How does insurance work for payloads on a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch? “Insurance is relatively inexpensive for Falcon 9 because it has such a strong track record, 300 consecutive launches without a failure.” “What it can’t compensate you for is the lost time, which is really the most valuable resource for a fast-moving startup.” “I'm slightly on the fence of the value insuring payloads.” — Starcloud CTO Ezra Feilden (@EzraFeilden)

Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston (@PhilipJohnston) on the #1# factor that decides whether data centers in space work: “The whole thing is actually contingent on the launch cost.” “If the launch cost gets below around $500/kilo, then it will be much cheaper to do this in space than terrestrially.” “In space, we don’t need permitted land, so your biggest cost is gone. We don’t need batteries & backup power because we’re 24/7 in the sun. And then we need 8x less solar cells because 1 square meter of solar panel in space produces about 8x the energy.”

Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston (@PhilipJohnston) on the possibility of a SpaceX - Tesla merger: “This isn’t a hot take, this is just a fact.” “SpaceX is going to buy Tesla, & they have to wait until the unlocks of the stock because if they do, then everyone’s going to say the price wasn’t fair.” @elonmusk

Philip Johnston (@PhilipJohnston), CEO of Starcloud, says @elonmusk is underselling SpaceX’s potential: “I think they might be worth more than $100 trillion in 10 years.” “A good chunk of it will come from the fact that Tesla’s Optimus will be up & running.” “Once you have Optimus building Optimus factories, then you have this incredible exponential.” “It’s a bit like what’s happening now with the recursive self-improvement, but for the physical world.”

BREAKING: Inside Starcloud, the $2.3B Startup Putting Data Centers in Space FACTORY TOUR - Redmond, WA Primes quoted them $75M-$100M to build their first data center in space. They did it for $2.5M. In just 21 months, Starcloud is one of the fastest companies to go from founding to orbit. With $450M in total funding from Manhattan West, Nvidia, Cisco, Benchmark & EQT, the team walks me through their mission for AI in space. I toured the new HQ w/ CEO @PhilipJohnston + co-founders @EzraFeilden & @AdiOltean AI compute on Earth is limited by power & permitting. @Starcloud_ is moving it to orbit, where solar power is nearly constant. Philip says the dawn-dusk orbit alone could fit about 10 TW of compute, roughly 20x the entire US power grid. Once launch costs fall below $500/kg, he says compute in space will be cheaper than on the ground. From Starcloud 1, Starcloud 2, to Starcloud 3, we saw: Tracking Starcloud 1 live in orbit, circling Earth every 90 minutes at 17,000 mph with the first Nvidia H100 in space. Co-Founder & Chief Engineer Adi Oltean walks through Starcloud 2 as the team fires the latches that deploy its 120 ft solar wingspan. It launches in January with 100x the power of Starcloud 1. Co-Founder & CTO Ezra Feilden shows the 16-ton secondhand vibe table. The team bought it for $200K, instead of paying $1.5M & waiting 2 years for a new one, they rebuilt it over a weekend. Engineering Manager Bailey Montaño leak checks the ion thruster after vibe. Bailey designed the radiators, which have 10x less mass & cost 500x less per watt than the ISS’s. In the fab shop, Ezra shows the Starcloud 3 demonstrator, a 2-ton, 235 kW vehicle that fits 50 to a Starship. Camilo Lopez cuts stainless on the laser cutter. Engineering Operations Lead Miguel Rivera, formerly of Helion Energy, teaches me to MIG weld. The tour ends in the new campus, about 100,000 sqft built to produce 100 satellites a week toward an 88,000-satellite constellation. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Philip Johnston, Co-Founder & CEO of Starcloud (00:53) Tracking Starcloud 1 live in orbit (02:46) Fixing a 16-ton vibration machine in one weekend (06:59) From founding to orbit in 21 months (08:17) From SpaceX to Microsoft to Starcloud (09:49) Inside Starcloud 2 (13:12) A $15M mission to the nearest star (17:49) What goes on a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri (19:10) Why SpaceX could be worth $100 trillion (20:41) “This isn’t a hot take, this is just a fact (24:22) How big is Starcloud 3? (26:41) How do you book a ride to space? (30:11) How Starcloud tests in zero gravity (33:49) Can GPUs survive space radiation? (35:46) The first AI model trained in space (38:40) Will solar satellites block the sun? (40:57) How Starcloud tests a satellite for launch (46:45) The paperwork behind a launch (53:07) Molly puts her welding skills to the test (1:00:18) The engineer behind Starcloud's radiators (1:03:07) Inside Starcloud’s new campus (1:05:55) Why launch slots are the new scarce resource (1:06:45) Can someone shoot down a data center in space?

Franklin Templeton manages $1.8 trillion in assets today. In 1955, when CEO Jenny Johnson's father took over the family business, it had just $2.5 million in AUM & $10,000 in revenue. It took nearly 30 years to reach their first $1 billion in assets. "We eked out a $5,000 profit for the entire year in 1973 or 1974."

David @friedberg explains why the Billionaire Wealth Tax violates one of the core principles America was founded on: "John Adams had this great quote. He said, 'Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.'" "He wrote a couple of years after this, 'The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.'" "We fucked up our public policy. We fucked up our tax policy. Half of America is left behind, they can't afford anything. Half of them are looking at all the wealthy people being like, 'What the hell?'" "And the course is: seize the private property and start to distribute it." "That's why I worry so much about this wealth tax in California and the conversation happening about instituting a wealth tax—which is really an asset seizure throughout the United States." "It sounds good in principle to take money from the rich and give to the poor. It sounds fair, it sounds right, it sounds just. But it is a violation, I think, of one of the reasons the United States was started."

Sequoia's @shaunmmaguire says SpaceX is still underrated "@elonmusk is  still extremely under-appreciated. He only gets 10% of the appreciation he deserves." " I first invested in 2019. Cumulatively, I've invested probably $1.2B. Across all the different funds that position's worth ~$12B today." " It's just the very, very beginning of the company."

Starlink revenue just grew 69% from a year ago to $5.2B in a single quarter. SpaceX's 1st employee Tom Mueller (@lrocket) says they always knew Starlink would "hockey stick" their growth: "All the naysayers said, 'There's no way they'll be profitable. They're going to crash.'" "We're looking at it the other way saying, 'This will hockey stick the stock.'" "Which it did."

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch (@rauchg) explains why the future of computing is headless: “What does headless mean?” “Headless means that we no longer go to the head ourselves. The agent can go and get the data out of the system and then either create new software or create new visualizations of the data.” “There was this entire category of SaaS you could call ‘no-code.’ I'm on the opposite of end of the spectrum. I'm a ‘yes-code’ company because I'm now saying coding agents basically make the code free.” “You buy Vercel as the platform, & then you never have to buy software again because you can just generate it to your needs.”

Ken Griffin of Citadel questions the economics of the AI infrastructure boom: ›What happens when GPU supply exceeds demand & pricing goes into free fall? ›Are today's semiconductor margins sustainable? Are investors overestimating the useful life of GPUs? “Look, I think this market is actually experiencing people doing research. For the couple of years, if you were on the thematic program of we're gonna spend hundreds of billions or a trillion dollars in data centers, we're gonna build compute at a scale never seen before, which companies in that story are choke points in supply chains that will have abnormally high margins? And who will be the big winners in this transformation? Will it be the Microsofts & AWSs who will be the gatekeepers to the foundational models? Like, who's going to earn the economic rents? But in some sense, like, 'I'm just gonna buy them all. I'm gonna buy the hyperscalers, I'm gonna buy the chip, I'm gonna buy businesses that make things I've never even heard of 5 years ago in Korea and Taiwan & in Japan.' And now we're reaching a point where people are becoming more discerning. We do realize that we are seeing extremely high margins in DRAM & MLCCs in areas where there are real supply constraints, but people are now starting to look out 2 years, 3 years. How long is this going to last? And in particular, I don't wanna be doom & gloom, but GPUs, like airlines, have a very low marginal cost to run. The incremental seat on an airline that's not full, if you can sell that ticket for $20, you're making money in that seat. And that's one of the reasons that the airline industry is such a nightmare, is because the moment you have overcapacity, pricing goes into free fall. We saw this actually with the telecom build-out back in 2000. We built more fiber than we had demand for, & the price of telecommunications just went straight down. If we reach a point where the provisioning of GPUs exceeds demand for GPUs, marginal pricing will actually go into free fall. And that really upends all the investment assumptions that people are working with today. That's issue number one. And issue number 2 is: I think people are taking a step back & saying, 'What is the useful life of a GPU?' Right here, right now, there's people that are earning extraordinary pricing on GPUs that are 5 or 6 years old. And so there's a growing set of concerns that I can't give the same capitalization rate or the same revenue models to year 7, 8, 9 of a chip in the future that maybe I was using 12 months ago. So I think we're really grappling with just how far will this demand carry us in the marketplace.”

Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on AI companies scraping all of Yahoo's content without permission: “You will see the Yahoo brand show up all the time in citations there.” “We are a top 20 publisher whose content has been taken by the large language models without permission.” He says Yahoo built its new AI answer engine Yahoo Scout to excels at content that's real time so they aren’t as susceptible to the evergreen content that LLMs “photocopied and took with them.”

NEW: In 2021, Apollo acquired a massive internet business for ~$5B. Just 5 years later, it's become *one of the fastest-returning deals in the firm's history.* 700M monthly users. Billions in revenue. And an enormous distribution advantage that would be nearly impossible to replicate today. Apollo's Reed Rayman recruited Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) to lead the turnaround. The company? @Yahoo. I sat down with CEO Jim Lanzone, one of the internet industry's most accomplished turnaround executives, to go inside @apolloglobal's PE M&A playbook for Yahoo, the economics of the acquisition, & why this may be one of the most underrated assets in tech. The numbers: › ~$5B acquisition › 700M monthly users, including 100M+ each across Yahoo Finance & Sports › 75% direct traffic, with ~75% of daily users logged in › Hundreds of millions in annual ad-tech losses addressed through restructuring › Major divestitures including AOL, TechCrunch & Edgecast › One of Apollo's fastest-returning deals, with Jim saying they're now "playing with house money" › Newer search companies valued at 6X Yahoo despite having a fraction of its users, revenue & profitability But the most interesting part of this deal is the operator. Before Yahoo, Jim helped drive a 50X stock increase at Ask Jeeves, grew CBS Interactive from 70M to 220M users, and led Tinder. And unlike the traditional PE playbook of aggressive cost extraction, PE micromanagement, Apollo backed an experienced product executive to restructure the business, rebuild its leadership, & reinvest in growth. Now Yahoo is moving from turnaround to comeback, with an entirely rebuilt product ecosystem, its own AI search engine through Yahoo Scout, and a potential path back to the public markets. We get into what it's really like operating under Apollo, the leadership decisions behind the turnaround, the value of internet distribution at scale, and why some startups with less than 0.1% of Yahoo's users command higher valuations. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo (01:33) How Apollo bought Yahoo for $4.8B (04:16) Taking over a company in the middle of COVID (07:22) Is private equity really the villain? (12:42) The mistake that handed Google the internet (16:09) Where Yahoo's 700M monthly users come from (17:07) Why Yahoo sold AOL & TechCrunch (21:21) "You can't skip levels of the video game" (27:58) Why people still trust Yahoo in the AI era (30:26) How Yahoo Scout competes with ChatGPT & Perplexity (33:48) Saying no to the AI gold rush? (37:31) From turnaround to comeback (39:42) One of the fastest paybacks in Apollo history (42:50) The biggest mistake companies make at scale (44:21) Silicon Valley startups are now worth more than Yahoo with 0.1% of its users (46:25) Why Yahoo is ready for the next crash (48:57) Barry Diller, Tinder & the tweet that predicted Yahoo (54:36) Is Yahoo finally back?

Jim Lanzone reveals what it was really like as CEO of Tinder: "almost 10% of all marriages in the US were started on Tinder" "Almost 50% of all marriages were started online 50% of all marriages were started online, and Tinder was 25% of online." "It was always perceived by others to be like a hookup app or whatever, but that is not how the team internally viewed it." "I loved the fact that Tinder from the outside was viewed one way, but if you were on the inside, you've never met a team of people more passionate about the mission of helping people find their person." "And I never would have left, it's the only time I've ever left a job. Everywhere else I stayed for a long time."

.@jlanzone and his team are a force and a big part of why I wanted to partner with Yahoo Finance. Have seen firsthand how fast they move & how much ambition there is for what's next we're making a bet on AI & on an enormous audience trying to make sense of how its changing business and markets and society

NEW: In 2021, Apollo acquired a massive internet business for ~$5B. Just 5 years later, it's become *one of the fastest-returning deals in the firm's history.* 700M monthly users. Billions in revenue. And an enormous distribution advantage that would be nearly impossible to replicate today. Apollo's Reed Rayman recruited Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) to lead the turnaround. The company? @Yahoo. I sat down with CEO Jim Lanzone, one of the internet industry's most accomplished turnaround executives, to go inside @apolloglobal's PE M&A playbook for Yahoo, the economics of the acquisition, & why this may be one of the most underrated assets in tech. The numbers: › ~$5B acquisition › 700M monthly users, including 100M+ each across Yahoo Finance & Sports › 75% direct traffic, with ~75% of daily users logged in › Hundreds of millions in annual ad-tech losses addressed through restructuring › Major divestitures including AOL, TechCrunch & Edgecast › One of Apollo's fastest-returning deals, with Jim saying they're now "playing with house money" › Newer search companies valued at 6X Yahoo despite having a fraction of its users, revenue & profitability But the most interesting part of this deal is the operator. Before Yahoo, Jim helped drive a 50X stock increase at Ask Jeeves, grew CBS Interactive from 70M to 220M users, and led Tinder. And unlike the traditional PE playbook of aggressive cost extraction, PE micromanagement, Apollo backed an experienced product executive to restructure the business, rebuild its leadership, & reinvest in growth. Now Yahoo is moving from turnaround to comeback, with an entirely rebuilt product ecosystem, its own AI search engine through Yahoo Scout, and a potential path back to the public markets. We get into what it's really like operating under Apollo, the leadership decisions behind the turnaround, the value of internet distribution at scale, and why some startups with less than 0.1% of Yahoo's users command higher valuations. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo (01:33) How Apollo bought Yahoo for $4.8B (04:16) Taking over a company in the middle of COVID (07:22) Is private equity really the villain? (12:42) The mistake that handed Google the internet (16:09) Where Yahoo's 700M monthly users come from (17:07) Why Yahoo sold AOL & TechCrunch (21:21) "You can't skip levels of the video game" (27:58) Why people still trust Yahoo in the AI era (30:26) How Yahoo Scout competes with ChatGPT & Perplexity (33:48) Saying no to the AI gold rush? (37:31) From turnaround to comeback (39:42) One of the fastest paybacks in Apollo history (42:50) The biggest mistake companies make at scale (44:21) Silicon Valley startups are now worth more than Yahoo with 0.1% of its users (46:25) Why Yahoo is ready for the next crash (48:57) Barry Diller, Tinder & the tweet that predicted Yahoo (54:36) Is Yahoo finally back?