Elon's Tesla Board Drama, Microsoft and Meta Earnings, and Bezos Bends the Knee

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Speaker 15 Cheech and Chong, what is the likelihood someone's going to spark up?

Speaker 16 I'm going to get a whole bag of weed. That's what I'm going to do.

Speaker 16 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher. I flew all night, and boy, are my arms tired.

Speaker 15 I did a joke.

Speaker 15 Where did you come in from?

Speaker 16 D.C. to San Francisco.

Speaker 15 D.C. to San San Francisco.
Oh, you're in your favorite place, San Francisco. Indeed.
I'm so excited. And you're collecting a bunch of awards.
And you're also, look what I'm wearing. I know.

Speaker 16 You're wearing the Bill Maher thing. It's very attractive.

Speaker 15 I'm wearing a Bill Maher shirt because I know you're going on Bill Maher. I'm hugely jelly.
And I'm also wearing my Beverly Hills Hotel hat.

Speaker 15 And I need you to go down to the pool, go to the polar lounge, have a few makers and gingers, say hello to Jorge, the concierge there.

Speaker 15 And any Russian woman that gives you eye contact, return her eye contact.

Speaker 15 You go down to the counter for breakfast, go to the pool, put on a big pair of black sunglasses, and any modestly attractive woman that walks by and put an unlit cigarette in your mouth and go, Jackie, marry me.

Speaker 15 I make you very happy, woman. I am doing none of this.

Speaker 16 I am in and out.

Speaker 15 So good day.

Speaker 16 I am in and out. I come back to San Francisco because I have to get a second award on Saturday and also do a charity.

Speaker 16 I charity award.

Speaker 15 Stop it. I am.
I'm doing a charity. I do.
So, by the way, Sheech and Chong and Kara Swisher, that was not the crossover I was expecting.

Speaker 16 Yes, they're the main guest. Yeah.
And then Kevin McCarthy and I are on the Kevin McCarthy.

Speaker 15 Well, at least one of you has a dick and it's not the former speaker. What, what? I don't even know.

Speaker 16 I don't get it.

Speaker 15 It's fine. Whatever.
I'm saying that you bring more masculine energy than Kevin McCarthy.

Speaker 15 That's where I don't know. Lacks a bad backbone and testicles to produce testosterone, which make you more risk-aggressive and have certain leadership skills, which he brought none of.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I know. I don't know why.
I don't know why. Well, we'll see.

Speaker 15 And it really paid off of the guy. All that ass-kissing really paid off.

Speaker 16 If he does an ass-kiss the way the Trump cabinet did yesterday to him, the suck-uppery, it was like, you know, Ann Coulter even was like, it was like Kim Jong-il.

Speaker 15 Yeah, but she's getting paid. He's not, they all find their backbone when they're out of his orbit, which does us no fucking good.
You watch tomorrow, he'll be, or Friday, he'll be really reasonable.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 because they all find sanity and all realize, I want to go on, I want to be a guest on MSNBC.

Speaker 15 I want a corporate board to hire me and realize I'm not as fucking crazy when it matters than when it actually mattered, when I'm supposed to be sane. I don't know.

Speaker 16 I think these people sound like they believe it. They do.

Speaker 16 They were such suckups. And then crazy RFK Jr., you noted that.
The whole thing about child trafficking.

Speaker 15 Oh, the guy who said that when he was a child,

Speaker 15 there were no kids with diabetes. My favorite one was that the Spanish flu was a vaccine-induced pandemic.

Speaker 16 And then the whole child trafficking thing? What was he talking about? What on earth? They must sit there and be like, that's like one of the, it's so weird. It is like Joe Kim, it's like North Korea.

Speaker 16 It was crazy. And then himself with the dolls, nobody can have any dolls.
You can't have two dollars.

Speaker 15 Well, yeah, but let me ask you this.

Speaker 15 Do you think there's any veracity to the notion that Trump says, all right, I want people to look away from the fact that I'm crashing the economy and deporting four-year-olds with stage four cancer.

Speaker 15 So just be as fucking crazy as you want. If people want to have their hair on fire about the stupid shit you say, have at it.
Anything that distracts them from the fact that

Speaker 15 I am crashing the global economy. The U.S.
is literally going to be like an estate sale. where there's no will and people just show up and fight over like mom's, you know, mom's sub-zero refrigerator.

Speaker 15 Every country in the world is now saying, oh, we want that part of your trade. Oh, we want your PhD students.

Speaker 16 It was something. It was something.

Speaker 16 And we'll talk about it more, but seriously, it was so like, I've never seen, I mean, you're supposed to be sort of peppy at those cabinet meetings, but not like that. It was like, ew.

Speaker 16 And the thing is, Donald Trump was the craziest of them. And I was like, this is like they were competing for crazy.
And once again, he wins. He wins the prize.

Speaker 16 In this case, like when he's always saying he wins at the golf club, this time he won on that particular, praising himself. He kept adding to their praise.
Oh, don't forget the firemen.

Speaker 16 Don't forget the this. I don't know.

Speaker 15 I'm excited to see you with Speaker McCarthy. He reminds me of my dog, and that is when I ask him to speak, he will, but it doesn't mean fucking anything.

Speaker 16 If he depends it and blinks. That was a joke.

Speaker 15 You didn't even give me a laugh on that?

Speaker 16 No, I didn't. Sorry, go say it again.

Speaker 15 Go ahead.

Speaker 15 Speaker McCarthy is similar to my dog, and that is when I ask him to speak, he will, but it doesn't mean anything.

Speaker 15 I think that's really good. I do.
I think that's really good. I expected a laugh from you.
I need your affirmation, Kara Swisher. By the way, I want to go to that Belmar after party.

Speaker 15 But But Cheech and Chong, what is the likelihood someone's going to spark up?

Speaker 16 Get a whole bag of weed. That's what I'm going to do.
Listen, they invited you. Speaking of weed, they invited you to club random.
They want you in that little, you should go for your book tour.

Speaker 15 That intimidates me.

Speaker 16 No, it's like up in the hills at his beautiful house.

Speaker 15 No, no, no, but they get high. Bill gets smarter when he gets high.
If I got high, he'd want to talk about transhumanism. I'd be like, dude, you got any frozen Snicker bars?

Speaker 15 I just don't, I get dumber.

Speaker 16 No, no, you need, it's comfortable. You'd like it.
You could have drinking. You don't have to get high.
You don't have to get high.

Speaker 15 Yeah, he intimidates me.

Speaker 15 I don't really know the guy. He doesn't hang out.
He hangs out with everyone after the show, but me. Yeah.
And I don't really know him. He kind of intimidates me.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Oh, my God. Scott.

Speaker 16 Everything happened to you in high school and it continues to this day. Oh, you think? I think.

Speaker 15 What, you think? You think Amy Atkins not letting me French kiss her and then going to the prom with some other guy that was three years older, you think I still remember that?

Speaker 15 You think that still makes me insecure? Yeah. you think the four women i asked a prom who said no you don't

Speaker 16 you think that doesn't have resonance prom thing i'm not gonna i told you i went to four proms each year but i'm not gonna go here we go here we in between

Speaker 15 in between collecting awards and having sex with straight men and i'm not even gay i'm straight but go ahead sorry that was my problem i'm way too straight how awesome a gay man would i make oh my god it's like my ex used to say gay by day straight by night okay

Speaker 16 okay anyway we've got a lot lot to get to today. I'm a little slow because it's early here in California.
Beautiful sunrise happening right now.

Speaker 16 Lots going on. Microsoft and Meta's latest earnings.
Wow, those were pretty impressive. And Donald Trump getting pissed with Amazon.
And then when they kissed his ass, it was fine.

Speaker 16 But first, Tesla's board was reportedly looking for a successor to Elon Musk last month, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 16 Journal says the board got frustrated with falling sales and Musk's DC focus, you think, and told Elon he needed to publicly announce he would spend more time on Tesla.

Speaker 16 Tesla's board chair, Robin Denholm, denies the reports. She has almost no credibility.

Speaker 16 She just backs up her back, her trunk and they fill it with money, posting on X that they are absolutely false. Not just false, but absolutely false.

Speaker 16 Meanwhile, Musk said goodbye to the President Trump's cabinet on Wednesday, claiming Doge has so far saved $160 billion. It's pathetic, actually.

Speaker 16 And most people think that number is not even accurate. He did so wearing not one, but two Trump hats.
It was so,

Speaker 16 so, so painful. Let's listen to the goodbye.

Speaker 15 You know, they say I wear a lot of hats.

Speaker 17 And as you can see, it's true.

Speaker 15 Even my hat has a hat.

Speaker 19 You know, the American people voted for secure borders,

Speaker 18 safe cities, and sensible spending. And that's what they've gotten.
A tremendous amount has been accomplished in the first hundred days.

Speaker 18 As everyone has said, it's more than has been accomplished in any administration before ever.

Speaker 15 Period.

Speaker 15 More lies.

Speaker 16 More lies from Elon Musta had things.

Speaker 15 I do agree that more has been accomplished. It's just how you would define accomplished.

Speaker 15 I think in 100 days, the entire world economy is being reshaped around, I mean, the kind of post-World War II order has absolutely been...

Speaker 15 is being reshaped. And you're going to see, I mean, first off, Prime Minister Carney was elected because of Trump.

Speaker 15 And you're about to see the same thing happen in Australia because the other party has has become associated with, you know, the other party went on kind of this DEI.

Speaker 15 They were trying to take a page out of Trump's notebook and they realized, oh, this isn't working out well. Yeah.

Speaker 16 Even though, you know, they would do well there. They were Murdoch there and stuff like that.
So, so the Tesla, the hat thing, I just, it's so painful. He's worn seven.

Speaker 16 Remember, he wore the big hat and then he had the gothic, like it's, it's sad. He's 53 years old.

Speaker 15 And we talk about him as if he's a teenager. He's about to start getting AARP mail.

Speaker 16 I mean, we, we, honestly. Tell me about the lead, the Tesla board thing.
Now, they're denying it, but it makes they have got to be open to lawsuits and everything else, even if Elon runs the place.

Speaker 16 But the numbers don't lie. I mean, and gravity is a thing.

Speaker 16 Like, what, what, do you, I don't, I believe they were looking for a CEO, or I believe they told him he needed to publicly say he's going to spend more time at Tesla.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I don't. So I don't know.
Obviously, we don't know if this is true or not. And if it is true, it reflects a couple of things.
One, there's someone leaking it.

Speaker 15 Two, it probably means the stock is, and this isn't financial advice, is a really great short right now because it means that

Speaker 15 they're going to cut this guy a lot of slack because he's built an incredible company and they've all made a shit ton of money because of Elon Musk.

Speaker 15 And so there's got to be a ton of goodwill just based on what they've put up with so far. They have put up with more aberrant,

Speaker 15 unacceptable behavior from a CEO than any board in history.

Speaker 15 And so for them to cross the line means that there's absolutely nothing in the product pipeline that is going to, that is going to stop this company from crashing.

Speaker 15 That it's about, it's going to, it's going to go sometimes its darkest before it's pitch black.

Speaker 15 It feels like if they are in fact looking for, taking the bold step of looking for a CEO, it means that they look at this company like, wow, there is, we are, we are in really

Speaker 15 big trouble. And,

Speaker 15 I mean, it just, the, the, but the thing I didn't agree with is that people said who would take that job. A lot of people would take that job.

Speaker 16 Okay. Look, before I get to that, tell me, you've been on boards.
I have not. Give me the strategy of leaking something like this.
I think it app the journal has been right about the drug use.

Speaker 16 It was right about, they did a lot of board stuff. So they know that board that has been very accurate.
It's turned out to be accurate. They even did a story about him sleeping with Sergey Brin's

Speaker 16 wife at the time. Accurate.

Speaker 15 The vice presidential candidate. Yeah, right, her.

Speaker 16 um anyway i just feel like they wouldn't write this if they didn't have it i i have a lot of regard for the journal and so someone on that board was telling them or more than one person or there was some messaging happening here to elon himself so what if you're on a board what how does this look leaks usually are

Speaker 15 Okay,

Speaker 15 our stocks getting so so so on a meta level, it is amazing how much boards will put up with when the stock is going up.

Speaker 15 And it's amazing how much unfair blame they'll put on the CEO when the stock is going down.

Speaker 15 This notion that boards, this bullshit virtue signaling narrative that they adopted in the odds, that it's about stakeholder value, it's not. It's about shareholder value.

Speaker 15 If the shares are going up in price,

Speaker 15 you know, he can be banging his assistant and her dog. And we'll find reasons to, you know, say

Speaker 15 you're going to rehab, but it's better now. And, you know, we'll figure out a reason to bring you back or maintain you're the CEO and call you chairman.
When the stock's going down,

Speaker 15 you're in trouble. You're on the green mile all the time, at least for two or three years.
A new CEO gets two to three years.

Speaker 15 And a lot of CEOs that are there for a long time will populate the board with their golf buddies. And

Speaker 15 the board becomes ineffective.

Speaker 15 In terms of actual leaks, sometimes it's a board-level thing where they say, all right, there's a narrative out there that we're an irresponsible board and that we need to find a new CEO.

Speaker 15 And so let's leak it that we're looking for a new CEO. I don't think he would have wanted this message to be leaked because it makes him look bad.

Speaker 15 When you have, I've been on boards where there's leaks, where there's a proxy fight, and the board is at each other's throat, and then one or more people start leaking shit.

Speaker 15 That's when boards start to really digress and dissolve into chaos because nobody trusts each other. Everyone's like, okay, who the fuck here is leaking?

Speaker 15 And most of the boards I have been on, generally speaking, they don't leak. They don't, they just don't, they realize it's bad for the, bad for the governance.

Speaker 15 It creates tremendous tremendous distrust within and among board members. They don't want to work with each other.
You know, there's two board meetings, one of the people on X side, one on Y side.

Speaker 15 So I don't, I'm confused a little bit by this because

Speaker 15 they don't want to announce this until they have a new CEO. So someone leaking this, I don't think it's on the board.
I don't think it came from the board.

Speaker 16 But you don't. Okay.
So

Speaker 16 when you, who would be the CEO? You said that.

Speaker 16 I mean, who would, who would do this? And more to the point, if he's running it, what does he do?

Speaker 16 What does he do? Except go on and on and try to do this hypnotic thing. And by the way, Henry Blodgett wrote a piece about my idea and likes it, the idea of merging Tesla with XAI, FYI.

Speaker 16 I said I rendered you speechless, which I did.

Speaker 15 I did, which isn't easy to do.

Speaker 16 So who would be the CEO or what should Elon do as CEO? Should they replace him? And if they don't, and he is the CEO and

Speaker 16 he stays, what should he do? Because he seems entirely uninterested in the business or pretending it's another business. We're going to have millions of Optimus Primes.

Speaker 16 This is a data company or we're going to have robo-taxis, none of which exist. No products exist.
It feels like a cyber truck part two, essentially, which was a huge dud, by the way.

Speaker 15 Who should run it? So first off,

Speaker 15 he shouldn't have been CEO two or three years ago when he started committing securities fraud and started getting really awful accusations and decided that he wanted to be CEO of three or four companies companies who shouldn't have been CEO.

Speaker 16 They should have said, all right, he has many hats in case you're interested.

Speaker 15 If you want to do this, you can be chairman and have huge input, but we need to bring in a full-time person who's CEO and has the license to make decisions and has accountability for these decisions.

Speaker 15 In terms of who should be CEO, I think it needs to be someone from the automobile sector. And there's a lot of great, there are a lot of great leaders in the automobile sector.

Speaker 15 I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being someone from outside of the U.S.

Speaker 15 I think that person in their contract says, I have total support of the board.

Speaker 15 And if something goes wrong and you fire me because I'm not getting along with Elon, I'm getting the most ridiculous fucking severance package because this guy's going to need, or Gal is going to need the mother of all kind of parachutes.

Speaker 15 They could go more design or more cool product or something around manufacturing, pick someone from the cloud or something. But I think the automobile sector is so much about.

Speaker 15 I think it's such a unique industry and so complicated and so much about supply chain that I think they would want someone from the automobile sector. This is a long-winded way of saying I don't know.

Speaker 16 And what if he stays? Very briefly, what if he stays? What should he do? Because

Speaker 16 he's the only one who can do his flim flammery around the robots and the he should do what you're suggesting.

Speaker 15 He should do a sleight of hand and merge it with XAI and pretend that it's not an automobile company to get people to look away from the fact that his automobile sale, his pipeline is weak and his sales are crashing.

Speaker 15 Yeah. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 16 We'll see. We'll see what happens.
I'm sure he looks like unhappy to be back working on that. He seems entirely unexcited by it, which is hard to do.

Speaker 16 I I understand that feeling of you don't want to keep doing the same thing.

Speaker 16 But he made a disaster doge, so he's going to make another disaster here because he's uninterested.

Speaker 16 Speaking of Flynn Flammery, President Trump sat down for a contentious interview marking 100 days in office with ABC News Terry Moran,

Speaker 16 who he's never heard of, apparently. It was so ridiculous.
Some highlights. I gave you this chance, Terry, and you fucked me.

Speaker 16 In regards to Pete Hegset, the president remained optimistic, but when asked, he wouldn't say he had 100% confidence in him, calling it a stupid question, which is his go-to.

Speaker 16 Trump dismissed backlash to terrorists, saying they were just what people voted for, and everyone's going to be just fine. When discussing the case of Kilmar Obrego-Garcia, this was a whopper,

Speaker 16 whom the administration sent to El Salvador in error, Trump referred to a photoshopped image of MS-13 on Garcia's knuckles. Let's listen.

Speaker 20 And you'll pick out one man, but even the man that you picked out,

Speaker 20 he said he wasn't a member of a gang, and then they looked and on his knuckles he had MS-13.

Speaker 20 There's a display. Wait a minute.
Wait a minute. He had MS-13 on his knuckles.

Speaker 20 He had some tattoos that are interpreted that way. But let's move on.
Wait a minute. Okay, Terry, Terry.
Terry. He did not have the letter MS-13.
It says MS-13. That was Photoshop.

Speaker 20 So let me tell you. That was Photoshop.
Terry, you have to do that. Hey, they're giving you the big break of a lifetime.
You know, you're doing the interview.

Speaker 20 I picked you because, frankly, I never heard of you, but that's okay.

Speaker 16 Oh, my God. He's such a nagger.
It's so amazing. Like, nag, nag, nag.
But let me say, it was Photoshopped.

Speaker 16 He didn't, he doesn't know that that was trying to say the tattoos on there represented MS-13, and someone put those to give reference. And he's insisting that MS-13 was actually on there.

Speaker 16 It was

Speaker 16 total adlement, like I, or just lying almost continually. Everything he does, he breathes, he lies.

Speaker 16 Any thoughts on that interview?

Speaker 15 The thing that struck out for me was, first off, Terry Moran is a world-class journalist. He's been covering the Supreme Court and, I believe, the White House for a while.
He's in this,

Speaker 15 I thought he put on a masterclass, and I think the big winner here was Terry, because this is an impossible position. You have to maintain some decorum and dignity and respect for the office.

Speaker 15 And so when the president says, no, you got to trust me on this, it's this, it's hard. It's really hard to push back.

Speaker 15 And he was forceful yet dignified and attempted to show grace and not just say, okay, Mr. President, stop fucking lying.
Stop lying, please.

Speaker 16 See, that's what I would have done. Yeah, but I would have had the picture.

Speaker 15 But that's why you'll never interview the president because

Speaker 15 these people have to, these people have to walk a very fine line, and that is they get criticized if they don't push back on obvious lies.

Speaker 15 At the same time, they have to maintain a certain decorum that respects the office. Terry thread that needle perfectly.

Speaker 15 It reminded me of that interview on CNBC with Deidre Bolson and Keith Rebois, where basically Keith committed securities fraud over and over and over about Open Door, claiming it was profitable.

Speaker 15 And she real-time fact-checked him in a very kind of dignified, non-combative way. By the way, I think that stock's off like 70 or 90% since he went on.

Speaker 15 Journalists who want to give people the benefit of the doubt want to show some decorum, and you have to show the president a certain amount of grace. Otherwise, you're...

Speaker 16 I'm going to push back on these. I'm an interviewer.
So

Speaker 16 I feel like in that case, the constant lying, this is Biden's GDP drop. This is this.
It's just,

Speaker 16 you cannot let him continue to make things up. It's literally, although what I got the vibe was as an old person, it literally brought me to an argument I had with my mom.
Like, no, it's this.

Speaker 16 No, it's absolutely this. And I was like, it's not.

Speaker 15 Yeah, but he got, don't you think Terry made it clear to anyone with an IQ over, I don't know, 40 that he is lying or uninformed? He did.

Speaker 16 He did. I was going back and forth on it.
I think he should have pulled the picture out and said, Mr. President, these numbers were put on by Photoshop to indicate and been polite that way.

Speaker 16 This was not actually on his fingers. Here's the picture of his actual fingers.
Did you?

Speaker 15 But what's so interesting, it's interesting what the media focuses on. The media is focusing on that.
I thought by far the most interesting and damning part of the interview.

Speaker 15 was when he asked them what the Declaration of Independence meant to him.

Speaker 16 Desi Leidick made fun of it.

Speaker 15 And it was hilarious. And the look that Terry Moran gave was the same look.
And Desi Leidick said this, that when a school teacher decides a kid needs to see an adolescent psychotherapist,

Speaker 15 it was the look he was like, he's like, oh my God, we're in worse trouble than I thought. Like,

Speaker 15 this person needs help.

Speaker 15 Yeah. Break glass.
This is an emergency.

Speaker 16 Yeah. I don't know.
Yeah, because he said the Declaration of Independence was about unity. And Desi Leidick, like, that is the only thing it wasn't about.

Speaker 15 What's interesting, though, is that

Speaker 15 just to call some of Balls and Strikes here, the people around Biden clearly knew he was cognitively impaired and they hid him from the media.

Speaker 15 I think the people around Trump would probably, or anyone smart, would like to say,

Speaker 15 let's pull back on the media appearances, but there's no way. He thinks he's doing great.
He thinks he's doing great. You know,

Speaker 15 with Biden, they said, no, don't go on, Jon Stewart. We're just going to reheat your soup and Nana's coming home.
And he listened. And

Speaker 16 he was, I told you, the well-behaved guy in the old folks home. And Trump's the one that's like, where's the soup?

Speaker 15 I ordered soup. No, he's the guy leading water aerobics.
Yeah. Joe's leading water aerobics today.

Speaker 15 And regardless of stories of Korea.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And how he fought a Tyrannosaurus breast.

Speaker 16 He does think he's doing great. It's really something.

Speaker 15 No, he thinks he's killing it. He thinks he's killing it.

Speaker 16 He feels really old. Everybody's freaking out.
I don't get that.

Speaker 15 I think he feels crazy.

Speaker 16 I don't see the physical impairment you you see or no, but it's like, well, you don't have an elderly parent you're dealing with who's absolutely certain they didn't block Amanda on the phone.

Speaker 16 I did not. Like she, she blocks my son.
She pushes somebody. It's the longest running argument we ever have.
I'm like, you did it. No, I did not.
The phone did it. That's what it feels like.
Anyway,

Speaker 16 I'm not going to go into it, but that was a long argument. And I don't know why I have to be right.
I should be like Terry Moore and like, okay, let's move on.

Speaker 15 Let's move on. Just again, shout out.
Terry Moran was fantastic. He handled a very difficult situation very well, I thought.

Speaker 16 Yeah. Anyway, lastly, a federal judge dismantling Apple's control of the App Store ruling said that Apple violated orders in a five-year antitrust case bought by Epic Games.

Speaker 16 In a previous ruling, the judge ordered Apple to allow apps to use external payments to avoid 30% commission charges.

Speaker 16 The judge accused executives of lying, saying Apple created a new system forcing external sales to be charged 27% commission.

Speaker 16 Now the judge says Apple may no longer take commissions from sales outside the App Store.

Speaker 16 Let me just say, I do not understand this because Apple won almost everything except this one thing, and they did not follow it along.

Speaker 16 Now, the App Store is a large part of Apple's $100 billion annual services revenue.

Speaker 16 I don't imagine it's an enormous blow because it's difficult to do those outside external sales, but it seemed like a real error on Apple's part here to do something like petulant like this, given how much they won.

Speaker 15 The biggest toll booths in the world are Google and arguably Apple's App Store.

Speaker 15 And to think your buddy, Barry Diller, summarized it perfectly. This is like a credit card company.

Speaker 15 The App Store provides infrastructure, payment technology, security, safety, a certain level of assurance that if something goes wrong, they vet the stores, they vet the consumers.

Speaker 15 Credit card companies charge between 1.8% and 3%. Apple charges 30% or 15%, I think if it's recurring revenue.
But they have such a lock,

Speaker 15 even though they have, I think, about 40 or 50% market share in the U.S., I think they have closer to 80 or 90% of actual revenue volume because anyone with any money has an iOS or people with most money have an

Speaker 15 iOS.

Speaker 15 So I've been saying this for a while. The best ways to oxygenate the economy would be to, one, for China and the U.S.
to kiss and make up because everything would get 10% cheaper around the world.

Speaker 15 But two, to basically bust up these toll booths and have other toll roads or other players. I mean, I don't know if you saw in the wake of just monster earnings from Meta and Alphabet.

Speaker 16 We'll talk about that in a minute, but go ahead.

Speaker 15 Pinterest and Snap are just dying a slow death. I mean, no one can compete with their scale.
So

Speaker 15 in the app store is just another example. I mean, you could easily break a great company in terms of a breakup would be Apple Services, which would probably be the App Store or their media.

Speaker 16 So why would they do this given they really did sort of win in this case, except for this?

Speaker 15 I don't understand. What do you think? I think you have a better, you know them better than I do.

Speaker 16 I I have no idea. It seems like, well, they just don't want to do it.
They just don't want to do it. Like, they're going to just challenge it.

Speaker 16 And now, of course, the judge is saying, well, they'll appeal it. These people know how to appeal, I guess.
I assume that's what they're going to do. Anyway, it seems to be a real

Speaker 16 unusual error on their part to do something, being petulant. I mean, I can see petulance from Mark Zuckerberg or Bezos or any of them, but not Tim Cook.
But here we are.

Speaker 15 Another, a real winner, though, and a player in this is, and I've been investing in them, is Epic.

Speaker 15 And they went up against Apple and sort of, I don't know if, I don't know if you'd say they won, but they didn't back down. And it doesn't appear,

Speaker 16 they didn't really win. It was, it was more in Apple's favor, but in this case, now they're able to do what they want.
We'll see how much that sticks.

Speaker 16 I mean, I think Apple's playing the very long game with Trump and everything else, the quiet long game. Anyway, okay, Scott, let's go on a quick break.
Going get back.

Speaker 16 Microsoft and Meta earnings, which we will discuss because they were pretty fantastic, and why Trump is getting compared to the Grinch who stole Christmas.

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Speaker 16 Scott, we're back. Microsoft and Meta shares are up both after companies reported quarterly earnings that beat Wall Street expectations on Wednesday and how.

Speaker 16 Microsoft sales surpassed $70 billion, up 13% from a year ago. The company's Azure Cloud unit posted a 33% revenue gain.
Meta sales grew by 16% year over year to $42 billion.

Speaker 16 Net income was $16 billion. The company isn't slowing down on CapEx spending either, boosting its forecast as high as $72 billion.
This is mostly around AI.

Speaker 16 Of course, the weak spot continues to be that first shift that Mark made. Meta reported $4.2 billion in losses from its Reality Labs division.
That's why they call themselves Meta.

Speaker 16 It also announced the launch of Meta AI this week. It's a standalone AI app, sort of to compete with ChatGPG.
Makes sense.

Speaker 16 So far, the company's avoided getting dragged down by tariff chaos, which is interesting. We'll see if it goes on.

Speaker 16 Mark's actually addressed the concerns about tariff impact in his earliest call, saying, I think we're well positioned to weather the economic uncertainty. I think advertising is an open question.

Speaker 16 Just for people to know, Amazon and Apple earnings coming after we record, so we'll dig into those next week. But talk a little bit about these earnings, each company.
Let's start with Microsoft.

Speaker 15 Staggering.

Speaker 15 You know, revenues on a big base up 13%. Their cloud revenue is up 20%.

Speaker 15 And what you have here, and also Microsoft is probably, I don't want to say it's a defensive stock, but it's least, it's kind of most recession-proof.

Speaker 15 And also, it doesn't seem to be subject to real damage other than a slowdown in the economy from these tariffs. And keep in mind, the majority of their biggest customers are global.

Speaker 23 So even if the U.S.

Speaker 15 gets hit, they're pretty well insulated. You know, Apple is going to take a hit if the tariffs

Speaker 15 continue to escalate. Amazon will absolutely take a hit.

Speaker 15 Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet are more insulated because they're digital marketing. But Microsoft has exposure to the cloud.
It's a very diversified, robust business. It's really well managed.

Speaker 16 Can I just say with Microsoft,

Speaker 16 Chatsu Nadella, I think, even though he's the quietest of them. And by the way, if you've noticed, he hasn't sucked up to Trump.

Speaker 16 He's just doing his job, like kind of thing.

Speaker 16 And of course, his job doesn't have that much. The interaction they have has to do around national security and everything else.

Speaker 16 And they do have, let me tell you, that's where their big weakness is around security issues, around their software, et cetera.

Speaker 16 But I have to say, he deserves much more credit than almost any CEO in terms of really making this company shine.

Speaker 16 I'm always impressed with him and especially how he handles things.

Speaker 16 He manages not to lose his soul every five minutes.

Speaker 16 But go ahead, Meta, which I think is hugely impressive. Mark Zuckerberg really knows how to run a company.
He really does.

Speaker 15 Oh, revenue increased 16%. And even, I think, even more impressive, their price per ad was up 10%.

Speaker 15 If you're looking for how AI is impacting our economy, their ability to target, I mean, having, don't you increasingly have more of those moments where you're thinking, my shoulders have been bothering me.

Speaker 15 And all of a sudden on reels, I'm getting served ads for like

Speaker 15 for bands to help with my shoulders. I'm like, how the fuck did they figure that out?

Speaker 15 And the amount of time in terms of serving you up, incredible ads.

Speaker 15 Their recommendation engine is contributed to a 35% increase in time spent on threads, a 7%

Speaker 15 increase in time spent on Facebook, 6% on Instagram.

Speaker 15 He predicted, or Zuck predicted AI would be able to handle half of Meta's developer work.

Speaker 15 So he's able to maintain, you know, other than CapEx around data storage and AI, their human capital costs have decelerated and aren't growing nearly as fast as their top-line revenues, meaning that quote-unquote earnings are going to explode.

Speaker 15 And just to give you a sense, I do this deck on AI. I think the AI company at 2025 is Meta because

Speaker 15 first off, if you look at it, 80% of people in the world outside of China.

Speaker 16 But can I I just note something? It's the best data. Like, think about Twitter data.
It's not good data.

Speaker 16 Like, you know, it's kind of all noisy, but this is all people moving and using and relatively behaving. I mean, there's all kinds of problems on this platform, obviously, but go ahead.

Speaker 15 Well, the peanut butter and chocolate or chocolate and peanut butter of AI is loosely speaking, the chips of processing power. They're the second biggest purchaser of chips.

Speaker 15 They're in line with the second biggest purchase order of NVIDIA chips. And then the chocolate is the actual data, the input, the coal in the furnace, whatever you want to call it, right?

Speaker 15 Grist in the mill.

Speaker 15 And just to give you a sense of just how much data is produced on meta platforms, Reddit, which is unbelievably accelerated, has the fifth most traffic of anyone in the U.S., any site in the U.S., Reddit is the source of roughly 1.3 trillion tokens of text, right?

Speaker 15 1.3 trillion tokens of text.

Speaker 15 Meta.

Speaker 15 180 trillion tokens. So Meta has more coal to throw into the furnace to process and learn from, and they're going to have the second most

Speaker 15 NVIDIA chips. In addition, they not only get the benefit of saying, all right, we're going to use that to have a consumer-facing product.

Speaker 15 Instead, or in addition to, we're going to use AI to give advertisers such extraordinary targeting at the right time for the right person in the right place that advertisers are going to be helpless not to just reallocate more and more of their budgets to meta.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 16 He's too.

Speaker 16 Look, we all have our issues with Mark Zuckerberg, and it's deserved, but man, can he ran? He's like a Gatesian figure. Remember how well Bill Gates ran or

Speaker 15 brilliant businessman.

Speaker 16 Brilliant business person. He wore those glasses everywhere, the meta glasses, which are probably, I don't think they're an enormous business for them, but

Speaker 16 he does the walk. I mean, he looked,

Speaker 16 he didn't look, he wore them everywhere this week, which was smart. It was smart that he did it.
He didn't look as dumb as Elon looks in a hat, but

Speaker 16 I would agree. I think it's really astonishing how

Speaker 16 what's happening. Like you were noting, and I was thinking about it the rest of the week, was Google has so many good businesses, you know, within this company.
So does Facebook, right?

Speaker 16 And I like threads. I

Speaker 16 do, I do. I like it for, it feels like Instagram a little bit easier, like essentially.

Speaker 16 And I'm on Blue Sky. I like Blue Sky too, by the way.
But there's so many good products in this term.

Speaker 16 I think the two dings on them obviously will be their deleterious effect on the entire world um and this trial we'll see a lot of people do you know i've been talking to a lot of people most people and i agree think it's a relatively weak case that they have competition now and they're just doing very well with the competition but a lot of other people think they're going to lose and it's and it's going to be like microsoft right it's not going to really matter um and they won't spin stuff off but we'll see if they have to spin things off like an instagram or a um a whatsapp it would be certainly be interesting if they did, as you and I have talked about.

Speaker 16 Anyway,

Speaker 16 good job, Mark Zuckerberg. We have to give it to you.
And again, we'll talk about Amazon and Apple earnings. We both think they're going to get hit.

Speaker 15 There's only just one thing in the Microsoft earnings that I thought were interesting in the earnings call, and that is

Speaker 15 their data storage expenditures coming down. And I wonder if some of them are thinking

Speaker 15 that DeepSeek, maybe there's an opportunity, or maybe the

Speaker 15 maybe the data storage and the power consumption won't be as as great as initially forecast.

Speaker 15 I think a lot of them are looking at the deep seek innovation and thinking, how does this impact our capex moving forward?

Speaker 15 But you're probably going to see in the back half of the year, even more staggering earnings because it feels like they have so much momentum on the top line.

Speaker 15 And yet on the expense side, I think they're going to maintain.

Speaker 15 I think their capex is going to go flat or maybe even down, which is just going to be like nitro and glycerin for their earnings.

Speaker 16 Yeah, we'll see about that. It'll be interesting.

Speaker 16 And it'll be interesting to compare Amazon and Apple with them. But speaking of economic uncertainty, President Trump is blaming former President Biden for the U.S.

Speaker 16 economy contracting in the first quarter of 2025, suggesting in this cabinet, this ridiculous cabinet meeting that Q2 will also be tied to Biden. He's going to blame Biden.

Speaker 16 He mentioned Biden like 912 times, or not that many, but a lot. He's taking the same stance on markets, writing on True Social on Wednesday.

Speaker 16 This is Biden's stock market, not Trump's, even though he had claimed it was Trump's stock market back in 2024 when he wasn't president. The market was doing well.

Speaker 16 He was calling it Trump's stock market.

Speaker 16 He's also telling Americans to be patient, but acknowledge there will be some consequences from his tariffs. Let's get to the doll situation.

Speaker 25 You know, somebody said, oh, the shelves are going to be open. Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dollars, you know?

Speaker 25 And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.

Speaker 16 Oh my God, it's true. Whoever said that.

Speaker 16 This idea that, I mean, look, that may be true. I agree.
I have too many fucking toys in my house, and I wish I had like a

Speaker 16 many less, but it's none of his business if people want $30. Americans are used to products on the shelves and open, whatever open means empty is the word he's looking for.

Speaker 16 Toy manufacturers are already warning about a Christmas toy shortage. Factories in China produce nearly 80% of all toys and 90% of Christmas goods sold in the U.S.

Speaker 16 It's, I don't like, he's making a point. Yes, we shouldn't consume as much.
The man who consumes more than anybody, who's just like a giant maw of consumption, is lecturing people.

Speaker 16 His whole administration is doing this. They're very on message.
Well, you don't need that stuff. You don't need it.

Speaker 16 And that may be, but how do you think it's going to hit with people, especially if there are empty shelves, not open shelves, but empty shelves?

Speaker 15 From a guy that golfs every third day and bangs porn stars, he's talking mess about consumers.

Speaker 16 I know, and then shows off his gold in that Terry Moran interview, by the way. He showed off.

Speaker 15 Americans, we are the most conspicuous consumers in history.

Speaker 15 America is sort of an, you'd argue, an insurance company with a military, but really what it is, it's a platform for prosperity where people get material and hopefully emotional,

Speaker 15 you know, gains from an incredible operating system. And

Speaker 15 you could argue that Biden was kicked out of office because the price of eggs went too high, but he doesn't think people are going to notice. 90% of America is on a fixed budget.

Speaker 15 And if toys go up in price, 30%, 40, 50%, that means a third to a half fewer toys.

Speaker 15 You don't think that's going to hit home emotionally when the kids start noticing, wait, you know, that just really hits you hard. It hits on an emotion where

Speaker 15 when you feel like you're not providing for your kids on key moments, it really rips at your soul. And

Speaker 15 people are going to get angry. Just the notion that, oh, Americans, that these people, that him with his, that with his tacky, retrofitted 757,

Speaker 15 that somehow Americans, you know, don't need all this stuff. Well, okay, folks, Americans love

Speaker 15 their stuff.

Speaker 15 America is the land of stuff. We love our shit.
There's nothing wrong with it. Our Nespresso, our Netflix.
We love stuff. And loosely speaking, actually, if you were to pick one thing that impacts

Speaker 15 the majority of elections in America for the last 50 years, it's kind of your safety and security around your ability to buy more stuff. It's the economy.
And so that's just a ridiculous statement.

Speaker 16 So why did he make it? I mean, he just,

Speaker 16 and then it was echoed by all his people. And then blaming Biden, obviously, he's going to use Biden as, you know, 10 years from now, he's going to say Biden was the reason.

Speaker 16 What is, I mean, I don't think people are thinking of Biden anymore, you know, or mentioning it. Although his voters have a very astonishing, they are now echoing this.

Speaker 16 There was a lot of interviews I saw where they're like, yeah, we got to buck up.

Speaker 16 Like we're in the middle of the World War II and the Nazis are headed our way, like that kind of mood of something like that.

Speaker 15 There is some truth to the notion that this GDP, this, so GDP was off, first negative quarter since I think 2022, first in three years. We had a contraction.

Speaker 15 I don't think it's fair to lay that at the feet of the Trump administration. GDP is a lagging indicator.

Speaker 15 The surge in imports because of these ridiculous tariffs took, you know, took a large portion of the GDP down.

Speaker 16 You're going to see. Consumption is down too, the both things together, but go ahead.

Speaker 15 Next quarter, there's just no excuses he owns it. And you're going to see a contraction.
I don't like GDP. I don't think it's a good measure, but you're going to see the economy contract.

Speaker 15 And it's on its way. I'm doing a lot or a decent amount of, I have a lot of friends who are impacted by the tariffs.
And essentially, like business has come to a standstill.

Speaker 15 And they're sitting around trying to guess, do we try to move?

Speaker 15 Do we, do we go to our bank, borrow a shit ton of money, cut 20, 30% of our workforce and spend the next three years trying to reroute our supply chain through Vietnam or Indonesia?

Speaker 15 Or do we hope this guy pops up, wakes up tomorrow morning, and goes, just kidding. But in the meantime, they're in a state of paralysis.

Speaker 15 They have stopped all shipments from most of my friends from China. Shipping volume is off anywhere, depending on how you account for it, between 35 and 65%.

Speaker 15 The port of Los Angeles is less crowded than it's been in recent memory, and it's the largest port in the Western Hemisphere.

Speaker 15 And there's a lag effect, but when the ships coming into the port are empty or they're not coming in, that means in about four to 12 weeks, the stores are going to be empty.

Speaker 15 And also you're going to start to see layoffs.

Speaker 16 Yeah, because I just interviewed Wesmore, who's he's the governor of Maryland

Speaker 16 and a very handsome man, as you would say. Wesmore, he's going to be a presidential candidate.
And he was talking about

Speaker 16 the knock-on effects in Baltimore

Speaker 16 in terms of like truckers, unloaders, people around it, restaurants around it. It's just going to reverberate all over

Speaker 16 these economies

Speaker 16 in California, in Maryland,

Speaker 16 New York. You know, of course, these are all blue states, but still, it will have so much reverberations around the country.
And then it just keeps having knock-on and knock-on effects.

Speaker 16 Anyway, I don't think he can keep blaming. I agree with you.
He can blame them for a short time, but this is just nonsense lecturing people on how many dolls they should have.

Speaker 16 I agree that we shouldn't have so many choices, but that's my personal opinion. And he's the president of the United States.
It's none of his business to tell people what to buy.

Speaker 15 It's like that Borad film, you know, 33 different types of cheeses. That's just who we are.

Speaker 15 The weird thing is, just going back to the earnings for a moment, you're probably going to see increased bifurcation between the Magnetism 7 and the rest of the economy because these firms, so Amazon is the most subject to this trade war than anyone because two-thirds of their business comes within the U.S.

Speaker 15 and a lot of their products are subject to tariffs. A company like Meta gets only one-third of its business from the U.S., and the majority of its products are not subject to tariffs.

Speaker 15 Apple, two-thirds from outside the U.S. A company like Microsoft, half their business comes from outside the U.S.

Speaker 15 So these companies are, I don't want to say they're insulated, but the big guys and the big tech companies are much more insulated.

Speaker 15 A, most of the vast majority of the products are not subject to tariffs. And B,

Speaker 15 the majority of their business comes from outside of the U.S.

Speaker 15 So who's going to get really hard here are kind of the mainline traditional mainline firms. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 16 the main street economy is really going to get hit hard you're absolutely right all right scott let's go on a quick break uh speaking of amazon we get back we'll talk about jeff bezos bending the knee once again it's not the first time to trump

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Speaker 16 Scott, we're back. President Trump is calling Jeff Bezos very nice and a good guy.

Speaker 16 After phoning Bezos to complain about a report that Amazon was was going to show how much of an item's cost comes from tariffs, the White House's initial reaction was a press secretary Carolyn Levitt, also known as Tracy Flake, calling Amazon's plan for a hostile and political act.

Speaker 16 And while Amazon first said the pricing plan was only being considered for its budget site, Amazon Hall, in a subsequent statement, the company knows the plan was never approved and it was not going to happen.

Speaker 16 They kept changing their story. Trump later told reporters that Bezos solved the problem very quickly.
So it clearly was on deck to happen. Who knows where and which part of Amazon they have.

Speaker 16 Their credibility has declined rather significantly with this incident. Bezos has, of course, been making nice with Trump for a while.

Speaker 16 Known back in December at the Times Deal Summit, he said he was optimistic about Trump's behavior in his second term and completely wrong. Let's listen.

Speaker 15 What I've seen so far is that

Speaker 15 he is calmer than he was the first time and more confident, more settled.

Speaker 16 I guess he wants him to go to his fancy wedding in Venice in June, I guess. What do you think of this? Obviously, he's going to do it.

Speaker 16 You predicted the Fortune 500 CEOs and businesses were going to start standing up to Trump. This is not what happened here.
And it looks like Paramount is going to do the same thing, Sherry Redstone,

Speaker 16 to settle a ridiculous, baseless lawsuit

Speaker 16 in order to make NICE to get that merger through. Was the initial Amazon plan a good idea? Should companies be transparent about these prices and put them on? Some companies are doing this.

Speaker 16 And there's an antitrust trial coming up, obviously, for Amazon. It didn't work so well for Mark to kiss up because it's still going forward.

Speaker 16 Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Bezos on Wednesday asking whether he received any promises or favors from Trump in exchange for scrapping Amazon's plan.

Speaker 15 Thoughts? Well, when the White House

Speaker 15 press secretary,

Speaker 15 she immediately said this was a hostile and political act. And why didn't they

Speaker 15 put what the prices were because of the Biden inflation. I mean, that's just such a ridiculous statement.

Speaker 15 One, in terms of Biden and inflation, that's so intellectually dishonest because of all the G7 countries, our inflation was the lowest.

Speaker 15 There was tremendous supply chain shocks from the invasion of Ukraine and COVID.

Speaker 15 And two,

Speaker 15 these guys all claim they're such free speech warriors, putting what the terrible,

Speaker 15 Airbnb and

Speaker 15 Amazon have all come under criticism for not putting on

Speaker 15 when I order from Caviar, which I love in New York, it used to piss me off that I wouldn't see up front how much delivery charge and service fee and all that. Airbnb came under fire.

Speaker 15 So Airbnb said, okay, we're going to put the true costs. And they started breaking it out.
That's transparency. And it's also free speech.

Speaker 15 It is entirely reasonable for Amazon to say, all right, this is what, this is how much the tariffs are costing. It is a bit of a political statement.
It's also called free speech.

Speaker 15 And two, when you start having

Speaker 15 Biden came under fire for having one-off conversations with Meta about misinformation around COVID, and he got huge criticism.

Speaker 15 And there's some veracity to the notion that the president should not be having one-off conversations and putting pressure on individual companies.

Speaker 15 It's supposed to have systemic solutions and laws that impact the whole industry. Otherwise, it just ends up being corruption as it is now.

Speaker 15 Where I don't know if you saw the latest, auto companies are now going to be exempt from a lot of these tariffs.

Speaker 15 So, if you're a big company that's on his lunch calendar, or you have a popular brand, or you're gigantic, or or you get to have lunch with him, you get exemption from this ridiculous behavior.

Speaker 15 And the problem is, is that small and medium-sized business, which account for 98% of the companies that depend upon export and import, are shit out of luck because they can't afford lobbyists and they're never going to go to Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 15 So these individual one-off conversations are corrupt. You're not supposed to have them.
And also, I got to be, I mean, you saw me. I was so excited about Bezos.

Speaker 15 I went out with all these threads saying, good for him, Good on him. Yeah, you did.
And I was so excited. And then you texted me and you're like, he caved.

Speaker 15 He caved. And I'm like, oh, fuck.
And I had to go back and be like, well, false alarm.

Speaker 15 You know, no way.

Speaker 16 He's such a caver. He's a caver.
He wants all the Trumps to be at his wedding.

Speaker 15 Like, are you kidding?

Speaker 16 He's gone. Jeff Bezos never was there, but he's gone now.
He's down the Mar-a-Lago Highway and he's living down there, you know, much more so even than Elon, I think. I don't know.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I don't know. I'm actually excited and we'll talk about it maybe next week, but I'm excited about

Speaker 15 he's about to put a competitor into space.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I'm good with this blank slate. I'm good with the rocket stuff that he's competing with, but

Speaker 16 oh, it's whatever. They never, they never fail to disappoint these people.
They really don't. They just don't.
I just expect disappointment. You're like that.

Speaker 16 This time, you're like, this time my boyfriend's going to behave and show up and pick me up. He's changed.

Speaker 15 He's sent an Uber for me.

Speaker 15 He sent an Uber for me.

Speaker 16 The stripper loves me. I swear.
I swear she loves me. You can go to a strip club, Scott, but she doesn't.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I'm into a strip club in 20 years. I don't like strip clubs.

Speaker 16 We should go. No, we shouldn't.
We should do a tour. We should pivot.
Live pivots in a strip club.

Speaker 15 No, I'm not into strip clubs. All right.

Speaker 16 One more quick break. We'll be back for predictions, Scott.
So have a good one.

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Speaker 16 Okay, Scott, let's hear a prediction and listen up. Time for something new.
We want to hear your predictions.

Speaker 16 Send us your predictions 30 seconds or less, and we'll play them on the show if they're good. And if they're, well, if they're dirty, we'll probably play them too.

Speaker 16 Go to nymag.com/slash pivot to submit a prediction for the show or call 85551 Pivot. I wanted to create some competition for Scott.
So, Scott, up your game today. Let's go.

Speaker 15 I don't know if it finds very good, but basically one of the wonderful things about our economy is once a company establishes something resembling or supposedly monopoly power and can start implementing those rents on consumers, there's so much profits that that's like chum in the water and other sharks show up.

Speaker 15 That's the basis of competition.

Speaker 15 And hopefully if a company gets too far ahead of another, the F2C and the FTC and the DOJ move in, break it up such that it can inspire more competition, lower prices, more innovation, et cetera.

Speaker 15 Competition really is one of the secrets to America's success.

Speaker 15 And my internet went out in London. I have to have crazy fast broadband.
And I spent,

Speaker 15 I'm not exaggerating. I think I spent $50,000 or $60,000 to have fiber run across Regents Park to get the kind of broadband I need.
And it went out. You're that guy.
Yeah, I'm that guy. I went out.

Speaker 15 I don't have satellites. It went out this weekend.
And so everyone's scrambling, including Drew, to try and figure out a solve.

Speaker 15 And they went out and they bought one of those portable Starlinks and they set it up in about four hours. It's an incredible service.
I've used Starlink on a plane before. You can do FaceTime.

Speaker 15 It really is an amazing product. I think now close to two-thirds of the low-Earth satellites are owned by

Speaker 15 Starlink or SpaceX. I guess it's Starlink.
And it really is an incredible product. And I'm just thrilled to see.

Speaker 15 And I think another reason why I think Amazon's going to continue probably to outperform is that they launched their first, I don't even know know how you pronounce it. Is it Cooper?

Speaker 15 K-U-I-P-E-R?

Speaker 16 Cooper. I think it's Cooper.
Yeah, I've met with the CEOs.

Speaker 16 They've been at it the same way they've been at the rocket stuff, but Cooper.

Speaker 15 Yeah, Cooper. So the first batch of a planned 3,300 Cooper satellites launched from Florida.

Speaker 15 The mission kicks off a race to rival SpaceX's massive Starlink network. And Amazon could launch five more Cooper missions this year.

Speaker 15 I think the promise of that is going to take their stock up because Starlink is just such an incredible company that essentially has monopoly power right now.

Speaker 16 Yeah, that was run. I forget who used to run that company.
I met with them several times.

Speaker 16 They've been trying it. Like everyone's trying to catch Starlink, obviously, and it's a great opportunity to do so.

Speaker 15 Anyways, the brand, we talk a lot about in brand strategy, the first kind of key asset in brand strategy is awareness. About 98% of our purchases,

Speaker 15 at least until, is that true recently? I'd like to redo this data, but

Speaker 15 up until the social graph, 98% of your purchases are from from brands you've heard of before. Just think about you're just less inclined to return the email of someone you don't know.

Speaker 15 Just having heard of somebody or having heard of a brand makes you much more, your purchase inclination or your purchase consideration goes up exponentially.

Speaker 15 And so I would often say the first step in any brand is just to be known. And unfortunately, we live in a society is

Speaker 15 the philosopher, Italian philosopher Umberto Echo said that being famous and having awareness is more important than what you're famous or have awareness for.

Speaker 15 So awareness is enormous and it's a decent proxy for future value to be monetized. And I think the brand that's about to go from zero to 100 in the next six months is Cooper

Speaker 15 because

Speaker 15 it's a $10 billion project that was unveiled in 2019. It's had a lot of delays and it's finally starting to get its kind of mojo.

Speaker 15 And I think you're going to see, they're going to start doing a good job of showing real-time footage of every launch.

Speaker 15 And then when you think about if Amazon can offer a Starlink-like service with their interface, I mean, at some point, you know what they're going to do? They're going to roll it into Prime.

Speaker 15 Anyways, Cooper from Prime is about to become one of the biggest brands and also be the most formidable competitor to the most valuable private company in the world, I think, right now, which is SpaceX.

Speaker 15 So anyways, my prediction is the

Speaker 15 brand you haven't heard of as of May 1, 2025 is going to be ubiquitous in the investment and consumer landscape by the end of the year.

Speaker 15 And that is Project Cooper, which is a $10 billion satellite effort from the good folks at Amazon.

Speaker 16 You know what? I've touched a Cooper. They brought one to show it to me.

Speaker 15 That was in high school, right? I've touched it. Oh, wait, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. And then he decided, no, not for me.
Interesting, but not for me.

Speaker 16 But Starwind is handy. But as usual with Tesla, same thing.
People are coming in and they're going to give him a run.

Speaker 16 And if he's not on his game, Elon Musk, he's got a lot of competitors headed his way because he's shown the way.

Speaker 16 And just because you're shown the way, Elon, the planes are covered with the bodies of pioneers, as everybody will know.

Speaker 15 Oh, Starlink, to be fair, Starlink's an amazing product.

Speaker 16 It is, but I'm just saying, so was Tesla three years ago, right? And then now there's a video competition.

Speaker 15 That's why, folks, we need an FTC and a DOJ to break companies up.

Speaker 15 You need these small, scrappy stars. Anyway, Project Cooper.

Speaker 16 That's correct. You can't take your eye off the ball.
He's lucky in that company. He has a good CEO, Gwen Chotwell, who is also much too obsequious to him.

Speaker 16 But nonetheless, she really runs that show and that shows the good idea to have a good CEO in place oh and my I think you're going to be outstanding on Bill Maher I think you're going to be outstanding

Speaker 16 I could crash and burn but I hope not um I think I will he likes me like slapping him around a little bit like just like you do anyway as I said People, give your predictions.

Speaker 16 We want to hear your predictions. Send in the predictions 30 seconds or less.
We'll play them on the show.

Speaker 16 As I said, go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit this prediction for the show and beat Professor Galloway or call 85551-Pivot.

Speaker 16 And elsewhere in the Cara and Scott universe, this week on Prof G Conversation, Scott spoke with David Brooks. Okay, okay for you.

Speaker 15 I love, how can you don't, don't I do, I do.

Speaker 16 He's wonderful.

Speaker 15 Okay. You know, how can you not love David Brooks?

Speaker 16 So many people don't. Are you not paying attention on the spiritual, smart,

Speaker 15 big community?

Speaker 16 I'm glad you. He's very smart.
You're right.

Speaker 15 He's fantastic.

Speaker 16 I'm sorry. I can be not a fan of David Brooks.
I think he's just a lot um he's a writer also at the atlantic too let's listen to a clip

Speaker 33 and when i look at the trump administration i see a massive attempt to return us to the life of dog eat dog uh the life of nasty brutish and short the life where gangsters have maximum freedom to do what they want to do and that is the evisceration of all the values of civilization that conservatism is supposed to transmit and preserve.

Speaker 33 And I think the raw lust for power that Donald Trump embodies has not only eviscerated conservatism, it's inviscerated Christianity.

Speaker 16 That's a very thoughtful thought. He's right.

Speaker 15 He's right. He's right.

Speaker 16 I'm excited. I'll listen to it, I promise.

Speaker 15 I really, I really enjoyed my conversation with him. I found him to be very spiritual.
By the way, we were out there with Bill Maher. Say hello to my favorites.

Speaker 15 Bill doesn't hang out with me, but the executive producers do. Sheila Griffiths, Sheila Griffiths, I think, and Mark Gervitz and Dean Johnson.
They're literally Friday Night Lights parents.

Speaker 15 They're like handsome people.

Speaker 16 It's a great team.

Speaker 15 They're handsome people, like good-looking people in their 40s who feel like

Speaker 15 if I ever have a big problem, I'm just calling them and saying, can you just pretend to be my parent right now? And they are so nice.

Speaker 15 And they come in into that little green room and they're like, we're so happy to have him. And they're so nice.
And I get nice emails from them.

Speaker 16 Good swag, too. Good food, good swag.

Speaker 15 And beer. I shotgun to beer before the last one because I got so fucking nervous.
You're kidding. I'm not doing it.
I think that's called alcoholism.

Speaker 15 And also my Sherpa there is a woman named Susan Bennett, who's wonderful.

Speaker 16 Yeah, Susan's amazing. She's so lovely.
I have to say, Bill Maher has a staff that stayed with him for a very long time. And it's a good reflection on him, even if you don't like Bill Maher.

Speaker 15 Greatness is in the agency of others. And that is a...

Speaker 16 He has a team. Same thing with Scott.

Speaker 15 100. Scott has a team.
Percent.

Speaker 15 The key to success is the ability to attract and retain people more talented than yourself. That is it.
Full stop. Full stop.
And having a big Cooper and having a really big Cooper.

Speaker 16 My code team, All Things C team was with me for 20 years, the conference team. They were all, for the most part.

Speaker 15 Finally, the Pivot team is nodding right now. They feel nice.

Speaker 16 Nodding. They're hoping.
They're hoping. We'll see.
We've changed.

Speaker 15 There we go.

Speaker 16 Okay, Scott. That's the show.
We'll be back on Tuesday with more Pivot.

Speaker 16 Read us out.

Speaker 15 Today's show is produced by Larry Amon, Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin, and Kevin Oliver.

Speaker 35 Ernie Ruth entered into this episode. Jim Mackle edited this video.

Speaker 34 Thanks also to Jubros, Ms. Severo, and Dan Shallan.
Nishak Kuruaz, Vox Media is executive producer of auto. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 35 Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine of Vox Media.

Speaker 34 You can subscribe to the magazine at nymmag.com slash pod. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

Speaker 15 Tune in to see Chi Chin Chong, Speaker McCarthy, and

Speaker 15 Kara Swisher.

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