E130: DeSantis's Twitter Spaces, debt ceiling, Nvidia rips, state of VC, startup failure & more

That Model Y is going to be the best selling car. It's going to be the best selling car in America. If you get the base level, it's actually cheaper than the average car in America now with incentives.

You know what happened? Absolutely fucking nothing. So I do think that this is another opportunity for the little red riding hoods to get their panties in a bunch. But these downgrades don't mean much of it.

They're going to have to raise the debt ceiling. That being said, I think they're going to be able to. Reuters had a report this morning that they're only 72 billion apart now in their positions, which is a relatively small amount. So my guess is they're going to work this out.

Well, I mean, I was talking with the CEO and CFO of a major data center REIT, and they shared with me that they're seeing more demand in the last couple of months than they've seen in the prior 10 years.

And I think this is the great renewal for America, another amazing American company. It's only three decades old. It's best years, it's best decades are in front of it, obviously.

Yeah, Nvidia has basically joined the trillion-dollar club now in terms of market cap companies. It's really amazing. I mean, I'm kind of kicking myself because this was the easiest buy ever.

But when you look at the valuation of the business, they are currently trading at 70 times the next 12 months EBITDA. So how do you think about valuation, even at a trillion dollar market cap, at a trillion dollar market cap, they're trading at 70 times next 12 months EBITDA.

Instead, what this was, was a really seminal moment, I think, in further divorcing ourselves away from the mainstream media.

So you have a hysterical overreaction by the traditional media, and they simply don't like, A, that Elon is dis-remediating them by letting the politicians go direct, and then, B, he's restored the platform to be a free speech platform.

And I think one of the greatest things that's happening right now that could be a great benefit for this modern democracy is the sort of stuff that we've been doing on our podcast and RFK coming on board like last week and what Sacks did with Twitter.

This is the beginning of the beginning. All of these people who have zero judgment are going to fuck so many companies up.

And unfortunately, most folks who are working in the investor community that are sitting on boards weren't around for the dot-com crash the last time this happened.

And I think that startups are absolutely seeing that in their sales right now. Sales are slipping. It's taking longer.

So even if you set out a team and said, just copy exactly what Figma has, with a copilot enabling 50 engineers, that's like 500 engineers cranking on something, I would be surprised if they couldn't just replicate the product end-to-end.

They made specific note when they launched this that all of this is done with stock photography. They have the complete license to, so they can monetize this without getting sued like Microsoft is currently being sued.

And so the question there is, how many of those companies are just going to stop spending because they're just not going to exist?

There's a lot of failure going on in Silicon Valley right now. You know, Sacks, you talk a little bit about having paths for exit and options for SaaS companies. But there are many sectors in startup land that don't have those sorts of options in biotech, in SYNBIO, in FinTech, in direct-to-consumer, e-commerce.

The money is being sucked out of the system like the tide before a tsunami. And the tsunami is going to be all the failures and bankruptcies.

We had about 300,000 people contemporaneously in my Twitter space. I think Mario had a couple hundred thousand. But if you look at the numbers today, there's already 10 million views for this thing.

And it does beg the question, you know, would you want to buy bonds from an entity that's generating $4 trillion in revenue and spending $6 trillion and has a plan to do that for the foreseeable future?

I mean, the inflation is here and the crowding out of private investment and private borrowing is now occurring because the government borrowing is so big.

But if you flip them around, I'm just telling you, it's not like I want any of this to happen, but I'm telling you, nothing will change and you guys will still be crying wolf in five years. It'll still be the same. It'll just be a different debt-to-GDP number that gives you anxiety.

But the most important thing, I think, to remember is that where the real value gets accrued is five, six, seven years later when the software and services companies show up and create a huge moat. And those are the Googles and the Facebooks and the Apples of the world.

I think that speaks to the larger economy is not doing that well. I think the economists a year from now may say that the recession had already begun.

My thought on the Adobe thing for what it's worth is like, do they want a mulligan on this $20 billion Figma thing?

The AI startups, there's a lot of interesting things happening in there and money is being pushed at them by VCs. It's very frothy, arguably bubbly.

But the reason that broke, quite frankly, is because the lobbying power of the military industrial complex is so great in both the Republican and Democratic parties that they basically wanted the sequester over to keep raising the defense budget.

This is Biden's signature legislation is creating energy independence for America, which will have an enormous peace dividend. You will not fight these stupid endless wars.

And, you know, after seeing what Elon did at Twitter, where he reduced the staff by 80%, I'm like, I realize there's no good excuse anymore for not giving yourself the maximum chance of survival.