Predicting the SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic IPOs — With Dick Costolo

We are headed towards the most epic run of IPOs of all time, with SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI all coming out within the next calendar year. What's going to happen? Let's ask the man that took Twitter public right after this. I'm just back from ServiceNow's Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas, and the conversations I had there are ones you're going to want to hear. I sat down with their president and CPO, Amit Zavery, on the platform strategy powering enterprise AI. Chief People and AI Enablement Officer, Jackie Canney. And Chief Digital Information Officer, Kelly Romack, on what AI really means for the workforce. The technical leaders behind ServiceNow's NVIDIA partnership on shipping AI at scale and Ulta Beauty on deploying ServiceNow's technology across 1,300 stores. If you want to know where enterprise AI is actually headed, not the hype, but the real story, you can find these videos on my YouTube channel. Search Alex Kantrowitz on YouTube. 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For clarity, I'm Dick in the Nick, Dick & Paul Show. It's good to know that. It's good to have that clarity. Thank you for establishing that. It's a very interesting time that we're about to head into. We are in, right? But in terms of the financial markets, three major IPOs are on the way. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic could all come within, who knows, maybe even the next six months, which is crazy to think of. You were the CEO that brought Twitter public. And, in fact, I showed up to San Francisco in May 2015. I got one week in, and then week two, you stepped down as Twitter CEO. That's right. And then away we went. So it's good to be... We actually spoke the morning after. We're going to talk about Twitter in a bit. But you're somebody who knows not only about the going public process, but how important, I think, the message is when you go public, how important that message is for what the rest of your company lifetime is going to look like. And how you're communicating with your own team and company about it inside the company. Because the interesting thing about an IPO for any company, but particularly for tech companies, and particularly in a bull market, is there's the time before the IPO where you raise your Series B and you are valued at $1 billion. And that's what the stock price is and what the valuation of the company is until 18 months later, whenever, and you raise your Series C. And now you're valued at $2 billion. And so there's not really any concern about, you know, the stock price. If you're in a fast-growing company before the IPO, you're like, oh, my options are priced at a dollar, and now the stock's $2. My options are priced at $2, and now the stock's $3. It's all kind of fine, you know? And then you go and think about, not just Twitter in 2013, but more recent examples, like what Dylan Field had to deal with, I'm sure, at Figma, and Cerebras now dealing with as well. You know, it took us, you know, seven years, six years, seven years to get to the price of, you know, $30 a share. And then one day it went to $110 a share. And then, you know, two months later, it's back down to $40. So it becomes this, you go from, yeah, whatever, it's not something you think about having to reinforce with the team or talk about with the team regularly to whiplash and, you know, what happened and why is the, you know, so my advice to people who are taking a company public before and are about to do it is, you need to prep the team for, hey, we're about to go into a world where the price of the stock can change, even though nothing particularly happened today. Like, the stock can go up by 15%, 20% in value based on nothing or down 15%, 20% in value based on nothing. Totally. I think the public underrates how turbulent that could be inside the company. And this is kind of what I was getting at. The early days are really important in terms of the way that that turbulence actually lives out in your time on the public markets. So let me just make the distinction between the private markets where, you know, the numbers matter to a degree, but they're not the ground truth, right? A lot of it is feeling and potential. You go public, those numbers matter a lot. You have to report quarterly. Yeah. For now. We'll see if that actually rules changes. So there's conversations that it might be once a half, but you have to report quarterly. And ultimately, even if you're not showing profitability in the early years, you need to show a path toward it. And investors who bought in on the IPO promise, they need to see that promise lived out. Of course. What are future cash flows going to look like? Exactly. I remember before, a year before we went public, I was at a summit at GE, General Electric, and I was on stage with Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO, and he asked me, you know, how do you think about how you're going to manage your investors once you're a public company? And I said, well, we're just going to continue to focus on the longterm like we have now. And everyone in the audience laughed, you know, like, good luck. You know, let us know how that goes once you're a public company, when all the, you know, sell-side analysts are asking you every two days what the next quarter numbers look like. No, you're right. And so, look, I'll tell you what I remember covering, because I was a Twitter beat reporter for a while. And what I remember covering, because I would go on CNBC and talk about Twitter earnings, and I would always look back to the sort of the messaging at the Twitter IPO. And now I'll caveat it. Well, no, I won't even caveat it. I'll talk about it. What you said was, look, we see a path that this is a global service. We'll get a billion users. And what's the thing that dogged Twitter every quarter? It's like, you know, 200, 250, 300 million monthly active users. But I bought in at this promise that there's going to be a billion users. We're going to get to a billion. Now, this is what I was going to caveat, but now I'm going to sort of talk about this fact. We could even have beat top line and EBITDA and grown, you know, bottom line more than we said we were going to grow it. But if we miss an MAU number, the stock would be down. Exactly. And we could miss top line. I mean, we only missed top line one quarter by like 1%. But that quarter, MAU were up over consensus and the stock went up. And by a little amount. Yeah. And so this is the point that I was going to bring to it, which is the hype that you came out of the door with at Twitter, you know, is basically going to be nothing compared to the hype that we're going to see SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic come out with. I mean, talk a little bit about what it's going to look like when these companies hit the public markets and then start reporting these quarterly earnings. And SpaceX might come out $1.5 trillion, OpenAI, Anthropic certainly $1 trillion each, at least. Yeah. This seems like they have obviously the potential to change software. We talk about that all the time, change tech. But until they do, they're going to be sort of measured against the expectations they set. And that could be a very rough road on the public markets for a while. 100%. However, I think you've got three very different personalities and stories associated with each company. And let me just say what I mean by that. Elon has the benefit of already knowing what this is like. And like him or, you know, like the way he runs his companies or not like the way he runs his companies, he does a great job of the narrative of, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is what's going on right now, but let me tell you of what's coming. I mean, look at Tesla, you know, they can hit or miss delivery numbers and they can have 37, you know, 63 robo-taxis on the road in Austin versus the year ago number of a million estimated a million. But the narrative is, yeah, but this is where we're really going. And he's just out ahead of it with the public market and the retail investors and his fans and even the analysts and the sell-side analysts and the people who run hedge funds. So I There's so little float. My understanding is there's so little float, and the float is, you know, how many shares are being issued, etc. as a percentage of the overall number of shares of SpaceX that... and there's going to be so much demand that the day-one price is going to go to some insane number. So and where it floats out, I don't think is, I don't know. I just think that his ability to frame a narrative on a small float... You know, he doesn't need, for example, you know, a bunch of sovereigns to come in and put $400 billion each into the company. He just does, you know, $330 billion each into the company. He just doesn't. So he's been able to sustain that retail narrative with Tesla, and I think it'll continue for some time with SpaceX. We'll see how long that lasts, but I do think he'll be able to do it. Okay, what is the narrative? Before we move to OpenAI, what is the narrative? I mean, Starlink is going to be power all, you know, all internet connectivity. So it's a Starlink story. It's a Starlink story, and then I'm sure it'll be data center space, which Sam has, and on our podcast, we've talked about. It's a long, long way off from being true. I think data centers in space is actually like full self-driving. If you remember, Elon in 2013 said, you know, maybe it's 2014, by next year, your Tesla will be able to back out of the garage, drive you to work, pull into the garage at work, navigate downtown, all without you ever touching the steering wheel. He eventually was kind of right. You know, it was just like 11, 12, 13 years off. The data centers in space thing is the same thing. The amount of the acreage of cooling, you know, systems you would need to launch into space right now... Well, the argument is you don't need cooling because it's space. Well, you actually do, but it's a longer, that's a longer conversation. Okay. The amount of stuff you have to launch into space right now to even power a one-gigawatt data center is something like, you know, 16 acres of stuff in space. So you can't just, the capacity to launch that right now is non-existent. I don't see it as ever possible. I mean, a piece of space junk hits your thing. You have to send, not just an astronaut, a fleet of astronauts. You think a data center never has a plug come undone because it wasn't like properly plugged in? It's like, ah, shit, we have to send an astronaut. That's crazy. Let's at least agree that it's at least 10 or 12 years away. Okay. But the story will be, here's what's coming. And I just think, look, if you would ask me 10 years ago or how long are people going to buy the Tesla story where, yeah, they didn't miss this, but this is what's coming. I would have said it would have fallen apart a little while ago and it just doesn't. So I think the same will be true of SpaceX for a while. I have this theory that the Tesla stock will, or the Tesla shareholders who've been through this bumpy ride with Tesla, like they've been told a couple of stories, Tesla, the electric car, the self-driving car, the Optimus robot, they will move their money. The retail in particular will move their money to SpaceX as their true story. I think that's probably true. Yeah. I agree. And then SpaceX will buy Tesla. Probably. Yeah. Okay. So if Elon is somebody that can sell a vision, Sam Altman is not? No. I don't think it's that he can sell the vision and Sam can't. I think it's that the narrative around OpenAI is already, Sam has gone out and written checks that Sarah Fryer and team, not to put Sarah as the CFO, so it's not just her. Sam has gone out and written checks that the rest of the organization can't cash, if you will. The compute commitments, the public commentary about, yes, we're going to spend this much on compute, but we're going to spend three times as much on training the models. And when you go, there have been plenty of podcasts with OpenAI investors on all these topics, etc., but when you go and run on the numbers, it adds up to crazy over a trillion dollars worth of commitments that don't have the, you know, and you don't see the revenue model or growth yet to back it up. So he's kind of mortgaged a bunch of the company, if you will, that now Sarah and the rest of the executives in the company are going to have a harder time. Help me map how you get from here to here. I just think they will. They've got hard numbers associated with them that Elon doesn't necessarily have. Elon kind of does a lot of, here's where we're going to go and this is what's going to happen next. And people are like, great, I get it. Well, SpaceX has basically given up on the AI project, and I know that might sound extreme, but when you're renting data centers to Anthropic, you've given up. Yeah. So is it possible with OpenAI's case that OpenAI really delivers on the product because it has more of these data centers, but still doesn't get it right economically? I think, so this is my admittedly opinion from the last couple of weeks. But one of the things that I see happening that works in OpenAI's favor is Codex is getting more and more popular. I think if you ask people a month ago, you know, if you actually looked at Google Trends a month ago for Claude Code, what Google Trends is, you know, show me what the search results, the volume of search results for this term over the last, you know, over time. Claude Code looked like one of these inflection points. Yep. And Codex is kind of bumbling along. In the last couple of weeks, I've heard more and more folks say, we were 95% Claude Code and a couple, like, Codex fans. And now we're, now there's rapid growth in the number of people moving to Codex. So all of that works in Sam's favor and should that continue and you see a sort of, you know, balance of, I don't call it, I don't know, 50/50, 60/40, whatever, with the growth in agentic coding across the board that's going to continue, that could be what saves, that could be one of the things that saves OpenAI. Anthropic? I just think, I mean... Same thing? No. I think Dario, I mean, that's why I think there are three different things. I think Anthropic has just been, maybe as a result of just not being the lead horse, so they don't have the spotlight on them. They were just more focused on, we're going to go attack the enterprise. We're going to focus on the enterprise. You know, they weren't even initially going to release Claude Code. I mean, the initial, my understanding from folks inside Anthropic is, we were just going to be like, wait, this is like a huge competitive advantage to be able to increase the rate of speed with which we can accelerate our own work. And then decided, well, actually, we should release it because people will find problems with it out in the wild that we didn't find internally, and that'll make everything better, etc. And there are probably other narratives internally, but that's my understanding. Anyway, I just think their focus on the enterprise, their consistency of story, and the public's perception that Claude Code is like the, irrespective of what I just said about Codex two minutes ago, that Claude Code is like, this is the great unlock and going to be the real game changer, makes their story maybe the most... I think SpaceX will be. Elon will build castles in the sky and people will buy it. And Sam will be put up much more against the, Help me understand how this maps to this over here. And Dario is threading the needle between the two. And we'll probably get a little bit more of a, this is the most consistent one of the three I can bet on for long-term growth and focus. But the finances aren't going to look that different, or they will? Big losses from all of them. I get it. My experience as a public company executive is that the narrative and the story and your ability to help the market think about the way you want to tell the story is just as important as the specific numbers in the quarter. And I think, you know, that's more true now than it ever was. Mm-hmm. Does it matter then who goes first because you get a chance to set the narrative as opposed to sifting the wake of the others? Yeah, I think it would be great for Anthropic if they can go first. Because? For this reason. Like, we can tell our story. It's not going to be compared to, but Sam says, and we just saw in opening bell on CNBC, that they have this much. They had to spend this much in compute. Why don't you have to spend this much in compute? You want to go first. I mean, I actually think part of the Elon lawsuit that we now all know the verdict of was, you know, when the verdict was announced, some people were like, oh, I'm, you know, surprised he pursued that if it was going to be that kind of obvious that he was going to lose. Elon was going to lose. I think part of it was just going to, you know, throw some wrenches in the works over there and slow them down. And I can get out first before any of these things. And I'll be first out to market and I can suck a little bit of, you know, the air out of the room. And that'll be great. Now, you mentioned that most people are innumerate. So let's keep running with that. Yeah. I mean, this is going to be the, unfortunately, this is going to be the, I can already see the clip. This, unfortunately, most people are innumerate. And then someone will go find somewhere I made a simple math error and then they'll... Oh, our team will do that for sure. Okay, perfect. But we're very generous with the errors. Excellent. Just kidding. We won't do that too. So, but let's talk a little bit then about the money in the market that can, I mean, we're going to talk about 1.5, $2 trillion for SpaceX, a trillion for OpenAI, a trillion for Anthropic. Is there, I mean, obviously, that is just the market cap, not the money going in. But there's a lot. But the money has to come from somewhere. Where's it going to come from? Again, another advantage to going first or going second and not going third is there's not infinite capital out there. You're going to want to be in one or two of these things. And then probably, probably not all three, although we'll see. And they're going to require a lot of capital. And I think the advantage of going first is you have access to everybody's liquidity. And then you go second, you have access to some of that liquidity. And then when you go out with third, like, well, we're, you know, we put this much into SpaceX and this much into Anthropic. And we're, you know, I'm sort of tapped out on my public, the percentage of money I devote to public equities, et cetera, et cetera. The other thing, let me ask you, the investors, the public market investors. There are all sorts of secondary effects on that. Right, but they must be making contingencies, right? They go through these planning cycles where they're like, I'm going to want a piece of all these companies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm going to have much more money available than previously. But maybe not. We'll see. Because if you don't do that and somebody else comes in and gets OpenAI for cheap, you just messed up in a big way. We'll see. We'll see. There's such, as you already said, even though those market caps are not the amount of, you know, money that's sloshing around on the supply demand side of the shares that are floated, it's still, there are still big numbers and there's not infinite capital out there. The interesting other thing that will happen is there's been so much illiquidity in the private markets. You've got all these university endowments and venture LPs, et cetera, that haven't had their big liquidity events that are now going to be, you know, flush with distributions of SpaceX and Anthropic and OpenAI that are going to be able to turn around and pour a bunch more money into the early stage, early stage venture capital again that have been maybe, maybe people who, Hey, like I'm already, you know, SpaceX is marked up to this. It's on a markup basis. It's now this percentage of my portfolio. It's only supposed to be seven or 8%. It's now 15%. Can't invest in new venture funds. That becomes liquid. You get your big SpaceX distribution. You've got a lot of money to go invest in, in, in venture capital again. So there will probably be six to 12 months down the road, a great time to go raise venture, venture capital from LPs. Right. And the sort of question is, well, what can you invest in that doesn't get eaten by these companies that have not gotten the distributions. That's something you have to be thinking about if you're a venture investor, for sure. Yeah. All right. Let's talk a little bit about where this story can sort of unravel, where it could go wrong. Let me give you one scenario here, which is I was speaking with an investor recently about the margins that these companies, these big AI companies are getting. And I thought, well, they can easily raise the price because the economic value that they're creating is so great that you could double the price and most people would, would pay that price. This investor said, no, they're so close to parity that you're much more likely to see a price war than you are to see a across the board price raise. And then I had to agree with him. I think that's true. So if that happens, then how do you justify these massive valuations for the OpenAI and Anthropic of the world? I agree with that sentiment. I actually think there's a bigger challenge for them. And it's something that is growing in the news, which is the public backlash against where's all the compute going to come from and how are these data centers that have been already committed to and approved by the county commissioners and blah, blah, blah. Are they going to, are they really going to keep happening? I mean, you know, the one that's been in the news a lot is the Utah data center just north of Salt Lake that Kevin O'Leary, the Shark Tank investor from the Canadian Shark Tank. Whoever's in charge, who's ever actually the money behind this thing, and I actually don't know who it is, why they picked Kevin O'Leary, a Canadian Shark Tank guy, as the face of this is anybody's guess. But this people... Well, it's funny when we talked about this before. You mentioned these Canadians. So like, why are you in a US infrastructure project? Fine. But I would say the bigger problem is he was the face of FTX. That's not the guy. Right. Somebody picked this guy. And he's going out and doing big public interviews on both the right. He was on the Tucker Carlson thing. You know, you've got the right, you've got the right that really doesn't want this thing to be built. Progressives and others who are like, you know, it's going to do this to the environment and it's going to not, it's really not going to create a bunch of jobs. It's going to be just this huge problem in Utah. He's getting pushed in these interviews. And he's not prepared for these interviews. I mean, the Tucker Carlson interview was like not dissimilar to the Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson interview. He just got crushed. Annihilated. So I think there's actually going to be a growing, there is a growing backlash against, Hey, not in my backyard on these data centers. And we'll see. I mean, the compute has to come from somewhere and these things have to get built. And that's going to be, that's a, that's a real problem for these companies should that become a, This is like the only thing I can think of that unites the right and the left in the country right now is I don't want you to build one of these things in my backyard. Yeah. Recent Gallup poll said seven out of 10 Americans don't want them. Yeah. The other three people don't know what, yeah, the other three people aren't having seen what one looks like. It's probably the other three got a check in the mail or something like that because they're widely unpopular. If you give a commencement speech and you say anything about AI, they'll boo you out of the stadium. Yeah. Like we've seen recently with Eric Schmidt. Yeah. So that could be a real, it's the idea that there could be moratoriums. Uh, there was one that was proposed in Maine that got vetoed by the governor, but it's being brought up by national politicians. The idea that moratoriums could happen maybe not tomorrow, but like it's going to be on the ballot in 2028. There are going to be pro moratorium candidates. Yeah. So the interesting thing about all this is because, you know, you've got, And again, Americans' perception of these guys is they're like bickering about who's going to be the more rich in court and, you know, I know you were name-calling and et cetera. And that coupled with, now you want to go build this thing next to my house, is a bad look. And so they just need to be a lot more focused on the external narrative about this is why this is important to the future of, you know, our society. And it's not happening at all right now. So let me challenge the economic benefit part of this and see what you think. So another place this could go wrong is, are these companies going to create enough benefit for others using them? This is, Chamath had an interesting tweet. He said... Wait, Chamath had an interesting tweet? Yeah, I like this one. Well, I guess he does that often. They're all super interesting. So let me read this. In an early meeting at Facebook when I was describing the goals of Facebook platform, an area I oversaw, Bill Gates yelled at me. Wait a minute, you got to love, comma, an area I oversaw. That's right, yeah. Okay, he said, his quote has stuck with me to this day. This isn't a platform. A platform is where the collective sum of revenues of the participants exceeds those of the platform itself. So the platform is something that's so useful that the companies that use you make more money than you make. I think that's a good definition. There's an article in The Information, Anthropic and OpenAI's share of AI startup revenue rises to 89%. That's not a platform, according to that definition. Yeah, correct. I agree. I mean, not wrong. But that doesn't mean they won't be able to be wildly successful. If you're increasing the productivity of every Fortune 500 company and beyond by not just 10%, 20%, but orders of magnitude, that's an extraordinary amount of value. What do we have seen a corresponding increase in earnings? Well, we'll see. I mean, again, if you look at six months ago and you tried to foot out, hey, we're not going to need all this compute and, hey, these companies are never going to be able to be profitable, you would have been right if that continued to be the trajectory. And then along comes Agentic Coding, and up everything goes. So we'll see. One can easily imagine there are two or three or four more of those unlocks that we haven't seen yet that are coming. Yeah, I mean, it could just be that that is, that's simply been applied to coding work and it can start working for all different types of work. Sure. Which is what they want. So, okay. One last thing to run by you and then we're going to take a break. This is, we had a, one of our commenters talk about the fact that, like, Microsoft has pulled back a little bit from OpenAI and Apple has not participated in this moment. They said Microsoft and Apple come from real innovations and use cases. Executing LLMs is expensive, risky trash for grifters, and they know it. There is no paradigm shift without Apple and Microsoft on board, so why should they take the risks of building these models driven by stolen data? This stuff is toxic and they know it. Could you find someone who has a stronger opinion and is less equivocal in their commentary? Let's see. It's unclear whether that was a choice Apple made or a, a inability to do whatever they needed to be doing. I've found it. It's, it's surprising how Siri, for example, Siri or iMessage, for example, have been, have been so impossibly slow to keep pace with what appear to be things that AI startups with 10 or 12 people have been extraordinarily successful at, like text-to-speech or speech-to-text. Granola, for example, does a 100 times better job of interpreting what I'm saying than Siri does, which seems, I would imagine, has orders of magnitude more people and resources focused on it. So I don't think it's that Apple has seen that what OpenAI and Anthropic are doing is, you know, grifting. And I don't think that's the case at all. And I think, I think Microsoft pulling back from the OpenAI relationship probably has more to do with Satya's understanding of the dynamics that are going on inside OpenAI and with the relationship between him and OpenAI and maybe his perception of what he believed to be true and what is actually true and his understanding of where he wants to take Microsoft. Yeah, no, I think that's a good perspective. Hey, I love our listeners. I'd love to give you guys an opportunity to come in and comment. Of course. So I have nothing against that listener. I was just making a joke about the clear opinion he had. That came through. All right. Let's take a break. When we come back, you ran Twitter. I want to talk about meta. And then there's also this really interesting thing that's going on, this concept of a permanent underclass that's emerging because there is, there is going to be this sort of distinction between those that have one from AI and those that haven't. 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That's B-R-A-I-N-L-Y .com slash bigtech. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. Let's talk a little bit about Meta, which was your number one competitor when you were working on Twitter. Yeah, number one, number two, and number three competitor. I remember Meta and Twitter didn't like each other so much that when Meta built a trending tab, a short-lived trending tab on its news feed, whenever there was a story they picked up from Twitter, they would write social media. People are talking about this on social media. I didn't know that. Oh, I didn't know that. That's very good. So, because they clearly saw you as a competitor. But right now, it's kind of a rough moment at Meta. They just went through, or they're in the process of going through some large layoffs. Their AI models are not state of the art. They don't have a cloud code or codex equivalent. In fact, the consumer use case for AI hasn't really been correct. And employees are starting to question whether it's worth working there anymore. I'm just going to read one employee's comments in the SF standards. From the outside, there's massive negative sentiment, and there's certainly something there, but the pain of working here is not very well understood. It's this grand calculus of what it costs to live in the Bay Area and what personal sacrifices you're willing to make and what you're willing to do for money. On the one hand, I feel massively privileged and lucky to work at a place like this. On the other hand, I'm like, where is my line? What do you make of those comments? I mean, there are always people who are, there are always people inside the company Down and focus on people will like, okay, I get it. You know, they might be sad that Jim is leaving, but then they kind of are like, okay, like I get it. We had to do that. Fine. The doing it, you know, a second and then a third and then a fourth time is like, okay, you start to be like, okay, this is obviously not the last time. It's going to happen again. It might be me. And then that starts to be like massively anxiety-inducing across the company and people just start to look around and like, you know, who's next? So that's just been, and each time in these layoffs, it's been a slightly different version of the, you know, because of blah, we need to XYZ. And at some point you just start to realize like, yeah, we already, you said that one. That was the same reason as the second riff. And then the third riff was a third layoff was a little bit different narrative. Now we're going back to the second layoff narrative and people just start to go, okay, like this, we're just being, you know, we're just being spun. Yeah. I mean, I worked in newsrooms for eight years, so every January there was a difficult decisions subject line. Yeah. The difficult decisions. Yeah. And I was like, I can't deal with this anymore. And that's why I just decided to go out on my own. There's nothing people hate more in an organization than feeling like they're being spun. And that's when they start to kind of turn on management. Like, you know, you can get up to, you can make mistakes and get up in front of them and go, man, I really screwed this up or we really screwed this up and we should have done X and we didn't. It's my fault. I'm the, you know, blah, blah, blah. I'm fessing up. And they'll kind of be okay. You can do that a few, you can do that a couple times a year and be like, people are like, okay, I get it. We all make mistakes. But when you start to spin people and the reason for this is because of our, like, and you said that, you know, same thing nine months ago or whatever. Then they're like, it drives people crazy. You think people are fooled and they're not fooled. And I'm so glad to have you here because, man, Dick, I feel like we could speak every week because there's so much that, you know, I covered social media. I covered AI. You worked, you ran social media company. You're investing in AI. So I mean, it's unfortunate. We only have like 12 minutes left. I feel like we have to do this again. Ben Horowitz has this great, shout out to Ben Horowitz. He ran this management class when he was running his loud cloud. And he had this great, and I asked him for his outline of it because I wrote a management class and I did it to Twitter. And I remember he was like, you know, your job as a leader is not to be, you know, is not to have all the answers. If you try to spin people and you think, and I just said this, if you try to spin your team and they know you're like spinning them, like there's, that's like the most demoralizing thing you can do. Like, don't try to con me. And so there's got to be, that's the problem with these layoffs and then layoffs and then layoffs. And now, you know, we're doing it again, but this is the reason why. And it just, people just are like, okay, I'm like, they turn off. No, I'm with you. And okay, so here's where I was going with my windup. The interesting thing about meta is that, is it really like a social network anymore or is it like reels and an AI project? And is Twitter and a social network anymore or social media, or is it like, I mean, it does still have text posts, but it's kind of like reels. And it's combined with that side AI project. I think Twitter's text posts have been extraordinarily resilient. It's like, it's like this, you know, it's ability to survive the changes in the way people use TikTok and reels and social media. I do think, and I do think meta is reels and an AI project. Let me just tell you though, Twitter, I just went to my home feed. First post image, second post video, third post video, fourth post text only. Fifth post video. Some guy beating the shit out of someone who tried to take his bike. Sixth post. Alex, you've got a weird, you've got a, the algorithm wants you to look at, it's the algorithm. Don't algorithm me. I'm not the only one that gets the fight videos. All right. Next text post. Next image. Go ahead. Anyway, I just think, I'll say this about, I'll say this. I think you're asking about, about Twitter. I think Twitter's usefulness as a, here, as a, as a text-based medium, despite what you're seeing in the, in your, in your home feed has been extraordinary. And I, and I think I would actually credit, I like the, knowing a little bit about, you know, knowing a little bit, a tiny little bit about what goes on inside the company. I would credit a lot of the recent success. And I hope I'm actually hurting this person by crediting him instead of, you know, the, the ownership. But I think Nikita Beier as the head of product, and he's the product, he's, I think he's the only product manager there now. Right. And then loads and loads of engineers or sorry, some engineers and a designer. Sorry. I don't mean to insult Elon by saying loads of engineers, some engineers. But Nikita has, Nikita has an extraordinary instinct for product that I think only, I would say Kevin Systrom and maybe, you know, Evan Spiegel with his initial instinct for Snapchat stories are, are comparable. I just think Nikita's got an almost remarkable instinct for no, no, no, this is going to be what helps grow the product, even though, you know, nobody else is talking about that right now. We're going to go do this. And he, he's right more often than he's not. And it's, it's impressive. Yeah. No, it's I mean, I just remember, I sort of foreshadowed this at the beginning of the episode, but so I moved to San Francisco in May, 2015, and I think I had my first week on the job, second week on the job. You stepped down. Yeah. June 10th. And this was, yeah. And this was my second week there. And this was Twitter and Facebook. That was basically my beat. And the whole newsroom stopped. And we're like, this is big, big news. Holy shit. And my editor looked around and he's like, who's writing this? I was like, I guess I will. And then the next day we spoke about the fact that you were leaving and Jack was going to become the interim CEO and my favorite game, the full-time CEO. And that was like, it was definitely like welcome to Silicon Valley moment. Just like, Oh, things haven't really slowed since then. Yeah. Go ahead. Your favorite. Not favorite. A moment I remember vividly from that is, you know, I had that, we have all these alerts on our, on our devices internally around the platform, obviously. And I got off stage after telling the company, Hey, I'm stepping down. Jack's going to just take over as interim CEO. I've told this story before, but a couple of times. I get off stage and my phone, you know, and you know, I was super emotional. And my phone bings. Elon Musk has unfollowed you on Twitter. I was like, Whoa, man. Yeah. That's four seconds. You might, I don't know. You might've dodged a bullet there. You never know. Anyway. Yeah. That was, that was. Well, look, I think it was more like, let's then see this. See this news. Like don't need to follow this idiot anymore. Well, he should, does he follow you now? I don't believe so, but I don't, I haven't looked. Um, no, I always, I mean, I always liked looking at your tweets, so I mean, I think we could do another full episode talking about the Twitter era and the transformation of that product. And I actually thought, you know, maybe we should have even started there, but I'm glad we went with AI IPOs, but it's a, it has been a fascinating product. I mean, I, when I was covering it, I covered like every little tweak to the feed. I broke the news that it was going to be algorithmic. Um, and that was a very intense time because Jack initially denied it. And my DMs were like, you're a liar. Your credibility is gone ever forever. And then on Tuesday, like I broke it on Friday. On Tuesday, they're like, we're going algorithmic. And clearly it's algorithmic. But I've forgiven Jack for that. I hope we're all good at this point. But no, just crazy, crazy product. And clearly like, you know, this whole, you know, this whole Twitter's dead thing. I mean, when you were CEO, you saw it after you left. Every journalist writes a Twitter's dead story. I'd never wrote it and I never will because for whatever reason, the format works. That's what I was saying. It's remarkably resilient. The year I, the, the, the, the day I became CEO, I walked up to the head of communications But it is interesting what you're seeing in Silicon Valley today with like these lottery ticket winners at the big AI labs and everyone else. I don't know, man. I'll say two things about it. Living a life of comparison, it doesn't matter where you are in that stack, it's a losing strategy. It's just a, it's just a life of misery. And I guess, because you're comparing or you can't buy a house. No, just, no, just the, like, I'm here and this person, there's no winning that ever. That's right. By the way, you can be, look, look, Elon has got more money. Elon's going to be the first trillionaire. Is he talking about, like, what's he talking about on Twitter? You know, like, I'm going to, Sam's a bad guy. You know, like, you, you don't get like, man, if I were a trillionaire, life would be great too. You get, I'm going to, that guy's a bad guy and I'm going to, you know, go get this person. I just, like. There's a great old Winston Churchill quote that I'm going to botch, but it's something like, functional expertise, while great, is no match for a broad appreciation of the, for the humanities and the human condition in all its joy and suffering because you just develop this immense understanding of, of, it's, it looks like that, it looks like things are great for that guy. They can be just as horrible for that guy. It looks like things are horrible for her. Actually, some things about her life are better than anything about yours. And literature is filled with these, hey man, stop chasing ghosts. Stop looking, stop living a life of comparison and chasing ghosts and, and, you know, this phantom thing you think you're supposed to have. Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Great Expectations at Dickens. And I just think there are too many people in Silicon Valley who have functional expertise and not a broad appreciation for the joys and sorrows of the, that you grow to appreciate in the humanities and therefore live in this like vortex of like this tunnel vision of like, they got that and I would have that if I went to Anthropic and I didn't go to Anthropic and that sucks. The person in Anthropic is like, I was going to get this house, but this jerk paid $15 million for the $8 million house and now I don't have it and that sucks. It's just, there's no winning. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would say, I would say, okay. I get that it's worse for the guy that didn't go to Anthropic and now doesn't have a billion dollars. I get that. No, I'm not, I'm not taking the side of someone saying life is miserable on that front. I do get the person who's like, it's, you know, crazy, like making a couple hundred thousand dollars. And because the, these OpenAI and Anthropic folks have gotten this windfall, they've taken the housing supply. Rent has gone up here in New York. Rent is like the craziest it's ever been. Yep. But that being said, you can still have a pretty nice life with that type of money. Again, writ large across the country, it goes back to the Darios and the Sams, et cetera, et cetera, need to start painting a picture to the country about why this is great for us or a lot of these data centers aren't going to get built. Yeah. All right, Dick, you have to come back. This was so great. Yeah. Thanks for having me. That's the fastest move an hour I've ever done on the show. So thank you. Thank you for being here. Yeah, happy to do it. All right. All right. Check out, let's plug the show. Check out the Nick, Dick, and Paul show. Please. On your podcast app of choice. And we always thank you for being here with us. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.