E125: SpaceX launch, Fox News settlement, "Zombie-corn" exodus to AI, late-stage implosion

This is going to embolden a lot of people to take matters into their own hands and sue some of these media companies if the lie is egregious enough, and it negatively impacts them enough. I think it would embolden a lot of folks.

look, I hope Chamath is right that this actually incentivizes more actions against media companies because I think their feet need to be held to the fire and they need to do a better job publishing the truth.

I think there's an interesting question here on how far this goes with respected, maybe it invites the lawsuits, like you guys say, where there's things that are more on the line.

The big disruption is going to happen by the end of 2026, because this next generation set of licenses, spectral licenses that the FCC sold came with a condition that you had to launch satellite capacity by the end of 2026, I think, otherwise you lose it. Or you have to do your first launch, I think, by the end of 2026 And the point is that the only company that actually has the capability to build and to launch is SpaceX. So they have a complete monopoly. And because they're advantaging their own solution, it puts everybody else behind the eight ball.

Crypto is dead in America. I mean, now you had Gensler even blaming the banking crisis on crypto. So the United States authorities have firmly pointed their guns at crypto.

So I think Chamath is right that they're effectively banning crypto in the United States. They're going to drive all these companies overseas, which is terrible for American innovation.

But I think this new poll that you just mentioned is really interesting because it shows that that sugar high of Trump's poll ratings was a temporary bounce and it's coming down somewhat.

I think Nikki Haley is going to win the Republican nomination.

So for this one network to get a fine of like 800 million, it's like pretty incredible. I mean, they should be handing out a lot more of these in my view, not just to Fox. But yeah, look, I would like to see, to that end, I would like to see the standard in New York Times versus Sullivan revised by the Supreme Court.

Fox, I think, has only 4 billion of cash, so they just spent 20 some odd percent of it paying this off. And if I were a shareholder, the question I would ask is did we actually make enough money to justify having to pay almost $800 million of our cash balance? The answer is probably no. And this is the first of a bunch of lawsuits that they have.

so many of those companies have a valuation that's less than their preference stack. And as a result, those founders that work there and those employees that are there are getting their equity wiped out. They'll have to get restructured.

But if you're a series C stage startup, you're a late stage startup with a, it's called a pre-AI model, the spigot has just turned off completely.

What is their incentive to really mark their book down 50%? They don't have an incentive. Why would they do that? They would rather let it decay down naturally.

A bunch of this tiger stuff got released. I mean, their funds are underwater, just like Masi Yoshisan's fund is underwater.

Coinbase played by the rules, stood in line, tried to do the right things, it seems, at every step along the way, right? Everything from board composition to executive composition to how they tried to interact with the regulators, yet they were probably the furthest away from getting a license.

But if it's that we just have such institutional rot, we're incapable of doing it, well, then you might as well just not write the check because that company is going to get undercut by some new white sheet version of that business that doesn't have any of these impediments.

Management has told you in a way, Chamath and Sacks, management has told you they're incapable of running this business, this concern in a thoughtful way.

as you brought up robots.txt last week, there's going to need to be an AI.txt.

The more I think about it, the more I think it's probably not a coincidence that you're seeing all these concerns about de-dollarization at the same time they're cracking down on crypto.

And so we'll create this massively bubble-ific, you know, index of AI stuff. But some number of these things with some great leaders will emerge and will accrue extraordinary value across many industries.

But at least there's a reason now to believe that, say, dozens of unicorns could be created in the next couple of years.

But look, I think all of this, this maelstrom is great for an investor.

It's so funny you say that, Sacks, because I literally am looking for an office space in San Mateo to start like doing the incubator in person again. And on Monday, I'm having 60 companies come to San Francisco.

which is my whole concern about if we jump the gun on regulating AI too quickly, it'll turn into another, you know, woke game that everyone's going to play.

So I think that the self-regulation for areas that impact everybody, independent of whether you participate in the system or not, is where you have to look for good examples, Jason. And I'm not sure there are many good examples of self-regulation, those kinds of systems.

But they were basically able to let go a third of their workforce by moving a bunch of work to models.

I think there's going to be SaaS software products that were just good before, but now will actually be great because the incorporation of APIs from, you know, AI foundation models will just turbocharge the capabilities.

Private equity has refined a very powerful toolkit of putting two or three orders of magnitude of the money we put into companies to work on the premise that the glass is actually half empty and what can go wrong and how do we mitigate that risk.

like how impressed Sacks was about plugins and then plugins were rendered useless and somewhat impotent two weeks later by auto GPTs.

And then I'm going to go out on the road to meet with LPs and Silicon Valley Bank blows up.

Really? I trust Disney implicitly.

So look, whether you believe that is a problem or not, what I'm saying is this has been a brand disaster for Disney getting involved with DeSantis this way.

And just the point I was making is that when I was reading the mainstream media coverage of this, it was almost like ghoulish. It was like a type of glee.

When you look back on something as meaningful as this, it'll just make them even less credible. That's what that's unfortunately what they're doing to themselves is shooting themselves in the foot.

There is a roadmap for the press to learn from this and to get better, right?