Tony Ursillo

2/2 - Mark Zuckerberg (deceptive, ruthless, win-at-all-costs mentality) - Adam Neumann (promising the world without the full game plan to get there) If AI were asked to create the most invincible person to lead a company, it might have created Sam Altman.

1/2 The @RonanFarrow @NewYorker exposé convinces me @sama is actually channeling four of the most iconic tech personalities of the past 50 years: - Bill Gates (more business person than technologist) - Steve Jobs (bending reality to fit his narrative and objectives) (con’t.)

This used to be known as @Uber Black. Now Black car trunks are full of drivers’ personal stuff, half of them can’t load our suitcases, and in places like Florida, some drivers are unable to communicate with us in English. Competition was overdue. @dkhos bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

@bgurley @rohanpaul_ai The AI industry is still in its infancy. NVIDIA and others want to make sure they don’t throttle demand. Once AI is more pervasive and the monetization models are more established, you can bet price will rise to create a supply/demand equilibrium.

@rohanpaul_ai Most companies that are supply constrained raise price. This would balance everything. Yet that isn’t happening. Why?

"Anthropic is making great money. OpenAI is making great money. If they could have twice as much compute, the revenues would go up 4 times as much. These guys are so compute constrained, and the demand is so incredibly great." ~ Jensen Huang on CNBC

@JerryCap @borrowed_ideas Similar for $AMZN, $META, $MSFT: headcount roughly flat, capex up 3-4X. They said learn to code, lol. We’re all coders now.

I would highlight $GOOG employee base is basically the same since ChatGPT's launch even though their revenue increased by ~$120 Billion. However, capex almost became 4x during this time. It's likely a good glimpse of the changing landscape of our future" - @borrowed_ideas

Big takeaway from hyperscaler earnings: @oracle is screwed. Don’t have the cash flow or bal sheet to compete at scale w/ @amazon @microsoft @Google. Also blew 100% on OpenAI - now no one else will make a big RPO deal on OCI. Cooked. @PythiaR @TechFundies @buccocapital $ORCL

Most important number from @amazon tonight was $244B RPO. That $44B seq increase was equal to the growth in RPO from Q4’23 to Q3’25 - two yrs of incremental backlog in ONE qtr! Fully explains capex guide. $AMZN @TechFundies @TMTLongShort @blondesnmoney

@blondesnmoney Itemized deductions, last min IRA contributions, change in number of dependents, rental home expenses, home office expenses, marriage, divorce, relocation. Lots of manual inputs. And @intuit @turbotax will agentify its own offering, also with a huge incumbency advantage.

I give it two years until Anthropic releases Claude Tax > "Good afternoon! Just drop your W-2 and 1099-B and I'll handle the rest!"

@Oracle Is this a parody account?

Our partners’ financing for the Doña Ana County, NM; Shackelford County, TX; and Port Washington, WI data centers are secured at market standard rates, progressing through final syndication on schedule, and consistent with investment‑grade deals.

@JaredKubin Had been wondering how FCF vs EPS out to 2030 had diverged so much, even with depreciation timing differences. Gotta love how Safra parachuted out right at peak narrative momentum. Wasn’t gonna get left holding the bag that she prob wasn’t on board with in the first place. 🚩

Keith at MS out nuking the $ORCL EPS number. wow. FY30 EPS to $10.65 vs Guide of $21 (his work) Overlay this cut with stock price... that's how the big Fundamental guys think.... This is prob well known in the deep sector focused guys

Time for some hard truths @JesseBWatters - @CharlesHurt is not cutting it as your stand-in. Awkward, low energy, no chemistry with guests. You lose us every time he sub hosts. Sorry. Give it some thought. P.S. You still da man!

@TechFundies This is golden! What’s tough for us as investors who are also humans is that this moment - down so much on relentless selling that you waver btw despondence and throwing up - is the moment you should be your own contrarian indicator. Few have that intestinal fortitude.

This period of time in SaaS reminds me of the living hell that is running a hedge fund when a sector dies and you have exposure. 1) You wake up, reach for your phone, see your stocks are down pre-market for the fifth day in a row on no news. Good morning! Go get a bacon / egg / cheese and coffee from a deli - this will be the only good thing about your day and you know it. 2) Enter the office and your SaaS analyst has a grimace on his face. You don't want to have the same conversation you've had in your head and with him 30x a day for the past week so you just go eat your breakfast at your desk while reading news / research. 3) Your analyst comes in and you have the 121st version of the conversation. No new insights. You can sense he is beaten up so you go through 50 mental model / frameworks but neither clarity nor comfort arrives. 4) Morning meeting with the investment team. Someone will invariably ask "So what's our view on this sector?" [meaning the sector that is equal to hell on earth right now]. This kicks off a conversation in which the other analysts who know absolutely nothing about the sector in question will start by asking gently probing questions of you and the analyst. This escalates to unanswerable questions that people only have the nerve to ask when a sector is dead. You have to graciously entertain these questions because the stocks are down so apparently anything goes. You start thinking that everyone in the room is stupid including and maybe mostly you. After 20-30 min of abuse (maybe more) and at the point where you literally have no clue what you're even talking anymore ("when will this turn?), someone will mention that their buddy works at a rival fund where the PM sold the entire sector earlier that week. Another analyst will then mention "That fund is really smart" (implying you are stupid with which you agree wholeheartedly). 5) Meeting over. Now you and your analyst have another conversation, and you can see the fight leaving his body. You wonder how his physical body remains upright seeing as the spine is dissolving in real time but then realize you're not a doctor because you're not smart enough. Anyways, this chat may or may not culminate with the suggestion that "maybe we should take some off or just come back later". At this point, your brain floods with the history of your interactions including how the two of you have patiently been waiting for a "buying opportunity" JUST LIKE THIS. And now that it is here, didn't immediately go up, and, in fact, went down further, you are having to contemplate trimming or selling. You restrain yourself from smashing something but also understand your analyst who doesn't want to destroy his year by January 16th and die like this. Who does? 6) At this point, you realize you are simultaneously fighting 1) the market, 2) your primary analyst, 3) your other analysts, 4) your competition including QQQ which only goes up. And you feel very, very alone in this investment. No joke, this part truly sucks. Most times, you probably trim some of whatever is hurting. Because at least you did something. And if it all goes to hell, you can sell more and say / feel you took the right action. And if it goes higher, well, at least you somewhat stayed. Honestly, at this point, no one will give you any credit for your actions anyways and you're just going to get whatever potential discredit results. It rarely pays or is feasible to be the hero here. 7) Day is almost over. 10 minutes to close or maybe right after, your largest, most "proactive" institutional investor like Blackstone will email "Hey - got a second to chat about Saas?". Or maybe your most unsophisticated investor. Usually both. So then you hop on the phone and explain what you know, what you think and what you did or plan to do. This is the point where having a 10 out of 10 investor like Blackstone helps because they are professional and get it so long as you are sticking to your process. 8) Go workout and feel a bit better. Go home and try to be present with the family for a bit. Then whiskey time and mentally go over everything again. Alone. To make sure you hopefully aren't impairing capital permanently and, if so, have a plan. And that plan is to fire everyone and become a monk. [To my prior SaaS analyst and team, this is not really about you. I mean, you probably did this in some shape or form to me on many occasions. But it's ok. Everyone is doing what they think is best / most helpful at the moment. And I probably did the same thing when I was in your shoes. Just trying to laugh about team investment dynamics during meltdowns and grateful I only have to answer to myself during this SaaS drawdown. So much simpler! Hope you all are well].

This is my Dad. Born in 1926. Spending his 100th year on earth. Takes the road test every year to renew his IL driver’s license. He barely needed it today. Thx @elonmusk for giving us the gift of a great afternoon with FSD! @Tesla @wholemars @SawyerMerritt @teslacarsonly @turo

@WillManidis Bostonian here. The term wasn’t used, but essentially San Fran built network effects while Boston squandered the “inputs” that could have led to durability of its former pole position in Tech. Once the flywheel of network effects takes hold, it’s nearly impossible to dislodge.

@theallinpod @friedberg Spot on @friedberg. Smart investors (and implicitly the market) understand that the hyperscalers’ FCF is around 30% below Net Inc. Moreover, do people really think Satya, Zuck, Sundar, & Jassy are screwing w/ Depr. just to juice near-term EPS? These guys are thinking 10 yrs out!

Friedberg: Michael Burry’s “Cooked Books” Claim is Totally Wrong @friedberg: “Burry's implication that they are cooking the books or hiding accounting is completely false because all of the accounting is apparent in the cashflow statement and in the balance sheet.” “Remember, companies have three financial statements, an income statement, a balance sheet, and a cashflow statement.” “The cashflow statement reconciles the difference between the income statement and the balance sheet, and it shows you all the cash that's going in and out of the company.” “And many analysts and many investors that are intelligent and do their homework, will look at the cash flow statement and they will see the CapEx, they will see all the investments going out, and they will calculate a number, typically called free cash flow, that will allow them to estimate the true cash generation of the business in a particular period and make an assessment of, should they be valued on free cash flow or should they be valued on the GAAP standard of EBITDA?” “And the investor has the choice on how they want to value the company.” “And Burry is incorrect in thinking that they're hiding anything because it's all there.” “They're following GAAP standards. And then investors make a market and they all decide, what do I want to value this company on? Cash flow? EBITDA?” “Let them choose, and then the market sets the price.” @chamath: “I think we've given this guy way too much airtime. He's not very good at what he does.” Recorded in the brand new poker studio at The Venetian Las Vegas. Thanks @VenetianVegas!

@kevg1412 @cpaik 3/3 @OpenAI (and @AnthropicAI, @MistralAI, @perplexity_ai, etc.) will try to do the same - core search/queries, with various mainstream use cases built for AI that also generates more usage and data, making its flagship GPT better.

@kevg1412 @cpaik 2/3 There were many of them vying for leadership, each with their own twist. In the end, RELEVANCE of results, which was a function of more and better data, is what helped Google win, as well as tying other critical mass applications to that (email, maps, etc.). So…

Every few months I think back to Chris Paik's take on why OpenAI is the AOL of AI

@TechFundies Conceptually, is this much different from how 1) Meta subsidizes free app usage until it scales to 1 bil users, 2) Netflix ran at a loss investing in content & underpricing for yrs, 3) Amazon lost $$ for over a decade until it was an ecommerce gorilla and we were all dependent?

Quick take on $NVDA. [The AI space has honestly gotten so complex that it is hard (for me) to have a clear point of view. So I have no clue at this point.] Q3 rev of 57b was up 25% qq (excluding China from Q2) / 11.5b qq. GAAP OM of 63%. Nice. So this year will be 209b excluding China (assuming 2b beat for Q4). SWAG: Q4 ought to be 67b (10b qq); next year Q1-Q4 74+81+88+95 = 338b rev (street at 294b). This would be 547b spend over CY25/26 a bit ahead of their current orders/”forecast” of 500b for the period (although their guide is for 500b in data center and I’m comparing total co rev). 65% OM is 220b (street at 66%) at 17% tax rate is 182b in net income. 25m shares is $7.44. 25x is $186, 30x is $223, 35x is $260. Would guess we don’t see higher multiples than this. Most PMs are old enough to have lived through the dot-com boom/bust so I’m guessing we don’t see that kind of blow-off in multiples again. Stock at $196 here seems prone for a melt up. Now maybe the hockey stick in revenue continues and there is another 10b they can do (22c extra), or maybe China gets unlocked (50b at 65% OM – 15% US tax share = 50% OM at 15% tax would be 10.5b or 43c extra). So even getting both of these would be 65c at 30x $20 extra to share price. I mean it’s not bad or anything. But I think at this level of global expenditure, the returns to customers all the way through the demand chain (to end users) are going to have to be there heading into 2027, or everyone slows their roll to focus a bit more on efficiency / rational monetization. Seems like stock market might be rational here. Inference is taking off but is being mostly given away below cost. Duplicative training at scale is currently happening w/ GOOGL / Open.AI / Anthropic / Meta / x.AI / etc. all vying for “The One Model”. Also could see investors tapping the breaks on funding brute force model competition while GOOGL has a cost / funding advantage. I’m personally skeptical that we see chip spending levels substantially higher than 2026/2027 so think the market assigning lower multiples to potentially peak earnings might prove to be prescient. I remember my physician father getting an early Motorola cell phone in the early 1990s from the hospital. It cost $3k then (or $8k in today’s dollars). All it did was make and receive expensive phone calls some of the time. Motorola could have given away high-priced phones to everyone for free to drive much faster demand / adoption but what would have been the point? Everyone would have taken a free phone and started making cell phone calls but that wouldn't have positioned Motorola any better for the future. Seems like that the cell phone cycle played out rationally as adoption was driven by people opening their wallets as the functionality / cost of cell phones improved to meet their needs. You can literally get a budget Android phone today for less than $200 w/ a $20 / mo cell plan that does amazing things. And, guess what, everyone has one. Today, we’re subsidizing the AI industry massively to drive functionality / adoption ahead of what we would see if confined by historical business / economic practices. To think monetization or subsidization is going to reach a trillion dollars a year seems unlikely to me. But, hey, anything is possible w/ the question being what is probable.

Looks like someone at @SECGov (or Bloomberg?, @business) fat-fingered entry of a $10m mkt cap Canadian penny-stock mining company called Silver Elephant as owning 12.2m ($3.4B) shares of $ORCL instead of Oracle Commodity Hldg Co. (ORCL listed on @TMXGroup). How does this happen?