# SpaceX IPO, Media Shifts, and AI CapEx Risks

**Podcast:** Pivot
**Published:** 2026-05-22

## Transcript

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Remember WeWork?
Its mission was to elevate the world's consciousness.
That sounded grounded.
Hi, everyone.
This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher.
And I'm Scott Galloway.
Scott, things are happening at Vox Media.
We're going to do something a little different today and start with a voicemail from a listener who's going to explain the situation.
Let's play a clip.
Hi, after listening to Pivot today, I saw that Jen Smurdoch is buying part of Box Media, and I was curious how that might change the freedom you guys have on your various podcasts.
Anyway, love your shows.
Just finish Burn Book and listen to all your podcasts.
Keep up the good work.
Jenny from Texas.
Oh, that's a very good question, Jenny from Texas.
So in case people don't know what she's talking about, James Murdoch's company, Lupa Systems, is acquiring Vox Media Podcast Network, New York Magazine, and the Vox site.
The other parts of Vox Media, including Eater, The Verge, SB Nation, are becoming a different company, a new independent company.
The deal is expected to close in the coming weeks.
There's a few legalities and this and that.
From what I understand, Lupa Systems has not disclosed the purchase price, but it's reportedly around $300 million.
The podcast network is the more attractive asset, though we love New York Magazine, and it does rather well, and love docs.
And so, Scott, people want to know what we think about this, because a lot of people have bad information.
First of all, Jim Bankoff is staying as CEO of this unit.
It's a spinoff, essentially, of these assets, which have been fast-growing.
Mr.
Business, explain the situation.
Well, about a decade ago, people thought, wouldn't it be great to aggregate kind of this alternative media or build alternative media companies for a new world?
And so BuzzFeed, Food52, CNET, Vice, was it called Mike?
Mashable, and Vox.
And back when they thought, probably six, seven years ago, that if we bring together sort of these...
good little media assets, some digital, some not, and group them together, we can SPAC it and it'll go public at one, two, three billion dollars.
And so Jim, logically the CEO of Vox, thought this is a good idea, bought New York Magazine, had a bunch of very, you know, fast-growing websites, Eater, Verge, you know, Vulture, and then started some nascent podcasts, right?
And then essentially what happened was the market never said, OK, there was never the bloom came off the rose.
And basically of all these companies, basically they're competing against monopolies who extract rents.
And then their margin was, you know, the margin of all these companies is Google and Meta and Amazon's opportunity.
And they've slowly but surely sucked the oxygen out of the room.
And BuzzFeed.
From peak valuation to sales prices off 86%, Food52 lost 96% of its value, CNET lost 94% of its value.
Vice was, I think, basically went bankrupt but sold some assets, was down at least 93%.
Mashable off 80%.
I mean, just on and on and on and on.
Tumblr, my favorite, 1.1 billion to 3 million.
If you're an investor in Union Square Ventures, thank God that the guy with the Caesar's haircut, I forget his name, was able to convince probably one of the weaker CEOs in digital history to buy his bag of shit for 1.1 billion Tumblr.
That was Marissa Mayer at Yahoo.
Marissa Mayer, right.
So effectively, this has just not worked out.
Now, Jim, our guy who we like, has always said, Scott, be honest, and always told us to be honest, so let me be honest.
They spent a lot of money to create a company with negative synergy.
There's some real assets there.
New York Magazine is a trophy iconic asset.
The sites themselves, the digital assets, are actually do pretty well.
But again, see above, they're swimming upstream against giants.
And then the smaller division that started out as an afterthought has become the growth engine and the crown jewel.
And Jim is a smart guy and realized that the whole was less than the sum of its parts and basically decided to break them up into what was going to be three buckets.
But my understanding is, and I do not have inside information here and I don't want it, is that Jim Murdoch or James Murdoch, who wants to be in the media business, said, I'll take New York Magazine because I think he likes it and it's an iconic asset.
And what I really want is the podcast network, which is growing.
I'll stop there.
Where did I get that right or wrong?
No, you got that all right.
And I think Jim, of all of them, has cannily.
moved that into a space, obviously BuzzFeed, just bought by Byron Allen.
You know, they've all, Vice has had a much less happy situation.
You know, Mike, I don't know where that went.
Like, there were a lot of them, and it was very exciting.
And one of the reasons I sold my tiny little site to Vox many years ago, Recode, was because they were ridiculously priced and were sort of pricing me at.
I was even a smaller minnow.
And so when I got to Vox, I I understood the ad market was really a problem here, although we did great.
Let me just, the only thing you're leaving out is so much great journalism by so many of these sites and so much really interesting independent media.
Absolutely.
The Verge, Eater, you know, all of them.
And New York Magazine just won the National, the General Excellence Award and the National Magazine Awards.
Wonderful.
Under David.
Oh, his punch is above its weight class.
Yes.
It's like the HBO of magazines is the way I would describe it.
Right.
Exactly.
It's amazing.
So anyway, so it's really nice parts.
They're really nice parts.
But what happened was exactly what Scott said and what I thought, which is one of the reasons I went to Jim 12 years ago and said, I'm going to start this little podcast called, it was Recode Decode at the time, or it might have been something else.
I don't remember what it was.
And because I really did have an interest in this area and felt it was shifting.
And then they added on, the Ezra was on there.
There's a whole bunch.
Today Explained, a bunch of things.
And what essentially happened...
After that, after that, I met Scott Galloway and the rest is history.
Like we've done really well.
The bald man with erectile dysfunction, James Murdoch.
It just all makes sense.
In Germany.
In the Murdochs.
In the Murdochs.
And I worked for Scoop.
Life is so rich, isn't it?
How did this happen?
I know, right?
How did this happen?
I know that people are thinking it's very funny for me, especially because I knew James from a million years ago when he was actually around for digital stuff very early when I was covering the early digital industry.
And he tried very hard to move his family's company digitally.
But Rupert always did something idiotic, like whether it was the way they handled MySpace or there were so many, I can't even tell you.
Like Disney, they had 19 of these things and especially the iPad news thing that I thought was ridiculous.
And so we left the Murdoch Empire largely over Rupert, over problems.
He was doing all sorts of nefarious things and we wanted to.
come out on our own and then ended up selling to Vox.
And so everything comes around.
Essentially, I met Scott.
We built Pivot and we built each of our other stuff on and all the Prof.
G stuff, which is wonderful.
And over time, in our recent renegotiation, we became partners with Vox and they sell our advertising.
They help us mount the events, which they're excellent at.
And Scott has his...
has his own way of doing things.
He just started a great sub stack.
And so it's a really actually fertile time.
And, but there's all these different configurations.
And I would say for people to understand, they are, we, we, I have met with James Murdoch and his wife, Catherine, who is also very involved in this.
I have.
Nothing but good feelings for them.
I don't have good feelings for his father, neither does he, which has been well documented.
And so we have complete freedom to do what we want.
We own these podcasts that we have.
Scott owns his, I own mine, and we own Pivot together in a death grip to the end for whoever, which one of us survives.
And so we'll keep doing what we want.
And we really like working with Jim and now this other Jim and the rest of it.
And we hope there'll be more synergies between them.
We're not like a total believer in all synergy, but they've got some cool things like Art Basel and a number of Tribeca Film Festival, which I'll be at interviewing Marc Maron on stage.
And so there's lots of opportunities here, but mostly it's not going to change.
you know, not going to change our deal.
We like the deal we got.
We, again, own our things.
And so we're happy to take suggestions from, you know, the same thing like Jim will suggest something.
We will either ignore him or we'll not.
Like he might have, he just had a great idea this morning for me.
And I'll take it.
So, and I really do think of James Murdoch has always been very smart digitally.
I think, I like him.
He's not, you can't just put Murdoch on it and say they suck.
I would agree about.
Rupert Murdoch, I would not be owned by Rupert Murdoch, and we're not owned by anyone.
So I think that's it.
Anything else?
When Reuters called me, I said, look, we like the gyms, and we have a lot of power here, and we didn't ask for anything.
We just asked for everything to stay the same.
I sell Pivot as a joint venture between Swisher, Galloway, and Vox.
You own On.
I own Prov.
G, but both On and Prov.
G uses Vox for, we do a revenue split where they sell our ads.
And if we could, I mean, this is going to sound self-absorbed, but it's true.
We could have killed this deal.
And we didn't.
And we just, we didn't ask for anything extra.
We just said, yeah, we just want things to stay the way they are.
And Jim Bancroft has never once asked me to tone it down, to stop the dick jokes, to reconsider.
I have.
No, you have, but you're trying to save me from myself and you're also posing for your woke friends.
Oh, stop it.
You're so much woker than I am.
No.
Anyways, I'm so much woker than you.
I'm the wokest.
You are.
Pied out there.
But let me go to just some of the learnings here.
Basically, the business model for tech has been have great technology, find a very compelling leadership team that's able to craft a narrative to raise more capital than anyone else, deliver an unbelievable product at below price.
and then consolidate the market and then start sucking the oxygen out of the entire ecosystem.
So let me give you an example.
And then everybody else gets crushed.
Google and Meta have been increasingly pushing users away from external sites in favor of their AI overviews, which they can monetize.
So HuffPo.
Between 2022 and 2025, so basically the last three years that we have data on this, HuffPo's organic search traffic has been cut in half.
The Washington Post's down by nearly half.
Business Insider has seen their organic traffic cut in half.
NYT organic search as a share of their total traffic fell from roughly 44% to 36.5%.
And the Wall Street Journal's organic search as a share of their total traffic fell from 29% to 24%.
And let me just go back in history and pat myself on the back.
In 2006, when I joined the board of the New York Times, in literally my first meeting, I said, They said, okay, you're the digital guy, what should we do?
I'm like, shut off Google.
Don't let them crawl your content.
Because eventually, they're going to commoditize your content, stop driving traffic to us, and all you're doing is building them into the ultimate toll booth.
And Martin Nissenholtz, who's a very smart guy, said, well, if we can't figure out a way to compete against Google and we're making money from the traffic they send us, then shame on us.
I'm like, yeah, go to Murdoch.
go to the new houses, go to the Financial Times and consolidate and turn off Google and then license your content to the highest bidder.
And at that point, Microsoft had Bing and we would have been able to get a lot of money and say, look, if you want to crawl this gorgeous content from Thomas Friedman and from Vogue and from the FT, you got to pay us.
But instead they said, no, we like the traffic.
They were pursuing this eyeballs thing.
And now it's way too late.
And these companies are the internet.
And very few people go directly to the New York Times dot com.
They get served stuff on Meta.
That's how they decide where they're going.
Or the Google is now entirely.
They don't take you to the best place.
They take you to a place they can further monetize.
And Jim.
you know, Jim has managed to get on the last helicopter out of Saigon.
Oh, wait, do you want to hear some of the threads I thought of?
I'll test the limits of our new ownership.
I was walking around Lisbon yesterday and it was beautiful and I was bored.
So as soon as I saw the announcement, I thought I'm going to test the limits of my freedom.
My first thread was alternative media is like a vegan restaurant.
Virtue signaling loses money and a billionaire bails you out.
That was my first one.
My second one was that picture of Jim Bancop and James Murdoch, where it looks like the 30-year reunion of Abercrombie and Fitch.
They're both very handsome.
They're very handsome.
And I wrote, Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion 2, post-transition.
That one I'm especially proud of.
Oh, okay, last one.
What was my third one?
Oh, God, I wrote something about, I don't know, but it just made, you know, late, late stage capitalism.
But anyways, and then I started doing it, and I'm sitting there in the park, and I'm like, Do I really need to be an asshole?
Not today.
Yeah, tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
And I give them their moment.
Give them their moment.
Give them their moment.
We'll be an asshole later.
Before we start making their lives difficult.
No.
You know what?
Let me just end this.
Go ahead.
Two things.
Jim Beckham, he said, we can say whatever we want.
I don't see that problem from James Murdoch or Catherine Murdoch at all.
They might be irritated by us, but there's going to be no change in that.
And let me be, I hate to say this, but Rupert Murdoch never asked me to change a thing.
Like, that is one thing I never experienced when I worked at the Walls.
I just don't.
I think he's a heinous piece of shit.
I think he's heinous the way he's done Fox News and the other stuff.
But and has degraded democracy quite a bit.
But he's not James is not him.
And so but that said, Murdoch never meddled in my stuff.
And he certainly could have for my entire time there.
I just didn't like him.
But one of the things we have to say, we get to do what we want.
We will do what we want.
And also just I know Scott was sort of putting a sort of an ugly picture on it, but actually New York Magazine is profitable.
So are the podcast networks are doing great and very profitable.
A lot of these websites are.
So it's not like it's just not like a.
It's not a crazy business, but it's not.
These are not suffering properties.
And last of all, a lot, many of them, most of them provide amazing journalism.
And I think David Haskell deserves all due credit for New York Magazine winning that award.
And awards are one thing, but they certainly they were up against some amazing journalism this year from The Atlantic and from ProPublican Wired.
So they're very good property.
He's bought some good properties here in that regard.
It's not they're not falling knife properties.
They make money, but.
The crown jewel, shockingly, of all this is the podcast.
New York Magazine is a vanity asset.
It is, but it does okay.
It doesn't, it's not, it does fine.
You become one of the sexiest men in Soho when your rap is I own New York Magazine.
We're going to stop.
It's very, it does great journalism too.
Okay, that's great.
So is NPR.
It doesn't make any money.
Yeah, but this one does.
So anyway, let's speaking of not make any money, let's talk about some IPO news, some really not any money.
SpaceX has filed an IPO prospectus and it is.
Revealing, well, the company brought in $791 million in profit in 2024.
It swung back to $4.9 billion in losses in 2025.
For context, 200 companies in the S&P 500 had more revenue than SpaceX last year, including Tesla.
Also revealed in the filing, by the way, they buy a lot of stuff from Tesla.
So there's a lot of round-tripping happening at these companies, all controlled by Elon Musk.
They also revealed in the filing, Anthropics paying SpaceX, and thank God for it, $1.25 billion.
million per month through May 2029 as part of the compute deal, the two sign, meaning Grok will not be using that space in Colossus 1 and 2.
SpaceX is reportedly targeting a $1.7 trillion valuation.
I mean, it goes on and on and on.
A lot of these, a lot of words like human, I don't know, like connection.
There's AI mentioned a lot.
Just it's, this business is not, economically and mass speaking, it's not worth $1.7 trillion.
I mean, it's just the Elon.
That guy gets a lot of credit for using this number because even the stuff they're promising seems problematic.
But he hasn't done it before.
He just moves from one lily pad to the other in terms of from Tesla to this.
But the big winner in this that I read is Starlink does great.
The others, Grok and the rocket company is not so much.
Go for it.
I got a lot.
Okay, good.
I can't wait.
I'm excited.
Spit it out, Scott.
At 3 a.m., I was reading the S-1.
I know you were.
What were you doing?
So first off, I have some notes here.
The first 14 pages of the S-1 are pictures of rockets.
AI is mentioned 1,200 times in the S-1.
There are 277 pages of the prospectus.
For context, it's longer than The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye.
And some direct quotes from the filing.
These are direct quotes.
We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs.
Well, thank God you're here, Elon.
For decades, a reality where humanity travels between the planets and the stars has felt tantalizingly close, but still looked— Would you mind if I ate my protein bowel where you do this?
Because I'm hungry and I also am fascinated.
Keep going.
For decades, a reality where humanity travels between the planets and the stars has felt tantalizingly close, but still locked in the pages and screens of science fiction.
The sun contains approximately 99.8% of the solar system's energy, and as a result, we believe it is the only truly scalable solution to terrestrial energy constraints in the age of AI.
Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.
All right, hold on.
Talk about woke.
We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding, space-faring civilization.
Can you use that in a sexy voice, please?
Ultimately preparing us to Kardashev type 2 status, defined in the filing itself as a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of the sun.
Remember WeWork?
Its mission was to elevate the world's consciousness.
That sounded grounded.
Yes, no, this seems like, it sounds like a Mayan.
He sounds like a Mayan, but go ahead.
So let's talk about the numbers here.
Headline valuation, 1.8 trillion.
whispering they can go at it too.
That's roughly the GDP of Canada.
So let that marinate.
The core business is generally an excellent business.
Starlink generated $3.26 billion in revenue in a single quarter with $1.2 billion in operating income.
That's 36% operating margin on a monopoly satellite internet business with no serious competitors in sight.
It's a great business.
If this were the whole company, it would be one of the great businesses of our era.
And then, but the problem is it's not.
Stapled to this rocket ship is XAI, a business that is clinically speaking a money furnace.
In 2024, XAI lost $1.6 billion on $2.6 billion in revenues.
By 2025, losses ballooned to $6.5 billion on $3.2 billion in revenue.
So revenue.
So revenue went up 20 percent, but losses went up 310 percent.
Can I ask you quickly?
These revenues don't seem like killer.
It's 30 percent.
It's not like wow.
They're not wow growth, right?
It's sort of good, solid.
Am I wrong there?
No.
Well, let's just talk about SpaceX, the best business.
It's growing 20 percent a year and is trying to go out at 100 times revenue.
When Google went public, it was growing 240% a year and went out at 10 times revenues.
So just back to XAI.
XAI is losing money on the way to losing more money.
And in Q12 2026 alone, the net loss of $4.3 billion on $4.7 billion in revenue.
Total CapEx, $10.1 billion in 90 days.
$7.8 billion of that for AI.
Cash on the balance sheet.
Cratered from $25 billion to $16 billion in just three months.
They burned $9 billion in cash in a single quarter.
That's $100 million a day.
That's not investing in the future.
It's the future building you in advance.
Right.
This anthropic thing is critical.
Do you think he's moving into being the infrastructure player rather than the AI player here?
No.
It's him having spent too much CapEx thinking that...
XAI, his AI would need it.
And he woke up and realized he didn't.
It's like, this has happened to me a million.
Every time I start a company, I raise too much fucking money.
I go get a giant office space in Soho.
And before I know it, I'm renting it out to a bunch of shitty startups to try and recoup some of the capital.
That's what happened here.
Total debt on the balance.
Thank goodness for that, right?
Presumably from the anthropic money.
Total debt on the balance sheet is $29 billion.
So just for context, that's more debt than it's on the.
Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and American Airlines combined with all their planes.
And those, they carry passengers.
SpaceX has Starship, which has cost over $15 billion in development and is still on its 12th test mission.
So, look, the bottom line, you're being asked to pay $1.75 trillion for a great satellite internet company, a rocket business that loses money.
An AI product losing $6 billion a year and falling further behind its competitors that has $29 billion in debt.
And a CEO who, and this is my favorite part of the filing, purchased $131 million of his own recalled Cyborg trucks with company cash.
He's propping up Tesla.
Propping up Tesla.
That's right.
So in sum, Starlink is the golden goose, an amazing company.
Everything else is Elon's hobbies.
And at this valuation.
You're paying full price for all of them.
So, you know, Snow White is fucking hot, but you got to, if you marry her, you're taking on these little non-value-add weirdos.
This is, so this company, you have an amazing company buried in all of these other money furnaces.
Right.
And he's asking you to pay essentially.
A hundred times revenue.
And people will.
So talk about that because, look, it is not – I read it.
I'm like, wow, this is not – there's one good business in there, right?
Really good business.
And by the way, easy to disrupt that business.
People will come into this business and there'll be more competitors.
And so that's my worry about Starlink.
It's like, sure, he has the win for today.
It doesn't mean he will have the win forever.
Just like Tesla.
The second thing is – It doesn't matter because people will just buy into this and run it up because it's him.
And these promises that you left out a little bit here is there's going to be all these robots in your home.
There's going to be he made a lot of promises in this in this prospectus, too, about the future.
Like you have to assume he's going to kill it in robots.
And by the way, I have heard from many people his robot technology is really advanced, but it has to get to people.
Right.
It's got it.
It's got to get to people.
It's got to become a product.
And so just it feels very hand-wavy, this entire thing, but I don't think it's going to matter.
I mean, be a Wall Street person and say, you know, what would you do as an investor?
You might want to play it for the pop, but I actually think that there's going to be a ton of people and analysts that will look at this thing.
The more scrutiny on this thing, the worse it's going to be for the IPO.
And does it go out at $1.8 trillion?
I wouldn't be surprised if the bankers try and...
It manufactures scarcity and it gets a small pop.
But I think by the end of the year, it's well below a trillion dollars.
There's just no, there's no way to justify this thing as a cash incinerator.
And also certain components of the business feel very we-working, the fact that as they grow, they burn more cash.
There's no operating leverage.
Even with this anthropic deal, because that's all he can sell.
It's like he's selling the chairs or something, right?
Yeah.
He built out infrastructure that he doesn't need because his AI is not growing the way he thought.
Right, exactly.
And he's got it.
He's got this colossus.
And, of course, he's facing lawsuits all over the place because he's going to buy more of these methane engines.
And trust me, they're going to put a stop to that eventually.
So how would you do it here?
People are listening.
What would you do here?
I want to tell you what to do because I have been wrong about Tesla.
I thought Tesla was a sell in 2017 and it's gone up 8x.
No, you were right, but you were wrong about what people would do.
I think we have to squarely say I was wrong.
So what I'm going to do is if someone called me and no one's going to call me, but if Elon Musk called me and said, do you want allocation in the IPO?
I would probably say, sure, and I'd sell it on the first trade.
They will manufacture scarcity.
Goldman and everybody will tell him, okay, this is what it looks like.
Put out press releases saying you're 30 times oversubscribed.
It'll get a pop and then get out.
Because, again, an amazing business can be a shitty investment, even at some valuation.
And a shitty business can be an amazing investment at a certain valuation.
This is an amazing business surrounded by businesses that are not scaling where he's trying to play catch up.
And at a valuation that makes just abso-fucking-lutely no sense.
Glomming XAI in here was a way to save his ass, his own ass, correct?
It's the cheapest form of capital he could find by attaching it to an amazing business such that he could try and catch up.
And even the amazing business on its own, which is doing $16 billion in top-line revenue and $8 billion in EBITDA.
This is Starlink.
Yeah.
Give it...
25, you know, give it 100 times EBITDA, it's worth 800 billion.
100 times EBITDA is, you know, no one trades at that.
But you not only are trying to get it out at 1.7 to 2 trillion, you've attached onto it all of these businesses that look to have negative leverage.
So...
And he's using the business to help Tesla out by buying shitty Cybertrucks.
Well, that was the most eye-popping thing in the whole thing.
I know.
I agree.
Was that it reminded me of, and this is the argument against when governments decide to start cosplaying business.
The Irish government or the UK government said DeLorean is the future and they gave them a bunch of loans.
And then these pictures came out of a ton of DeLoreans sitting in a warehouse in Ireland, unsold.
The worst product, arguably the worst tech product, either maybe than the Oculus or Siri, the worst tech product of the last decade is hands down the Cybertruck.
So he went out, a bunch of them recalled, and he used money from this organization to buy back Cybertrucks.
You're not supposed to do that.
You're supposed to say, okay, Tesla has a turd of a product and we're going to take a write down and you just take your pain.
This is Elon brings a level of awareness, magic.
People have done investing with him.
He is an unbelievable visionary.
But, you know, this goes to something broader.
And that is this is all part of an entity that will cement where I believe we are now.
And that is I finally believe we are squarely in 1999.
Yeah, I would agree with you.
That's what I felt after looking at it.
I didn't look at it over as carefully as it, but I thought, oh, no, no, no, this is not good.
This is.
You know, I don't really care about the luminous humanity bullshit and flying to those stars and the sun is going to power our world.
Like, that's all his.
I've had to listen to that nonsense from him for many years.
And great.
I'm glad you think that.
I mean, I don't really care if everyone, if that's what turns him on, that's great.
But it was the Tesla thing.
There was several things in here that were very, speaking of late stage capitalism, I felt it was late stage Elon.
Right.
That's what that's what it felt like to me.
Look, his job is to get capital as cheaply as possible.
He's going to do that.
I think it's smart for him to do this.
But I think investors in some, if you look at what happened.
So there was a really interesting analysis done in the FT.
And that is at the peak of the dotcom boom, about 60 percent of GDP growth was coming from CapEx related to telco infrastructure and the Internet.
It's now 93% is coming from AI, including loosely, and also these companies will be grouped into that.
In addition, the total CapEx inflation adjusted was about $850 billion in 99 up until that point.
Now we're at about $1.5 trillion.
And every time you have over 2% or 3% of GDP going into the build out of CapEx of something, whether it's railroads or highways or the telco infrastructure of the late 90s, Two years later, there's a crash.
Two to three years later, there's a crash.
Railroads, all of it.
We are there.
And in one of these companies or more of them is going to experience what every big tech company has experienced when they get out over their skis.
And that is you're going to see a 70 to 95% decline in the value of one or more of these companies.
NVIDIA, I mean, all these companies, there's the expectation of they're increasing their capex 20% a year.
while increasing their revenues optimistically 15% a year.
That's negative operating leverage.
And eventually the music is going to stop here.
Yeah, I felt drunken sailors had a feel of this.
I don't know.
Well, the way we're describing it is I think NVIDIA is the casino.
And we're all drunk people at the blackjack table asking for— Right, and it will affect very good businesses.
And then along with the tariffs and all the other corruption around Trump, it just gets to be a real problem here.
NVIDIA is an amazing business.
SpaceX is an amazing business.
They should—oh, my God, they should be worth—they should be worth a trillion dollars and $300 billion, respectively.
So down about 50 to 80 percent.
And the technology— I think the technology will live up to its expectations more on the optimistic side than the pessimistic side, but the valuations won't.
All right.
Well, speaking of which, OpenAI is preparing to confidentially file a draft of its IPO perspective as soon as Friday.
I expect you to read it over the weekend and tell me about it next week.
As you're listening to this, the company is valued at over $850 billion by private investors.
The things I'm looking at there is all the cross investments with Altman involved.
I'm probably interested in that, where the trends are in terms of their subscriptions and where their spend is.
I think those are the things I'm looking at.
What are you looking at there?
Very briefly.
Well, just to distill it, to justify the $1 trillion valuation that OpenAI is pursuing at its IPO, it needs to grow from $13 billion in revenue to the size of today's Microsoft in four years.
So they're saying they're going to be the size of Microsoft in four years.
And I just don't think revenue did triple to $13 billion, but the company burned $9 billion.
And right now it has negative momentum relative to Anthropic.
And what they have said is get out right away.
We need the perception that we're the leader.
And also Sam Altman looks at SpaceX and says, there's not room for, there's only so much retail money that's going to come into the ecosystem.
Get out because it's going to dry up because if SpaceX goes out of a pop and comes down, retail investors are going to start to get queasy.
And then when you have these enormous IPOs, in other words, at some point, retail investors are going to run out of money to invest in these things.
So he's like, get out.
And the CFO, Sarah Fryer, who I'm shocked still has a job because she's not towing the company line.
She worked at Goldman and McKinsey, has reported previously to colleagues at OpenAI saying, we're not ready for an IPO because the risk from its spending commitments.
And the company is committed to spending $600 billion.
Yeah, I know her.
She's a very, she's like that.
She's like a Ruth Peratt.
She's an adult.
Yeah.
The company is committed to spending $600 billion over the five years across vendors, and their Oracle deal alone requires $60 billion a year starting in 2027, nearly five times OpenAI's entire 2025 revenue.
Again, this is.
We are squarely in 99.
99.
All right.
Well, we'll go with that.
All right, Scott, let's take a quick break.
When we come back, Jeff Bezos, oh, good God, speaking of billionaires behaving badly, speaks out on all sorts of things.
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Scott, we're back.
Jess Bezos sat down for an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, our favorite Canadian, on Wednesday.
Let's talk about some of the things he said.
First up, Bezos said that Trump was more mature and more disciplined in his second term.
The Washington Post owner defended massive cuts he made to the newsroom earlier this year, saying he doesn't want a post to be a charity.
I have some things to say about that because I think he's the one that drove it into a wall.
Bezos also backed the idea of eliminating income taxes for the bottom half of U.S.
earners.
Let's hear what he said to say about his own taxes.
These people sometimes say that, you know, I don't pay taxes.
It's not true.
I pay billions of dollars in taxes.
And it's a perfect, again, if people want me to pay more billions, then let's have that debate.
But don't pretend, you know, that that's going to solve the problem.
You could double the taxes I pay, and it's not going to help that teacher in Queens.
I promise you.
Let's try.
Let's try.
Let's see what happens.
Let's see what happens.
If we take his effective tax rate from 16 or 17 percent to 32 or 34 like the rest of us.
I don't know.
Let's just give it a whirl.
Let's just give it a whirl.
Let's see what happens.
So disingenuous.
Let's see what happens.
Let me let me start and then I'll let you go.
First up, the more mature.
Come on, Jeff.
Like, seriously, like, I get that there's a lot of facework going on and a lot of other enhancements, but it's gone to your fucking head.
Like, I get what he means.
It's good for me.
Instead of saying more mature, more disciplined, as he's more focused on giving me the shit I want.
That's I would just prefer that if he wouldn't mind like saying that.
Whatever.
He can say what he wants.
He's never been a particularly liberal person, but now he's just he's just now being just disingenuous.
The Washington Post thing.
drove me crazy because he's the one who kept the same management in place, then hired an incompetent like Will Lewis, did nothing that the New York Times took moves after Trump left office to do something.
He created all manner of situations where people just left, cut their subscriptions, which were slightly growing, but they were definitely stabilizing.
And then after he put his...
dirty little fingers in the editorial process.
He messed it up.
A huge exodus of talent, blaming the talent, which went to successful properties like The Atlantic and many other, and The Wall Street Journal and other places, which are doing okay.
They're doing, they're making businesses, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, everything else.
So every time he says this, I'm like, why don't you look over at Lorraine?
Powell Jobs, who's managed to do a very nice job over there at the Atlantic by not meddling and supporting and not losing money.
The income tax thing, I'll let you take, but it was so full of disingenuous stuff.
And again, let's try, Jeff, even if you pay billions, you have billions.
And you pay, the fact that I pay more of a percentage of my taxes than you, and then the corporate, don't even get me started with corporations.
So anyway, the whole thing was, and also, He didn't look well, in my opinion.
And since he spent so much time on cosmetic stuff, I feel like I can comment upon this.
Go ahead.
Jeff Bezos pays himself $82,000, just enough such that he can claim a child tax credit, which, by the way, he takes.
And then he puts all of his additional money in such that the value of his shares go up.
He borrows against those shares, not triggering a taxable event.
Likely has a lot of those shares in a trust.
And then after leveraging the unbelievable infrastructure and culture of the great state of Washington, he then takes his $120 billion in shares and moves to Florida to spend more time with his father and then starts selling shares.
Now, granted, just as every prisoner has an obligation to escape, I think every individual has an obligation to avoid taxes.
I don't blame him for tax evasion.
I blame our government for letting him engage in it.
But quite frankly, Jeff, when you start trying to wallpaper over the tax avoidance of billionaires by claiming you care about nurses.
Teachers.
Sit the fuck down.
Just sit down.
This is a misdirect.
And it's like when Jensen talks about, yes, tax me more.
OK, thanks, guys.
But I just don't think they're in a position when a guy has when a guy has so optimized the dynamics.
of supplying demand of labor such that his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles to make their quotas.
You're just not the person to pretend to have empathy for that nurse in Queens.
So I'm not even going to, I'll talk about his idea, but give me the mother of all eye rolls when Jeff Bezos claims to be concerned about the tax rates of the nurse in Brooklyn.
When I've advised or when I was talking to Andrew Yang when he was running for president and mayor, I said, you fucked up.
It shouldn't be universal basic income.
It should be basic income.
And to get Republicans on board, you need different frame it.
Don't call it universal basic income because it sounds like socialism.
Call it a negative income tax.
Republicans love tax breaks.
I do believe there's something to the notion of saying anyone who makes below $50,000 should not only not get taxed, but maybe get a tax.
credit in the form of services or maybe just cash, quite frankly, because most of those studies show that when you create a government infrastructure to deploy social programs, they're inefficient and never go away.
Just give them the money.
Just give them the money.
Just cut them a check.
You're in a household, you have kids, whatever.
They did a bunch of studies in Africa.
And quite frankly, I'm going to be a sexist here when they give money to the men, the prostitutes in the bars do well.
When they give money to the women, the kids get.
taller and fatter.
You couldn't do that in America and just give money to single mothers, which is what I would like to see happen.
But if you gave, just gave money, nationalized healthcare, there's a lot of good taxation ideas.
What he said was very accurate is that if you had a tax holiday for people under the age of 30, he didn't say this, but if you gave a tax holiday, which is what he's saying, or cut the taxes of people making less than $75,000, you don't lose that much tax revenue.
Because it is true that only 1% The top 1% in New York pay 48% of the taxes and the bottom 25% really don't pay much.
So he's right.
They wouldn't be giving up much.
But he is just not, we need an alternative minimum tax on people like Jeff Bezos of, I believe, 60%.
Because the earner that's making $2 million working her ass off as a baller partner at Skadden Arps in Manhattan is paying $54.
And fine, maybe she pays, maybe the person making $10 billion, or $10 million a year makes 60% because here's the whole objective of taxation.
You want the least taxing tax.
If you start a taxing education in food and housing, you end up with homelessness, less educated people, people who put off their mammogram and die of metastatic breast cancer.
Those are taxes that are too taxing.
An alternative minimum tax on corporations making above a billion dollars and people, say, making over $3 million a year, they don't lose any happiness.
And also do away with the estate tax exemption.
If the Bezos children inherit $20 billion instead of $30, no loss in happiness.
But that $10 billion that could potentially be divided amongst the $10,000 to the million poorest households.
A lot of incremental happiness.
You know what the contrast was his ex-wife?
Like, she doesn't say a word.
My hero.
She doesn't do an interview.
She gives money to Meals on Wheels.
No ribbon cuttings.
No cosplaying.
No whatever weirdness you're doing to your body, Jeff.
And just and doesn't lecture us.
That's the tone was what was crazy.
I know I got like bent out of shape about the post stuff, but all of it had this tone.
The post stuff was disingenuous in the extreme.
He's the worst media owner of any media owner.
And it's a low fucking bar.
Let me tell you, I take Rupert Murdoch twice every day of the week and twice on Sunday to Jeff Bezos.
At least he understands media and likes it.
You know, this the tone was so obnoxious.
And this is why.
This general, you know, he talked about people demonizing billionaires.
Well, stop talking.
Stop appearing.
Like, honestly, the damage these people are doing to the brand of capitalism, brand capitalism and brand AI and brand tech is so vast that you can see why these polls are showing up this way.
I know my own sons who both are incredibly hard workers.
And it has nothing to do with me.
They, you know, they often don't listen to me.
They don't listen to anything I do, at least.
And I'm fine with that.
But they have these feelings, right?
It's just, I don't know.
And then it gives rise to too much demonization, right?
Because of the way these people behave.
So, I don't know.
So, I have stories about Mackenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates.
I'm involved in two nonprofits.
I'm involved in something called the Jed Foundation.
that tries to train high schools around how to identify what is kind of normal, strange adolescent behavior and adolescent behavior that should raise red flags around depression and suicide.
And they leverage the infrastructure of public schools and educate them.
And they are amazing.
It was started by a couple that lost their son, Jed.
It's run by this wonderful management team.
They do a great job.
I got right after I sort of got involved.
They called me and said they did a big thing event and they got, you know, we got great news.
I'm like, what's that?
And he goes, we got a $10 million wire yesterday and we're trying to figure out who it's from.
Mackenzie Scott didn't want an RFP, didn't want to meet with them, didn't want her name on anything.
She just wired 10 million bucks.
And then another association I love, the American Institute for Boys and Men, which focuses on the struggles and mental health of young men and boys run by one of my role models, Richard Reeves, Melinda French Gates.
$10 million, recognizing the majority of her funds are focused on the struggles and gender equality and struggles of young women.
But she said, without thriving young men, women aren't going to continue to flourish.
And she just sends $10 million.
And then someone who shall remain nameless contacted the firm.
And I get it.
He's trying to be or contact one of these companies and said, can I meet with so-and-so and Scott?
I want to hear about the strategy.
And I'm like.
Typical fucking rich dude.
We got to go sing for our supper.
We got to like go talk to him as if it's a business and return on investment.
Whereas these women are just like, you're doing good work.
Excellent.
Here you go.
Get back to work.
You don't hear from them.
God be with you.
They definitely check you out, but it's not.
It is.
It's such a different way of giving.
I couldn't dislike Jeff Bezos more after this interview.
He was dumb to do the interview.
I thought I honestly thought Sarkin could have.
could have pressed him harder.
I didn't think Sorka pressed him hard enough on this stuff and let him get away with some stuff that I wish he had.
But that said, we got to see him the way he is.
And that is the way he is, folks.
And let me go to the other.
Let me make the conservative or at least give some sunshine to the conservative part of this.
I can't stand it when people on the far left say Jeff Bezos didn't earn his money.
Oh, he did.
Because he was born to a single mother at the age when she was 17.
I believe he deserves to have earned $120 billion.
I think we deserve to elect people who have the backbone to tax him at 60 or 80 percent.
Yep.
But don't slow him down.
Right.
He's not a bad person.
He's doing he's doing what we all do.
He's optimizing for his own self-interest.
You may say you may just you may say he's more self-interested than some people.
Fine.
We're not doing our job.
Elizabeth Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
You've been in Congress for fucking ever, and the taxes keep going down under your watch.
Yeah, let's do something.
So you want to demonize him?
No, tax him.
Tax him.
That's the best way.
Like, hey, look, whatever you want to do.
Now, let me switch to another billionaire because this was something that happened.
We have not said a lot.
Some of our listeners are not going to like what I have to say here, and I don't really care.
But I do care, but I don't care.
Unexpected sighting in D.C.
this week, Mark Cuban standing alongside President Trump.
Cuban endorsed Kamala Harris, was a big supporter in 2024.
It's been one of Trump's most vocal critics, but the two appeared together as Trump announced a major expansion of Trump Rx's administration's online drugstore.
The site is adding more than 600 low-cost generic medications through partnerships with Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs.
Amazon Pharmacy and GoodRx.
At this event, Trump was asked about his new alliance with Cuban.
It's only on this issue, just for people to be clear.
Let's listen.
It's pretty remarkable seeing you and Mark Cuban up there and the fact that obviously Mark endorsed Kamala Harris back in 2021.
Well, he made a mistake.
But what does this say about what you two are building here?
Well, it says we love people.
We love our country.
He wants to.
He's got a good company and he's going to do a lot of business with this.
And I'm going to get drugs out through Amazon, through the whole group.
And we're going to get drugs out.
And Mark wanted to be a part of it.
And I think Mark was very gracious.
He said, this is something that really works.
Cuban later posted on X, if anyone thinks I'm going to put politics ahead of helping Americans reduce their cost of health care and pharmaceuticals, they're a fucking idiot.
He took that down because he thought swearing undercut his argument.
He's probably right.
Let me just say a few things.
The stuff out there about him making a...
bank or he's mobbing up with Trump is just not true.
You don't have to like that he stood there.
I get it.
I get it.
I get it.
But this business is to get drug prices down.
He does not make a ton of money here.
This is more, it's not a charity either.
He's trying to build a business.
But the stuff that's out there about what he's doing is just inaccurate.
And it's not if you don't like him standing there and you think he betrayed you.
And I saw a lot of these.
I now can't like him.
I thought he was a good guy.
He is a good guy.
He is doing something that I'm sure makes him deeply uncomfortable for a very good thing, which is to bring lower prices.
He's got to get in this Trump arcs.
He essentially took.
control of Trump Rx in a weird way, because you've got to get these things.
If Trump is doing this site, and I hate that Trump's name is on it, I hate it.
But look, he's an egomainer who puts his name on every fucking thing.
And there's nothing we can do about it.
And if he sat up there with Biden, you'd love him for it, or whoever, a Democratic president.
He would sit up with anyone.
The only thing I would say was that, I'm not sure, he got gretched.
I sent him a note.
I said, you just got gretched.
When he when he first he started talking about this, this one point seven, seven, six trillion dollar slush fund for people who criminals who attack the Capitol.
I don't know.
He got crouched.
He was sitting there when Trump was going on about something that's obviously illegal or and also a slush fund.
I don't know what he should he walk out.
Should he leave?
I don't know.
He did laugh at that.
You voted for Kamala Harris.
I'm not sure what you do in situate.
Should he have sat there and said I still would?
I don't know.
He would have gotten lost out this deal.
I don't know.
And it's not great to have to stand with Trump.
We get it.
We get it.
I wouldn't do it.
But if I had something that mattered a lot, I might.
And the only other thing I would say is Zarin Man Danmi went there and stood right next to Trump.
And everyone praised that.
And the difference was is, but he didn't insult Trump.
And he didn't like slap him or do anything rude.
He also didn't say much and he didn't get gretched.
And so he needed something for New York and he got it from Trump.
And so I'm not quite sure what the difference here is, because that's what I think was happening here with Mark.
And you can hate on me all you want saying I love the billionaires, but I think what he's doing is an important thing for bringing drug prices online.
And you cannot wait for three years to do so.
Your thoughts, Scott.
If your emotions and political partisanship trump the health of Americans, and the problem is you, not Mark Cuban.
Yeah.
The partnership between TrumpRx and Cuban's cost-plus drugs will unlock cheaper prices for millions of Americans.
This week's expansion at 600 generics, nearly seven times the previous catalog.
They'll be available to anyone regardless of insurance status, and in many cases, the cash price through Cost Plus is actually lower than what insured people pay at the pharmacy counter after co-pays.
Cost Plus Drugs sells the cancer drug, I believe it's called etanaminib, for $17.
The same drug runs over $2,000 in conventional pharmacies.
Three PBMs.
OptumRx, CVS Caremark, and Express Scripts control roughly 80% of the U.S.
drug access and are untouched by this deal.
Look, something has to change.
And I respect, and the U.S.
government has a scale and capital that no one can match.
And if you have something that's good for America that requires that scale and that capital, you act like an adult and you go there.
So, you know, if you think that Mark Cuban, sold out, then all right, you go buy people's cancer drugs.
I can't imagine Mark enjoyed this, but helping people get access to life-saving drugs at a reasonable value is more important than him getting dragged by a bunch of bots and people virtue signaling and applying.
purity test from their keyboard.
Right.
I would agree.
You just didn't have the right information.
The inaccuracy is what drives, as always, inaccuracy drives me.
And to say that he's going to make bank at this is just not true.
It's just absolutely not true.
And you, again, I wouldn't want to have to do this.
I don't know if I could stand next to him, but he's there for the next three years.
And if someone needs these drugs now and...
He has to take the reputational hit.
That's fine.
I guess that's fine.
The fact that you're dragging him is a pro...
I understand the...
And I don't want to...
In this case, for the first time, I thought derangement.
Don't be so fucking deranged that you don't understand what Mark just did, which is he had to, like, put his, like...
ego in his pocket.
He remains, by the way, Mark is not, I would say he's liberal or conservative.
He's quite, it can vary all over the place.
But there is absolutely no way Mark Cuban would vote for Trump at this moment in time or support Trump politically.
So I don't know what you want from him.
But to me, I thought it was just a bad look for the left.
I really did.
I just was sort of disappointed, very disappointed.
But they're going to drag us forward.
So too bad.
I don't care.
All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break.
When we come back, we'll talk about NVIDIA's latest earnings.
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Scott, we're back with more news.
Let's talk about NVIDIA's latest earnings.
You just called them a casino.
The company's profit for the quarter was over $58 billion.
They're benefiting from what's happening now, which is up 211% from a year earlier.
That is a number.
It's not 30%.
It's a lot.
Three years ago, profit was $2 billion.
NVIDIA projected sales in the current quarter would reach $91 billion, as spending on AI infrastructure would reach $2 to $3 trillion in 2030.
This is an insane growing streak, but like you said, they're benefiting from this huge spend by all these other companies.
Thoughts very quickly?
Well, not a casino.
They're the house.
Okay.
And all of these companies spending just a crazy amount of money on 1.6 trillion on CapEx are kind of drunk gamblers, is the way I would describe it.
And they're benefiting from it.
They're the house.
They're the house when...
billionaires show up, sharks who are drunk and have unlimited credit at the casino.
That's the way I would describe it.
But just in terms of the earnings, the revenue was $81 billion, up 85% year-on-year, which was a beat.
Earnings per share was a beat.
Data center revenue, $75 billion, up 92%, as you said, year-on-year, accounting for 92% of total revenue, again, a beat.
Their Q2 guidance, $91 billion, above the $86 billion expectations, another beat.
And their shareholder returns, Dividend was raised 25X from 1 cent to 25 cents per share, 80 billion in new buybacks authorized.
And I mean, the reason he's on that plane to China is there's no shipments right now.
And he looks at the stock price and thinks, I have got to continue to beat.
And the only thing that I found really interesting here was despite beating on every conceivable metric, the stock was flat, which says to me that the expectations of the stock price are so enormous now that they don't, people don't expect NVIDIA to beat, they expect them to massively beat, which says to me that the first time NVIDIA even whispers things might be slowing down, it craters.
So unbelievable company, 15th beat in a row, but I just think the expectations that are built into this valuation, I think it's the most valuable company in the world now.
are pretty significant, as evidenced by the fact that it beat on every conceivable metric, and the stock didn't move.
Right.
Right.
That's interesting.
That's a really good point.
Anyway, we'll see.
We'll see what happens.
There's a lot.
It feels precarious, is what I'm fragile.
By the way, stock's off 2% today.
Yeah.
But let me say, several different Wall Street people call me, and they said, everything feels so fragile.
So we'll see.
All right, Scott, one more quick break.
We'll be back from predictions.
Hi, I'm Maria Sharapova, host of the Pretty Tough podcast.
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This week on the show, comedian and best-selling author Chelsea Handler gives her tips on independence and aging gracefully.
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Okay, so today we're driving to southern New Jersey and heading to a data center.
A couple weeks ago, I read a story in NJ.com and it was all about how there's a data center going up in Cumberland County, the poorest county in New Jersey, that's receiving some community pushback.
And this immediately got my attention because data centers are going up all across the country.
I feel like we should be hearing politicians talk more about this, but we haven't really heard a consensus.
Are data centers really a necessary evil?
Let's find out.
This is technology we've never seen before.
Right.
Experiment.
We're an experiment down here.
And we're the guinea pigs.
Right.
And we're the guinea pigs.
Exactly.
Exactly.
One thing that happens in this country is there's no planning for the future.
Is it benefiting people or is it benefiting...
The elite and the money that's going into their pockets.
This is not about abstract politics.
It's about people's everyday lives.
That's this week on America Actually.
Why is this still burning inside of me that I feel like I am missing something?
I prayed so hard for my girl.
I prayed every night.
Prayed, prayed, prayed.
And when I lost my babies, it was so hard.
So that when I had them...
I thought that was going to be the thing.
Like, I am finally getting the thing that I prayed for, and it's going to fulfill me, and this is everything I want and more.
And it was, but it was also something missing.
I'm Raven Arsene, and this...
is Motherhood the Remix from Project Swagger.
This series is about defining our own versions of motherhood.
I am bringing in a mama I adore and admire.
My friend, fellow Peloton instructor Kirsten Ferguson.
Listen now at Project Swagger.
Okay, Scott, bring your predictions in a second.
We're going to be off on Memorial Day for Tuesday.
We'll be taping a show on Memorial Day for Tuesday.
But we'll talk about these laws banning prediction markets.
And the Trump administration is suing Minnesota after Minnesota became the first law banning prediction markets from operating in the state.
But we'll talk about that all next week.
Go ahead.
We talked about late state or 99, but I'm...
I just can't help it.
I don't think SpaceX is going to price near $2 trillion.
Okay.
The financials suggest otherwise.
I like that you're going for it.
Well, you're going to have so many people pouring over this S1.
And it's just pretty ugly.
You just read this thing and you start thinking, okay, this feels a little bit, you know, ayahuasca.
It just, it's a lot.
And if you take each of the three business lines, space, connectivity, and AI, and apply a comparable price to sales multiple to each, Rocket Lab for space, Viasat for connectivity, and Anthropic for AI, which are very generous, healthy valuations, and you add them up, you end up with a valuation of $547 billion.
My hero on this stuff, Aswath Damodaran, valued the thing at $1.1 trillion.
And if you double each of those price-to-sales multiples, you assume that each business will command a valuation that is two times the typical market rate.
You are still about $750 billion away from SpaceX's projected valuation.
Yeah, that's being kind, you're saying.
If you just get very aggressive and value every piece of this as a leader in its respective field.
And add the Elon Plus.
You get $600 billion, and then you go, okay, Elon effect, double it, $1.2 trillion.
I've always been wrong around Elon, but I'm saying I think it's going to I think two trillion is a real stretch for her and it's going to price below that.
All right.
And then the other one is just boring one.
There's I think you can expect a deal between the U.S.
and Cuba in the coming months.
Cuba is currently in a full blown crisis.
I absolutely think the smartest thing we could do is be providing humanitarian aid and let people decide that they want to be the 51st state or at least get along with us.
Yeah.
The collapse is comparable.
It's not getting any news because of everything else going on, but the collapse is literally comparable to the 1990s crash that followed the fall of the Soviet Union.
Between December of 2025 and April of 26, Cuba received just one of the eight monthly fuel shipments its economy requires to function.
And blackouts are now, get this, 20 hours a day.
I mean, it's crazy.
No, we should just help them become.
part of the world again.
100%.
But there's going to be a deal here because Rubio is reportedly having secret talks with Raul Castro's grandson, bypassing official Cuban channels.
Trump told reporters in February Cuba wants to make a deal.
Just yesterday, Rubio sent video message to the Cuban people proposing $100 million in aid and blaming Cuba's leaders for shortages of electricity, fuel, and fuel.
Rubio was born to two Cuban immigrants, and this is a deal that he has personal investment in.
He sees this as his run, his next His next ticket on his run for president.
It will win back all the people.
Sets him up well for a 2028 run.
Cuba is in a deep, dark corner.
And also Trump, he doesn't want another military excursion.
There's just, there's no fucking way.
There's a way to do this.
Just let it fall apart and we come in and help pick up the pieces.
It's already, well, it's fallen apart.
Right.
You know what I mean.
It's like, you know, interestingly, I agree with you here because I do think it should be welcome back into the.
I've always wanted to go there.
Actually, everyone in my family has been there but me, which is interesting.
I've been there.
It's great.
Yeah.
I just feel like it's wonderful people, and it'll help Rubio immeasurably.
This is at the heart of his presidential campaign.
You understand that.
It's very clear, at least for Florida.
And one of the things, speaking of collapse, I've heard from so many foreign affairs people who I really trust and think are smart that Russia is very in much distress.
Putin is under much stress right now because of the situation in Ukraine, the economy, everything else.
And that they had thought this is the first time they see a light at the end of the tunnel, Putin's rule.
Just saying that, just putting that out there.
I don't say there's light at the end of the tunnel.
I think the end is nigh.
The end is nigh.
Yes, whatever.
Anyway, so it's just interesting.
And we should do this, you know.
Let me quote that more on Brendan Carr.
We can do this the hard way or the easy way.
Let's do it the easy way with the Cubans, right?
Let's show them the bigness of the United States and really help them.
And then Scott and I will open our hotel there and retire.
Okay.
Great mojitos, great cigars.
Mojitos, great cigars, everything else.
In any case, we want to hear from you.
Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind.
Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT.
Okay, that's the show.
Thanks for listening to PIVOT.
And be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
We'll be back next week, actually on Friday, as we do not have a live Memorial Day show the day after Memorial Day.
Thanks for listening to Pivot.
Be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
We, as I said, will be back next week.
Today's show is produced by Lara Neiman, Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin, and Todd Wiseman.
Brandon McFarlane engineered this episode.
Thanks also to Drew Burrows, Ms.
Severo, and Dan Shalon, and Shat Kourouz, Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts.
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