IPOs and SPACs are Back, Mag 7 Showdown, Zuck on Tilt, Apple's Fumble, GENIUS Act passes Senate

I'm wondering if this is the year where we've seen the greatest divergence amongst the Mac 7, right? ... now the market is saying, wait, hold on, we might start to see diverging performance.

why would you belong any of these 493 companies that may turn around and one day just get decapitated by something you don't even know that's getting cooked up by a couple of kids in a garage using open AI or GROC or what have you?

I think it's the first time you could probably argue that you could go short the S&P and pick a couple of winners. ... I do think that this is such a transformative moment that if you really have a sense for what's possible, you could start to see category killers emerge out of the S&P, and it's an opportunity to short the S&P and pick a couple of winners.

I think all four of us would agree that if we could synthetically own AWS, Azure and GCP, if I could somehow automagically create an index of all three of those businesses, right, over the next five years, you wouldn't need to own anything else.

So why don't you put up with the shitty part of the rest of their businesses and just own all three and that's it, call it a day. Because you've got to assume that if one of them wins over the other two or accelerates ahead of the other two, it's going to more than make up for the losses that the other two might experience in their other businesses. The multiples aren't crazy on those three companies, by the way.

I don't think this SaaS market ever had the return on equity that it was supposed to. And I think so many companies have woken up from this hangover saying, there's got to be a better way. ... And I think that the jig is totally up for software.

the response from the SaaS industry is changing from the per-seat model as the number of employees at these companies continues to get lowered. ... They're moving from the per-seat model. They're not taking this laying down.

I think, and this is order of magnitude correct, that Anthropic in Q1 added 70% of the net new AR in the SaaS industry, right? Defined by public SaaS companies, right? So let's just think that the company in AI that is most powering, the disruption of SaaS, added three quarters of the net new of the entire industry

I only say that because I do think that there's a real probability of revenue decline in the next five years. If you look at the enterprise install base, I think that Cloud gets competed away. I do think on the application software layer, they're going to have a really hard time in this new world, because the old school customers that buy Microsoft are going to die. ... I think that Microsoft's core business is going to decline. The losers are their biggest customers and the winners are not going to use them.

I just wanted to comment on this consumption-based pricing. It doesn't work. And what I mean is you can have some adoption in the short term. The best example is Snowflake. But in the long term, it destroys your business.

I do think that we're starting to see a healthier market where we know a lot of dollars have gone in, but now we're starting to see some dollars coming out. So I think that's both in M&A, by the way, and it's also in IPOs.

really what happened was I had a lot of very smart money people on Wall Street and some crypto folks call me that I respect. ... Basically, what they said is like, it would be really good if you did it. I don't know if I'm going to do it, but I'm heavily leaning towards doing it.

Like V03, which we haven't really spoke about, is going to destroy Hollywood. Like in the next year, like Hollywood is done, I think.

it's absolutely confounding that they're optimizing for share buybacks and earnings per share instead of having some amount of that money, go towards innovation and acquiring companies. Biggest acquisition is beats? Give me a break.

So I think the good news for them is, look, they still have a monopoly on users, they have three trillion of market cap to kind of play with. So I think it's way too early to count them out.

I do think there is. I do think they're doing it. And I do think they have a shot at winning, which is this kind of ambient AI assistant. ... I don't think they need to own the full stack to be successful here.

I don't think they have any chance of anything. I would take the exact opposite of what Friedberg says. ... A company that focuses on this kind of revenue growth is not capable of creating something that's exceptionally unexpected.

I think Sacks' work on the diffusion rule, just generally, I don't think has gone enough attention in the rescinding of the diffusion rule, which essentially handicapped our ability to even arm our allies with our semiconductor technology.

So I do think that the lithography IP moat is being crossed in China. I do think that China is developing actually new technology for DUV and EUV systems. I do think that there's a risk to Nvidia's core. ... we're creating every incentive for an alternative to Nvidia to emerge from China.

So I think the first thing that Mark has to do, if I were him, is start to chip away at all of the sets of secrets. ... I think the thing that's missing is the infrastructure and compute set of secrets. I think it's insufficient to buy stuff off the shelf from NVIDIA and expect these models to fundamentally compete.

if we look at the winners, in models of the past 12 months, anthropic the same, right? They've been very deliberate and have explained how TPUs, right? They've been a big user of them, how it's helped define their training models. ... If we look at the models that have really performed, it's ones that have that quote secret, as you mentioned.

I think this humanoid robot opportunity is absolutely mind-blowingly ginormous. I don't think that there's a better company on earth positioned to execute against this humanoid robotics opportunity than Tesla.

My number one is build a humanoid robot. Like, how does Apple not have a humanoid robot? That seems like that's obviously the next giant consumer market is having optimists or figure in your house.

For physical AI, they're a kingmaker in parts because they're a sink for demand. So they'll just generate so much demand for robots. So if a figure lands the BMW or the UPS robot successfully, Amazon will buy a gajillion of them. If Optimus lands a successful robot that they tune inside the Tesla factory and then are ready to sell, Amazon will buy a gajillion of them.

So it is true that the number one stablecoin issuer on the planet right now is an offshore company. ... And then also Tether will under this act, will have three years to come onshore. But the bottom line is they will have to operate in the United States. And that's a good thing for consumers. It's a good thing for the US.

What if actually AI can increase productivity and regrow GDP faster than expectations, right? And perhaps that's one of the reasons why interest rates might not be quite as high as you might expect, given some of the trends that you guys have talked about.

Onavo was a small data service provider, but what it did is it had a panel of phones, and we as investors could see which apps people were using, and the data was incredibly valuable because it was the only service that gave you true engagement data. ... Eventually, it sold to Facebook, and Facebook used it internally and didn't allow anybody else to use it.

This is great service. A lot of people rely on it. He buys it, shuts it down for everybody else, gets the tool for himself, gets the data for himself.

we had this Genius Act, which is the stablecoin bill passed the Senate with 68 votes, got 18 Democrats, they came on board. ... And now we have this first major legislative win. And I would expect the House will act in the next few weeks on this, and then the president will have a bill he can sign.

now those folks who are running away with the industry, Thomas, now they have to compete with people like Jeremy O'Leary and Circle, which are totally buttoned up here in the United States and it levels the playing field. So it's an example of actually good regulation bringing this opportunity back on shore and taking it out of the gray area.

Look, I think to me, number one, I still think NVIDIA, right? I don't see the GPU kind of getting displaced. I see additional architectures kind of coming on board, right? And growing the market. But at the end of the day, all roads still lead to the GPU for all of these models.

if you were to buy a bunch of accounting firms or law firms or IT services firms, and you do an incredible job, who wants to buy that in seven years? ... You could take that generalization and apply it to all of IT services. Why does any of that exist? Why isn't it all one click? Eventually, if these agents become smart enough, the fear that I have is that there is no terminal buyer for many of these companies.

But again, I would tell you, as a user, Gemini models are exceptional, like absolutely just bar non-exceptional.

I think Google is in such a position. ... There's a pretty sizable family of models, including a lot of these graph-based models that are being used in really novel applications that no one else is even close to, no one's spending time on.

When I first started 80-90 a year ago, one of the key bets I made, which was a mistake and we unwound the bet, but the first bet that I made was, can we build a transpiler? ... And basically what I learned in that process are all of the attention mechanisms that are built into transformers that really differentiate how good the models are, need to literally be hand-tuned for every single target of silicon that you have.

if you had to boil down Google's economic North Star metric, right? Not the value North Star metric. The economic North Star metric would be price per click. And I do think that Google is extremely well positioned to pivot that to price per token.

Do they lose search share? Does it matter? What I think matters is are their ads more effective? Is their ad network more effective? ... all that data is going to lead to an ad network that performs so much better that even if they lose search share, their ad network is going to continue to grow.

Lena Conn is no longer in the building and M&A is back on the menu. As are IPOs ... So when you look at what's happening under the Trump administration, look at what's actually happening. The game on the field is three major IPOs, and then massive amounts of billion-dollar acquisitions.

So are the institutional fund managers hungry for access to some of these new high-growth offerings? ... And now is there kind of this pent up hunger or pent up demand for new issuances, for high growth tech issuances? Is that what we're seeing? ... And if there is, obviously it bodes well for late stage growth startups that are looking to go public because the demand will be there.

Then wait till we see the flurry of S1s that have already been filed. Figma is a generational potential company that's going to be coming. I think we're going to see fantastic assets coming out. I think the market is saying we're open for business.

when you hear public CEOs talking about lowering the number of employees while they're growing 10, 20 percent per year, this is obviously awesome for earnings, the share price. But there's going to be a massive job displacement.

I think knowledge workers are incredibly flexible. They can take their tools from, you know, one particular skill set to another. So I think this is going to unleash incredible opportunities for the economy. I think it is going to make us more productive and wealthier. So I'm definitely on the more optimistic side of the scenario.

most code generated by AI is crap. ... When you allow these models to run over complicated tasks over long periods of time, the error rates compound to such a degree that the resulting output is not worthwhile. And so until that problem is fixed, which I'm sure it will be, and I'm going to bet that it will be, the idea that all of a sudden it's because of coding agents that people are getting laid off, I think is a fallacy.