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Support for the show comes from bcx, the public ticker for private tech. The US Stock market started history's greatest wave of wealth creation. From factory workers in Detroit to farmers in Omaha, anyone can own a piece of the great American companies. But today, our most innovative companies are staying private longer, which means everyday Americans are missing out. Until now. Introducing vcx, a public ticker for private tech, now available wherever you buy stocks. Visit getvcx.com for more info. That's getvcx.com carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges and expenses. This and other information can be found in the Fund's prospectus@getvcx.com this is a paid sponsorship from the Goldman Sachs trading floor. In 10 minutes or less, investors and analysts share timely analysis on the week's market activity. The Markets podcast from Goldman Sachs. Listen now.
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Welcome to Prof. G Markets. I'm Ed elson. It is August 5th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices climbed, with the Dow and the S&P 500 hitting record highs on hopes that the straight of Hormuz would soon reopen. Brent crude oil dropped below $80 per barrel. The yield on 10 year treasuries declined. AMD shares dropped more than 8% despite posting record revenues. And finally, Palantir shares popped almost 30% a day after crushing earnings and raising its outlook. Okay, what else is happening? The legal war between OpenAI and Apple just heated up. Last month, Apple sued OpenAI, accusing the company of stealing trade secrets to build its own AI hardware device. At the time, Apple called the lawsuit, quote, just the tip of the iceberg. Then on Monday, Apple asked a federal judge to Bar OpenAI and two ex employees from accessing, using, or disclosing information it claims are trade secrets. Apple also asked the court to fast track the case, arguing that there is a, quote, imminent threat to its trade secrets. OpenAI then fired back in a blog post, calling the lawsuit, quote, careless, aggressive and oddly personal. The company also accused Apple's lawyers of mistakenly emailing the wrong person after confusing two people with similar Asian surnames. OpenAI maintains it has no interest in using another company's trade secrets and says the suit is, quote, based on false information. The hearing has been scheduled for for October 1st. Here to unpack this drama, we are speaking with Alex Heath, author of the Sources newsletter. Alex, it's good to see you. Let's just start with Apple's preliminary injunction, which was filed at the beginning of the week. Then we'll get to OpenAI's clapback, which was equal parts hilarious and important. What is Apple saying here? What are they accusing OpenAI of now?
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D
Well, they're basically suggesting that there's more to the story than they've led on previously, that the corruption, as they see it, runs deeper. And I think, most importantly, as you said in the intro, they're wanting a preliminary injunction. I mean, let's be real, Apple's trying to slow OpenAI down. That's what they're trying to do. They're trying to keep this launch that they have for their first device later this year from happening, derail the whole thing, freeze employees from continuing to work on things. And that's why I think we saw that OpenAI response that you talked about.
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E
So what do you make of that response? They started with that point about Apple's lawyers emailing the wrong person. And they specifically mentioned that they confused the names of two Asian people, which is. I mean, that seems intentional.
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D
It's embarrassing. That's also something you put into a case like this to get people like us to talk about it. It rather than the merits of the evidence, it's a bit of a distraction. It's like a look over here thing. They're accidentally emailing people. You'll also notice, I'm no lawyer, but you'll notice, like, the very specific language OpenAI has used. We have no interest in using trade secrets. Like saying to my wife, like, after I snuck a cookie, that I have no interest in eating cookies doesn't negate the fact that I maybe ate the cookie. Right. These are very different statements. Like, you could say, we have not done this and we're ready to fight this in court. They're not saying this. They're saying, we have no interest in this. I think probably both parties have some embarrassing things that they don't want to come out is my read of the situation and the way they're messaging it. It's a very nasty lawsuit. I mean, OpenAI was saying that this, you know, way that Apple's approached this has felt oddly personal. And it's like, yeah, no shit. It is super personal to Apple. You know, you hired Jony I've, who ran design at Apple. You hired, as Apple has put it, you know, hundreds of ex employees. Eddy Q's son is working at OpenAI on this hardware. I mean, it is very personal. Everyone knows each other. They go way back. And Apple takes these things very seriously. They've been very consistent even back to Steve Jobs on litigating these kinds of things. Taking, you know, employee poaching very seriously. Suing ex employees for suspected leaking. This is not out of the norm of them to behave this way. I think OpenAI going, you know, it's. They start with saying like, how much respect they have for Apple and then saying like, this is beneath them. It's a tactic. But it also doesn't speak to, like, the merits of what Apple has said. And if you look at the texts that OpenAI has produced to try to back up, I didn't see a smoking gun there that, you know, Apple's totally in the wrong here. I just see a lot of he said, she said hearsay. Yeah, maybe some ex Apple employees reached out to the people at OpenAI asking just innocently for stuff back. And Apple is using that to say, oh, OpenAI people are leaking proprietary info or taking it from Apple. There's just a lot of, like, very messy energy to this that suggests these two companies hate each other. And I, I haven't seen a smoking gun on either side. I see a lot of, like, potential room for more embarrassment on each side. And I think you see that even in the way OpenAI has responded.
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E
Well, that was sort of what struck me in OpenAI's response in the blog post that they published is I was looking for them to make the actual counter argument to the claim, but I couldn't, I couldn't find it. I thought I was seeing it when I was seeing all of their accusations because the language was very powerful and very accusatory. But to go with like, you're stealing cookies analogy, it kind of is like, hey, no, I didn't steal, or they didn't say, I didn't steal cookies. The accusation was, you stole the cookies. And then the response was like, yeah, well, you didn't do the laundry earlier.
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F
Yeah.
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D
Or it's like, I, I have no interest in the cookies. Maybe I did eat them, but maybe I did it accidentally.
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A
Yes.
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D
And that's like, maybe where this lands is like there were some unintentional transfers of trade secrets and that's bad. And Apple's using that to really go for the jugular and slow things down. I would not be surprised if that ends up where this lands. But we don't know, right? Like, you and I haven't seen all of the discovery. It hasn't happened. You know, OpenAI is producing these texts. To me, these texts don't really meaningfully move anything forward on the arguments on either side. So I think we'll have to wait and see how Apple responds. You know, it'll be really interesting if this settles or Apple gets the injunction. I mean, OpenAI definitely responded because of the injunction, because if that were granted, they'd have to pause work on their first device.
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E
I mean, what really is the point of posting this blog if they're not actually addressing the merits of the case and if it's not going to hold water, really, in the legal sphere? I mean, I know you're not a lawyer.
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D
Well, I don't know. So I don't want to speak to, like, I don't know if it'll hold water. As someone who's just following the case, to me, I didn't see a strong rebuttal. I did see, you know, like, Hock Tan, like the most senior person that they're accusing at OpenAI, the former Apple leader. You know, I did see OpenAI have a very simple blanket, like, he always told people not to give him trade secrets kind of response. Didn't address, like, any specific. I mean, Apple's very specific about how OpenAI employees allegedly coerced information out of people. And OpenAI didn't get into detail on that in its response. It was very blanket. And again, this, like, we have no interest. It's not the same as saying you didn't do seems really important. And it's like very, very specifically lawyered. And I've seen much forceful responses where, you know, usually the standard is like, oh, this is meritless. We believe this case is meritless and we look forward to defending it in court. Right. You're not seeing that here. You're seeing a lot of like, why is this so personal? We have no interests. Like, it's very, like, teenage angsty.
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E
Yeah, it's really interesting. What do you think this means for the launch of this hardware device? I mean, where do we even stand on this hardware device that OpenAI has been working on? Is that still happening?
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D
I mean, the latest I've heard and that others have reported is they definitely are on track for an unveil sometime later this year, year of the first device which is supposedly going to be this kind of Alexa HomePod, like AI speaker with a bunch of sensors on it that kind of sits at your desk or goes on a table and ambiently takes in the environment, maybe even interrupts. You essentially has like an AI personality, maybe your AI chief of staff kind of in a way and takes in the world around you. And then obviously they have a family of devices they've said they're working on. I think we're going to see probably some kinds of earbuds, maybe a wrist thing, some glasses. They're not going to do a phone. But I'm sure Apple would love to slow down, you know, the release of this. I mean, I think Scott has been saying that as well, that like, it's worth probably the legal fees just to like introduce chaos into this very competitive moment. Whatever OpenAI, though, is putting out in the fall, like, it's not going to cannibalize iPhone sales. So there's no like near term risk to Apple here. I think it's more of like the principle that Apple feels very betrayed. And yes, it's clearly very personal. You know, Hock Tan, the most senior executive executive at OpenAI, they're accusing of leaving Apple and taking secrets and coercing for secrets. You know, used to work very closely with John Ternus, right, The new CEO of Apple. Incoming. Like these people go way back. And so it's also very telling, I think, uninteresting, that Johnny I've is not named in the suit. I mean, I know that's been discussed before, but he continues to stay out of it, which to me suggests there's some kind of blanket agreement there that I'm not reporting this, I'm just speculating that, you know, there's an intentional reason he's been left out of it. And maybe it doesn't mean that he's not implicated, but Apple isn't able to include him.
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E
Say the preliminary injunction is granted, Apple wins that and the hardware launch is at the very least put on hold or maybe even just canceled. How bad would that be for OpenAI? How important is it to them?
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D
Very bad. If there's any traction of Apple winning an injection, you're going to see my prediction. You're going to see OpenAI go, you know, full court press on this and make a big mess of it and do a bunch of oppo messaging against this. It matters a lot. There's a lot riding on them getting hardware. Right. It's a personal kind of thing for Sam Altman and Johnny. And they spent over $6 billion on acquiring Johnny's hardware team. They've been working on the stuff. It would be very bad.
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E
All right, we'll see how things unfold. Alex Heath is author of the Sources newsletter. Alex, always appreciate your time. Thank you.
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Thanks Ed.
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After the break, a first look at SpaceX earnings and for even more markets insights. You can subscribe to my weekly newsletter Simply put at simply put profgmedia.com.
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Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder? With a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other, Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, E commerce, and more. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you try Odoo for free@odoo.com that's o d o o dot com.
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We're back with ProfG Markets. SpaceX made its earnings debut yesterday and the results were strong, but investors still weren't happy. The company reported massive revenue growth of 92% year over year and all three business SEG, space, connectivity and AI beat expectations. Just half an hour before the results came out, SpaceX also made a separate announcement. A partnership with Nvidia, the two companies are working together in an attempt to put data center computing into orbit. SpaceX stock initially had risen roughly 10% yesterday in anticipation of the earnings. However, after the earnings came out in after hours trading, the stock fell 8%. So here to break down SpaceX's first quarter of publicly reported earnings, we're speaking with Nicholas Owens, equity analyst at Morningstar. Nicholas, thanks for joining us. This was better than analysts had expected on the revenue side. Also on the operating income or loss side, what do you make of this quarter for SpaceX?
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I think you're referring to consensus. They actually came in $200 million light on my revenue and operating margin forecast. Okay, I'll say that one grain of salt is that we don't have a. First of all, it's a quickly kind of pivoting business and we don't have a sense of what the seasonality of this business is in terms of what's a normal Q2 look like. So I don't think there's a huge much to be made there. They also spent about $11 billion more in capex than I forecast. So I think the anticipation was for a good quarter and that's what they delivered. The big delta really is in the acceleration of AI revenue and these rental agreements which I think we've talked about, and those were mostly announced along with the ipo. So I Actually think the announcement about the partnership with Nvidia has some interesting nuance in that. Previously they had said they wanted to make custom chips, which is what I understand to be kind of the long term trend that a lot of people who want to build out all this AI infrastructure, they want to tailor the chips to tailor to their computation and their algorithms and so forth. The comments today were we really like these Nvidia chips. We think they're the best ones. I think that is almost like a we're going to buy those chips and rent them out. And it's less of an emphasis on the tailoring to grok.
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E
In terms of your expectations for capital expenditures, I mean what do you make of the money losing side of this business? I mean they have reduced their losses compared to last quarter. Last quarter the losses were insane. This quarter the losses are still crazy, but seemingly less insane. What do you make of the spending relative to the amount of money that they're actually generating on the revenue side?
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F
Well, a lot of what they're spending is still classified as R and D. I mean I saw a few of the line items even for SG and A go up. Admittedly the capex doesn't show up in the income statement, but the spending generally, so there's, let's say R and D&CPEX together. You can think of those as investments in the future of the business which they're doing hand over fist, which is appropriate for this type of project. And again, I think it's lumpy, you know, I think they, they almost pulled forward a lot of their R and D type spending and they had like you said, extremely low margins, high spending last year. And so in a way we're looking at almost favorable comparison post IPO the overall level. I mean we don't expect them really to make much money for a while.
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E
It seems like the story of this company is kind of morphing into the story of any other hyperscaler, which is that the entire depends on the AI thing and the potential for AI to work is an open question. That's where they're generating most of their growth. That is kind of what they say that the company is going to be about. It's going to be about AI, but also that is where the losses are stacking up. And when we look at how sustainable their business actually is, it seems like the reason that their losses were a little less bad than they were before is because their AI revenue increased. And the reason their AI revenue increased is probably because they inked a deal with Anthropic and then that's why I was very interested to see a disclosure that they included which was their customer concentration risk. And what they told us is that 38% of the company's entire revenue comes from two companies which they said were Customer A, which makes up 18% and customer B which makes up 19.5%. I assume one of those customers is Anthropic and that's basically the bulk of their AI revenue. And maybe the other customer is the US government. I'm seeing headlines today that Anthropic is borrowing or in talks to borrow nearly $40 billion from Blackstone in order to buy Compute from Google. So does that mean they're going to have to borrow tens of billions of dollars to keep buying compute from SpaceX? Probably. I mean they're probably going to have to keep borrowing, they're going to have to keep raising money because clearly the profitability isn't working, at least on the frontier side of things. So it does seem to me at least that there is a real risk that you could have randomly in one quarter, 19% of your revenue disappear overnight and suddenly the entire AI thesis is gone. Or at least that's the concentration risk. Right now, just looking at the price, the stock has come crashing way down from its highs of $225 per share. It was cut in half. That was one of my predictions. I'll ring the bell. We're now at a more reasonable place, but certainly not anywhere close to your fair value estimate. Before the IPO of $62 per share, it would need to get cut in half again. What do you make of the valuation at this point?
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F
Today still seems high and I have no reason based on today to change my fair value, you know, as we move forward and let's say, gain new information about some of these market dynamics. I mean, I think the scenario you're talking about, maybe to quote Elon Musk, there's a non zero chance that that anthropic rent goes away. So you have to sort of keep that in mind. And I think the scenario in which you're describing is really sort of some kind of a collapse, right? A house of cards falling down or all these cross funding deals being unwound. I'm thinking more along the. I'm kind of giving a little, trying to be a little more, let's say, middle of the road and say in a model where we're in scenarios where right now we're in this gold rush, this fantastical race to spend and invest and build and Create even when the business model hasn't proven out or the profitability isn't there. I think a lot of people are working on this assumption or mental model put forth by the head of Nvidia that there's this five layers cake of value and that over the very long term the value should accrue to the top two layers. So that's products and apps, which today looks like anthropic, even though that's not happening in terms of their bottom line. That's the theory. So it really boils down to what we think AI is and isn't going to do for people. If it's just going to become a plug into everybody's computer, sort of like Microsoft Word was, and and everyone's expectation of other people's productivity goes up. That's one scenario that I think is plausible. It's not the one most people are talking about where they're talking about hundreds of millions of people being displaced and all this other stuff.
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E
But even with your middle of the road analysis where you assume that there wouldn't be some form of collapse, that the value would accrue to the application layer, I.e. the OpenAI's and the Anthropics, even in that assumption you still value the company at half of where it is today. You value SpaceX at half of where it is today.
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F
That's correct. And that's running scenarios where mostly they are making money like they are now on these, let's call them economically attractive or generous rental deals. It has to really, really scale up for it to work out is that if The LLM that SpaceX has takes off and starts consuming more of their own computing capacity, ironically that displaces these rental incomes that they might otherwise be able to charge. And so they have to sort of keep making more of it. And that costs money. Right? So I think they're building an or I saw a headline the other day that they're buying land in somewhere, Arizona, you know, like another colossus type installation. And I think on the call they talked about how many gigawatts they plan to have by the end of the year and by the end of the decade. And that implies more terrestrial investment. So they're continuing to expand that footprint. Eventually they want to do it in space. They have to do that really fast for them to be able to sort of have their cake and eat it too, have a very broad based adoption of the AI, you know, the LLM that they own, so to speak. And as well as renting out to the market. All right.
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E
Nicholas Owens is equity analyst at Morningstar. Nicholas, we appreciate your time. Thank you.
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F
Thank you.
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E
Blackstone is in early talks to provide $36 billion in debt financing to Anthropic. This is according to reporting from Bloomberg. The loan will be used to fund Anthropic's leasing of AI chips from Google. Which would imply that Anthropic doesn't have enough money to buy compute from Google on its own. So it has to borrow billions of dollars from Blackstone. Which is quite remarkable when you consider how much money Anthropic has already raised. The company has received roughly $132 billion in venture funding so far. And it's also borrowed another $35 billion just a couple of months ago, which basically means that $167 billion isn't enough money to cover their costs. They need more. It's also quite remarkable when you consider the company that already invested billions of dollars into Anthropic. Specifically Google. Yes, Google committed to invest up to $40 billion in anthropic back in April with an immediate cash injection of $10 billion. Which means that even the money that Google wired to Anthropic so that Anthropic could buy Google's chips, even that wasn't enough. Anthropic needed more. Why does this matter? Well, because it shows you just how financially unstable these Frontier Labs really are. Despite the rumors that Anthropic was about to hit operating profitability, all the signs are telling us that the company is still losing money, and lots of it. So much money that even the money they were given by their vendor wasn't enough to cover the cost of sending that money back to them. Now they're having to borrow to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. The takeaway is quite simple. Despite the hype, the LLM business is still a highly unprofitable business. And if OpenAI and Anthropic cannot resolve that problem, then the collapse of this AI trade won't be a question of if. It'll be a question of when. Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Shalon, Kristen o' Donoghue and Mia Silverio. And our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thanks for listening to Prof. G Markets from Prof. G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I will see you you tomorrow.
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Avatar Fire and Ash now streaming on Disney Plus. Rated PG 13.