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- [00:02]
Dan Primack
SpaceX IPO under the Christmas tree. 1.5 trillion for the big man. For Elon Musk, he's gonna raise $30 billion, something like that. That's an incredibly small amount of dilution if he actually goes out at 1.5 trillion. I thought he hated just 1.5 billion.
- [00:16]
Ben Thompson
Running a public company. Just 1.5.
- [00:18]
Dan Primack
Just 1.5. Just one point five trillion. He said the biggest number. Because you know that there was that whole, like, leak, I think it was in Reuters. OpenAI going out at 1 trillion. You gotta go a little bit higher. What's just a little bit higher? He should have done. He should have done 1.1. I'm going to IPO. 1.1 trillion. Really stick it to Sam. But he didn't. He says he's going out at 1.5.
- [00:37]
Ben Thompson
He's got to leave some room for the. For the first day. Pump.
- [00:39]
Dan Primack
Yes.
- [00:40]
Tyler Cowen
Right.
- [00:40]
Dan Primack
Get it up to two, get it up to three.
- [00:42]
Ben Thompson
Yeah.
- [00:42]
Dan Primack
I mean, in terms of companies that should benefit from the space economy, like, is this not the Nvidia of space? Like, what other company is there? It's the space company. It's SpaceX. 30 billion coming in, coming company was doing great. Launch product is fantastic. The rockets go up, they come down.
- [01:01]
Ben Thompson
Putting sonic booms over Montecito, apparently.
- [01:04]
Dan Primack
But I think the actual launch market for anything but satellites, but for anything but data centers has just been a little small. And so Starlink has been the big unlock, of course, for SpaceX. Massive market there. Putting the screws to Verizon, AT&T and the other telcos. The other telcos, of course, have been noodling on working with a rival, putting up smaller satellites in a sparser constellation with more bandwidth. Per.
- [01:33]
Ben Thompson
Somebody was talking earlier that to get the same amount of compute as a 1 gigawatt data center, you would need 10,000 satellites.
- [01:40]
Dan Primack
That's not that many, though. Starlink has over 10,000 up there already, I believe.
- [01:45]
Ben Thompson
Sure.
- [01:45]
Dan Primack
So that's actually not crazy. That's actually like extremely bullish.
- [01:50]
Ben Thompson
Well, there is no. There is. There is a pathway to doing it with far fewer, which would just be like ultra, ultra long.
- [01:57]
Dan Primack
I don't think they want to do big. I think the whole thing is constellation. That was the beauty of Starlink was that you could go up there because it gave them the ability to have all this residual capability, as Gwynne Shotwell puts it, which is like, if the CIA shows up and they want to put a spy satellite on there, or some company shows up and says, hey, we want to Put something really serious in space. But we only need 60% of the fairing, or we only need 40% of the fairing, or we only need 80% of the fairing. It's like, okay, great, we'll fill the rest of the space with two starlinks, five starlinks, 20 starlinks. So in terms of the space thing, I mean, we keep going back and forth on this. Is it just a pump? Is it just a new narrative? Is it a pivot to AI? I don't really care. I think it all comes down to this just idea of Elon math. You know, the Elon math is always crazy. He's always putting up sort of wild predictions that then may or may not come true. A lot of them are way off. But at least he's telling a story that's like optimistic about the future. And at least it feels like that Trey Stevens good quest thing is like get to Mars is good. If he misses it by five years, at least he's still the first. He's the only person that cares about it, which is great. In true hit piece fashion, I pulled up all the different times he's made a prediction and then not landed it or not delivered on time. And it's crazy. The guy loves to rip predictions. He said he was going to put early SpaceX concept. When they started SpaceX was to put a small greenhouse with plants on Mars as a PR demo before they would even start the company. That of course did not happen before starting the company. Yeah, this was like the original thesis was like he went to some Elon, went to some like space kind of space nerd meetup. It was like we need to put a plant, a physical plant with a webcam on it on Mars. And if we land that there and we prove that life can live on Mars, we bring life to Mars. It will inspire everyone and marshal all the resources and all the capital and all the excitement to actually go put boots on the ground. Which also he predicted. He predicted humans on Mars by 2024. Of course, hasn't happened that we know of. It's possible snuck went up there. They keep saying that the star, they keep saying the starships blow up. But maybe, maybe one of them didn't. Maybe one of them sneaky, sneaky went off and put a person on Mars.
- [04:23]
Ben Thompson
Yeah, the shell of the real ship.
- [04:25]
Dan Primack
I like the inverse, the inverse conspiracy theory, you know, like, yeah, like, oh yeah, we never went to Mars or we never went to the moon. No, the inverse conspiracy theory. We're going all the Time secretly. But you're not cool enough to get in on it. You don't have a ticket. Everyone else does. Except for you. Because I was just on the moon yesterday and I'm not telling you about it. First crewed Mars landing as early as 2029. Little too early to say, but that one feels aggressive. We're just four years out. You got to put a whole crew down there. He also said tourist trips were going to be happening around the moon by 2018. Didn't hit that. Yeah, self sustaining city on Mars of 1 million people. 2050 feels a little early, but I.
- [05:06]
Ben Thompson
Don'T know, 2050, anytime you're getting more than a couple of decades, couple decades, anything's possible.
- [05:11]
Dan Primack
I agree, I agree. But then of course there's a bunch that he succeeded in. He said that he was going to deliver reusable orbital rockets. He did it. He's also predicted fully reusable starship with rapid turnaround. It's a little too soon to tell. He's behind some of the early dates. But in general that project seems like it's real, it's gonna happen. It's taken a little bit, but it is interesting how the SpaceX narrative has shifted from first we're going to Mars, then there was the whole. Do you remember SpaceX? Point to point. Are you familiar with that? Yes. So there was a pitch for a.
- [05:42]
Ben Thompson
While, like a commercial. Is this like, this is a replacement for an airliner? You'll just go up and then come down and land.
- [05:47]
Dan Primack
Exactly, exactly. So it was like New York to Tokyo in like 30 minutes.
- [05:52]
Ben Thompson
Because I would go so hard.
- [05:54]
Dan Primack
Insane, right? Insane. So the idea was like you're in Mexico.
- [05:58]
Ben Thompson
Imagine being able to commute to Tokyo for some obscure job.
- [06:03]
Dan Primack
It'd be amazing. It would actually be remarkable. And there's a whole bunch of economic research that shows that when you increase transportation, reduce transportation times, that you really do get an economic boom. Because people can do business in areas where they couldn't before. Even just reducing the time from San Francisco to la, from a six hour drive to a one hour flight, all of a sudden people can go up and do business, come back the same day. They just get there more often. I had a hot take for a while that if I was the President, I would recommission the SR71 Blackbird, which of course goes, I think Mach 3. So you can actually get from DC to London in like two hours. Cause it's a supersonic jet. And so imagine that, that, imagine the.
- [06:45]
Ben Thompson
The presidential SR71 would go also very.
- [06:49]
Dan Primack
Hard, remarkably hard, right? Elon is always the king of opening up new markets and just kind of saying, like, well, what if he was also replacing commercial air travel? And people are like, wait, that's a huge, huge market. If you can do that. And of course, if you could make it more economical, who would ever pay for a ticket on a 747 when you could ride a rocket and get there literally 90% faster? Now you have to go from Manhattan on a boat out to a launch pad. You can't take off from jfk. Like, there's a whole bunch of wrinkles. And, and that's why this is all practically probably like 20 years in the future. But it was, it was one of those famous examples of an Elon project where if it doesn't violate the laws of physics, it eventually will happen. And that's a lot of what's happening with, with the data centers in space. I think that the space data center thing, it's. People are still having the debate on, like, is it possible? It's like, obviously it's possible. The question is, is over under a gigawatt in by 2027, which is when the other big clusters come online, will it be competitive in the short term, in the near term? And then, and then on the flip side, like, you know, if you're, if you, if you're a bear, are you saying that it's not going to happen in 20 years? And then, I mean, the big question is, there's one, there's one more Elon gambit that he could run with. One more like, oh, you wanted a fifth act.
- [08:12]
Ben Thompson
Just one.
- [08:13]
Dan Primack
Oh, I mean, there's tons. But there's one that's really wild, which would be if he straight up said, we're building the Dyson Sphere, like we are going to launch. Tyler's nodding. He's pumped. He's pumped.
- [08:25]
Ben Thompson
Isn't he the obvious. Isn't he, like the only, only real candidate?
- [08:29]
Dan Primack
Well, he's the only candidate for everything in space because he has the leading space company by like two orders of magnitude.
- [08:34]
Ben Thompson
Tyler, the chat wants to know, did we ever find out if this kid, I'm assuming they're talking about you, is related to Elon Musk?
- [08:42]
Dan Primack
Why would he be related to Elon?
- [08:43]
Ben Thompson
I mean, he's got a lot of sons. He's got a lot of sons.
- [08:45]
Dan Primack
Oh, okay. Yeah. Could be anyone.
- [08:47]
Ben Thompson
After years of resisting it, SpaceX now plans to go public.
- [08:50]
Tyler Cowen
Why?
- [08:51]
Ben Thompson
And Elon actually replied to Eric and said, as usual, Eric is accurate. So I thought it was worth reading through this. Eric says SpaceX is planning to raise tens of billions of dollars through an initial public offering next year. Multiple outlets have reported and ours can confirm this represents a major change in thinking from the world's leading space company and its founder, Elon Musk. Wall Street Journal and the Information first reported about a possible IPO last Friday. And Bloomberg followed that up on Tuesday evening with a report suggesting a $1.5 trillion target valuation. This is an enormous amount of funding. The largest IPO in history incurred in 2019 when the state owned Saudi Arabian oil company began publicly trading as aramco and raised 29 billion in terms of revenue. Aramco is a top five company in the world now. SpaceX is poised to potentially match or exceed this value. That SpaceX would be attractive to public investors is not a surprise. It's the world's dominant space company and launch space based communications and much more. For investors seeking unlimited growth, space is the final frontier. But why would Musk take SpaceX public now at a time when the company's revenues are surging thanks to the growth of the Starlink Internet constellation? The decision is surprising because Musk has for so long resisted going public with SpaceX. He has not enjoyed the public scrutiny of Tesla and feared that shareholder desires for financial return were not consistent with his ultimate goal of settling Mars. A significant shift in recent years has been the rise of AI, which Musk has been involved in since 2015 when he co founded OpenAI. He later had a falling out with his co founders and started his own company Xai, in 2023. At Tesla, he's been pushing smart driving technology forward and more recently focused on robotics. Musk sees the convergence of these technologies in the near future, which he believes will profoundly change civilization. Raising large amounts of money in the next 18 months would allow Musk to have significant capital to deploy at SpaceX as he influences and partakes in this convergence of technology. How can SpaceX play in space in the near term? The company plans to develop a modified version of the Starlight satellite to serve as a foundation for building data centers in space. There you go, John. Has SpaceX been capital constrained or are they capability constrained? You know, clearly there's been like infinite demand for SpaceX equity for a very long time. So much so that people are investing in triple layered SPVs just to get enduring massive fees, just to get a taste. Does this massive capital infusion actually accelerate the business that much or is it just the right moment in time?
- [11:22]
Dan Primack
For a number of reasons, I totally get that. SpaceX was never crazy, crazy capital constrained. Even though like building a massive rocket that feels like super expensive. So expensive. But at the same time they've just, they've just been able to raise the money and it just hasn't been a problem. And of course the like SpaceX as a business generates a lot of revenue. Like, like some of the, some of the, some of the contracts with the government are in the billions. And, and then Starlink is just, yeah, it's throwing off its telecom so it's just throwing off tons and tons of cash.
- [11:55]
Tyler Cowen
Yeah.
- [11:55]
Ben Thompson
And you just look at, you look at the growth opportunity in effectively telecom you have. T Mobile is a $217 billion business that is threatened by Starlink. AT&T is $172 billion business and Verizon is $170 billion business.
- [12:09]
Dan Primack
But I think the reason you need 30 billion sort of paradoxically or counterintuitively might not be to build more rockets. It might be to actually just buy the GPUs. SpaceX doesn't make those GPUs. They don't just pull them out of thin air. They got to buy them from somewhere. And if they're buying them from Nvidia, those are expensive and you got to buy a lot of them. And to make a dent in like, let's assume all the physics works, let's assume that the launch costs are cheap, all the math works out well. If you're putting a gigawatt of compute in space, you probably have like a billion dollars of hard cost just on the chips or something like that. I don't know the exact number, but you can imagine that you raised 30 billion. The business is humming, but you still have to outlay a ton just for the GPUs.
- [12:56]
Ben Thompson
Do you think that Xai gets rolled into SpaceX or Tesla?
- [13:00]
Dan Primack
That's the hard part. I thought it was going to be Tesla for because Tesla has the lineage, they have their own chip, they have massive data centers to train AI models for full self driving. It felt like such a logical place for Xai to land. But now maybe it lands at SpaceX, I don't know. Well, we should read through some of the history about Founders funds investment in SpaceX because it might be one of the greatest. It might become the greatest venture capital investment of all time is founders fund investing. 20 million out of a 20 out of a $220 million fund. Two, which also invested in Palantir and Spotify early is just nasty. And Dan Premax is flashback to chatting with Founders Fund Luke Nosek when he led the first investment in SpaceX I spent some time on the phone earlier this week with Luke Nosek to discuss his firm's $20 million investment in private space launch services provider SpaceX. The company is run by Elon Musk who co founded PayPal along the founders Fund Partners. A few questions and answers Dan Founders Fund usually invests no more than a few million dollars in a company. Why invest 20 million when your fund is only 220 million? Luke we obviously have internal caps that we follow. What we do is look at how much a company needs and invest that much. For example, we only invested $500,000 in Facebook because that's how much it needed at the time. A lot of firms were offering more.
- [14:24]
Ben Thompson
Historically like the greatest venture investment ever in my view was MASA's 20 million investment in Alibaba. That's turned it into 70 billion at the time of the IPO. Hard to I wonder if we can figure out how much FF owns about 10% of SpaceX but I don't know how many, how many they've put in.
- [14:43]
Dan Primack
Yeah, yeah. To maintain that stake they put so.
- [14:45]
Ben Thompson
Again it's still like going to be a 150ish billion dollar position. Just the carry check alone will be nasty.
- [14:54]
Dan Primack
As Nico said Larry Ellison is addressing he's sitting on stage here in this Wall Street Journal article on the news that Oracle shares have tumbled as AI spending outruns returns. So Oracle is facing mounting anxiety from investors about how much it's spending to build out data centers for the artificial intelligence industry. The cloud computing company's revenue and operating income for the most recent financial quarters fell slightly short of a analysts expectations while the company raised its spending forecast, adding fuel to concerns over the timeline for turning the AI industry's ravenous demand for computing capacity into profits. I think investors didn't realize that like when you do the one of these crazy AI deals you have to go build the data center and then you have to wait and then you have to get get power and you have to buy the chips and chips have to ship, turn it on, rack the chips and you got to turn it on, then you got to test it and then you can generate some tokens and hopefully sell them all. While enterprise AI adoption might be stacking, we'll see. There was some crazy data out of ramp today. Our Karazi and the Economist over there.
- [15:57]
Ben Thompson
At least some businesses might say we've got enough AI, we like it but we have enough.
- [16:02]
Dan Primack
Apparently 55% of businesses are just like good without paying for AI. I mean, the paying thing, at least directly, at least the paying thing here.
- [16:12]
Ben Thompson
Is so basically, and so the example is like a lot of businesses don't pay for cloud.
- [16:16]
Dan Primack
Yes.
- [16:17]
Ben Thompson
But they effectively pay for cloud because they pay companies that leverage cloud to deliver their products.
- [16:22]
Dan Primack
But it's an interesting, it's an interesting chart to see where enterprise AI adoption is going ramps. AI index shows AI adoption held flat at 45% of businesses in November, driven by slight declines in finance and technology sectors. By the model. OpenAI went down negative 1%, Anthropic up 0.8% and Google went up 0.7%. And so you can see that this chart in 2025, OpenAI had a big, big jump and then just has been flat for the last couple months. A little bit down. Anthropic's been on a much smoother. It seems like they didn't exist in 2023, basically. Or maybe they didn't have a paid plan that really appealed to businesses. Then 2024, you see some slight growth here. And then 2025, a much smoother, like, okay, uptick, growing more, growing more, growing more. Kind of all keeps up with this. You know, they've been 10xing every year like, like a, like an Instagram Hustle account.
- [17:26]
Ben Thompson
It seems to be pretty obvious at this point that the model is just getting smarter, is not going to by default make adoption like accelerate massively again. They need to become more useful. They need to be able to, you know, Duart Keshe has talked about this. Like, they need to be able to learn on, learn on the job basically in the way that, that a human does. And I think, I think until we have that, there's some things, you know, the forward deployed engineer movement of like having people out embedded in companies, like trying to unlock the potential of the models. That's great, but I think the models actually just need to become generally more useful.
- [18:01]
Dan Primack
45% of businesses don't pay for AI, don't use AI. And the question is like, are they just not using AI at all or are they just good with free? Because if you told me like 55% of companies are in sort of like a private equity scarcity, wartime mode where they're watching every dollar that goes out of the door. Even a $20 subscription is something that will be scrutinized because you know what, like, son, we've been running this business for a generation. We're not gonna spend frivolously. Every dime that goes through our business is Precious. And so we're not just going to go sign up for whatever. No, you don't just spend, spend, spend. I do think there is a bit of a slowdown here. It's just getting harder and harder to justify. Okay, It's a no brainer to bring it in. It's a no brainer to pay for it.
- [18:51]
Ben Thompson
If you're a business that's not doing code gen, you're not generating a bunch of assets, et cetera. And somebody says, hey, for $20 a month or a hundred dollars a month, you can get somebody that's PhD level in math, but extremely low agency. You have to like tap, you have to tap the person on the shoulder.
- [19:07]
Dan Primack
I like the laundromat.
- [19:09]
Ben Thompson
The laundromat's like, actually I don't need somebody who's PhD. You know what, sir, sir, this is a laundromat.
- [19:15]
Dan Primack
We've been running this laundromat in this family for 45 years and I've never run into an IMO gold medal level problem ever. Disney, which is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and is going to license their characters for use in Sora, she says, look at this hype. Isn't it neat? Wouldn't you think? My bubble's complete. So Disney's making a $1 billion investment in OpenAI and will allow the AI platform to use its characters and properties to generate short user prompted social videos. Disney's three year licensing deal will let users generate videos using Sora of more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Star wars and Pixar characters. A curated selection of these short videos will be available to stream on Disney plus. Whoa. That's the bombshell there. I didn't realize, but for a kid who loves a Pixar character that wants to see Wall E, join the Avengers and go fight Thanos, that could be a delightful, delightful experience for a young child who enjoys Disney's ip. And yet it could make no sense for Disney to actually create that. I just think the idea that this is going to Disney is crazy. That's the crazy thing. Is there real demand for, for Sora level quality content in the Disney app?
- [20:35]
Ben Thompson
To me, what's exciting about this is personalized entertainment. And which is why I think that Disney would be interested in doing this. One thing that's notable. This went out this morning. Disney accuses Google of using AI to engage in copyright infringement on massive scale. As Disney has gone into business with OpenAI, the Mouse House is accusing Google of copyright infringement on massive scale. Using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute infringing images and videos. So the question, so Disney's not just allowing OpenAI to generate these assets, but they've actually invested. And so the immediate question is, will Disney do any of these licensing, IP licensing with other platforms?
- [21:22]
Dan Primack
I don't know. It does feel like Disney's sort of like picking a winner here in a video and they're saying like we like Open Air and we don't like Google, which is sort of a, sort of a bold. A bold move. You would think that they would be a little bit more platform agnostic. I'm fascinated by this.
- [21:40]
Ben Thompson
Then again, Thrive Capital bet. Yeah, bet the fund in some ways on OpenAI. Who's co owner of Thrive. Bob Iger.
- [21:50]
Dan Primack
Get out the red string. It's all connected. Lisaan says GPT 5.2 Pro. It has ridiculous pricing. Once again, $20 and $168. Tyler, do you know if GPT 5.2 Pro is more expensive? I guess they're raising prices.
- [22:06]
Tyler Cowen
Yeah. I mean, so this is the pro model. These are always like the very expensive ones. Yeah, I think it's pretty comparable.
- [22:10]
Dan Primack
I guess 5.1 was $1.75 and $14. So it's a pretty significant 5.1 was.
- [22:17]
Tyler Cowen
$1.25 on the input. It's one DOL for 5.2. It's like, you know, marginally more expensive.
- [22:24]
Dan Primack
We're eating good. Future pipelines may need to unify pre mid post training injecting reasoning data earlier and more continuously. To Anyone wondering if 5.2 is new pre trained, I'm letting you connect the top the dots between this says Alexander Doria. This is the new main catch of Deepsea 3.2. This isn't a new model card new ELO update, it's an architectural update. GPT5.2 2 thinking is at 52.9% up from 17.6%. That's a huge leap.
- [22:56]
Ben Thompson
Wait, we got to run our joke benchmark.
- [22:59]
Dan Primack
Yes, let's run some of the TVP.
- [23:01]
Ben Thompson
Benchmark, pull it up, try to make us around, try to make us laugh.
- [23:04]
Tyler Cowen
So yes, this is my benchmark where I ask to recreate the joke about the shrimp fried rice.
- [23:09]
Dan Primack
Yes.
- [23:09]
Tyler Cowen
So I'll just go through some of these and you guys tell me how good they are.
- [23:13]
Dan Primack
Yes.
- [23:14]
Tyler Cowen
You're telling me a crab rang this bell.
- [23:16]
Dan Primack
Crab rang bell.
- [23:18]
Ben Thompson
This is thinking this is 5.2 things.
- [23:19]
Tyler Cowen
Is 5.2 thinking this is the frontier.
- [23:21]
Dan Primack
This is the best of all. I kind of like you're telling me a crab rang this goon. That's funny.
- [23:27]
Tyler Cowen
Yeah, I think that's what I would.
- [23:28]
Dan Primack
Have thought, but that's not.
- [23:29]
Tyler Cowen
You're telling me a bear built this market?
- [23:32]
Dan Primack
Oh, because markets can be bullish or bearish. A bear built.
- [23:36]
Tyler Cowen
You're telling me a ham. You're telling me a ham wrote this lettuce.
- [23:41]
Dan Primack
Wait, ham wrote this lettuce? Ham wrote lettuce.
- [23:45]
Tyler Cowen
Wait, wait, wait.
- [23:46]
Dan Primack
This is terrible. Terrible has happened.
- [23:48]
Tyler Cowen
You're telling me a ghost wrote this script?
- [23:50]
Dan Primack
Ghost wrote script. Ghost written script.
- [23:52]
Tyler Cowen
Ghost written.
- [23:53]
Dan Primack
Okay. Yeah, yeah.
- [23:53]
Tyler Cowen
You're telling me an owl delivered this mail?
- [23:56]
Dan Primack
Yeah.
- [23:58]
Tyler Cowen
So I think. I think Gemini is still the frontier.
- [24:01]
Dan Primack
Here in terms of shrimp fried rice bench. Yes, yes. Because there were some good ones there. But again, to understand. It seems like Gemini understood the assignment, but still ultimately leaned on Reddit data and broad Internet data and did not come up with any unique joke that had never existed on the Internet before. Yes, but it did find the good jokes on the Internet.
- [24:24]
Tyler Cowen
All of the good ones that it gave me, I could find elsewhere.
- [24:27]
Ben Thompson
All right, let's try at least one more.
- [24:29]
Dan Primack
Wait, I wonder if this benchmark is, like, saturated in the sense that, like, every possible shrimp fried rice joke has been said and written down on the Internet. Is there any new territory? Like, if I put you on this job for a month, could you come up with a new joke that's as funny as shrimp fried rice?
- [24:45]
Tyler Cowen
Yes.
- [24:46]
Dan Primack
You think you could?
- [24:46]
Tyler Cowen
I think so.
- [24:47]
Dan Primack
Okay, maybe that's a challenge. Do it.
- [24:49]
Tyler Cowen
You're telling me a chicken actually tendered these? You're telling me a chef Boya made these ravioli?
- [24:57]
Dan Primack
Okay. Yeah. This is really, really rough.
- [24:59]
Ben Thompson
All right. You just bombed Tyler Dupe.
- [25:02]
Dan Primack
Google names a new chief to head up its $100 billion a year. AI infrastructure build out. Amin Vadat, who will Sundar directly. This is very exciting. Imagine having a $100 billion budget for capex. That's like Ben's dream.
- [25:19]
Ben Thompson
Four times NASA's annual budget. Yeah, Ben. So Ben's the cap. Ben's the Capex guy here. Almost every time. Every time we stop, to me he wants another 30 grand for a new camera. This light. This. It's going up next year.
- [25:36]
Dan Primack
One more. Meanwhile, we are actively on the show asking for goal post that will probably wind up costing 30.
- [25:42]
Ben Thompson
We're part of the problem.
- [25:43]
Dan Primack
We are. We are. I want to watch this video of a hillside in China that has been covered with solar panels. When you see this video, do you react with admiration or with disgust? Tyler's nodding. Sick. This is sick.
- [25:54]
Tyler Cowen
Yeah.
- [25:54]
Ben Thompson
For some reason, solar panels over mountains. Do you give me a little bit of disgust. Whereas I get. I'm less.
- [26:02]
Dan Primack
Yeah. Mountains are beautiful.
- [26:03]
Ben Thompson
Deserts. Deserts. I'm like, sort of already blanketed.
- [26:07]
Dan Primack
That's sort of already.
- [26:08]
Ben Thompson
This looks like a. Like, it would be a really enjoyable mountain range to just go on a nice little hike. And so I'm, I'm feeling the disgust.
- [26:16]
Dan Primack
You feeling the disgust?
- [26:17]
Ben Thompson
Also impressed.
- [26:18]
Dan Primack
I mean, at least the mountains won't catch on fire. You know, that's often a problem.
- [26:21]
Ben Thompson
Yeah. I'm curious around the efficiency because just given the movement of the sun, aren't you going to have like. It's actually blanketing both sides of these peaks. Trump says doesn't see why we can't have 20% or 25% GDP growth. Says the market should continue to go up with great results.
- [26:39]
Dan Primack
Don't see why we can't have 20% GDP growth. Because it's like, never happened in history. Maybe he is AGI pilled. That's extremely AGI pilled.
- [26:50]
Tyler Cowen
Dwarkesh has talked about this.
- [26:52]
Dan Primack
Dwarkesh literally has talked about this 25% GDP growth. The first AGI pilled president, I suppose.
- [26:59]
Ben Thompson
Apparently China hit 19.3% in 1970.
- [27:03]
Dan Primack
Yeah.
- [27:04]
Ben Thompson
Is that the great leap forward or something more recently? More recently, 14% in 2007. So I think Trump's looking at the data.
- [27:12]
Dan Primack
Great Leap Forward was 1960ish.
- [27:14]
Ben Thompson
First Lady Melania Trump is introducing the Presidential AI Challenge. Artificial Intelligence is America's next competitive edge. Driving advancements in your career, supporting your family, and strengthening your community. This is why I launched the Presidential AI Challenge, a nationwide call to students and educators to shape America's future. Teams from all 50 states have already registered. Shape the future. Be part of the Presidential AI Challenge today. What is the Presidential AI Challenge?
- [27:42]
Dan Primack
It's like a. It's a riddle. This is a riddle. It's some sort of, like, you know, it's shrouded in mystery. That's the whole goal, to test the American people. Can they understand what it is?
- [27:52]
Ben Thompson
Okay, I think I figured out. So there's elementary school, middle school, high school, and there's challenge projects that groups of students will be able to participate in, as well as awards and prizes. Hopefully solid gold. Solid gold trophies. There actually is a cash prize. $10,000 per team.
- [28:20]
Dan Primack
Wait, is it Peyton, Melania coin or.
- [28:21]
Ben Thompson
Trump coin or US Dollars or gold or.
- [28:24]
Tyler Cowen
I think meme Trump.
- [28:26]
Dan Primack
That's right. It's not Trump coin. Get it right. It's Trump me. Okay, here's some.
- [28:31]
Ben Thompson
You also win cloud credits. That's so okay.
- [28:34]
Dan Primack
That's actually amazing. I love that.
- [28:36]
Ben Thompson
Presidential Award certificate. So, boom. Certificate. You're getting cloud credits. You're getting 10,000 for your school, homeschool, or community group, and you're getting $10,000 per team member in the middle school category and the high school category and the educator category. Tyler, you. I guess there's no college tier. You say you have to go back to school and participate and win.
- [28:57]
Dan Primack
Get a fake ID that says you're 13.
- [29:01]
Ben Thompson
Just to go back and dominate the presidential AI challenge.
- [29:05]
Dan Primack
Yeah. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
- [29:08]
Ben Thompson
Please do.
- [29:09]
Dan Primack
Have a great rest of your day, and Merry Christmas. Goodbye.