Kara Swisher

Kara Swisher says You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes film directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, made $45 million in two weeks. It was the second-highest-grossing movie that weekend, just behind Clayface, and the biggest opening for a non-musical documentary since Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004.

She liked parts of it and not others. Nathan Fielder, she says, is full of trickery and may be pretending to be on the subjects' side. Amanda Seyfried is the best thing in the movie and deserves an Oscar. Elizabeth Holmes, in Kara Swisher's view, is the pattern of tech people she has covered: denying accountability, lying, and acting like the victim. She thinks Holmes bel

Scott Galloway says one person who was not elected should not be able to throttle Starlink or Starshield in a war. His comparison is Charles Lindbergh buying McDonnell Douglas and then cutting the guidance on planes sent to defend an ally, with London left exposed. He says that is the shape of Elon Musk slowing Starlink so Ukraine could not launch defensive drones, the ally weakened, and civilians dead.

If that is what happened, he says he would call Musk a traitor to the West, and that the government is at fault for leaving the switch with a private citizen. He thinks the admission landed this week because lawyers expect a hearing in Congress, where lying again would be worse, and because

Scott Galloway reads the risks section of Anthropic's S-1 and says his favorite line is that advanced AI could pose a catastrophic or existential risk to humanity. The filing says the models may behave in unintended, misaligned, or autonomous ways. He glosses that sentence as "they could blow us up." It also says capabilities may advance faster than Anthropic's ability to develop, validate, and implement safety measures.

He is quoting the company, not freelancing the science. He had turned back to the filing to read the lines out, and he says the safety sentence means the product should not be out in public.

Kara Swisher says Elon Musk is finally admitting that SpaceX restricted Ukraine's access to Starlink. She and Scott Galloway had already said he did. The account she relays is that Ukraine violated Starlink's terms of service by using it for offensive drone strikes. Ukraine disputes that. Musk also says Starshield is a different system controlled by the U.S. government, and that what the government does with it is up to them.

Ukraine's report, as she gives it, is that Starlink and Starshield are back to normal speeds after more than a week of disruptions that hit military operations and led to deaths. She calls his explanation a lie. In her view he should not be in a position to sway a batt

Scott Galloway says Anthropic is the fastest-scaling software company in history. From the IPO filing, he puts revenue at $386 million in 2024 and $4.5 billion in 2025, up 12x.

Kara Swisher reads the front of that filing. Anthropic has committed more than $600 billion to future cloud deals. Five customers accounted for about a quarter of revenue in the first nine months. Ninety-four pages of risk factors warn about rogue AI models and opposition to data centers. The co-founders, including CEO Dario Amodei, would keep 50.1 percent of the voting power. The company has not said how much it plans to raise or the offering price. She says Elon Musk is attacking data centers at the same time, and

Scott Galloway says $443 million to a trillionaire like Elon Musk is $443 to a millionaire. A millionaire who thought a candidate threatened the car wash, the government contracts, and the tax credits would spend $443. It is the price of a good dinner. This is why the money aimed at Talarico does not look large from Musk's side of the table.

Kara Swisher calls the giving staggering and says it is nothing like Michael Bloomberg's $80 million. Scott Galloway says the money has an impact and the return is falling, and that checks like this keep cutting at democracy until Citizens United is overturned. He still wants the company-building. Before a gain is spent on a boat or on a political campa

Scott Galloway says a win in the Senate and the House would be a red riptide, not a blue wave. It would mean voters hated Democrats less for a moment, not that Democrats are back, because Democrats are not polling. Speaker Jeffries, he says, has to move at once on affordability, a progressive tax structure, healthcare insecurity, and tariff policy. Otherwise the public had a one-night stand and does not want a relationship.

Kara Swisher says they will follow up. She picks up Hillary Clinton's warning about the time between the election and January, when the new Congress has to be seated, and says to expect hijinks before then.

Scott Galloway says ridicule is more powerful than indignance, and that this is what Obama understands and the rest of the Democratic Party does not. Outrage is a hobby. Comedy is a strategy. Obama does not sound mean, and he does not sound like Trump derangement syndrome. He ridicules the guy.

Few people, Scott Galloway says, manage a brand the way the Obamas do. They show up late and they are careful about when they speak. He thinks that adds 10 or 15 bips to Democrats who are running. It will not save a bad candidate. It is another couple million gallons of water forming a wave, cloud cover, and the candidate still matters more than the visit.

James Talarico says Elon Musk wants Texas land, Texas water, and Texas taxpayer dollars, and that Musk wants his own United States senator. Talarico says Musk is trying to buy Texas, and that on November 3 the state will tell the world's first trillionaire that Texas is not for sale.

Kara Swisher plays that clip after she reads the money. Musk, she says, just gave another $76 million to his PAC, taking his contributions to Republican groups this cycle past $445 million. The PAC has spent more than $12 million attacking Talarico, the Texas Democrat. She says he has been using the "not for sale" line all over the place.

Scott Galloway's media win is The Mosquito Bowl, an American war sports drama about a football game played during World War II. Peter Berg wrote the screenplay and directed it for Imagine Entertainment, adapting Buzz Bissinger's 2022 book, The Mosquito Bowl, A Game of Life and Death in World War II.

Four top American football players enlisted in the United States Marine Corps after the attacks on Pearl Harbor while preparing for the Battle of Okinawa. Most World War II movies stay in the European theater. The Mosquito Bowl shows the brutality and cost of war. Battle scenes are very hard to recreate. Steven Spielberg's landing on Omaha still sets the bar, and The Mosquito Bowl comes pretty c

Soon everyone would be able to invest in private companies before IPO, enabling your everyday normal people to benefit from the crazy growth potential of companies like Uber and Airbnb.

On Recode Decode, talking with Jason Calacanis, Kara Swisher said her children's school already dislikes her because of homework. She tells the kids not to do it. The workplace does not care about those assignments. It cares about teamwork, so she tells them to skip what she called the stupid homework. The same conversation argues that the school day is too rigid for parents who cannot pay for child care, and that a parent should be able to leave a child in a good classroom from early morning until evening. Her point on the assignments was narrower: if the job will never ask, do not give up the evening.

Childcare is exhausting and to better as a society, we need to enable everyone to access great education, even if they cannot afford it.

Dexter Learning is a self-paced school out of Texas that aiming to get private school education affordable enough to the top-70% of people.

If it comes down to Bernie Sanders vs Trump, it would be a very hard choice for a lot of people in Silicon Valley to vote for Bernie, and Bloomberg could be the solution to it.

According to Jason Calacanis, inability to make good money from facts and unbiased reporting has driven journalists to pick sides and to focus on click-bait headlines.

According to Jason Calacanis, Capitalism and entrepreneurship is the best system to run humanity, but people are starting to hate it right now.

The solution to that is for people who have benefited the most from this system to start behaving better to people who have the least. Stop grinding people on the margins and be generous where it matters.

Jason thinks Bezos continuous to grind people for optimization in situations when he does not need to.

Instead of being generous to low-wage employees, he overworks them. Instead of helping out a struggling city, he strings them along, and then still puts Amazon HQ2 in a city that does not need any more support.

If you are the richest man in the world, it might be a good time to stop grinding and to start giving, like the Gates family did when they were at the top of the list.

Jason Calacanis says that lower orbit satellites have the potential to connect another 1-2 billion people to the internet, which would be huge for SpaceX future.

Jason thinks that micro mobility is the future but it does not stand on its own, bikes and scooters are going to become a free/low cost offering from bigger players like Uber, and that's it.

If you give great founders with vision a lot of runaway, they are going to take it.

Jason Calacanis, an early investor into Uber, explains that massive amount of private money enabled Uber to grow rapidly in the early days, ignoring some of the realities at the expense of getting to scale.

Once they IPO'ed, the company had to switch from focus on massive growth, to focus on profitability. It was a big shift, and it will take time to transition.

However, as long as they can differentiate, and people love their product, they will figure out how to adjust their margins to give public markets what they need.

Although Casey does not know how many posts are reported per day, he does know that companies want moderators to take action on at least 250 posts per day. Really high performers will look at around 400 a day.

Facebook believes that American moderators would do a better job with understanding our culture and slang in order to have the necessary context needed to moderate our posts.

Casey thinks that Donald Trump would use another platform to post. Then, a bot would be set up to screenshot the post and upload it to Twitter. It may be somewhat of a positive for Trump to be on Twitter so we know about whatever topics are on his mind-- even if it's talking off the top of his head with no information.

Casey does not know, but he hopes nothing bad will happen to them. He strongly hopes that more attention is brought to this situation. He states how people have an unequivocal right to discuss their workplace conditions. To sue them for discussing their work conditions is a violation of their First Amendment rights.

Facebook wants its platform to be a place where people can talk about whatever. They view this as a political problem by restricting someone's constitutional right to free speech. If they do enforce certain content restrictions, another competing platform may rise and allow the banned content on their site, causing more users to leave Facebook.

Facebook does turn over videos to law enforcements when the contents are breaking the law. The authorities cannot intervene anymore because even if something is sent to the police, a video or post can be reposted.

Moderators have stated that they work in poor conditions that are unfit and unclean. They are not assigned a work space, so they usually have to find a new available area each day, and the work areas are not clean or well-kept.

For most videos, moderators have to watch at least 15 seconds, sometimes 30 seconds. It varies in length, but the video must be watched enough to know which section of the video is problematic. No matter if it's the same video that's been reported before, they must rewatch its contents again, and again, and again. This leads many moderators to burn out, and even to get PTSD as a result.

One example is that a person came forward to Casey and revealed that he was diagnosed with PTSD due to the videos he moderated each day for 8 hours, which included hate speeches and graphic violence. The person also volunteered at an animal shelter, and had to moderate videos of human beings and animals die in the worst way.

Cognizant is a contractor hired by Facebook to moderate content. Facebook may write the policies, but the moderator decides if what’s reported fits the policy. According to a moderator, they were just bodies in seats for the company.

Casey Newton reported that the moderators make about $28,000 a year. The moderators often leave the job with post-traumatic stress caused by the rough working conditions of the job.

Find an idea that is relatively easy to start, but gets more and more courageous as you get going, and something that will be shockingly difficult if it succeeds. Kind of like free soloing El Capitan.

Chamath thinks the next crisis is coming in 3-5 years in the debt markets. When companies start defaulting on their debt, the LPs are going to lose a tremendous amounts of money. When huge loses come in, those LPs are going to start liquidating, starting at hedge funds with easy redemption cycles. It won't be enough because the loses will outpace the bills. At that point the LPs are going to sell their venture investments, and that's when they will start asking hard questions around valuations, and why their money was actually put to play in these worthless companies. This impending crash is why venture capitalists are accelerating their fundraising and investments, raising more and investin

The steeper the growth rate of a company, the more appealing is is as an investment, so as long as the company can keep raising money, early investors are made to look like the geniuses.

This dynamic encourages investors to push the company to raise more and more money, and soon enough, the CEO has no choice but to raise more. No money and the companies goes out of business.

The cycle continues, as the company bleeds cash and gets further and further diluted. Startup employees get screwed holding bags of worthless diluted equity, while the VCs are getting rich off the funds fees.

There is an enormous tax that we've been paying to big tech startups for hosting and advertising our products. Those costs account for roughly 40 cents on every dollar. Layer in the headcount costs, and it becomes nearly impossible for startups to grow, never mind to become profitable and successful. Only the companies who can raise the most and not die end up succeeding in this environment.

Anger is a fantastic motivator for getting from 0 to 1, to catalyze progress. It is never the happy people who are able to make huge leaps forward, in Chamath's experience. At some point, however, it is important to transition from anger to making a positive impact, as most people are motivated by positivity and a sense of being able to make change.

People do not like who they are, so they tear down whoever made it. On Recode Decode, Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya tells Kara Swisher he is puzzled that success, and failure, are both treated as something shameful. He says the anger comes from people who dislike themselves and dislike what they see in others. His first step is to fix yourself and get a little happier, not to vilify the success that capitalism produced. He is in the middle of describing his own identity crisis, and he contrasts it with his parents, who he says never had the spare time to feel unhappy in that way.

The society has a responsibility to work on our mental health. We need to start talking about this as a problem, to talk about our issues, be able to share and find support. We need to realize that feelings and emotions are normal and there is an enormous number of people in the world who feel the same way.

A typical company would go through the same stages. A company would start at the "Product market fit" where the goal is to create something people want. It would then move to growth, when the goal is to make sure you can give your product to everyone who wants it. Then eventually when the products line is exhausted, the company will try to get all the revenue it can out of the existing users. In the transition to revenue they do what they are supposed to do for their shareholders, they maximise revenue. The implications of this eventual transition, which are implicitly demanded by the society and the government, are for us to bear.

No, if you were a jerk, then money would just make you into a jerk with more stuff, but that's not the problem. According to Chamath, we have not created a new generation of heroes who can demonstrate a set of values and choices that are worthwhile to live for.