AMD Rallies 24% on OpenAI Deal & Bari Weiss Takes Over CBS News

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today's number 26 that's how many calories a one minute long kiss will burn that is more than the amount of calories in a lemon after hearing this news secretary pete hegseth announced a new plan to strengthen military operations in the u.s the plan is a giant orgy.

Welcome to Property Markets.

I'm Ed Elson.

It is October 7th.

Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals.

The SP 500 logged its seventh straight record close.

The Nasdaq climbed and the Dow fell.

Bitcoin hit a new high, climbing above $125,000.

Gold continued its rally towards $4,000.

And finally, Tesla shares rose more than 5% after the company posted a teaser video on X, sparking speculation of a new vehicle model.

Okay, what else is happening?

OpenAI just struck a multi-billion dollar deal with AMD, locking in six gigawatts of compute capacity to power its AI data centers.

In exchange, OpenAI could secure up to a 10% stake in AMD if it meets certain deployment milestones.

AMD's stock closed up 24% on the news.

The agreement comes just weeks after OpenAI revealed a $100 billion chip deal with Nvidia.

Meanwhile, yesterday OpenAI hosted its third annual developer conference.

The dev day featured product announcements and a fireside chat with Sam Altman and Johnny Ive.

Okay, for more on this blockbuster slate of news from OpenAI, we are joined by Alex Heath.

Alex is the author of the Sources newsletter and co-host of the new access podcast from Vox Media.

He is joining us just after actually attending OpenAI's Dev Day event.

Alex, thank you for joining us on Prof G Markets.

Thanks for having me, fan of the show.

I'm glad to hear it.

So you were just at the Dev Day, the annual developers conference for OpenAI.

What did we learn?

What were your takeaways?

I would say the big takeaway is ChatGPT wants to be your operating system.

They want to have all kinds of apps inside the experience.

They demoed Figma, Coursera, Zillow.

They're going to onboard a lot of developers where essentially you don't have to leave ChatGPT.

It creates these rich visual apps inside the chatbot for all kinds of third-party websites and apps.

So that's a pretty big vision.

Then they showed this agent workflow tool where basically you can no-code create an agent from scratch.

They did it on stage live in under eight minutes, made an agent.

I thought that was kind of fun.

And otherwise, I would say, you know, they're still very much riding high from that recent release of Sora, the Sora app.

And they're releasing that same video technology for developers.

So essentially, what you see in that Sora app, third-party developers will now be able to put into their products through the API.

What was the feeling among developers at the conference?

Did people walk away feeling pretty excited?

Was it kind of a meh?

How did people feel about this?

I think if you're a hardcore developer, nothing here really blew you away.

It's more iterative.

I think the opportunity to get distribution through ChatGPT as a third-party app developer is very exciting for people.

That's the thing I heard a lot.

Kind of reminds me of the early app store when there was just this gold rush of indie mobile apps popping up everywhere.

I mean, ChatGPT just hit 800 million weekly users.

So that's about one tenth of the global population.

It's a tremendous distribution service.

It's crazy.

And this is a product that's like three years old.

So that seems like a pretty big deal.

And they're going to figure out some kind of revenue share model where

they were very vague about it, but it sounds like the developers will maybe pay OpenAI for visibility or vice versa.

I don't know.

They were not clear about it, but it sounds like there's going to be some kind of app store-like revenue model here that they're going to do, which could be big for them because they need money, as everyone knows, to fund fund all their aggressive compute build outs with Stargate.

So a lot happening.

I mean, man, just OpenAI seems so ascendant.

They seem almost untouchable in terms of the velocity of what they're shipping right now.

Yeah.

You also spoke with Greg Brockman, who is the president of OpenAI.

What did he have to say?

What were his takeaways?

Yeah, I talked to Greg for about 30 minutes about mostly Stargate.

So he's running Stargate now with Sam Ullman.

And,

you know, the theme you heard here with, you know, my combo with Greg, and then there was a media Q ⁇ A with Sam and some of the other exacts that I attended is that they are compute constrained.

They are capacity constrained

on what the products that they have and then also the products that they want to put out.

There was that new pulse feature that I think is gated to the 200 a month ChatGPT tier where essentially ChatGPT will start recommending things to you agentically, things like a calendar reminder or saying, you know, looking at your inbox and saying, here's what you should do today.

Here's what you should follow up on.

That kind of stuff that requires the more expensive reasoning models is very expensive for them to run at scale.

And so they're limited in what they can do.

That's why that feature is still gated at 200 a month.

And I think they want to release a web browser.

I think they wish that they could open the Sora Up app to everyone and not have it be invite-only.

That's another thing that's gated by compute.

So they seem to think they can 10x their compute from here and just still be serving the user base that they have.

So I think that's what's motivating a lot of this build out.

And I do think there's competition at play.

I do think there's also the Mag7 hyperscalers going out there and buying up a bunch of GPUs and capacity as well.

And it's like this gold rush and, you know, frenzied just rush to try to secure as much capacity as possible.

It seems like this is the new

oil.

Yeah, I want to return to the compute question in a second, especially in light of this AMD news.

But just one final question about Dev Day itself.

Johnny Ive was a big feature at Dev Day.

He is, of course, the designer behind the iPod and the iPhone.

He is reportedly working on a device for OpenAI.

Did we learn anything about that device?

Did he tell us anything new at Dev Day?

No, they're super cagey about the device.

We know that it won't be a phone.

It won't be glasses.

What I've heard and what the other reporting suggests is that it's kind of like a puck that you hold that has a bunch of sensors on it.

Basically feeds ChatGPT data from the world around you and gives it more context about your life.

A fun thing I heard recently from sources is that Johnny Ives like considered how can we position this almost like the Walkman, like a cool thing that people wear around them, wear on their hip or whatever and walk around with and is taking in the outside world for them.

So it's going to be this more passive, always listening on device.

At least that's the thing they're currently working on to my understanding.

Got it.

Just returning to the compute question, this AMD deal, which is arguably bigger news than Dev Day itself.

This new deal between OpenAI and AMD.

OpenAI is going to take a 10% stake in AMD.

Part of this partnership means they're going to buy six gigawatts of compute capacity.

They didn't mention how much it'll actually cost, but they said tens of billions of dollars.

I've seen stuff that suggests that this is going to cost a lot more than that.

Your reactions to the AMD deal and what it says about the compute path ahead for OpenAI.

Yeah, I asked Greg Brockman about that because he, you know, you know, obviously worked on that deal with Lisa Sue from AMD.

And he acted like it was the first deal of its kind with that structure and that they'll probably do more of them, that they're probably going to be more bespoke kind of

tranched out deals, maybe in return for equity, rev share, et cetera.

It sounds very bespoke based on the need of the partner because, you know, the NVIDIA deal was structured very differently, right?

There was no like OpenAI getting equity in NVIDIA, right?

It was the reverse.

Right.

So I think it's dependent on the partner, partner, but they're willing to do whatever it takes to shore up more compute.

And so

I think they're talking to everybody at every layer of the stack from power, cables,

all the way up to just the GPUs themselves.

But it sounds like they're going to be a lot more and that we're going to hear about this.

financing instrument, a way to kind of standardize and templatize this that Sam Altman's really pushing for.

It still sounds months away, but it sounds like they're thinking about how can we create a blueprint for this that we can use to scale up into the hundreds of billions, I think is what they're thinking.

The numbers are, they're astonishing.

I mean, it's, it's hard to comprehend, but

they clearly see something on the other side.

I don't think they're totally irrational.

I think they're very excited, maybe a little irrational, but I don't think they're totally irrational.

Do you have any concerns about this idea of the circular deal that we keep seeing?

This idea that, you know, NVIDIA invests in OpenAI and then OpenAI goes and buys the NVIDIA compute capacity.

And we see similar things with Oracle.

We're seeing a similar thing again here with AMD with this strange arrangement.

You know, a lot of people say this is what happened in 99.

There are concerns that, you know, where is the real revenue actually coming from?

Are we just printing money?

Do you have any concerns about that yourself?

I do.

I definitely do.

I mean, ChatGPT is at a 10 plus billion annual run rate.

There's no reason to suggest they couldn't keep scaling that.

I actually think there's maybe more of a limit on a subscription business than people realize.

In India, for example, where ChatGPT is rapidly approaching its largest market, if not already, they're doing a lower price subscription because you can't really scale at 20 a month in India like you can in the U.S.

So the margin profile starts to look a little different on subscriptions.

The bigger you get once you get into the billions of users.

The only models, and we know this based on history, that really monetize effectively at billions of users.

The only model is ads.

So they have to do ads.

I know they're going to do it.

I know they're thinking about it.

I know they're looking for a leader for it right now.

It's just a matter of,

it's just a matter of when and how.

And I think where it shows up, does it show up in the SOAR app first?

You know, because it's like a TikTok-like experience, maybe.

Does it show up in Pulse, that new ChatGPT feature?

Maybe.

I think they're thinking hard about it right now in the media Q ⁇ A.

I asked Altman about that and he was like, well, I like Instagram ads.

If we can do something as good as Instagram ads, I mean, who's to say?

And this is a huge change.

I mean, OpenAI leaders, I remember even almost a year ago, the idea of ads was like, they would never even consider it.

So they know they have to monetize.

I think that would be the way that they could get to tens of more billions in ARR, which could, you know, it could pay for more of this.

At the end of the day, there still is a like, the math doesn't quite work out, right?

Like, it's like, what are we, what are we really building towards here?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm glad you mentioned advertising and i'm glad you asked sam that question that's my big question what are you going to do about the advertising it sounds like they didn't really mention it and then when you did ask it he was kind of cagey about it or at least didn't give you much of an answer to what seems to be the trillion dollar question is that the vibe you got from sam altman Yeah, they're being cagey about it.

I mean, right now they get to say that ChatGPT's business model is inherently aligned with the user because there are no incentives for them to recommend you something that you don't want to see, right?

Because you're just paying a subscription.

It's this almost like moral virtue in the product that they're very proud of.

I think they're very wary of introducing different incentives with an advertiser in the middle and how they do that.

And they want to be thoughtful about it.

So that makes sense to me, but they have to do it.

I mean, they can't monetize the user base at the billions.

And you look at who they're bringing in.

Fiji Simo, the executive team she's filling out.

They're all OG Facebook people that scaled Facebook from, you know, single-digit billions to tens of billions a year in ad revenue.

So it's a tale as old as time.

I mean, you try to ignore ads until you can't.

And with how

capital intensive their business is, it's the most capital intensive business I think that's ever existed.

They can't do it on subscriptions alone.

And this Johnny Ad hardware stuff is, who knows how that will materialize.

So I do think it's the opportunity.

I would be shocked.

Ed if we're not talking a year from now and there are not ads in ChatGPT.

All right.

Alex Heath, author of the Sources newsletter, co-host of the Access Podcast, which is a great podcast.

You've been getting some wonderful guests and you recently launched that.

So shout out Access Podcast.

And Alex, we really appreciate your time.

Thank you for joining us.

Thanks, Ed.

Okay, so this AMD deal.

We've been talking a lot about these circular deals that have been happening in AI recently.

NVIDIA investing billions in OpenAI and then OpenAI using the money to buy compute back from NVIDIA, but also using it to buy compute from Oracle, which Oracle then uses to go buy more chips from NVIDIA, et cetera, et cetera.

This is the circular deal theory.

My revenue is your revenue is my revenue is your revenue and so on.

The money goes around in a circle.

And with every deal announcement that we see, we also see this big bump in the stock.

Well, this...

is the exact same thing, OpenAI and this deal with AMD.

OpenAI essentially goes to AMD and they they say, we want to buy six gigawatts of power, to which AMD says, great, okay, that is going to cost you about $200 billion,

to which OpenAI says, great, we don't have that money right now, but let us get some of your stock.

And then when we announce the deal, the stock is going to go up in price and we can use that to finance this transaction.

And then AMD says, well, that's a little weird, but okay, what should we do if the appreciated value of the stock doesn't cover the price of the contract?

To which OpenAI says, we'll figure that out later.

And then they say, okay, they shake hands, they announce the deal, and then AMD stock skyrockets up 25%, and everyone's pretty much happy.

That is essentially what has happened here.

Now, to be clear, I said it would cost $200 billion,

but we don't actually know the real price.

The real price hasn't been disclosed.

That $200 billion number, that was an estimate.

Because according to executives at OpenAI and according to many other experts in the industry, according to them, one gigawatt worth of chips, one gigawatt worth of chip compute capacity, that costs about $35 billion.

Now, that doesn't include all of the other costs like the land and the energy and the construction costs, all of the things that are required to actually get those chips online.

That's another 15 billion.

But for the sake of simplicity, we're just going to focus on the chips now, and we're going to assume $35 billion per gigawatt.

That's what people in the industry say.

So six gigawatts of power, that is around $200 billion.

Now, the official announcement here said that this was going to cost, quote, tens of billions of dollars, which is a lot lower than is realistic.

And it's also very vague.

Tens of billions of dollars kind of implies below $100 billion, but it doesn't really tell us anything.

I mean, how many tens of billions of dollars, that is crucial information that they are omitting here.

However, you also have to remember that this is really by design.

Because what OpenAI wants you to ignore, and this goes back to our conversation with Alex there, what they want you to ignore with this deal is how unbelievably expensive it is.

And how when you actually add up the numbers of all of these contracts, suddenly the numbers cease to make sense.

So let's do what OpenAI doesn't want us to do.

Let's add up the numbers and you can decide for yourself if it makes any sense.

So we will start with AMD, which if we're going off of market pricing, again, will cost OpenAI a little over $200 billion.

Next up, we have NVIDIA.

They have this partnership with OpenAI, which is going to be 10 gigawatts of capacity.

So that's going to cost OpenAI roughly $350 billion.

Then you have this deal with Core Weave, which has been expanded twice, and that's about $22 billion.

And then there's also Oracle, which is going to be about $300 billion.

That is the future expectation of costs for OpenAI.

Lastly, we have this deal with Broadcom, and that's going to be $10 billion.

So, in total, OpenAI plans to spend over the next few years $882 billion.

That is more than the US government will spend this year on education, transportation, agriculture, the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, the Department of Homeland Security combined.

It is also more than the total free cash flow that Microsoft has generated over the past 20 years.

Now, the very obvious question here.

How on earth are they going to pay for this?

Well, if they were a profitable company, you would say they are going to pay for it with their profits.

They're going to pay for it with the cash that they are bringing in the door.

But this brings us to the other glaring issue here, and that is OpenAI isn't profitable.

It is unprofitable, in fact, extremely unprofitable.

Just to go through the numbers here, they did more than $4 billion in revenue in the first half of the year, but they posted a net loss of nearly 14 billion.

You look at their cash burn, which is on a current trajectory of $10 billion per year.

Part of the problem is how much they're spending, but also there's the fact that they signed this deal with Microsoft where they have to hand over a fifth of their revenues over to Microsoft.

So actually,

in addition to all of these contracts, we also need to factor in their burn, the amount that they're spending on marketing and R ⁇ D and compensation, et cetera, which over the next few years should add up to between 50 and 100 billion dollars.

Now, to be clear, OpenAI says their burn is actually going to increase significantly from what it is today, but we're going to lowball it.

We'll call it $50 billion over the next few years.

So we are now up to $930 billion in gross spend.

Again, how do you pay for this?

Let's do the math.

Supposedly, OpenAI has about $18 billion in cash on their balance sheet.

Okay, strong balance sheet.

With the AMD deal, assuming the stock is issued and it stays elevated, they're going to have another 30 billion dollars worth of AMD stock.

Then you've also got the NVIDIA deal, which again isn't signed, isn't completed, still highly contingent on multiple factors.

But let's assume it happens as planned.

Then they're going to have another $100 billion in cash that came from NVIDIA.

Add that all up.

That's $150 billion.

That's how much cash they will presumably have.

The spending plan is $930 billion.

So we are short $780 billion.

That is $280 billion more than the current valuation of the entire company.

So that means if they want to do all these things they say they're going to do, they have to sell either $780 billion worth of equity, which is impossible, or they have to sell $780 billion worth of debt.

More possible.

but still close to impossible.

This is getting crazy.

Gil Luria, head of tech research at D.A.

Davidson, he said it best on the podcast just a few weeks ago.

He said, they are making a lot of commitments and they don't have the capital to fulfill those commitments.

He is right.

I'm sorry.

Open AI does not have $780 billion, nor will they have $780 billion within the timeframe they are suggesting here.

Now, why does this matter?

Why do I care?

Why do we care?

Why should you care?

OpenAI is a private company after all.

We've talked about that a lot.

It should only really impact a handful of investors if things go wrong.

The trouble, however, is the impact that OpenAI now has on the public stock market, on stocks like Nvidia and Oracle, and in this case, AMD.

It's the fact that the company actually can just say things, announce deals, and it does drive stocks up.

to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.

In the case of AMD yesterday, $100 billion.

So the stock market is at this point inextricably linked to Open AI.

And so when you realize that the prospect of OpenAI not fulfilling its promises, when you realize that isn't just probable, it's actually likely.

In some cases, some would say it's actually certain.

Well, then suddenly you have to ask yourself, what comes next?

What happens to AMD stock if OpenAI can't make good on this contract?

What happens to NVIDIA?

What happens to the rest of the S ⁇ P 500 for which AI is driving 75% of the returns?

These are the questions we need to start thinking about.

These are the questions we need to start taking seriously.

And no, that doesn't mean sell.

We're not there yet.

It just means pay attention.

When you see these AI headlines, when you see these stocks ripping up 25% just on some deal announcement, you need to ask yourself, what is really going on here?

What are they really saying?

What do they want us to believe?

Don't let FOMO get the better of you.

Don't buy into the hype mindlessly.

Yes, fortune favors the brave and fortune will favor the brave.

But in the case of AI, it will also favor the smart.

After the break, a look at David Ellison's latest acquisition.

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To remind you that 60% of sales on Amazon come from independent sellers, here's Scott from String Joy.

Hey, y'all, we make guitar strings right here in Nashville, Tennessee.

Scott grows his business through Amazon.

They pick up, store, and deliver his products all across the country.

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Rock on, Scott.

Shop small business like mine on Amazon.

We're back with Profit Markets.

Paramount has officially purchased Barry Weiss's startup, The Free Press, for $150 million.

Weiss will also take over as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News.

She will report directly to David Ellison, and she will take the reins of flagship programs such as 60 Minutes.

As a reminder, Barry Weiss is a former former New York Times journalist who resigned in 2020, citing a quote, illiberal and hostile work environment.

She launched the free press in 2021 as an alternative to mainstream media.

So here we are four years later, and Weiss is stepping back inside the mainstream tent.

This time she's bringing a readership of one and a half million free press subscribers with her, 170,000 of whom who are paying subscribers.

The Financial Times estimated the free press generates more than $15 million per year so that 150 million dollar price tag would value the platform at 10 times revenues which feels rich by comparison netflix's revenue multiple is 12 times so for more on what this acquisition means for the future of independent media let's give scott galloway a call

scott how's it going it's going really well and i just did a

workout with my son and he is now officially stronger than me.

So I am cutting him off.

No way.

I don't don't believe it.

Well, I actually do not believe it.

He's faster

and more agile than me.

I can still, I'm still stronger, but you know, I'm freakishly strong.

I'm freakishly strong.

I mean, look at these weights.

If you buy all these weights, you're going to be just really fucking strong, even if nobody ever touches them.

We need to get you to start working out during the podcast.

I think that could be an interesting new spin on things.

Well, hold on.

Let me do my impression of a cash patel pull-up.

Can you see me?

Can you see this?

Hold on.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

I've got to do this.

Hold on.

It'll be really funny.

Okay.

Can you see me here on the pull-ups?

Yep.

Okay.

This is a cache patel pull-up.

One, two, three, four, five.

This is how.

The dog does pull-ups.

That's right, Dick.

That's right, ladies.

Surrender to the dog.

Secretary of War, Maya.

This is independent media at its finest.

You're not seeing this on TV.

This is our differentiator.

I could have a stroke right now, Ed.

I could have a stroke.

All right.

Speaking of independent media, we want to get your reaction to the Paramount CBS News

free press deal, which officially closed.

They officially announced Barry Weiss as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News.

They're acquiring the free press for $150 million, 10 times revenue.

Scott, your initial reactions.

My initial reaction, Ed, we're going to be rich

if

that thing sold for 150 million.

No, look, okay, my first reactions.

I'm happy for Barry and I'm happy for independent media.

I know Barry,

you know, it's only four years old

And I don't know her well, but I've had lunch with her and I think she's smart.

I think she's fearless.

I think she built a really nice company and I'm happy for her and her family and

the journalists of Free Press.

The genius was that there was very few reputable media companies kind of right of center.

It kind of went full spectrum, center, left of far, left of center.

And then it went all the way to kind of the crazy shit in Fox and Daily Wire.

very few things kind of right of center they occupied that space the second thing is

i think the majority of her revenue when i met with her was subscription and that is very attractive because those revenues are much more enduring right

in addition i think they were

probably excited to have someone who they saw is

fearless and right of center kind of take charge of the cbs newsroom now

the other thing is she's about to have the worst fucking job in the world because all she's going to do is be the person jumping on the grenade of massive layoffs and basically the neutering of the CBS newsroom.

And from what I understand, it's already been pretty seriously neutered.

But the reality is, if you look at the NBC, CBS, and ABC nightly news,

it's the same fucking thing.

It's 22 minutes of them reporting the same goddamn story and then a feel-good story about a woman in Alaska who's been feeding a big cube bear for 30 years that continues to show up at her door.

It's just, it's 22 minutes of them saying the exact same thing about

the exact same stuff and then a feel-good story about, you know, a porpoise that saved a dog's life and now the porpoise comes back to say hello to the dog every day.

It's just,

it's just, you know, I mean, it's the same fucking thing.

And

the reality is these companies, they get six to seven million viewers a night.

It's gone way down.

And the core demographic is

people age 25 to 54, the people that advertisers care about, just aren't watching these shows any longer.

What you hope is that occasionally, not even a lot with these programs, occasionally they have a clip that goes.

that goes viral.

And all she's going to be doing is essentially explaining, sending out memos and meeting with journalists who are going to think she's the devil.

Because

the other observation I have is that

in the world of the economy,

this is a meaningless acquisition.

There have been five acquisitions in the last week of $8 billion, of 50 times this size.

There was a merger between two railroad companies that I think totaled 80 billion or 500 times the size of this.

Media is obsessed with itself.

And the notion that something's going to happen to a newsroom, these folks think they're precious.

I get that.

They play a very important role.

But the reality is

investigative journalism or any type of cable news or broadcast news is no longer economically viable when the only people that advertisers want to reach are getting two-thirds of their news from social media.

It just.

Just going back to your point that it isn't economically significant.

I think that is true.

I think the reason people are so interested in it is because it is so culturally significant.

I mean, people on the left generally are not very excited about this.

People on the right generally are excited about this.

But I want to read you a tweet from Paul Graham, who's the legendary investor, founder of Y Combinator, who commented on this deal, specifically on the price, $150 million.

He said, surely this is an anomaly.

They got bought as part of a plan to control the US media, not for their revenue growth.

In other words, 10 times sales for the free press for a company that, as you say, media is not the greatest business, economically speaking.

But his view is that this is part of a larger strategy for the Ellisons to control media.

And that's why they're paying this premium.

I don't see how buying the free press is going to help the Ellisons control media.

What's going to help the Ellisons control media is spending $30 or $40 billion to buy Time Warner, which includes Warner and CNN,

and to control TikTok.

And the notion that somehow Barry Weiss is going to come in, as talented as she is, and reshape the editorial view of all these things, it's just sort of laughable.

If you want to deal with a disagreeable group of people who are under the impression they don't have a boss, walk into a newsroom.

I was on the board of the New York Times that I don't know if you knew that or not.

But I used to say, do you want to see me do pull-ups?

Do you want to see me do pull-ups?

I used to, I went to something called a page one meeting where they argue over which story is going to be the lead above the fold in the page one the next day.

And everybody goes around and says, oh, Hillary Clinton's in Africa or NAFTA just went through.

And then, and then they all let the sports guy go so everyone can just laugh at him.

And, and, you know, because these are all the people that were beaten up by the athletes and they want nothing to do with sports.

They just roll their eyes when this guy's talking about sports.

But essentially, these folks are very, they're A, really good at what they do.

They think that they play a special role in society.

And the notion that a 30-something year-old woman's going to come in and go, okay, we need to change our complexion to center right.

Yeah, good luck with that.

And she'll have, she'll have the power of the person to be able to hire and fire.

But this isn't,

I don't think it's going to change much.

And from what I understand, the CBS newsroom has already pretty,

has kind of been devastated.

In addition, just the dynamics of M ⁇ A are that big companies are always hoping they're going to acquire a small company and the competence of that small company is going to infect

or save the corpus of the larger organism.

And what you generally find is the larger organism always wins.

And so the notion that this huge media company or a larger media company is going to be, quite frankly, is going to all of a sudden shift political viewpoint and shift culture,

there's going to be massive organ rejection.

Now, that's not to say she won't have influence.

That's not to say that,

you know, they might have a different, you know, a decent amount of influence.

But quite frankly, this is a win for her.

This shows that there is a life for independent media, subscription revenue.

But if I had to bet on the CBS newsroom and if they get a hold of CNN and if they get a hold of TikTok,

my guess is in 24 to 36 months, Barry Weiss decides to go spend some of that money and spend more time with her kids.

She's going to be a very talented bug bug slapping up against the windshield of a newsroom of 50 of baby boomer journalists who don't really give a flying fuck what she tells them to do.

But anyway, I'm being redundant here.

I'm happy for Barry.

I'm happy for independent media.

And Ed, let's just hope that these big legacy media companies keep paying 10 times revenues.

Keep it up.

Keep it up.

Because you need to get out there and get a dog.

Dogs are expensive.

You're living with someone.

That's right.

And I'm not going to to pick one up for the shelter, as we discussed.

I'm going to buy one fresh.

Those are fighting words, Ed.

You're getting a rescue, bitch.

You are getting a rescue.

And when I say you're getting a rescue, bitch, I mean you're getting a rescue female dog and you're getting a rescue, comma, bitch.

That's good.

That's good.

Okay.

That's good.

Appreciate your time, Scott.

All right, my brother.

Well, as we discussed, this is less of a story of economic significance and more of a story of cultural significance.

The big question that everyone's asking, the reason people care about this, is because there is this question over what is the editorial direction of CBS News going to be.

Could it be that now that they have acquired the free press, now that Barry Weiss is in charge, could it be that they are going to skew more towards the right?

And what would that mean?

for the media ecosystem.

Well, Scott has made his opinion quite clear.

He believes that it's not really going to change anything.

He believes that these companies and these outlets are too big already.

Barry Weiss might want to shake things up, but ultimately she's not going to have that much of an impact.

We want to get your reactions.

What do you think this is going to do to the editorial direction at CBS News?

How will this change the media ecosystem?

Let us know in the comments.

Okay, that's it for today.

This episode was produced by Claire Miller, edited by Joel Paston and engineered by Benjamin Spencer.

Our associate producer is Alison Weiss.

Our research team is Dan Shalon, Isabella Kinsel, Kristen O'Donoghue and Mir Silverio.

And our technical director is Drew Burrows.

Thank you for listening to Profit Markets from Profit Media.

If you liked what you heard, give us a follow.

I'm Ed Elson.

I will see you tomorrow.

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