Elon Musk vs Sam Altman: The Escalating Feud Over AI's Future

Hello and welcome back to Equity Techrunch's podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, May 1st and I'm Kirsten Cororus, transportation editor here at Techrunch and today is just senior reporter Sean Ocaine. Anthony isn't here today. We will miss him. Normally we kick off the show usually on the lighter side of tech. You know, sometimes a fun story. This is a little bit different. Uh Sean, catch us up on this investigation that you and Dominic Madori Davis did on a startup. I think it has a valuable lesson for founders who maybe are celebrating or about to celebrate their startup getting acquired. That's really the thrust of this. We wrote this week about this company

called Scoly that was founded by this guy called named Christopher Gray back in 2013. a really like early iPhone and like smartphone revolution kind of company where he you know as someone who came from like a relatively poor background and didn't have a lot of access to college realized that there was an opportunity to build something uh you know in particular at the time an app to better match not only find but match students with scholarships that they were well qualified for and you know it really caught on. It was like one of those like really popular 99 cent apps in some of the earlier days in the app stores and that led them to Shark Tank and he was on Shark Tank in 2015.

Got some money from some of the sharks in our reporting. I went back and found an Instagram reel from one of the hosts of the show who sort of referred to it as like one of the all caps worst uh fights that they ever had of who got to invest in the company. U which I thought was pretty funny. And then, you know, it sort of cruised along from there and grew to believe it was something along the lines of like $30 million in cumulative revenue. So, nothing incredibly huge, but a really solid business on uh this one particular piece of the college puzzle. And then in 2023, they got acquired by Sally May. Sally May the sort of like longtime student lender that a lot of people are familiar with. And for Gray, this was, you know,

not just supreme validation of the product that he and his small team built, but also it was the way that he felt they were going to be able to really tr reach the true goal of Scoly, which was to make the service free. And that was Sally May's big promise was this is going to be free after we acquire it and sort of integrate it into our platform. But it didn't quite turn out exactly as expected there. So my understanding is that in the beginning of uh right after the acquisition it was okay, but then he started having some serious questions about how Sally May was sort of packaging these and the data collection piece and whether the people who were participating in this meaning the customers actually knew what was going on.

Yeah, I think there's two big lessons here. one is that it is very hard when your company gets acquired to you know keep control over the thing that you've built regardless of sort of how many protections you are able to sort of lawyer into the agreement. Uh the other is that nothing is free and that's not necessarily a surprising lesson but it's one that you know we should all kind of come back to as much as we can. you know, in Gray's position, he was very protective of the data of the students who were using Scoly, not just because he was really going after people who were like him and were coming from, you know, minority communities or impoverished communities and so therefore he, you know, felt like a

kinship with them and a need to protect them, but also because students tend to be minors and they not might not, you know, even if they have a parental signature on a document, they might not really fully understand the trade-offs of whatever they're getting into, whether that's a ton of debt or even just searching for scholarships and handing over some data. And you know what we wrote about this week was that Gray has filed a lawsuit against Sally May citing wrongful termination basically arguing that the contract was breached by Sally May going out and actually selling this data when he says that he was promised by executives at Sally May not to sell it. And you know we really get into a little bit of the

mechanics of how we think Sally May is doing this. uh they essentially started this other company as they expand beyond just lending just called Sally. It is frankly very confusing when you look at the two websites side by side. They use the same logo and that can be kind of tricky. Sally May is a public company. I didn't see a lot of mentions of this in their SEC filings. That's one of the things that Gray was contending was wrong here. And but the you know the end result here is that Sally the company that's actually using Scoly now is you know does appear to and it discloses in its privacy policy that it is taking data from these users and selling it to ad networks and brands and

even other universities that are looking for leads on enrollment. Yeah, we've talked a lot about this prior to publication and to me it will be interesting to see if he has any success in the lawsuit and we can speculate if they will. There is sort of a public message here not just to founders but also on the customer side which is I think we all think of well our data is probably going to be used but you really need to read the fine print and it really comes down to this whole question of even if they disclose it is it obvious is it clearly stated is it boldly stated so that anyone who is participating in whatever these companies are doing and in this case Sally May that it's very clear but we have a lot to get into this week we

have deals from BMW i Ventures and their $300 million fund, a recent fundraiser from a defense tech firm called Scout AI. We're going to get into the OpenAI Elon Musk trial, and then dig into the earnings from some of the Magnificent 7. Let's get into BMW i Ventures. I actually wrote this story. So, you know, Sean, do you have any questions for me? 300 million, $300 million fund. Uh, what do you want to know? I've long been fascinated with corporate venture arms. I remember one of the first few years that I started doing this job a long time ago talking with like JetBlue's venture arm and I was just very tickled at the idea that they

would even do something like that. And you know, I think back then there was a bigger divide between companies that were clearly doing it just because it was like the hot thing to do and get them into some like cool Silicon Valley parties and others that were really using it in a way that could eventually benefit uh, you know, their core business in some way, whether that was, you know, finding acquisition targets or finding technologies that make sense to them. My first question to you is sort of like, you know, what does this feel like to you? Does this feel like one of those ones that's a venture fund at BMW just for the sake of doing it or do you feel like they're actually

putting some effort behind this to go out and find stuff that could actually benefit them down the road? Not just financially but maybe even technologically. Yeah, I would say the latter. I mean they've had first of all this is their third fund. So their previous fund and each time it's about five years in between. So they have uh $1.1 billion of assets under management at this point. This fund is 300 million. The previous one was 300 million. The first one was a little bit larger than that. It was more around a little bit more than 500 million. And each time they do kind of a specific focus. This one, not surprising

on AI, but they've been, I think, pretty serious for a while now. I mean, they have two offices. They have one of their managing partners is located in their office in Silicon Valley. The other is Germany. The these are companies that they're um investing in that may have a very clear benefit to BMW AG, the parent company, which is the only LP. I think that's really interesting, too. Sometimes with these strategic venture arms, they're taking in other money. There is one LP in this, but they're still considered independent. So, I do think that they're serious is the short answer. You know, the question to

me that was really interesting is that from the very beginning of the interview, they're like, "We don't chase trends, but they are focused on AI, which you know is pretty trendy for them. They think that this is AI is really more foundational and that will create a number of other technologies that in their view will reshape automotive. Interestingly, I don't know if you caught this in my story, but they say also though that this could be applied to other industries. They are looking for startups that go outside of automotive as well, even though that's the primary focus. This is interesting to me for probably two big reasons. one, last year I wrote about this new fund called Light Motif, which is kind of the other version of what you were just describing of

a technically independent fund, but the single LP in that same $300 million fund is Volkswagen. And so they're they're a bit more at an arms length than it seems like this one is, but it was similar remit of like getting into these emerging and fastm moving industries. And I think it's interesting that now we have two of the biggest German automakers and automakers on the planet really stepping up their efforts to, you know, I would imagine invest in like competing versions of some of the same technologies, which I find that sort of tickles me a bit. But the other thing is there are a ton of startups that are trying to carve out space in the entire automotive chain, especially

from an AI perspective. I've written about a few even from the customer side. There are companies that are trying to build businesses around, you know, sort of like AI voice agents helping out with dealership scheduling and maintenance. There's ones that are working on detecting uh defects or scratches, you know, using sort of AI assisted scanners that are working with company, rental companies like Hertz and things like that. So, there's a ton of stuff to be evaluating here and hopefully help grow and maybe find a way to help BMW down the road. But I also think that, you know, broadly speaking, a lot of these AI first startups that are just getting off the ground over the last year or so, the

big question when I talk to them is always like, do you have enough to stand alone as a company for years? Or is this something that like you are getting ahead of others and you'll eventually be acquired? And I wonder how much BMW is looking at some of the churn here and just saying like some of these might pan out for us and in surprising ways even but also some of these are probably going to get exited fairly quickly by getting rolled up into something else and like it's a you know an okay way to make a couple extra bucks on the side compared to just the automotive business. Yeah. I mean, I think that's always I think generally speaking, a lot of strategic funds look at it in that view, which is, you know, there

there are ones that they're absolutely expecting to have like pretty hopefully large exits, but there are ones that they're sort of spreading their bets out. Uh, you know, I think what's interesting here is a number of these startups, and we're seeing this across the industry. This isn't just, you know, the companies that BMWI is investing in, but the idea of companies that are AI first, but that are seeking to change workflows. So, Sinera is one of these companies that they've invested in. And they started out as a SAS company that were sort of automating some workflows, but now what they've done on top of their platform is they've added a bunch of AI agents. So it is completely focused on the design and

engineering process. So suddenly you can see how that could be really transformative for automotive but also applied to really any kind of industry that uses engineering and design. Um and this basically this product allows them to like iterate really fast and we're I think we're going to see a lot more of these types of startups pop up. This is the one that BMW invested in. You know, I think anything AI related is very sexy to a lot of companies. I have to mention separate from BMW, but you know, SoftBank just had this um investment in a robotics company that is uh supposedly building data centers, two hot topics, AI and data centers. And apparently they're already eyeing a $100 billion

IPO, which is absolutely insane. Like, we're just skipping all the steps. I don't even know if we're peak AI anymore. I think we are like in somewhere in space. We're in orbit right now. I mean, I don't know when it's going to come back down to Earth, but it just shows how interested these funds are in literally anything that is touching AI. Yeah. I mean the soft bank thing is interesting to me in the sense of I also wonder about where BMW will look as far as the physical AI stuff that's happening. Like we, you know, my mind goes to Mind Robotics, the company that Rivian just sort of recently spun out. There's so much that people are going to try over the next couple years that may not be flashy humanoid robotics or

anything like that, but is like an industrial application of AI and robotics meant to modernize and make more efficient the way that we build things. And so like I could see BMW playing in that space here too with this fund. And that's clearly an element of what SoftBank is aiming at with this company called Rose AI that yes, he said they're already, you know, supposedly eyeing an IPO, which you know, listen, it Masa is nothing if not ambitious, which is maybe the most restrained way of describing Masio's own. That's probably not even the first one that he's floated at $100 billion. I'm sure this year. Yeah, I'm sure there are others. You know, one another hot area right now and this has been going on for about 18 months, even two years, is defense

tech. And we had a story Tim Fernho wrote about uh he went and actually um you know visited what they're doing and this is a company called Scout AI and they're building AI models to operate military vehicles. It's they've raised 100 million after a 15 million seed round. There is a lot to unpack here. To me, what's really interesting is I don't know if three years ago you would see companies flouting the fact that they are working on anything to around weapons or the military and that has really changed and I don't know what are your thoughts about not just scout AI but you know other companies are you seeing this a lot more often where they're really talking and promoting how they're using AI in weaponry.

There were companies that were doing it a few years ago that there were certainly the outliers, right? You had Palanteer or Anderil and uh and maybe one or two others that were really high-profile enough, but everything changed when Trump was elected for a second time and the way that the administration has aligned itself so closely with, you know, quite literally some of these folks like former co-workers, right? like we have one of the top sort of lieutenants to uh Travis Kalanick in his tenure at Uber, Emil Michael, working in the administration. That's just one of many who are like spread across the Trump administration. And so I think that bought a lot of cover, you know, that plus this idea that, you know, there was also like just

a crazy deregulation push happening and also a lot of funding in the defense space, you know, gave a lot of cover for more people to come out and more boldly proclaim that this is what they're doing. And yeah, there's just a ton of this stuff. I mean like Bermus is a company that's building like a hypersonic plane that I wrote about a couple weeks ago that just raised a bunch of money and is not maybe a company that people have heard of on the scale of like an Andril. So there's just a lot of it and there's going to be a lot more of it. I thought this piece was interesting in the way that Tim sort of talked to uh Colby Adcock who runs this company and is the brother of uh Brett Adcock who runs Figure AI the

humanoid robotics company. you know about that piece of this and how they are sort of you know trying to press their advantage as far as fundraising and snapping up contracts goes by being proud of it versus being part of the larger you know conglomerate tech companies like a Google where there is still even though they have aligned themselves with the Trump administration in many ways um there is still resistance inside those companies to see their technology be used on the battlefield and to direct weapons. A couple of things I think worth noting specifically about Scout AI is that their goal here is that they're building large language models um to create military AGI. Uh so that's that's a

lofty goal that they're working on and their argument is that they're using vision language action models or VALA models which I am hearing so much more from startups that this is the approach that they're taking um to reduce collateral damage. Their whole pitch is that by using these AI tools it will be far more precise and it will reduce collateral damage meaning the loss of human life. That is their argument in their pitch. Whether they're, you know, successful in that, we have yet to see. But there's clearly interest um from the DoD in all sorts of startups like this. And I expect so many more and probably a number of them that we don't we haven't heard of yet. I should also mention they're working with DARPA and the US Army. So they have contracts and

you know seem to be making progress already. caveat that with like you I don't want to say it's not hard but like a lot of companies get contracts with the DoD and with the government in general like they're always trying out new technology. I don't say that to dismiss these guys but uh it is not necessarily the like tailwind that I think a lot of people make it out to be sometimes. The other thing is like words have meanings and it's it's good to try and remember that sometimes like okay maybe they want to help reduce collateral damage on the battlefield. That sounds great in a vacuum, but I think it's worth when companies come out and do say this stuff proudly asking them

what they mean when they say these things and you know, do they have like a bright red line that where they consider something to be misuse and that they would actually walk away from a deal in some way because they see, you know, this administration or the next, you know, using it in a different way. at justifying it, you know, on the surface in order to get away with how they're doing it. So, that's just what comes to mind when I hear a lot of these companies talk about this way and try to profess that they're also being safe and reasonable and all these other things. Yeah, I mean we do have to move on because we have a couple of other really interesting things to talk about, but I will say

that there is a difference between saying technologically speaking we have created something so precise that it will reduce collateral damage and is a very different thing of how it is used because it could certainly any weapon can be misused and we have a long history uh within the US and other countries of misuse of weaponry and there's once you're under contract is very difficult to you know pull back from that and we're seeing that play out on the AI stage with anthropic right now and the US government. So there's going to be a lot more to talk about that I think in future episodes. But we have something that I've been looking forward to talking about which is the open AI

Elon Musk trial. And I wrote down in my notes a quote that Elon Musk seems to be uh continuing to come back to, which is you can't steal a charity, which was something he said today um and that was tweeted out. First of all, let's set the stage here. What is this about? Is this sour grapes or is there a legitimate reason behind the lawsuit? Yes. like uh I think it is more sour grapes and an attempt to you know drag OpenAI and in particular Sam Alman uh through the mud as much as possible uh than it is about the merits. Although I do think Musk is fanatical enough that he really thinks the two are basically intertwined.

Really short version of this. This is the lawsuit that Elon Musk filed against OpenAI, basically saying, "I helped found you. My understanding when I helped found you and fund you originally was that this was going to be a nonprofit. We've seen over the last couple years this big drama sort of play out as Sam Alman has decided, hey, actually, we should be a for-profit company and we need to be in order to keep raising all the money that we want to raise and pay back our investors and all this stuff uh as we become a hyperscaler. and uh and it made it all the way to trial and here we are. And you know, I think you know there are certainly plenty of people who actually think that Musk has a good case here. I

think there are more people who especially legal experts who believe that he doesn't uh and that it's just the fact that he has more money than anybody else in the world that he can uh bring this to trial and that most other people wouldn't bother. And so here we are. And you know, all that said, that has set the stage for just a, you know, a pretty messy courtroom fight. And we're only in the early stages of it. I think, you know, as of the time that we started recording of it, Musk was maybe only just finally coming off the stand. He was the first real big witness in this case u called to testify. And you know, he's been on the stand for basically the better part of three days. And it's only going to

get weirder from here. I mean, there's already been a ton in the leadup to this. We've seen a ton of text messages released, emails, notes, diaries. I mean, like so much stuff. And even with all the stuff that gets excluded before we get to trial, there's still a lot of uh a lot of mess. So, Marie Condo fans out there are probably pretty happy. Oh, that's a really good deep cut reference. I like that. I think that the interesting argument that Musk is making is that there's this insistence that there is a big difference between investors whose profits are capped and those whose profits are unlimited. And that's one of the key arguments he's making. And that can be viewed a couple of different ways. The sour

grapes way, which is, hey, you actually thought about doing this yourself. And then there's separating all of that, that is an interesting sort of overall question about a company like OpenAI. What's really fascinating to me aside taking out all the personal stuff which I think is makes this trial a little bit more circus-like. There's a lot of personalities in here. Um is that Elon Musk's tweets are absolutely coming back to bite him in the butt. And that was actually one of the focuses of one of our articles and covering this. Tim Fernholds, who we mentioned earlier, is actually in the courtroom and has been covering this and really that's been something that I have watched happen before. And here we are,

you know, he's under oath and he's being presented with tweets that absolutely have contradicted some of his arguments, which I find really fascinating and also been kind of illuminating about what Tesla is working on because one of the questions was he had tweeted out that Tesla was working on AGI and on the stand he confirmed, "No, they're not. Shareholders, take note." As Tim mentioned, I wish we had more of these trials because I think that we would find out a lot more about what Tesla's and SpaceX are actually working on as opposed to what he uh presents out on X, formerly Twitter. So much of what we see every day is like people in power who are trying to, you know, shape the narrative in their own way without having to do this. Those

people wind up in these situations like in a courtroom or in a deposition ahead of a trial where they're under oath and they actually have to answer these questions. Certainly they're prepped but they can't prep. I mean like to get back into some of the personal stuff he Musk was asked on the first day to say who Siobhan Zillis was. I mean know we as observers know Siobhan is the mother of four of his children. We know that she works and or has worked at many of his companies. She was on OpenAI's boards during a lot of the sort of back and forth period that we're talking about in this trial. she's a very well-known quantity and must just sort of stammered because he I guess wasn't prepared or

wasn't ready to sort of answer that kind of question. And you know that's more like the kind of look personal drama stuff that comes out in a case like this. But it's also this other stuff where you can really finally pin them down on answers in a way that you know they don't like even Tesla's earnings calls like Tesla's gotten a lot of credit for kind of leading the charge over the last five or six years of focusing on retail investors and bringing people bringing retail investors into the earnings calls and answering their questions from the you know the say technologies platform and now so many other companies do this too and that's great like it's good to give retail investors a voice at the table

those questions are also presubmitted and they get to prepare the remarks to them and everything and it's not and they're often times fans, right? There's a stake there. They're not maybe as they definitely are cuz they're literal shareholders like you have to own shares to be able to even submit those questions. I will say like there are especially with Tesla, there are some fed up shareholders who often get their questions voted to the top of the queue. But like you know the company and Musk himself are prepared to answer those questions. That is not the case in this set.

Well, and he's not under oath. I mean, it's he's not under oath, you know, and I think that's like the big distinction. It's like, yeah, let's give him credit for like, you know, having these fairly open um conversations on earnings calls and people are paying attention and it can have a direct effect on stock price, but you're still not under oath in a court of law. there is a little bit of a different bar and we know he doesn't like it because one of the sort of things that really popped this week from his testimony is an exchange with one of OpenAI's lawyers where you know the lawyer was really pestering Musk on a particular issue and Musk's response was like your questions are designed to fool me or deceive me and

it's just like you know you can see like we've also seen reporting about a number of instances where the judge has really kind of had to back both sides really off but especially Musk to just sort of answer the question like you're here to do a thing and get the information out into the record not to argue whether or not like you know the tactics of opening eyes lawyer are really stepping over a line or something like that. So we know that he doesn't like being in these situations as much as this is like a situation of his own creation. Yeah. I mean he put himself in this position. I think we're going to hear a lot more and not just about Elon Musk.

Obviously, there's so many more characters who we cover a lot that will be on who will be on the stand, Sam Alman and others, Greg Brockman. So, we're really looking forward to that. I want to close the show by talking about some of the magnificent seven. These are the publicly traded companies that uh really make up a huge amount of the total of the public exchanges value. Not all of them have uh reported earnings. Apple is actually probably as we're recording this just about to uh report earnings, but we have a number who have and I'm talking about Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and at least the theme I saw was that if you are in the picks and shovels business of AI

infrastructure, so if you have a cloud business, you're making some money. You're making lots of money, but you're also spending lots of money. So, is it equalized out or is there a winner here? Sean, you know what I think is one of the most interesting things to come out of this week is Meta announced another bump to already really high capex uh expenditures like expectations for this year. Something like I forget the exact figure off the top of my head, but it's like previously coming into the year they had promoted something around say 120 billion. Now, they're expecting like 140 billion. And if it's not those exact numbers, it's like in that range. And

when they really led this year with that first number, that was like seen as a big sign of optimism. Look at all this buildout they're going to do with data centers and capacity and how much inference they're going to be doing, like all this stuff. Like it was such a sign of where we were even just like 3 months ago to the point that like when you and I were covering Tesla earnings last week, like it very much felt like the reason Tesla bumped up its capex expectations for this year was because like it looked like a poultry little number compared to the all the other tech companies which were all planning to spend like a hundred or more billion dollars this year uh coming out of the sort of fourth quarter results. And now this week, Meta, you

know, bumped that up again to like around 140 billion. And their stock price went way down. Like they had a big hit last night and into today's trading, one of the biggest drops they've seen in a long time. And I feel like that's just a really good signal of like how some people have been tapping the brakes on some of this stuff where like, oh, there actually might be a limit on the investor side of how deep they want these companies to go into AI and AI buildout and data centers and all of this stuff. Whereas just three or four months ago, it didn't feel like there was a limit. It felt like number was going to go up and it was never going to stop going up. So that was the thing that stuck out the most to me.

Yeah. I mean, here's the thing. like uh companies love that sweet spot and they're rewarded by shareholders when they are not they are a growth company and you know there's the mature stocks you know for a long time Microsoft was considered a mature stock but they've tried to pivot themselves as kind of a growth stock now because here they are investing in cutting edge technology look at what we're spending and one of the indicators is capital spending and oftent times investors are happy with that and they reward companies for that. But I think all of us I mean I don't invest in any of these companies. We don't invest in any of these companies. But any of these investors are now saying to your point earlier like pumping the brakes like okay we get it. Like now

you're what are you putting your money into? Now it feels um or looks as if there isn't a point to this extra spending. And I think that's what a lot of retail and institutional investors are worried about because they've already they're already spending a ton. I mean, I believe Google is something around 200 or maybe it's Amazon 200 billion in capital spending. I mean, at what point um do we stop doing that? And also, what is the result of it? And I think that's the other thing is that there is all these commitments to spending a lot, but they haven't quite seen the upside of it yet. I mean the one upside I mentioned at the beginning of this segment which is the cloud businesses are doing quite well.

Google's cloud business and AWS are doing incredible. Andy Jasse yesterday during the earnings call for Amazon noted that the growth rate for its cloud business is the fastest growth rate it's had in 15 quarters. That's notable. But does it warrant this amount of capital spending? And is it sustainable? And you know, we won't know until future quarters, but you know, I think that's the big question mark. Yeah. I mean, like you to your point, there's just been so much haze around some of the largest projects in a way that, you know, that didn't exist a year ago. You know, a year ago, we were coming off of the announcement of Stargate, this $500

billion dollar project that like OpenAI and Oracle and SoftBank were all going to do, and it was backed by the Trump administration. And like that seems to be falling apart, at least in the way that it was presented a year ago. And now it's going to be more of these kind of like lease agreements that happen across different uh data centers and it's more distributed versus like a very purposeful buildout, you know, like we originally thought. we see companies that are supposed to be using some of these data centers backing out only to be replaced with others. And so it's just more it there is not a clear line being laid out there by these companies for investors to sort of bite onto and

and follow along with like it was a year ago. So I don't think that's terribly surprising at this point. But one thing that did surprise me is that I know Microsoft reported that it has 20 million paid co-pilot users. Uh which is, you know, is surprising in the abstract because like LOL copilot, but also because like we've actually seen Microsoft very recently kind of back off some of the copilot stuff because it was getting so intrusive in so some of their products. I think broadly speaking, we've seen a lot more uptake of uh you know various AI assistants and products in enterprise versus in commercial uh at least certainly with like paid accounts and having them be lasting

customers. So I'm not, you know, maybe I'm not terribly surprised that's the number that they're just feels like a lot of people paying for co-pilot when other products are out there and uh seem to have better value. Well, I think that there's going to be a shift. So, I do think that the one and this is a little bit speculative, so you know, remember that, you know, Microsoft up until right before earnings was, you know, sort of exclusively working with OpenAI. That deal has now been restructured. But I think a lot of people associate Microsoft Copilot with OpenAI and so that there is a little bit of like early adoption and experimentation. And I think we're absolutely seeing that we are in the era

of everyone trying everything. That's going to settle out eventually. Uh eventually companies will particularly on the enterprise side find their go-to um tool. You see this in day-to-day life now, right? Like you've got your Microsoft shops and you've got your G Suite shops. And employees don't like to make those shifts or changes between the two. And I think we're going to see that a lot on like sort of the agentic AI side where companies lock in and start using certain tools. And so right now everyone's adopting everything and trying all these different subscription products. I mean they haven't reported um this company hasn't reported earnings yet but Uber I just talked to their CTO and he was talking about how like their

use of enterprise tools just in the last 6 months has had this extreme uptick. They've sort of blown through their inference b budget by the way, but it's helped them launch products, including one that I just wrote about um of Uber getting in the hotel business by half. Like normally a product like that would take a year, it took six months. So I think what we're seeing is all these companies jumping in and Microsoft is one of the beneficiaries of that. That just that raises the hairs on my neck because it brings me back to this idea of if they're already blowing through their budget for that this year, you know, and are going to need to exceed it. And we also know at the same time that a

lot of these products probably aren't priced to be a profitable business yet because it's really all about reaching scale. How sustainable is that, right? like do we, you know, those just feel like two arrows that are moving in very different directions and you it just makes me very itchy thinking about where that goes. Uh, you know, if you all of a sudden flip the switch and we're we're seeing some of that start to play out with some of these labs in particular. I'm thinking about Enthropic, which in recent weeks has like started to sort of tinker with some of the pricing again and started to tinker with what features are available at what pricing levels. And every time they do that,

understandably, it really upsets a lot of people. You scale that up to an enterprise level, you know, and you have all these customers who are not only relying on it, but are transforming their businesses around it. That makes me it makes me itchy. Think of all the CFOs out there. I think that they're probably a little bit itchier than you are right now because they're the ones who have to, you know, balance books. I love the CFO's perspective on things. So, let me know. Call me. Yeah, absolutely. Give Sean a call. That is a perfect way to end this show. You can reach out to us on X or threads at EquityPod and we'll see you next