Scott Galloway

Scott Galloway says the existential risk in the AI buildout is that the capital spending already committed assumes the market grows to $3 trillion in revenue, while all of big tech is $1.5 trillion in revenue today. That would mean AI triples current big-tech spending, through applications and business services.

He compares the mood to Janet Yellen's line that the risk of overspending was dwarfed by the risk of underspending. The companies, he says, are afraid of missing AI, and only a handful can spend at this scale, so the capital itself works as a moat. He puts Meta's spending on the order of $40 billion and asks what other sector could put three quarters of a trillion dollars into capit

Scott Galloway calls Elon Musk a traitor to the West. He says a democracy let an unelected person decide geopolitical strategy and battlefield technology that threatens the West, and he describes Musk as someone who sleeps with a loaded gun beside the bed and is addicted to ketamine.

Ed Elson lays out the episode Scott Galloway is pointing at. Drones in Ukraine that rely on Starlink and Starshield, both SpaceX products, started falling because Starlink was turned off, and reports, including the Wall Street Journal, say Elon Musk did it. Musk's account, Ed Elson says, is that the decision belongs to the government, and Donald Trump said he was not responsible. Ed Elson adds that Musk has not

Scott Galloway says SpaceX would not pay a premium for Tesla. About 7 in 10 acquisitions destroy shareholder value, he says, and a special committee for SpaceX shareholders, looking at 300 times earnings for a company whose revenue with growth is flat, would refuse to pay one. Elon Musk has 80% of the voting power there. Scott Galloway still thinks a committee that wants a report it can defend in court ends at a like-for-like swap at the closing share price.

The benchmark he uses is what anyone else would pay for Tesla. His answer is 30 cents on the dollar. Nobody, he says, would pay the current price, much less a premium. He asks whether Apple, which he calls probably the only viable acqui

Ed Elson says Tesla stock is down 13% over the past year, and on a five-year window it has underperformed the S&P by about three times, because the car business is in decline. Revenue fell again last quarter, and car deliveries fell too. The story people are excited about is the robotaxi, and Ed Elson says that robotaxi is millions of miles behind Waymo.

He calls a merger with SpaceX brand laundering, or multiple laundering. The SpaceX story moves from satellites to orbital data centers, then asteroid mining, then colonies on Mars, and he says investors are buying it. He and Scott Galloway agree Tesla is way overvalued at more than 300 times earnings, against an auto-industry average of 17.

Scott Galloway says Elon Musk would merge Tesla into SpaceX because when Musk merges one company into another, it is an acknowledgement that the first company is about to crater. He says Musk bailed out SolarCity, a company Musk chaired and that Scott Galloway thinks was owned by Musk's cousins, by stuffing it into Tesla. He says Musk then stuffed Twitter into xAI, which was folded into SpaceX. When one of the companies is failing, Scott Galloway says, Musk makes another one adopt it.

He calls Tesla the patient and SpaceX shareholders the organ donor. Tesla shareholders would trade a declining car company for a stake in Starlink and AI, which he compares to trading a Buick for a piece of a

Ed Elson says prediction-market traders put the odds of a Tesla and SpaceX merger before 2028 at 81%. He says Elon Musk confirmed that special committees at both companies are studying a deal, and he quotes Musk that there is a lot of merit to combining the companies because they are pretty much in the superintelligence singularity. Ed Elson puts SpaceX at $2 trillion and Tesla at $1.5 trillion and guesses the combination would be a $3.5 trillion company.

Scott Galloway says that 81% is the wrong question. He puts an 80% chance on the boards approving the deal and calls the vote a formality, because on decisions that involve Tesla or SpaceX the bride, the groom, and the officiant are the sa

Scott Galloway says the biggest risk-adjusted upside in AI right now is Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Meta is delivering AI to consumers, has the biggest moats, has the capital for the arms race, and is already using AI inside the company.

Anthropic is supposedly worth $2 trillion, which Scott Galloway calls a ridiculous dislocation between private and public markets. Meta is competing neck and neck with Anthropic and also has one of the most profitable businesses in the world. The downside is heavy spending on capital expenditure, which looks a little crazy. If the strength of the recommendation algorithm is a function of AI and machine learning, the return shows up in the earnings. Nvidia is

Scott Galloway says the accurate Anthropic loss is $9 billion on $16 billion in revenue. Media coverage says Anthropic lost $80 billion on $16 billion in revenue. He says 72 of the $80 billion was an accounting loss on convertible debt that converts into equity because the equity keeps rising in value.

He thinks Anthropic multiplied revenue by 9 times year on year. He says the AI trade is still showing an unprecedented level of velocity in revenues, adoption, new products, and capital formation.

He agrees a correction is coming. He is not sure he would buy the narrative that the trade is clearly a bubble waiting to pop viciously.

Ed Elson says the woman in the Nathan Fielder movie is a metaphor for the current moment because she is the quintessential tech founder and grifter. She got away with convincing huge amounts of people with a lot of money that what she was doing was legit. Ed Elson says the conversations show she truly is lying. He calls that his take, and he says the end of the movie leaves the question up for debate.

Scott Galloway has not seen the movie. He finds her frightening, in the vein of the clown from It, and he is going to wait until it comes out on streaming. Ed Elson says the movie was fascinating, calls her an extremely interesting person, and says Nathan Fielder really got that out of her. Ed

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.