a very bad 💩podcast about #VC #secondaries broken unicorns ❤️🩹🦄 & busted carry 📉🙈| @davemcclure @amanverjee @practicalVC
Silicon Valley, CA
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“$500 billion. Wait, wait, wait.”
Dr. @elonmusk is at it again!
This week's Trading Places Podcast, we go deep on SpaceX's Q3, its 2027 revenue ambition, and why @AmanVerjee predicts a Tesla-SpaceX merger opening stock price of $420.
Plus: @davemcclure admits he was wrong about @SpaceXSI
00:00 - cold open + @42geeksofficial in China
[ tech and vc news ]
04:34 - Fed squeeze: 3.7% CPI, oil over $100
06:57 - Midterms: 90% odds Democrats take the House
14:22 - @SpaceX Q3: AI revenue triples to $7.6B
22:44 - @AnthropicAI S-1 leaks: $16.3B Q3 revenue, $1.5T valuation
27:19 - @Replit switches to OpenAI, @OpenAI round cut to $1.25T
33:47 - @CoreWeave: 15% bond yields, $50B debt
37:01 - Megadeals: @anduriltech $90B, @tryramp $60B, @deepseek_ai $75B
41:55 - Ukraine strikes Russian data centers
[ valuation corner: SpaceX Q3 deep dive ]
49:39 - @Starlink hits $5.2B and 20M subscribers
50:52 - AI revenue up 7x to $7.6B
51:50 - $500B revenue target pulled to 2027
56:16 - 12-month payback funds $400B in CapEx
1:06:48 - @Tesla merger: $300B revenue, $420 a share?
Dr. Elon probably: “I want data centers. In space. With frickin’ laser beams.”
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💸@AnthropicAI's early investors are sitting on huge returns. One of them left the table in the worst possible way:
"Those early rounds were actually led by angels. Jaan Tallinn, Dustin Moskovitz, Eric Schmidt. They'll get a 300X return...
The leads in the series B, also not venture capital firms, the big lead was FTX. Sam Bankman-Fried would have had an 80X return on his money. A $500 million check would be worth $40 billion today, but there's a plot twist...
He sold it for $1.3 billion back in 2024. They could have made everyone at FTX whole, but they sold it at a significant 95% discount...
Worst trades ever. I got five words for you. Pedro Martinez for Delino DeShields."
— @AmanVerjee on Trading Places VC podcast
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Elon didn't start xAI just to compete in the AI race.
He's playing a much bigger game.
"My skepticism with Elon getting into the AI business was really about his sour grapes over OpenAI...
He saw all the attention going to OpenAI and then Anthropic, and him wanting to get into that race was why xAI was created.
Now I think there's entirely different motivations. He now realizes, hey, the frontier model isn't the game. It's the infrastructure for both frontier models and open weight models and everybody else. That's the game...
And he's attacking it like a dog on a bone. And I really don't want to bet against Elon in this area."
—@davemcclure with @AmanVerjee on the Trading Places VC podcast
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VCs @davemcclure and @AmanVerjee break down the nuclear startup industry:
"Nuclear startups... wasn't really a part of the venture roadmap when we started our first fund back in 2020.
Pretty impressive backing from venture investors. So Valor is in Aalo, they've, I think, tripled down on this company...
TerraPower is Bill Gates and NVIDIA...
But the number one reason is just the hyperscaler power demand. That is something that really wasn't the case five years ago. It now is.
Compute power is a bottleneck in terms of building AI.
Companies like Microsoft are willing to sign these PPAs, five, seven, 10-year contracts for revenue that will drive revenue and offtake revenue.
So now there's real commercial viability to these deals."
From Episode 50 of the Trading Places VC Podcast.
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🚀 Why would a rocket company want a carmaker? Trading Places co-host Aman Verjee works through the logic:
"People might have questioned, why do you want to combine a space tech company and a car company? Elon's answer was, robotics and data centers in space.
...Limiting factors for that is demand and build out. And SpaceX seems to be really efficient at doing that build out.
And then your limiting factor is, well, how much capital can we raise?
And then I think it makes a lot of sense to do that merger."
— @AmanVerjee, Founder and General Partner of @PracticalVC, with @davemcclure on the Trading Places VC podcast
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🧾 Anthropic's S-1 headline is an $80 billion loss. Then @AmanVerjee opened the cash flow statement:
"If you look at their statement of cash flows, you can see their Q2 cash flows, net cash from operating activities, despite the $80 billion loss.
If you add back some of those non-cash changes in fair value, accounting assumptions and stock comp, they actually had about a $3.9 billion operating cash flow positive number in Q2...
So you look at those numbers for Q2, and I would say it's actually quite impressive."
— Trading Places VC podcast, E52
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🚨 Anthropic's IPO filing has a few risk factors you don't see every day:
"Anthropic, which just dropped their S1 today, 94 pages of risks in their S1 right out of the chute...
If that doesn't warn you off, how about this one? 'Our models pose catastrophic and existential risks to humanity.'
If we can wipe out humanity, that's kind of a nice way to raise money."
— @AmanVerjee on Trading Places Podcast EP52
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.@AmanVerjee on why AI bigwigs are pushing for regulation:
"What Sam wants is an agency that will step in and provide some cover. He and Dario definitely want the industry involved in pre-release testing...
And all the government, this agency has to do is say everyone plays by the same rules. We want these things in your code. Every closed model provider will say, yes, I can do that. And every open weight model will now say, no, I can't.
And this is a way to preference the closed source guys... and just handicap the open source guys."
From Episode 49 of the Trading Places Pod.
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Elon just moved the @SpaceX $500 billion target up by three years during their recent Q2 call, and this time the call came with a specific roadmap:
"They were aiming at getting to $500 billion in revenue, that's with a B, by 2030.
On their Q2 call, they moved it up to 2029, so they moved it up by a year. And on the call this week, they moved that up to 2027.
So by the end of 2027, Elon is saying they could be at $500 billion in ARR. By the end of 27 is somewhere between $500 billion and a trillion..."
From Episode 52 of the Trading Places VC podcast, hosted by @davemcclure and @AmanVerjee.
@elonmusk
Check out the full episode. Link in bio.
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📉 VC Aman Verjee on why Anthropic's growth curve is bending, and who he thinks is behind it:
"Anthropic was ripping and roaring because of Claude 3.5 and Sonnet Opus. And they really cracked the code, which was coding and complex agent workflows...
And then OpenAI came out over the summer with their enterprise API coding business and the Sol and Luna and Terra models.
And I think they're just eating into Anthropic's market share lead now."
— @AmanVerjee, Founder and General Partner of @PracticalVC, on the Trading Places VC podcast
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Elon Musk just raised the bar on his own AI ambitions.
SpaceX reportedly tripled AI revenue to $7.6 billion, posted its first profitable quarter as a public company, and hinted at reaching $500 billion to $1 trillion in annual recurring revenue as early as 2027.
The key is AI infrastructure that reportedly pays for itself in under 12 months.
Can @SpaceX actually become the biggest company in the world?
@davemcclure and @AmanVerjee break down SpaceX’s massive revenue ambitions and the AI infrastructure economics that could make them possible.
From Episode 52 of the Trading Places VC podcast.
@elonmusk
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