Transcript
Patrick O'Shaughnessy (0:00)
First, I wanted to chat more about the breaking news from yesterday. Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100 billion for an AI manufacturing fund. There was a funny post that was like, he has $200 billion, why does he need to raise more money?
Wally Funk (0:15)
No conviction. No conviction. It was funny. It was like this broke containment and got into kind of the anti capitalist
Patrick O'Shaughnessy (0:26)
people are not part of acts.
Wally Funk (0:27)
And they were like, wait, why are you asking people for money? You have all the money. Yeah, he wants to let other people in on the action.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy (0:34)
I do wonder what his like GP commit will be.
Wally Funk (0:36)
That's what I was saying yesterday. I was like, I would expect him to be like, yeah, I'm good for
Patrick O'Shaughnessy (0:40)
20, 20 or 30 or something like that. I don't know, maybe he'll go even longer. But in general, I think the idea of going around the globe because he's an international person at this point, hoovering up money from all over different sovereign wealth funds and then deploying that to help rebuild the American manufacturing base is a good thing. I wrote about it today in the newsletter tbpn.com and I also tried to, you know, do some searching and think about like, what do you actually buy for $100 billion? What does a portfolio look like if it's a private equity style roll up? If you're just taking out the market caps and you're sort of assuming the debt and continue to operate the business but then bridge bring more efficiency to bear. What are some of the top options? What are some of the options look like?
Wally Funk (1:24)
The other thing is I saw a very viral post about someone that seemingly read the headline and thought, don't you have enough money already? Why do you have to buy all these companies and fire like they saw automation and just assume like job loss. And when I look at this, I'm like, okay, if he's successful, we will actually start adding jobs, a bunch of new manufacturing jobs which we've been shedding over the last year.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy (1:48)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So headline number is funny. If he had done 99 billion or 101 billion, I don't think people would be making as many softbank comparisons. But of course as soon as you hear $100 billion for a mega fund, you think this guy's got vision, he's got vision. It's a vision fund for America. I like the idea of an American softbank, an American vision fund. So I'm generally pro. But of course people are going to make comparisons to SoftBank which has had some huge winners and a few black eyes. Moss is a high volume gu. He's been the world's richest man briefly. During the dot com boom, it was reported that he was worth more than Bill Gates. It was pretty temporary, unclear exactly how much. And of course there was no liquidity at the time. But he's also held the crown for the man who lost the most money in human history after losing $76 billion in two years. You're supposed to do the wah wah for that. But he made it all back.
