as a compliment founders know that every missed call is a missed opportunity customers don't want to wait they will call someone else if you don't pick up.

7:53But if you use open phone, you're never going to miss another customer call. And guess what? It's super affordable and easy to use. People used to spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars putting in a corporate phone system. And now for just$15 a month, open phone will give you a business phone line and complete control of your destiny. Want to know who's answering customer calls and how they were handled? Open phone can do incredible things like sync with hubspot and give you ai powered call summaries automated responses to ensure you don't miss a single ring well that's all built into open phone and if you've got an existing phone number they will let you port it over at no extra charge get 20 off your first six months what an amazing offer at openphone.com twist that's o-p-e-n-p-h-o-n-e.com slash twist for 20 off for six months all right so um so jason we have so much where do we want to go yeah so it's so much i feel like we should probably start with the micro strategy stuff because i saw comments on the youtube channel before we even started people wanted us to get into that so okay let's start there okay i wanted to start and i'll give my general disclaimer here whenever i see something that doesn't make sense and i have like questions about it i ask questions and i get my hooks into it and i get a little obsessive that's true it is true it is true uh guilty as charged and you know what theranos i was the first person to have um who's the great journalist uh john carrie yes i was the first person to have him on a pod talking about it and you can go look it up and we had a really deep conversation about and i just kept going on that it's a little bit of like all the president's man i got a little investigative journalist in me i did it with tether i did it with xrp i really got into those stories because i'm fascinated when things go awry or there's something weird going on now there's something very peculiar going on with bitcoin right now in that there's one person a wow who has suddenly become the number two holder behind satoshi out of nowhere buying it on loan his name is michael saler he has been at this for four years five years yeah and he's doing it he's got a colorful past he's had some sec stuff in the past that we talked about micro strategies is now worth 90 billion it owns 40 billion in 400 000 over 400 000 bitcoins and he has become incredibly effervescent um in terms of his enthusiasm for bitcoin it has gone over the top now and when i see that and then i see people saying have fun being poor or telling me i'm wrong well i wasn't wrong about theranos i wasn't wrong about tether or xrp i mean i saw these things very clearly in the market i wasn't wrong about nfts i wasn't wrong about icos i mean i saw these disasters as they happened and i just said hey let's ask questions here i am not saying that there is any fraud going on here or any malfeasance i am saying there are very important questions to ask we asked some yesterday and today michael saylor uh started talking about his microsoft pig i think that's the best place to start the story and i've invited michael saylor to come on the pod he's begging to come on all in i invited him here if he wants to come on all in i'm fine with that too he's just got to get two other besties to vote yes i vote yes if he gets chaman sacks or freeberg to vote yes he's halfway there he's like two-thirds of the way there yeah by the by the way michael we've emailed you several times i believe in dm so you know we'd love to have you on that's not an idle offer we will no and i have no animosity towards him and we own seven figures in bitcoin now people gonna make fun of me your wife but it's not making fun of me my wife and i discussed it she said i think we should buy something she also bought our houses and made a killing my wife is an incredibly astute smart person who went to an ivy league school who truth be told is smarter than me i might be more clever i might be more of a hustler i might have my own skill set she's when it comes to brains she's smarter very proud of the fact that she makes great trades for us all the time sometimes i go into my wife's office at home and i look at her degrees on the wall and i'm like crap i should get some of those i mean she's better looking and smarter than i i'm funnier okay that's actually that's what i bring to my marriage too i just make jokes i make jokes so why do people put up with us anyways uh it was a good trade seven figures in bitcoin in your portfolio correct and i had bought some as well my uh thing got hacked the one i was part of got hacked i forgot the name of it it wasn't mount gox it was another one btc dash e back in the day i can't remember so long ago i wrote one of the first articles about bitcoin in 2011 not bad and i had bitcoin on this podcast but i wanted to go through the deck and his pitch to microsoft yeah because this was fascinating to me but do you have anything else before i teed this up and i gave my little disclaimer questions from you um no i i think i'm ready to go through the the slide deck i pulled out a couple of my favorite slides jason but i'm going to go ahead and pull up the actual full presentation so we can walk through it and i'll screen share it for us fair enough sounds great sounds great and this is a pitch michael saler made recently to the board of microsoft all right no when he did this exactly but he walked through it on twitter yes and he was on cnbc this morning in the studio saying all of these companies should start moving their treasuries to move their treasuries to bitcoin and he claimed microsoft would add not one not two but three trillion dollars in market cap three trillion he would add an nvidia or an apple to microsoft if they went all in on bitcoin that's his pitch to them here's the pitch and I have to say from the get I'm open to hearing the pitch I love the fact that he is an open book let's go through the deck do you want me to walk us through the deck Jason or would you like us to play the Michael Saylor clip of him going through the deck two different ways to go about this that's actually that's actually a good idea if we play him put it on 1.5 speed and then I'll just say pause okay when I think we should pause and discuss it Microsoft can't afford to miss the next technology wave, and Bitcoin is that wave.

14:40Bitcoin represents the greatest digital transformation of the 21st century. Hit pause. Okay, go back to that slide for a second. And if you scroll back, what he's doing from the get-go is using fear with Microsoft. i just want to point out that microsoft is one of the most amazing success stories michael sailor this is true persuasion here he's using fear now let's scroll back here to that first slide um if you go back just a wee bit thank you now microsoft can't afford to miss the next technology wave why alex is it so important to start with fear well i mean people respond to with microsoft oh because they missed mobile and so i think they're terrified about missing the next technology wave that's why they're investing so much in ai so i think this is aimed directly at the fear that their investors have that they might miss the next generation and therefore fall behind so from the get-go michael saylor is doing one of the most persuasive things you could ever do i do this as a psychology major i studied persuasion i started influence i've read every book on persuasion or influence uh some people might say i have people who follow me um so maybe on the margins i have been persuasive in my career personal computing is the first technology wave he points out microsoft defined it graphical user interface microsoft almost missed it but defined it with windows internet microsoft did not miss it because of um netscape they built the internet explorer they almost went too hard at that and got a justice department but they didn't create yahoo or google they did miss it and he didn't put on here social media he could have added social media they did miss so they got personal computer they got graphical user interface they kind of half got internet i won't i'll put that in the thing that they didn't get right bing they didn't get and social media they didn't get so two for two mobile computing huge miss cloud computing it was a miss but they saved it with azure yes give that as one they got artificial intelligence they didn't do it internally but they saved it with the open ai deal yep and then here we are with digital capital interesting way to frame it it's really bitcoin but he's going to say digital capital and he's saying hey you might miss it four to seven they did not miss they now so let's keep going but to be clear though if they had missed cloud computing and hadn't saved it with azure microsoft would be in the absolute dustbin because that means means they wouldn't have gotten ai because open ai's deal came to be because they had azure so this stuff can be added anyways um shall we play yeah yeah please afford to miss the next technology wave okay point is that wave bitcoin represents the greatest digital transformation of the 21st century he's so good at this in that next slide he's taken the market caps if you just go back a little bit scrub back just an inch to the list of all the companies he's showing a list of the greatest companies in the world or the greatest assets right so gold is at what trillion up there 18.25 he's got gold at 18.25 then he's got nvidia apple microsoft amazon alphabet google bitcoin saudi aramco silver and meta so this is really interesting what another persuasive technique he's now done something which in um persuasion and techniques like this would be framing and it would be equivalency he's now told you that commodities like gold and silver are the same as technology companies and corporations.

18:33They are two very different things, aren't they? One is a natural resource. One is a company that provides products or services created by humans to other humans and corporations. These are very different things. They're very different things. And also, I'll just point out before we start going again, it says most useful, which if you are a Bitcoin hodler, strikes me as a slightly odd way to frame it because you don't use it you hold it so and then very subtly on here he has the annual reoccurring revenue no annual run rate so i think that's annual rate of return annual rate of return for microsoft at 18 ars use many ways yes he's got bitcoin at 62 and so this is where bitcoin people can be really cheeky and clever they can go from the start of bitcoin when it was less than a fraction of a penny not sure actually what the actual first coins went for but you know it was it was in the pennies or less so he can start with that and then have a compounded rate on average of 62 that may not that previous 62 number somebody can check me in the in the notes please what is the annual rate of return for bitcoin in the last five years versus the last i guess it's been around 12 or 14 years something like that or if you want to invert the experiment jason you could say actually what we should do is we should take microsoft's market cap arr and string it all the way back to when it was just incorporated versus when it went public because that that value appreciation is lost when you start matters right yes when you start really matters for this so it's persuasive company yes yes this is persuasive but to me it's uh cheeky i think jason might be underselling my view about this slightly okay so i'm saying it's cheeky what would the most cynical take on this be oh this is blatantly manipulative and that as you watch this presentation he goes through it so fast that no one has a chance to actually read the screens and most people don't do what we do which is pull up the actual presentation go through each slide and think about it and so you just get blasted with bitcoin is the way right and by the way this is a um hypnosis technique a stage hypnosis technique he doesn't he may not know he's doing it i'm assuming he does it but uh this was l ron hubbard's uh one of his major techniques which he got from hypnosis i'm not gonna say where he got it from because i don't want it to make the zero words but it's called going down the rabbit hole and um uh down the rabbit hole he wrote battlefield right yeah i read that before i knew about science so there is uh a down the hypnosis rabbit hole technique which is you um savings very quickly and you put a bunch of acronyms in and what happens is if you say a bunch of truths or truisms so facts or truism you know a stitch in time saves nine two birds in the hands worth one in the bush whatever it is right early bird catches the verb and then you put acronyms in there so the way l ron hubbard did this is he would say kst keep scientology a ksg keep scientology going or whatever you put acronyms in there and what it does is it just subtly puts the it implants opinions as facts when they're alongside truisms interesting so if i said to you stitch in time is worth nine if you had bought bitcoin early you would be at 62 percent arr and of course as you know a bird in the hand is where two in the bush so you might as well get your bitcoin now rather than wait and get greedy yeah now i've said a bunch of truisms and that 62 percent you know might slide in there you don't question it but here he says it's the seventh largest asset okay he hasn't included other assets in here i don't see other assets in here like land real estate yeah real estate land commercial real estate um plutonium i don't know what else is oil yeah it isn't the seventh largest asset there's many other assets that aren't included in here so if you're going to include gold and silver you would have to include corn you'd have to include i would love to know the value of all corn today that i have no idea what that is but like another commodity who knows well on the cnbc clip which we'll get to he talks about soybeans so if we're going to talk about soybeans i also want to know the whole value of pig bellies you know which is another commodity that everyone was talking about seven large sasset fastest growing okay okay we can debate that i don't think that's necessarily the fastest growing most popular i think the most popular microsoft has way more individual holders through index funds yeah uber is more popular i think i mean airbnb probably more popular i don't know more popular how frequency of use um most interesting is it the most interesting most digital can we get that does mean most digital dos equis ad in here about the most interesting commodity in the world most useful you pointed that out that's ridiculous most global i would say gold and silver are more global but okay i mean there's it's definitely not the most global because other assets are allowed in more countries and so the block so we've already pointed out that he is just sending you a bunch of information really fast keep going all right let's keep going to that wave and take two hours Bitcoin represents the greatest digital transformation of the 21st century.

24:05It represents digital capital. The global wealth is distributed across assets that provide utility and others that preserve capital. But risk is destroying trillions of dollars of that capital every single year. Sorry, I'll go back. There we go. The risk, I mean, all right. so he's going very fast here and he's talking about assets right that don't go down and that don't get destroyed so he's now saying bitcoin could never go down or get destroyed i think is what he's implying right is that your takeaway from that slide i'm just yes but also i'm trying to sort out what this is trying to show because these are very different categories of things regulation constrains activity competition theoretically spurs it i don't know like expert war and crime tenants traffic these are all ways to make money i don't so i guess what he's saying with this is all of these things culture shock obsolescence incompetence cat catastrophe are risk factors on the previous assets on the previous slide okay gold or real estate but these are not the bitcoin is magically not taxable it's not a currency it doesn't have have catastrophes it doesn't have risks of obsolescence it can't be impacted by energy don't have any impact on it of course it does the whole bump is the trump bump right now and the whole um dive in cryptocurrency people were saying was because of overregulation so you can't really have it both ways here you can't say it's immune when it's correlated with the stock market and it's correlated with political activity even when it's even like correlated with future political you know implied political activities in the future so this is a very weird slide let's keep going let's keep going of that capital every single year and investors are turning to digital capital in the form of bitcoin in order to avoid that risk digital capital is economically and technically superior to physical capital and it represents a revolutionary advance in capital preservation the asset class itself is growing from trillions to hundreds of trillions of dollars and it is backed by digital power along with political and economic power it makes sense for microsoft to be let's go back one little bit there the previous slide okay bitcoin is secured by digital political and economic power 20 gigawatts 622 million crypto users 400 million btc holders 850 billion invested 700 x hash okay the way that i understand this slide is that people view bitcoin's security and we talked about this yesterday that it's never been hacked and has maintained its independence so the more uh the network can sue yeah the more power consuming will compute the safer it is i would say bigger too big to fail because the network is so large yeah i i agree with the internet i kind of like this slide actually i would say differently but okay i get it this slide makes sense to me this slide is good the thing that's not good is this bit of stock art here and the preceding uh that bit of stock art i just want to go talk to them and be like skyscraper yeah that's the moon kind of it's ugly and just gross all right uh shall we keep going yeah political and economic power it makes sense for microsoft to be powered by digital capital bitcoin's the best asset you can own now wait we have to stop there because jason you said you said it's correlated to the stock market and yet here we have michael saylor saying that it is an uncorrelated asset talk to me about that well i mean if we were to put remember during uh covid we had this like spike everybody got stimmy checks everybody's buying nfts everybody's buying stonks game stop you know all this like coinbase robin hood all these stimmy checks uh prize picks you know people doing betting online poker whatever everything boomed because there's a lot of cash in the system and then everything came back down so it you know chamat said this says this over and over again like he thought it was going to be an or correlated asset turns out be a correlated one okay fine it's correlated well so this is not true yeah i think the most generous thing you can say is this is completely false and everybody thinks the opposite or history has proven the opposite it is the ultimate correlated asset because people buy bitcoin when they feel speculative when they have excess money when they have less money and they've got to pay down debt or they lose their job they sell their bitcoin they sell their stocks they empty their savings account to pay for their life expenses yes you can't eat digital currency we're still manning this both ways i just said the last slide was brilliant yes the network is too big to fail i agree with that that was my big question that was why i thought bitcoin could fail is the network could be compromised and political issues and it is true sailors right i think i was right pointing this out that those were the probably the two biggest risk factors were geopolitical you know taxation as i'll put that in one bundle regulation and then on the other side hacking somebody taking control of the network the network being compromised the network failing because nobody wants to put servers and energy towards it that would be another reason right i think a lot of crypto projects people just don't put up servers and spend money maintaining servers to be part of the network.

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The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash twist that's netsuite.com slash twist okay let's go best asset you can own the numbers speak for themselves it makes a lot more sense to buy bitcoin than to buy your own stock back or to hold bitcoin rather than holding bonds if you're going to outperform you're going to need bitcoin and those bonds let's go back there okay we got okay so again all of this is based on this 62 annual um return rate i think we have to question that so this is the 62 versus uh the microsoft 18 then he i built oh this is since august 2020 just as a data point and then okay so this is performance of bitcoin since then not micro strategy got it okay great and then here again he's picking like probably when bitcoin crashed but okay and this is since microstrategy adopted this bitcoin strategy bitcoin versus microsoft and then oh this is comparative to the s p because this is compared to the s p okay that's why this is 48 not 62 and that's why that's four not 18 okay i mean i get that bonds are down right we understand that we get why gold is down there's other opportunities people don't want to be in gold but gold is since surge so if you were to put this in the last year gold has gone parabolic i think in the last year so anyway okay so this is where time horizons matter and he's not showing a chart he's doing selective framing if you did a chart here you know and you zoomed it out to the start of bitcoin and the start of microsoft you put year zero of microsoft year zero of bitcoin as a starting point that would be a more intellectually honest exercise here so it's impossible for us to tell what's reality here but you should question this and somebody should make a chart that you know refutes this and it gives a more intellectually honest view of it also this is through november 27th just as a dig a point so this data is not inclusive of this week in case people are handicapping at home uh here we are comparing microstrategy to various magnificent seven companies of course here is the nvidia spike that we've seen recently tesla's done quite well and then over here we see microsoft and then amazon um kind of the sick horse of the mag seven okay all right let's keep going if you're going to outperform you're going to need bitcoin and those bonds are undermining your options market and your equity liquidity luckily you have an alternative we're going to come back to this jason in the cnbc section but one thing that he talks about is how you can hold commodities as a public company and the idea is that you shouldn't have anything on your balance sheet but bitcoin and so that's what he's talking about here and we'll get more into that everyone in just a second public support for bitcoin is surging as is political support as is support for the u.s Bitcoin strategic reserve as is wall street support and the president of the United States says never sell your Bitcoin that's why we're entering year one of the crypto Renaissance and you have a choice to make cling to the past or embrace the future pause that yeah I was I was literally going to click so Jason why did this slide catch your eye because I have my thoughts okay so this is again you're trying to uh scare people it's a manipulation tactic right you're saying microsoft has to you're framing this as a binary choice that nobody would say cling to the past everybody say embrace the future but i could reframe this and say stick to what got you here or follow the crowds okay stick to what got you here is make great products and services that delight customers and businesses at high margins that's what got microsoft and don't follow friends and manias like tulips so i just did the same framing with just different words and i reversed it see how easy that is folks super easy also everybody keep in mind that two of the things that are mentioned here buybacks and dividends are just the two pillars of traditional shareholder return apart from share price appreciation a buyback is when you repurchase your own stock constrains your overall float makes each share worth more and dividends is literally a cash disbursement to equity holders in the company people like buybacks and dividends jason who doesn't want to have a higher percentage of ownership in a company and income um and i bring that up because i want to talk after this about how the view that sailor has to me is um it only does one thing and i want to talk about why that matters but let's keep going for now we only have another option here clinging to the past in his mind where is m &a r &d in this as an option i would make the argument that buybacks and dividends yeah are things people do when r &d and m &a is either you know uh churning great you know it's cranking rather so if if your m &a is cranking and you're buying youtube and whatsapp and there's nothing left to buy got it or um and by the way they did mna right i believe powerpoint and excel were mna back in the day part of the office suite um and they bought minecraft and they didn't they made the xbox so that would be r &d hololens halo lens i think that was yeah r &d was r &d connect etc but i bought other things that were purchases that they made an mna versus r &d but anyway 49 of open ai pretty good deal pretty good deal so m &a and r &d are things that created all these new product lines they have whether it's xbox or azure yep okay so you notice that that's conveniently left out here as an option for money yes so cash sitting on the balance sheet could go to a buyback dividends bitcoin mna or r d and when you frame it like that or it could be in making a product or service better which you could say is r d but you could also just say like hiring better more talented people too so talent and uh talent acquisition and um professional development is another one investing in your people in other words so okay But my point was, and you nailed it for me, Jason, you underscore what I was trying to get at, is that in Saylor's view, everything else is merely subsidiary or supportive to purchasing more Bitcoin.

37:55And that to me is a relatively narrow approach. And we'll get to that in a slide that's coming up in just a second. Divest billions of dollars and slow your growth rate. Invest billions of dollars and accelerate your growth rate. You've surrendered hundreds of billions of dollars of capital over the past five years. and you've just amplified the risks that your own shareholders face if you want to escape that vicious cycle you're going to need an asset without counterparty risk what if you could buy a hundred billion dollar company growing faster than microsoft for one times revenue pause what if you could keep doing i think you just described micro strategies uh right they're worth 80 90 billion yes he said they're growing at 60 their revenue though is in the last quarter their their income revenue is not one times revenue so he's talking about bitcoin as if it was a car uh not a distributed project yeah open source project with no ownership no central authority and that's where this gets a little bit crazy is he conflating market cap with revenue jason i'm confused by this i think he's saying revenue is the increase in the value of the bitcoin and this is what people have been criticizing about how micro strategies is doing their accounting yeah if bitcoin goes up they consider that revenue if it goes down they consider it a loss which would be you know i'm trying to think if that makes sense you know if it's a balance sheet asset or revenue yeah yeah hard to know okay yeah so some of this is just is just vague enough that you can't really vet it.

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40:51And all you have to do is tell MicroOne what you're looking for, and then they help you find an engineer in 48 hours or less. So here's your call to action. Visit microone.ai slash twist to instantly ramp up your product team and twist listeners get two weeks of free development per hire plus 10 free AI interviews. That's microone.ai slash twist. M-I-C-R-O, the number one dot AI slash twist. Microone dot AI slash twist. what if you could keep doing it every single year it's time for microsoft to evaluate what if you can make 60 a year forever yeah dude it doesn't go down it only ever goes up but okay we're gonna guys we're just gonna play the rest of this clip then we're gonna talk about it yeah options we've created an open source model you can plug in your own assumptions fair enough you can convert your cash flows and your dividends and your buybacks and your debt into bitcoin if you do that you'll add hundreds of dollars to the stock price you can create trillions of dollars of enterprise value 4.9 trillion you can strip away risk from your shareholders and you can go back to that slide okay i'm sorry i just stopped i know it's okay bitcoin decreases microsoft enterprise value at risk microsoft is currently levered to forward earnings expectations to an extremely unhealthy degree so the way that i read this just everyone who's watching and doesn't see the screen it shows uh five bar charts and it shows that Microsoft's current value is predicated on its earnings versus its assets.

42:37Now he calls those expectations as a way to cast fear on them, but having a price earnings ratio, Jason, isn't a bad thing. And Microsoft being a software company does own things, servers, you know, buildings and so forth. But most of the value Jason is in its cash flows, it's business. And he wants to convert that into a company more predicated on the ownership of commodities but when they buy bonds right if let's say microsoft's treasury owns bonds with their cash right or they own equity and other businesses they pass through to some level of ownership so i guess in this you could also say microsoft should instead of paying dividends buy gold buy real estate and just sit on it well yes i think i think there are i mean i understand what he's saying here yeah but i don't know that this is necessarily a risk what you're talking about is asset heavy versus asset light yes so now you're running an asset light organization so you're taking all of the profits instead of giving them to your shareholders and appealing to shareholders who want dividends who want cash back from their retirements or their endowments etc and you're saying to people with large sums of money instead of increasing the value of our shares and giving you dividends along the way by making great products and services and buying back our shares and giving dividends instead of that deal here's another deal we just own bitcoin we own this asset and you own that asset but we control it those people have access to just buy bitcoin themselves so if you were a giant hedge fund if you were a giant retirement you're calipers if you're buying an index fund if you're an index fund buying the index yeah and you know microsoft is whatever five ten percent of the index or whatever wouldn't you have the ability to just buy bitcoin or real estate directly and not have this intermediary yes and i'm gonna go ahead and blend those i'm gonna stop sharing so we can go over to the cnbc quote because i i i have his answer to that jason so let me let me explain that so we pulled the transcript from his cnbc appearance from this morning and he explained what a bitcoin treasury company does which is what he says his company is.

44:56So he says, we're securitizing Bitcoin. Primarily, our job is to bridge the traditional capital markets that want bonds, or they want fixed income, or they want equity, or they want options. And we plug that into the crypto economy and we use Bitcoin as the vehicle to do that. So the argument, as far as I can tell from what he said this morning, is that people want other ways to access Bitcoin who cannot purchase it in the way that you describe i still do not understand that that's not true i mean you're literally talking about the most sophisticated players in the world you don't think the cfo of microsoft and the people who are investors in microsoft yeah have access to bitcoin or the bitcoin ets didn't you say you alex wilhelm yes sir directly through your schwab account or your robin hood account whatever you use i don't know what your jam is each right you have access to bitcoin etfs not only do i have access to bitcoin etfs i have access to a plethora of incredibly low-cost bitcoin etfs that have enterprise grade custody via coinbase or i can go to coinbase or i can go to kraken or bybit or uh gemini isn't gemini the the winklev brothers here's the thing i don't think anyone the reason people are so up in arms about us asking these questions specifically me obsessing over this that's okay the last week i'm okay with that i'm just asking questions folks i think the reason people are so upset is that i am being a voice of reason and making completely valid counter argument to his argument yep that you should just buy it direct instead of participating in micro strategies it's such a clear argument that the only way to stop it is to insult me personally and then when presented with the fact that i'm also long bitcoin people will double down and attack me and say just have him on the show and i said he can come on the show anytime yes and then they say well the other podcast my girlfriend always goes to a different high school ladies and gentlemen there's always a different reason yes here of why the valid observation that we just made just multiple valid observations that it's wrong and i'll tell you why if you own bitcoin which we do both of us not insignificant so we believe in it i'm not going to speak for you but just facts are facts here we both believe in it obviously or we wouldn't own it the fact that we're taking the leading hyper of bitcoin who is trying to get the third or fourth largest company in the world with some of the largest amount of cash he's trying to go and pressure them into buying bitcoin and he's rewarding other public companies that are buying bitcoin by going on cnbc and giving them kudos and then recreating them and giving them kudos people's belief is that what we're doing is limiting the pressure on the sell side oh interesting he is the buy side right now if if we say hey this doesn't make sense don't give him more money to do this outrageous stuff just buy it directly if you're so inclined then there's nobody in the market with 5 billion or 10 billion like he just did uh-huh to run the price up yep and then you don't get to liquidate your preference now your position remember in order for him to buy it there's some amount being mine but he has to be buying other people's holdings he is other people have to be clearing their position right there's not just to be clear if he's buying a billion dollars a day which he did the other week how much bitcoin new bitcoin is produced by miners and are they willing to sell it anyway so he's got to be by other people are clearing their position my belief and what i heard from the back channel is ogs are clearing their position to him and they're delighted by it because they think this is a high water mark it will come back down to 50 and they'll buy in again and just rinse and repeat right just ride the waves up and down and yeah of course the the wave seems to be higher highs yeah and that does seem to do a lot of that and and godspeed for everyone who likes to ride the volatility roller coaster i want to just say one more thing about this because i did read the whole i watched the cnbc clip twice pulled the transcript and i found one section that was very interesting to me jason i'm going to quote mr sailor and i want you to find where i think the ball is being hidden in this particular quote by the way he also said earlier that due to the capped nature of bitcoin quote you can expect it to keep going up um but anyways here's uh sailor quote we sold one and a half billion dollars worth of stock backed by 500 million worth of Bitcoin.

49:56We bought back 1.5 billion of Bitcoin. We captured nearly a billion dollar gain in the arbitrage. That we can do with equity day by day. When we do it with debt, we issue$3 billion of debt. That's backed by$600 million of Bitcoin that comes due in five years. We pay zero interest. We buy$3 billion of Bitcoin. We capture 2.4 billion in the arbitrage gain upfront. But then over the course of the five years, we double or we quadruple the investment because we're buying an asset. which is appreciating faster than the asset. I think he means than any other asset. So I figured out, I read this like five times.

50:32When he says we sold, and we sold 2 billion and got back a billion and a half, it's the net asset value thing. Essentially, right now their stock is worth more than their Bitcoin, so they can sell that, and then they can buy more, and then they get more rewarded. So the sucker at the table is the person buying MSTR, in this case. because he's saying he's arbing the mr shareholders if you buy mstr if he sells you at 80 billion and he's got 40 billion in nav the net asset value the value of the bitcoin sure then you're the sucker because you're buying something at two times the price and the only way to say you're not a sucker is if bitcoin doubles and fills that in versus you buying the smp or the qqq or whatever other asset you were going to buy that would grow at seven to 15 percent a year five to 15 percent a year uh so there's a lot of risk here uh all of this is predicated on a 60 growth rate uh continuing and so well if you trust michael saylor more than you trust yourself to buy bitcoin then bet on michael saylor what one i think some people might i mean maybe he's so audacious that if you want to go with the most audacious craziest all-in chips person maybe that's the best the better bet is to buy mr maybe and maybe there's a chance you can appreciate faster than bitcoin maybe one last thing though sailor wants to take microsoft and essentially use it the whole company according to his pitch you know dividends cash flows buyback all the money to purchase bitcoin why do anything why not just buy bitcoin and then that was kind of where i thought this hypothesis kind of gisted down to what it boiled down to and then i realized that's what he's doing he's turned his whole company into simply a vehicle to purchase more bitcoin well i don't know man there's other stuff i like to do like i like to work with other people i like to build things i like to make shows i like to when i was at crunch space it was great to do that stuff like i don't know there's more to life than just buying one asset and holding on to it yeah i mean there's and just to put everything in perspective this is all going to come to a head in the coming years because there's going to be 21 million bitcoins created eventually right that's always been the plan there's 900 or so created a day i heard somebody in the there's two different numbers in the chat room of people saying how many bitcoins are getting mined every day but let's say it's under a thousand um so there's a hundred million being made a day if he's buying a billion in a day he's got to get 900 million that are not we're not mine that day at least um so there are like over two million coins left to be mine he's gonna buy up more than that i mean this is um yeah i'm trying to sort out that number for you uh the the the the really interesting comments i'll just go to the comments here i think a really interesting comment here is why wasn't he doing this bradley anderson from x says why wasn't he buying at this volume when it was a 30k or 40k or 50k yeah that's a good point i wonder why he wasn't going all in at that point maybe there wasn't enough hype mania to do the convertible notes at that time i don't know well i think there's been as the share price of microstrategy has risen quite a lot in the last year he's had more access to more capital right the sums are getting larger so there's there's a there's an amplification effect going on and you know what's really nice about this jason it is a free market and so if people wish to buy into the micro strategy effort godspeed i don't think you and i are going to stop holding or buying bitcoin and instead buy micro strategy but it appears according to lots of folks on the internet that they are so may our concerns be overblown may their bags be large and may everyone make a lot of money that's where that's where i kind of leave this i don't get it but hey you know what free country free work um yeah and and come on the pod anytime uh sailor if we got something wrong by all means tweet it we'll retweet it we'll engage you on x he's at alex i'm at jason the show is at at twi startup so we're totally fine being wrong and asking questions um yeah and i'm reading the chat in real time now so we have said just so we're clear we're both long bitcoin we're not using him a fraud or anything like that nope we do think the pitch is i think the pitch is crazy um and it's incredibly high risk um and i think you should own your bitcoin yourself that's all yeah and also i just i i would love to get uh amy hood is the cfo of microsoft right memory serves um i would love to get amy's take on this because i have to say she's been really solid at microsoft in my view so i would be actually legitimately not kidding like i would love to know like what does the cfo of a multi-trillion dollar company think of something like this because we're only getting yeah one side mike roche is saying this is like watching your brother-in-law everything is wrong with bitcoin and they know how to fix it it's insufferable no i'm not saying i'm the expert on bitcoin i mean i've been covering it since 2011 i've owned it since 100 i am in no way saying i'm an expert on it i obviously uh have bought it said it and forget it and i don't spend my time doing this uh you know all day long i think it's a good to have one two three four percent maybe every time i see one of these bitcoin podcasts jason two percent yeah they're saying the same things they're like bitcoin is great and then the other host is like yeah bitcoin's great and i'm like dope what else you got like what do you do at a bitcoin conference other than walk around going hodl i don't know i mean jesus christ yeah i mean i think the thing that would have broken bitcoin out is if it actually had use cases other than you know this store of value and you know digital gold kind of situation and the scarcity wasn't the main feature but apparently that's the main feature it would have been really cool if you could like build more on it but i guess the other protocols are much better at that solana ethereum except yeah especially if you look at like uh base from coin base and so forth and all the lts all right anyways um jason so possible ways to go next south korean martial law and the denouement they're up the brouhaha in delaware or we can riff into the service titan ipo price range where does your heart desire what do you think what is the audience what do you think is the most important story here where we can add the most value yeah well i i kind of have a a somewhat contrary view of the delaware court situation so maybe we should go there all right um we have memes from jason we have uh recaps but why don't we start jason with uh your description of what the court said in january that doth no no you you you you tee up the story because you got the facts right there it'd be easier and i'll just give the color commentary on it all right so jason edelman musk tesla well-known relationship long-term founder had a relatively aggressive compensation package that was set up to be hit with certain milestones as tesla grew and appreciated in value he would make more money this was the largest pay package in corporate history at least that i'm aware of and was controversial for its size two of these schools of thought here well also controversial because people thought it was unobtainable that was the key thing people thought it was stupid i mean there's multiple cnbc clips of everybody's sort of describing and saying like this is not tied to reality a car company has never been this big therefore giving somebody you know billions of dollars in award compensation he has to make everybody who owns a share in this company you know give them 95 of the value and he retains 5 or whatever the the percentage was so i bill gurley many other people said if only compensation uber ceo compensation microsoft google sundar uh satya if only everybody's comp was this way it would be the best possible shareholder alignment on the planet no cash you only get your options if the market cap hits a certain number the revenue hits a certain number this way the incentives are perfectly aligned how many times do we see a stock go sideways and the ceo just keeps getting more and more options dumped on their head and more and more calm 30 40 50 million dollars in salary yep billions of dollars in stock awards and they don't make the stock go up so from jim kramer to bill gurley myself everybody it's just like this is the perfect award this should be the gold standards in rewards and it's pretty obvious here that there are political things at play in my mind hold on hold on do you want to do you want me to see this up or do i see it up sure okay yeah so so there's a little bit of political stuff here and i think there's a lot of like law firms because the person who brought this case owned nine shares of tesla the person who brought the case was not a major material shareholder but nine shares as far as i know you made a ton of money maybe that's all the shares he could afford to buy um sued over the compensation essentially saying that it wasn't fair and that as far as i can understand jason correct me here if i'm wrong the idea was that when elon negotiated the compensation package he was not doing so with a equivalent of a third party but was instead essentially negotiating with himself and so there was concerns that that was a form of self-dealing now i know you don't agree with that i understand the judge earlier did and this was a explosive moment then tesla put it to its shareholders again and said please vote for this then they went back to court and said our shareholders approved it then the judge said no and there there were four fatal defects in their approach and then after this everyone has gotten very very mad so elon and tesla have lost again and will say that they will appeal and we presume this is going to go to the delaware supreme court okay over to you if the how many times the shareholders have to vote in favor of the greatest ceo of all time you know up there with steve jobs bill gates i mean this is rarefied air how many ways do the shareholders have to tell a bunch of judges and uh you know the courts we want this guy to get a pay package that is commensurate with the acceleration of the value of the company and the value it's providing to humanity and if you don't want the shares you don't have to own them you could own any other company if you don't like the comp package you could say i don't like the comp package and you know what people do look at stock-based comp yeah bill gurley brad gerster they've been on top of this for a long time saying hey the stock-based comp at uber at microsoft google is out of control meta it's got to get brought back into reality because you're looting et cetera yes yeah and and they uh i think make a compelling case but there's also the case that if you don't like it you as a shareholder get to vote or you get to buy another share where they don't have stock-based comp that you don't agree with and so i think the problem the big problem i have with this is we all picked delaware so that it wasn't um partisan or vindictive and it listened to the shareholders the goal of corporate law is to be predictable so people know in entrepreneurship and capitalism these are the rules if you shoot the ball behind the three-point line and it goes in you get three points not if you shoot the ball behind the three-point line and it goes in you get zero points that's essentially what they're doing here and then they're like but we talked to everybody who owns the team and who plays in the nba and they still want the three-pointer to count and they're like nope it can't count and you know what my feeling on this is if delaware is going to suddenly be and the reason we all do delaware is because they were predictable and there's case law what this has done is now it has rocked everybody's belief and trust in the delaware system okay and i think we have to leave delaware and yeah you know i think startups and big companies just need to reincorporate their companies in nevada texas other places that will listen to shareholders and that's actually what needs to happen here and then they just need to do a full on investigation and figure out if there is any bias here because if you flip a coin in the judicial system you'll get a republican or a democrat right and if you flip a coin of a approximately you know it could be bias or it could just be not correlated right it could be correlated but not causation so i don't know the judge i don't know enough about it to know it's biased but i think we have to look into it and it does need to go to the supreme court uh and and get adjudicated because this just screws capitalism forever well jason jason take the pot off the stove we don't need to boil this is going to be okay everyone let's breathe Elon Musk is going to make rent it's not about personal wealth it's he's the richest guy with this or without I know it's just about how do how do we regulate the game a person with nine shares or something crazy so that law firm that paid 350 million the lawyers here are doing this for a payday and so it reminds me of drive-bys go ahead you tell me everyone does things for a payday you're you're using you're you're going back to the Michael Saylor thing the way you're framing this is really a little bit a little bit i'm not saying you're wrong i'm just saying okay it strikes me as a relatively imbalanced presentation so i read the ruling that came out and it struck me as a piece of serious legal work i may disagree with the conclusion but i don't think that this is something that was whole crock whole you know whole clock drafted as a f*** you to Elon Musk.

1:04:55And I think that there's been a whole bunch of people who are so politically pilled now that they can't disentangle the possibility of politics from something to the point in which they go, here's a judge who interpreting the law, the case law as she understands it in Delaware with all the history that you mentioned, the predictability thereof, and said, I think this actually is an abrogation of those norms that have held for so long. we can disagree with that but i think it's pretty crappy of us to be so mean to the person who's just doing the best job she can with the the law that was behind the president that she had to work with and if you don't think that compensation committees and boards should be independent then i don't think there's an issue here but i think that her her perspective here is at least sufficiently serious as to warrant serious complaint versus what i think i'm seeing a lot of which is just people saying oh this is politics oh fuck delaware you know it strikes me as a childish response to the legal system especially when elon is currently throwing as much sand as he can and open ai's gears out of pure pick and using the legal system to do so and when a lot of folks that are on the tesla side of this thing liked it when people used money and the legal system to kill certain media properties so to me there's a lot of hypocrisy here about the law should always correspond to what i think because i have more money i think this is going to go to appeal it's probably going to lose and tesla will pay elon but i just think that we can all be a little bit more adult you know the the reason i think entrepreneurs do not give or the capital allocators do not give the benefit of the doubt to this court is because shareholders are supposed to make these decisions not the courts and the shareholders if if there was one vote you could maybe make an argument uh but when there's a second vote everybody's like no no give him this we want this ceo to be in this position for a court representing somebody with nine shares to do this it makes it feel like you're going to break capitalism just like the patent trolls you know if you don't stand up to them could break capitalism where they troll people and so the law and if you think that elon's doing lawfare against you know sam altman i mean he's taking a non-profit and flipping it to a full profit this is when we run into our our different set of personal allegiances and i know elon is your friend and i you're not going to i'm also friends with a friend i was from sam i don't know if i am anymore do you think that do you think that elon musk's lawsuit against open ai is because of his charitable views towards the world or because a personal pick due to how his relationship with sam allman fell out because i know what i think it's because it feels unfair to take a 50 million to take all these 50 100 million dollar and then flip it into doing the opposite and giving half the company to microsoft why does elon get to complain when he thinks things are unfair but the shareholder that sued tesla doesn't get to complain when he thinks things does the shareholder does and then the shareholders voted a second time right and they're holding it up which is like that's the problem i think everybody has and it's like okay there's no damage to the shareholder the shareholder made a massive profit on it so if there was damages but i'd be like yeah sure if the stock collapsed and you gave a job if you gave if we take elon's name out of we just put in satya nadella or whatever we all love satya yeah and if he got a huge compensation package and then somebody sued because their shares and they lost money then it would be like easier like okay sure this person gained this person lost feels unfair yeah you know in this case the person gained and so that's where i really have a problem with it because then it's like well i didn't gain enough and it's like that last five percent of the gain like it's so obvious that elon you know basically gave up everything to have tesla survive i watched him do it yeah he almost went bankrupt funding that company he did go bankrupt but actually funding the company he was on loans from his friends he's talked publicly about that yeah and getting the model three out was a herculean you know amazing effort and the company almost went out of business a second time i see and so when you see in my case my friend or just appreciate an entrepreneur risk it all and then somebody with nine shares who made a ton of money comes in and is so ungrateful they sue the company to do this so the lawyers can make a bunch of money that's where it tweaks entrepreneurs so that's what that's why you're seeing consensus amongst the bill girlies the cnbc anchors me um you know anybody who's in capitalism or capital allocation why did the cnbc anchors make the cut there that's funny um because they they cover it every day yeah you know and that's why i do include them in it because they also were like at the time of the compensation package there's that famous clip of them saying like andrew ross sarkin and everybody at the front of the table being like this is ridiculous like you never hit this it's a it's a big package but he'll never hit it and they study and they comment on all day long executive compensation in this issue so that's why i think they make the cut so and then i put bill gurley in because he's been at this for a long time and i'll put other ceos and myself and other investors because they also have seen this i think that's why this is so tweaking for everybody it's like what does the guy got to do to get his package well you want ceos to be comp And also we want CEOs to be compensated this way.

1:10:43We want their success tied to the share price. That is the ultimate alignment. And it's infuriating when people break that alignment. And now we got the system breaking. I think the reason why I've been slightly irked by this is there is the, there is the, what is reasonable standard person with the nine shares versus person who went bankrupt building the company and made it worth more money. That's a very, very reasonable point. And I think that, nests well into your point that this is why people are tweaked. My point is, if we want to let that be the standard for how decisions are made versus what is the law, I think that we get into a sticky place.

1:11:25So I think the best thing to do here is to run this up to the Delaware Supreme Court, sort out if they agree with what the judge said, because we should take her opinion seriously because she obviously put a lot of work into it. I read it. I'm sure you've read it. We can all access it and go through it. And there are lots of interesting things in there. People can learn about like conflicted controller transactions and how compensation committees work and how independence is supposed to work on a board and normal corporate governance. And then we can decide what's best to move forward. But I just think that we should not start throwing invective at people who are doing their job inside of the legal system when we don't get a judgment that we like, especially if we are a lawsuit happy group.

1:12:09Yeah. Okay. I mean, fair enough. Everybody looking at it from the business side just looks at it as profoundly unfair. and anybody who's in the capital allocation business is infuriated by this because this is how capitalism is supposed to work and you know if you look at comp committees if you're on the board of a company and you're spending your time on it and you have equity in that company there's no independence in that regard because you um are getting compensated by the company right so your job is to represent all shareholders and make sure all shareholders have the best chance at success and that's exactly what happened here and so this idea that like the board isn't independent like it was steve jobs's board like 10 independent people like a jury the boards of companies are not like juries in their independence randomly selected they're selected they accept they're compensated so there's alignment there as well and the alignment is like when i'm on the board of a company and sometimes i'll join a board where i'm not already an investor i've done that twice i think lashify um and uh culo and they will give me a you know an equity grant so in those cases as not an investor in those two cases of boards and i'm on one non-profit board i don't get any compensation there but you can get compensated actually on a non-profit board um i get paid in equity so i am incented to make the equity go up for all shareholders and what i'm looking for is conflicts of interest and in this case it's not like elon voted his shares or kimball voted his shares they they were not in it everybody else is the the other directors so yeah i think this is we've built up a lot of law around how to run corporations and then i do think that there are certain times in which companies grow very quickly people become very very powerful and then those norms get tested and they get pushed on and then you end up with situations like this this gets us to clarity so this disagreement will i believe helps that president not just in delaware probably around the nation for how this sort of thing should go and i think we'll end up with elon getting his money tesla getting what they want you think it's a bad ruling even though you're objecting to i don't agree with the ruling because on a moral basis on a elon built it elon took a risk pay the man but yeah she's making a legal argument which seemed very serious and reasonable when i read it i am not a lawyer but i do read a lot i read a lot more court documents than i wish i did and so i think we should just let the process play forward not be so mean fair enough let the process play forward i think is what we're seeing here i just every time i watch it i'm just like oh my god this is so frustrating um to make you feel better though we've pulled some tweets i'm not a shareholder in tesla by the way not a shareholder test it wasn't an angel in test it so i don't have a horse in this race but we do have some tweets uh here's paul graham um pointing out that uh everyone's gonna leave delaware if quote activist judges start overruling shareholders that is again so paul graham has invested in more startups than any human on the planet more than me i've invested in 400 i think he's invested and 3 ,000.

1:15:23Can you imagine doing this? Actually, if they're doing 500 a year for 10 years. Can you imagine his taxes? 400 a year for 10 years, 4 ,000 maybe even. Yeah. And then here's Jason Limkin, one of my favorite people in the technology world, saying that it's interesting how a default, don't think about it choice since we started in tech, i.e. incorporate in Delaware, is now upended. So this is the business sentiment. Past my point, this is what people are saying, underscoring what Jason has been saying this whole time, which is the folks who are out there are pissed. and yeah yeah and then just because i love you here's the meme oh this is me oh yeah i only have the one memes yeah no there's a second one i did which is wake up honey or can i get a wake up call you see that one is on my uh no i i thought i went through all your tweets i missed that one sorry there's another one where it says can i get a wake up call and then somebody just does this whole thing like the delaware court is biased or whatever you know the thing you're objecting to which you know listen and i got to admit you know uh when all the fair law lawfare debate over trump's six different cases when i looked at those six i objectively looked at the six and i was like these two would not have occurred if trump wasn't if it wasn't like new york and it wasn't trump and even like the governor of new york said that probably wouldn't happen and those ones felt biased and then like three or four of them i was like those seem kind of legitimate to me january 6th in the documents case like the documents they do ask for documents back all the time and you give them back and then it's over and then if you don't give them back and you obstruct justice then they say you're obstructing justice and we got to take you to court to get them back like you know just objectively there is there are prosecutors who are overzealous and who do it for gain right we've both seen that so prosecutors versus judges because the way the the the thing that i think here is that people are saying because the moral argument is so strong in this case the judge should have ruled in opposition of her reading of the law and that to me is a dangerous thing to say if the law sucks change the law but don't shoot the you know actually we'll see that was yeah you i'm gonna retire shoot the messenger quotes because yeah it's not your fault that there are crazy people on the planet alex i will not we can disagree about this one but i'm not going to make you responsible for crazy people we agree on like 98 of it i'm just saying if the law is wrong let's change the law let's not bash the judge who's trying to interpret yeah and i understand the trump people's lawfare arguments and why they're upset about it because when i saw like the um the case or in which trump was actually guilty i was like oh they upgraded those misdemeanors to felonies with the hush money case i was like this feels like a speeding ticket that should have been settled and when leticia james was going out saying like we have to hold this guy accountable vote for me and we'll get him accountable i was like and then she was like tweeting how much he owes every day i'm like this is makes it seem even if you weren't biased you're making yourself seem biased you're making it seem like she was an ag right she was an attorney general and she was like i'm gonna go i'm gonna go after trump and put it and lock him up and she was like tweeting the amount of the judgment against him every day and what the fine was if he didn't pay it like the additional interest yeah and i'm like oh my god you're just feeding into the lawfare argument here just played straight like jack smith was i think is that the guy's name jackson yeah i think he was yeah yeah like he was very procedural like if it you know like mueller was actually very procedural it's like i don't think there's enough here to say trump colluded but there was a bunch of smoke and obstruction of justice we're done well ladies and gentlemen um just to wrap this up uh people are moving to texas nevada and other states are going to vie for their incorporation and you know what great okay you know it is hell yeah democracy labs let's do them um okay how how long have we been going for i have no idea an hour i think an hour all right um give me a give me a startup give me a startup we added to twist 100 maybe that's a good way to end on a positive startup note i'm gonna do so uh watch this okay twist 500 jason and i are building a list top one percent private market companies which companies are gonna have the biggest financial outcome you freaking love this been a lot of fun jason news tens torrent a company on the twist 500 that's building specialized chips for ai just raised 693 million dollars this week huge round very interesting and um we added vatten systems to the twister 100 as you requested yesterday the rhode island based company building underwater drones yeah we had them on the show i think that's like an interesting one for military um yeah and then we also added the browser company because they are building a new thing called dia which combines ai agents computer use from anthropic and a new browser all into one into a package that i think is absolutely incredible announced it this week and it's the first time since chat gpt came out that i have been super excited about a next gen technology product so on the startup front the browser company is my startup of the week oh okay and they're doing just so everybody knows they're doing arc so the browser company is producing our i just put it i just saw um i don't know what arcs value proposition is here um but i guess it has something to do with ai now yes so they're building a new version called dia which is um remember how i've said on the show that i want to have an ai agent that follows me around and knows my personal context across my devices and is intelligent and can help me do my things they're building that at the browser level versus the operating system level which is probably a faster way to do it and their vision seems quite large so i to me someone's taking the big bet to make something incredibly difficult it looks like uh yeah it's looks like this browser um is doing a bunch of ui stuff but now that ai's happened yeah pull up dia browser.com d-i-a browser.com this is the thing they made an 11 minute faux recruiting video and then used dia as their pitch that come help us build this thing and it looks awesome i'm really excited about this i put in the newsletter yesterday added them to the twist 500 awesome all right uh go to twist 500.com you can see them there you can nominate a company at twist 500.com we'll see you all tomorrow bye bye Bye-bye.