Nvidia Hits $5 Trillion, Elon Musk Launches Grokipedia, and OpenAI's IPO Future

Kara Swisher: Support for the show comes from Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital. Every exceptional company story is defined by those high-stake moments that risk the business but can lead to greatness. That's what Crucible Moments is all about. Hosted by Sequoia Capital's managing partner, Rulof Bota, Crucible Moments is returning for a brand new season. And they're kicking things off with episodes on Zipline and Bolt, two companies with surprising paths to success. Crucible Moments is out now and available everywhere you get your podcasts and at cruciblemoments.com. Listen to Crucible Moments today.

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Scott Galloway: And you did something you almost never do. You didn't let me finish. That's really unlike you.

Kara Swisher: Oh, yeah, right. Do you like to see the statistics on the talking of this show?

Kara Swisher: Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.

Scott Galloway: And I'm Scott Galloway.

Kara Swisher: I have returned to our country, Scott.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, you look much better.

Kara Swisher: Thank you. How was your travel back?

Scott Galloway: You know, you leave yesterday and arrive today. Or no, you leave tomorrow and then you arrive today. I don't know. It's just like I left at 10 a.m. and then I got back. It was the same day at 10 a.m. That's all I know.

Kara Swisher: It's funny because I can confirm you have not aged since yesterday.

Scott Galloway: Do you like my... I had a treatment. I think I look good.

Kara Swisher: You look very nice. You have great skin.

Scott Galloway: Yeah. I wore a robot outfit. I wore a robot. It was good. It was good.

Kara Swisher: You wore a robot outfit. I really am happy to be back. I don't like traveling that much. You know, I'm not, I don't, even though I travel a lot.

Scott Galloway: So I didn't want to tell you this while you were in Asia because I didn't want to trigger anything. But occasionally... I can tell you think it's going to be a dirty joke. It isn't.

Kara Swisher: I'm waiting.

Scott Galloway: You're literally waiting like, "Oh, no, here it comes."

Kara Swisher: I'm slowly catching up on myself. Is this the one? Is there going to be something about, I don't know, some sort of bad Asian flu joke or something?

Scott Galloway: You know those funny Democratic ladies? They said the word "twat," so we can do anything we want now.

Kara Swisher: Well, that's the great thing about living in London is technically you can use the C word.

Scott Galloway: Oh, yeah.

Kara Swisher: It means something different. I still don't use it. Anyways.

Scott Galloway: You can't say it, can you?

Kara Swisher: I can't say it. You can say it. I can't say it.

Scott Galloway: I can.

Kara Swisher: I just think there's certain things that are just off limits for a straight white guy.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, I would agree. There's certain words that we just have lost.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: That are just a give. Anyways.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: You can say it to me on our tour every night. You can say it to me just quietly.

Kara Swisher: I never say that to you.

Scott Galloway: Anyway, so I occasionally... a couple times... a couple times, yeah, twice when I've been in Asia. I used to go to Asia a lot for business. And there's something about that amount of jet lag or crossing the date line that triggers something in my hypothalamus or amygdala or whatever. And I get a pretty serious depressive episode. And it's happened to me twice. The last time I was in Hong Kong and I was staying at one of the most remarkable hotels. I was on the 88th floor.

Kara Swisher: Like the Grand Hyatt or whatever?

Scott Galloway: No, it was called the Upper House. And it was just remarkable. They bring you this incredible tea set and you're on top of the clouds and looking at Hong Kong. And I woke up and I got this weird sort of fear anxiety that I'm too far from anyone that cares about me or that I care about. And I feel very isolated and very frightened. And like, what series of bad decisions led me to somewhere where I don't know anybody and no one cares about me? And if I get sick or something, I just start freaking the fuck out. The last time I was supposed to meet with Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group the next morning, I was supposed to meet with the CEO. And instead, I just checked out, went to the airport and got on the first flight home.

Kara Swisher: Really?

Scott Galloway: But there's something about—

Kara Swisher: I was waiting for the dick joke too. I was like, where is he gonna tell you?

Scott Galloway: No, no, no.

Kara Swisher: Wow, that's amazing. That's interesting. I get that feeling. I have to say, I was saying this to Amanda last night. I just wanted to get home. I felt unsafe. I don't know what it was.

Scott Galloway: Oh my God.

Kara Swisher: By myself. What you just described, times that by 10.

Scott Galloway: Yeah.

Kara Swisher: Where you start to kind of shake a little bit and you feel really upset and insecure and foreboding. And I just went straight down to the lobby, went straight to the airport, looked at the board and said, get me the first flight back to the U.S.

Scott Galloway: Because I find... and this sounds more virtuous than it is because it only lasts about five minutes before I start hating them again... as soon as I'm around my kids, it was like the solve.

Kara Swisher: Oh, no, I love my kids. I was just thinking how much I love them. I'm so excited.

Scott Galloway: That's what I mean. It immediately snaps me back to just something okay.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, it was great to see them. And of course, it was just like when I got back, Saul often gets into bed with us in the early morning and he goes, he looked at me, he goes, "I really missed you." And I was like, oh my God. I was like, where are the cameras, right?

Scott Galloway: Yeah, right.

Kara Swisher: I think he knows the impact too, which is really cute.

Scott Galloway: Well, so another quick parenting piece of advice. One of my biggest regrets about raising my kids is with my youngest one. Until he was like two or three, we didn't let him co-sleep with us because we read somewhere it was bad for you or bad for him. And he used to show up at our bedroom with a basket of cars, like as an offering, saying, "If you let me sleep with you, you too can play with these cars." And I look back, and fortunately, we did co-sleep with our younger one. Co-sleeping is a gift from God.

Kara Swisher: It is.

Scott Galloway: It's unavoidable. They come in, and you sleep better, they sleep better, and you'll wake up occasionally, and they'll be looking at you, and they'll smile, and then they'll put their arm on you, and then they fall asleep, and everything is right with the world. I think co-sleeping is... the Japanese cultures do it, Indian cultures do it. Some psychiatrist fucked up in the head, in my view, in the 50s or 60s convinced American parents we're not supposed to co-sleep. I really miss that.

Kara Swisher: Well, it's unavoidable with us. At one point, Amanda's covered with a cat and both kids. I'm like, "Hi, good to see you over there."

Scott Galloway: Yeah, it is a nice thing.

Kara Swisher: Before we get to this award you got, last night I was at Mount Vernon, which they're redoing. Mount Vernon is privately run, so they can put up whatever they want. They have a whole new things about the slaves of George Washington. It was really well done. But Ken Burns was showing off his new American Revolution series there last night, an outdoor in the middle of sort of a rainstorm. It was wonderful. And it was quite lovely, I have to say. I had the loveliest time last night. I love that, Ken Burns. There is some wonderful things about social media. I always loved his documentaries. But now that I have the attention span of a cat that's got into its owner's meth supply, I don't watch a lot of that PBS documentary style stuff. He's been all over social media talking about the current administration and history. He is an outstanding thinker, I have to say. But it looks actually really good and really pertinent right now. So anyway, tell me about this Spirit of Hope, speaking of hope in America.

Scott Galloway: Well, Kara, I don't like to bring attention to myself. As you know, I've successfully navigated all awards since I won "Most Comical" in high school.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: Last night I was in Toronto at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and I got an award with Van Jones.

Kara Swisher: Wow.

Scott Galloway: For... I think...

Kara Swisher: He's a handsome man.

Scott Galloway: Oh my gosh. He's so dreamy.

Kara Swisher: He's really nice too. Very spiritual. I like Van. I'm trying to get him to run for Senate.

Scott Galloway: Was he wearing like a spiritual outfit?

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: He looks like a sexy monk.

Kara Swisher: Like, hello.

Scott Galloway: Monk isn't a spiritual figure.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: He's very, yeah. And I traveled back to New York with him. He's a really very impressive man.

Kara Swisher: What's the Spirit of Hope? What was the award for?

Scott Galloway: So every year, the Simon Wiesenthal Center gets together and they present an award to people for defense. I think it's defense of the Jewish community, and they do a talk and a speech. There were like 1,600 people. Canada has a very strong Jewish community.

Kara Swisher: It does.

Scott Galloway: Toronto in particular.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, Toronto.

Scott Galloway: And they reached out to me, and I was really excited to do it. Quite frankly, I was sort of shocked.

Kara Swisher: You never do those things. I'm surprised.

Scott Galloway: No, you know, it was a really nice moment for me. I've never been that in touch with my Judaism. I'm an atheist. I don't feel much connection with Israel. I've obviously been pretty outspoken on it. And regardless of what you think of the situation, there's a lot of people in the Jewish community who are very appreciative. And it was just very nice for me. My mom would have loved it.

Kara Swisher: Well, we'll be back in Toronto, too.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, we're going back. Actually, a bunch of people came up to me and said, "I'll see you next week. We're going to have such a good time." I'm excited.

Kara Swisher: So we sold out there first, which was really interesting. Toronto, yeah.

Scott Galloway: Toronto.

Kara Swisher: We love them. It's so strange. I doubt you've been watching the World Series. You know less about sports than I do. Blue Jays, right? But it's so weird to be rooting for the Blue Jays. L.A. is my home team.

Scott Galloway: Oh, why aren't you voting for L.A.?

Kara Swisher: You know, I just find Canada to be, quite frankly, the nation the U.S. should be right now. I think they've got a good leader. I think there are reasonable people. I think there are generous people. I think they take care of people. I don't think you can go bankrupt if your wife gets lung cancer. I think Canada is the underappreciated neighbor. We should move there. We should just stay there. Who recycles, sees your kid on the street and walks him or her home, pays the rent on time.

Scott Galloway: I'll tell you, I think we noted Doug Ford, who is very conservative. And the Gavin Newsom-Doug Ford thing about the World Series was very funny. And they took like, they dumped on Trump at the same time as talked about the bet on the Blue Jays versus the Dodgers, which is interesting. It's a great series. I mean, I'm not into baseball, but it's a great series.

Kara Swisher: I don't watch any of it. None of it. Not a bit of it.

Scott Galloway: Slightly. I got cut from the baseball team in high school. That's my connection.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, I made the team and then I got cut mid-season, which was really good for my confidence.

Scott Galloway: Oh, wow.

Kara Swisher: Mom, I made the baseball team. I got news.

Scott Galloway: How did you get cut?

Kara Swisher: How did I get cut? It's pretty easy. You don't play that well.

Scott Galloway: Right.

Kara Swisher: And then the coach sits you down and says, "We're cutting you." Why even bother? Why even just let you stay there, sadly, on the bench?

Scott Galloway: I guess there's only a certain number of... I don't know, it's not everybody gets a trophy. I kind of respect that about sports.

Kara Swisher: All right. Okay. All right. Anyway. Well, congratulations on your spirit. You're my Spirit of Hope.

Scott Galloway: Spirit animal.

Kara Swisher: Anyway, we've got a lot to get to today, including NVIDIA making history. Kind of crazy. And Elon making Grokipedia. Oh, my God. But first, OpenAI is finally a for-profit company. And I knew this would happen. Elon tried to stop it. It announced this week that it's formed a public benefit corporation similar to the structures of xAI and Anthropic. Under the new setup, OpenAI's nonprofit foundation gets a 26% stake worth about $130 billion and will run the for-profit arm. It's the same board, by the way, I think. Microsoft gets 27% and keeps exclusive rights to OpenAI's tech through 2032. Sam Altman reportedly does not have a significant stake. I feel like he's going to do just fine. There's a buzz about an IPO as early as next year possibly at a trillion dollar valuation out of the gate. But Altman is saying no specific time frame yet. Talk a little bit about this, because we've talked about the idea of them going public, and a lot of companies not going public.

Kara Swisher: And I just want to note, OpenAI is also sharing estimates for the first time. This is a drag on them, I think, how many ChatGPT users are struggling with mental health issues. The company says in a typical week about 0.07% of users show possible signs of mental health emergencies. And while that percentage sounds small, remember, ChatGPT has 800 million weekly active users. OpenAI says they've consulted with more than 170 mental health experts to help improve responses during, quote, challenging conversations. Character AI, which is probably the worst of them, is barring people under 18 from using its chat box starting next month. You're kidding, Character AI. Long time coming, should have happened right at the start. So these are a drag on these companies too, because these companies do know much more so than a Google mental, what people are asking specifically about. So talk a little bit about the IPO and possible drags on... I would say this would be a drag on it, but maybe not.

Scott Galloway: I think it's actually good that they're releasing this data. And supposedly some people have said, although the chatter's calmed down, that the number one app of AI was therapy. And so if you can imagine a significant portion of those 800 million people are using it as a therapist, 0.07% of users showing possible signs of mental health emergencies, that just may be representative of the population who wants to talk to a therapist digitally or in person. So I don't think...

Kara Swisher: They should be governed by therapy rules if they're going to be a therapist, but go ahead.

Scott Galloway: I think that's a really good point. Can you say more about what that means? I don't know what that means.

Kara Swisher: It's just these people have no... what you put into OpenAI is not, doesn't have any privilege, just like legal stuff, financial stuff. That's one. And then this, or privacy. And then two, they're not governed. If they do something wrong, if the AI bots have something wrong like they have, there are no repercussions for it. And so therapists are governed. People are governed. If you shame someone into suicide, you could be tried for it, and people have been. And so that's the issue. They have all the usage and none of the responsibility, I would say. So if they're going to do mental health work with people, they should be licensed therapists and should pay the price if they fuck up. That's my feeling.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, look, I agree with that. I think that more broadly, they should have adopted a similar approach to most content or the military or bars put in place. And that is, there should be different versions of AI. And you have to show your age and your identity. And if you can't prove you're over the age of 18, you get an entirely different set of algorithms and processing and warnings. Also, I think kids... if I went in and tried to buy beer under the age of 21 and I got caught, they call the cops and my parents get to know.

Kara Swisher: Right. Yeah.

Scott Galloway: And my parents weigh in and say, "Okay, you shouldn't be buying beer. Why are you buying beer? Or why did you try to buy a gun? Or your kid was here with a fake ID trying to get a driver's license."

Kara Swisher: Right. There's no precautions.

Scott Galloway: I think that it's pretty simple. There needs to be a different version of AI. And there needs to be, in my view... I've never bought into the notion of... so for example, I want to throw the right a bone. I don't think kids under 18 should be allowed to engage in gender affirmation drugs without the consent of their parents. And when someone is under the age of 18, they're a kid and kids are stupid. They make irrational decisions. Their brains aren't fully formed.

Kara Swisher: Right, may I point something out?

Scott Galloway: Sure.

Kara Swisher: This is almost every case they are. So it's... it's a very rare case.

Scott Galloway: Rare.

Kara Swisher: I agree with you. It's been weaponized and politicized, but there are instances where parents found out after a lot of other adults knew. And that is wrong. I think when you're under the...

Scott Galloway: Okay, but it's small. It's like the number of trans-fenders, but go ahead.

Kara Swisher: I know, but I'm saying just theoretically, it just shouldn't happen.

Scott Galloway: What I'm saying is there should also be no kid who types in different ways to kill yourself and not have their parents notified.

Kara Swisher: Right. Exactly. They shouldn't be using them. They shouldn't be using them. I mean, there's only one way to stop it. Well, look, use them for homework. Use them for research. For example, if you go to a movie and you're 12, there are certain movies you can see and certain ones you can't. It shouldn't be any different here. There should be a certain type of AI that minors can have. I mean, do you know what's going to happen? Do you know how a 17-year-old boy is going to start using AI now? It's going to be insane.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, erotica and stuff.

Kara Swisher: You know, they had a great piece in the New York Times with the guy who was in charge of that, how it happened. They have a lot of insight into what people do compared to Google. You go, you search it, you know, like bondage or whatever you surf. But you don't really know what they're doing. In this case, it's very, very explicit what's happening in the search. And so it's a very different ball of wax. Talk a little bit about the public offering, though, because this is going to be the blockbuster, right? We predicted this. When he announced... I mean, I personally think all this stuff around "we need 50 nuclear power plants, just OpenAI." I think what he's saying is, my business is going to be so big, bad, awesome, and valuable, I'm going to need 50 nuclear power plants. I don't think he has any fucking idea at this point how much power they're going to need.

Scott Galloway: I mean, generally speaking, there's a bunch of catastrophizing about how we don't have enough power. And my thesis is China is just going to develop AIs or LLMs that use a lot less power. But in also signing a $300 billion deal with Oracle, what does that say to the market? It says, "Oh, my God, he thinks it's going to be... he knows more than us, he thinks it's going to be a trillion dollar revenue company." And all of this. He is a very bright guy. And to be clear, he is focused on nothing but his quote unquote insignificant stake in AI. And his insignificant stake might be only five or six percent, but of a trillion dollar valuation, which it might get, he's going to make 50 or 60 billion dollars. And he has energy companies and he has blank, blank, blank. I just love how we continue to fall for the hushed tones and "Oh, I don't get paid. That isn't why I'm doing this." Yeah, he's getting paid.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, but meanwhile, I've decided that porn for kids, synthetic porn, lifelike porn for kids is good for the world and is helping the original mission of using AI to improve and protect humanity. I mean, when do we clue in and realize everything these guys do is to get the incremental dollar? And in my view, that's fine, as long as we recognize it, regulate them, and then tax them such that we can reinvest.

Scott Galloway: Yeah.

Kara Swisher: Whenever they say we're not here for the money, I'm like, you're here for the money. This is the only reason I appreciate Trump. It's like, how much money can I make?

Scott Galloway: He's naked. Yeah. He's transparent.

Kara Swisher: I've always said the VCs who get on stage at business school and say, "Well, it was never about the money," would fuck their sister for a nickel. But anyways.

Scott Galloway: Oh, my God.

Kara Swisher: Okay, that's not fair. Ten cents.

Scott Galloway: So, look, this is where the IPO markets are right now. The IPO markets are essentially branding events. He is an amazing brand builder. He's done a great job being in the news. OpenAI is the leader in what is considered the tectonic shift in the technology. Also, the capital needs of this company are so extraordinary because it's a capital war right now. I think they've all figured out there's probably going to be one in the seven dwarves and it's a capital race.

Kara Swisher: And by the way, the last stop on the valuation change, the only people investors willing to pay a trillion dollar valuation for a company with... you've got to keep it high, in other words.

Scott Galloway: That's going to be 50 to 100 times revenue. It's going to probably make Palantir look like a value stock. And the only people willing to pay that are going to be retail investors. Retail investors are like, "Why not buy OpenAI and just hold on?" And so we said... I think I said two months ago when he announced this deal with Oracle, I'm like, "This means he's going public." Because the only way he could ever even begin to deliver against that $300 billion agreement for compute is if he went public and raised $150 or $100 billion over the next few years in the public market.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, this is his move. He has to be Google. He can't be Netscape. He's got to be Google, right? This is his move. Even though there's other competitors and everything else, they have got to maintain the lead perceptually and actually, right? In terms of quality enough, they don't have to be the very best AI, I guess. It's sort of like Microsoft. They have to be a very good one. But they have to keep the brand. They have the branding lead still. I don't think you think of anybody else. People can't name other ones unless they can say Anthropic, I guess, but people who are actively using it or regular people think ChatGPT. And I think we should do away with the classification as a public benefit corporation. I think it is such bullshit jazz hands.

Scott Galloway: Explain what that is for people who don't know.

Kara Swisher: It's defined as a corporation which is something along the lines of intends to produce public benefits or public good and operate in a responsible and sustainable manner, balancing financial returns to shareholders with a broader public interest.

Scott Galloway: This is like British Petroleum in the aughts. "Beyond." BP is "Beyond Petroleum." And they'd show some Asian dude in a lab coat working on algae. And we were supposed to forget that 99.7% of their R&D was just drilling more for fossil fuels. And finally, BP just said, "Let's stop fucking pretending."

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: We're an oil company. Everybody needs oil. They interact with it every day. They're willing to pay for it. We're not doing anything wrong. We're complying with laws.

Kara Swisher: Lies, too.

Scott Galloway: We're complying with lies. That was a bit of a Freudian slip.

Kara Swisher: That's my favorite Freudian slip was Senator Warren's Freudian slip. What did she call Trump the C word?

Scott Galloway: Yeah. You really just want to say that word, don't you? And a bunch of VCs here in New York started calling their companies public benefit. By the way, who enforces that? Who decides whether it is such marketing and BS? And so what I would like to see is, all right, you want to call yourself a public benefit corporation. There are certain guardrails here. One, you pay at least an AMT, an alternative minimum tax. You're at least a good taxpayer. Right. You have... I don't know, you never get more than X number of complaints about X or Y. Otherwise, just call yourself what you are. Employees get this much money returned to shareholders. You could do all minor things. The CEO doesn't make more than 50 times the average worker's salary instead of 800, right? You could come up with a series of things. If you're really serious about, quote unquote, the benefit of the public here, here's a few ideas.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. One of the things is that they started that way, right? And so they kind of had to keep... they couldn't like predict. Elon Musk was like, "This is bullshit." And he was right, like in that regard. But they did manage to jam it through. There was a lot of... like he was ginning up all kinds of trouble and state attorney generals were looking at it. And so they managed to jam this thing through, which shows how talented they are, meaning they are the farthest away from public benefit in terms of personality. But we see where it goes. Would you buy into it? Would you buy or not?

Scott Galloway: No? Yes?

Kara Swisher: Oh, if I could get into the IPO, I would do it, but I would do it as a trade.

Scott Galloway: So you buy and sell?

Scott Galloway: Yeah, because what they'll do is they'll get—I mean, this will be a monster IPO. CNBC will just sit there touching themselves talking about this for three weeks. And then that's good. And then the thing goes out. What IPOs do right now is they check in with the bankers every other minute and they go, we want to price it such that we can manage a 20 to 40 percent pop right out of the gates and maybe more. Now, Chesky priced it too low and it was up 120%. Figma went up 140% circle. Those guys didn't realize that was going to happen. But what you want to be is, this is what he wants the headline. He does not want the headline to be "OpenAI flat in IPO." What he wants is "OpenAI surges in IPO." That is a branding event that is singular and can only happen once or not.

So the thing will be priced. They'll come up with some bullshit thing where they'll say that we're offering our users a chance and they'll let them buy $11 worth of stock and claim that they're letting their users participate. So you've made $14, yeah. And then they'll run around the world with the biggest hedge funds and biggest institutions. They'll go to BlackRock, State Street, and the bankers will make a shit ton of money. It'll be a huge branding event. But right out of the gates, I bet it's up 30 or 60%. But the problem is, if I got access, which I don't think I'll have given that I have this podcast where we're constantly critical of them... But the people, the institutions that get in, well, some of them will hold, a lot of them will sell. And then the retail investor, the guy or gal on the street will buy at that first trade. That will probably not be a great price to buy in at. But, you know, we'll see. We'll see if they'll give Scott some.

All right. Let's say, speaking of high stock market, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, NVIDIA hits yet another major milestone.

[Ad Break]

Scott Galloway: Scott, we're back. NVIDIA just became the first company in history to hit the $5 trillion in market value a little over three months after it hit the $4 trillion mark. To give you some perspective, NVIDIA is now worth about 25 Disneys, 50 Nikes, or bigger than the GDP of Germany. It's been a busy week for NVIDIA. The company is also taking a $1 billion stake in Nokia.

Kara Swisher: Oh, that seems—I'm not loving that move.

Scott Galloway: Plus, partnering with Oracle to build the energy department's largest ever AI supercomputer. And at NVIDIA's annual conference, CEO Jensen Huang took an opportunity to lavish praise on Donald Trump. Why wouldn't he? Trump has made him really rich. Let's listen.

[Audio clip: Jensen Huang speaking]

Scott Galloway: Oh, my God. Let me interpret for all of you out there what he was saying. "Mr. President, let me sell my shit to China."

Kara Swisher: Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking.

Scott Galloway: Sell my—okay, weapons, greater likelihood they can hack our systems, more cyber attacks on us. That's exactly what I thought. An increased probability they're able to invade Taiwan in a hot or a cold war using our GPUs, which American universities and IP protection have made me worth more than Boeing. Let me sell my chips into China and ignore all of the concerns from the Defense Department. And look how rich I've gotten off of you. It's just—you know, let me tell you something.

Kara Swisher: I've known Jensen for a long time. I interviewed him many times when he had the company that was just selling chips to video game companies, essentially. He will not do an interview with me. I've known him 30 years. Like, he refuses. Because I'll be like, "So let's talk about China. Let's talk about President Trump."

Scott Galloway: Yeah, he's smart.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, it's just like—actually, you know what? I lost a lot of respect because I like Jensen, but boy, is he like—

Scott Galloway: He should go on your show because he'd be fine.

Kara Swisher: I would agree, but he won't because I know him, right? Talk about someone I've known for like—it's fine if he wants to do it this way, but he probably looked at a Cisco or something like that and is so much smarter. Speaking of wanting to keep—he doesn't want AMD to show up. He doesn't want Apple to make changes. He wants to control. He wants to avoid the mistakes of Intel over the years. He kind of wants to own it for the future, essentially. And so sucking up to Trump, he'll do it. He has no problem doing it whatsoever.

Scott Galloway: Though he dresses like a very attractive lesbian, I think. I'm sure that's what he's going for. That's what he says to his stylist. "Look at that outfit. Hot lesbian. That's what I want my closet to look like."

Kara Swisher: I have that exact leather jacket.

Scott Galloway: So, look, you got to give it to the guy. He's created more shareholder value in a shorter time than any person in history. And he's created tremendous—he's made thousands of people millionaires, if not tens of thousands. He's created an ecosystem. He's paying a shit ton of taxes indirectly and directly for the great state of California. A lot of that—it's great that that ecosystem and he's sort of the ground zero for the ecosystem is happening in America. I think the guy deserves a lot of credit. He seems like a very nice man.

My Jensen Huang story is the following. I spoke on stage at some thing at Cannes and a bunch of people lined up to take photos. And this nice guy comes up and says, "I just love your videos." And I was like—the line was really long. And I'm like, "Boss, where's your camera?" He's like, "Oh," and he pulls out a camera. We take a snap and I'm like, "I'm sorry, boss. The line is long." And I kind of shuffled them along. And the next guy comes up to me and goes, "You know, that was Jensen Huang, right?"

Kara Swisher: Oh.

Scott Galloway: And I'm like, "Jensen, Jensen, come back."

Kara Swisher: Was this recently? Because no one really paid attention to it.

Scott Galloway: No, it was like—that's exactly—it was like three years ago.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Because I got to say, I always thought he was—it was unusual for us to have him at Code because he wasn't that well known. But he was doing all sorts of innovative things in chips when others weren't. And it was largely around video games, as I recall. He was doing, and phones maybe. But his whole situation has changed rather, including that entire company, which was sort of not as well known.

Scott Galloway: But he has a feel for brand. One, the leather jacket is not an accident that he keeps wearing it. And two, his annual meeting is now the new Berkshire Hathaway Summit, I forget what they called it. But they are very—the investor relations there is very good. So he announced a bunch of promising new things: AI and quantum computing infrastructure. He announced partnerships with the US Department of Energy and leading US companies to build AI infrastructure, aiming to support scientific discovery and national competitiveness. He hit all the right notes: AI supercomputers. He revealed a project to build an AI supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy with a reported $500 billion in bookings for AI chips.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, he needs to keep selling his chips. He needs to keep selling his chips. He's really good at it, but he's still a chicken shit. You're a chicken shit, Jensen, for not talking to me.

Scott Galloway: I'm not that hard.

Kara Swisher: That's probably a little rough.

Scott Galloway: By the way, you know who the only politician is—the only candidate who has refused to come on Raging Moderates?

Kara Swisher: What, who?

Scott Galloway: The leading candidate for mayor of New York. He's the only person that said no to us.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Anyways.

Scott Galloway: Why would he come on your thing? I wouldn't.

Kara Swisher: Well, everyone else does.

Scott Galloway: That's a smart move. He won't come on mine either. He's like—literally talks to a door. He won't come. He's already won. Why take any risks? I would advise him to just go with families right now.

Kara Swisher: He won't come on mine either. It's weird. I was in touch with him months and months and months ago when he wasn't ahead. No. Oh, was he a babysitter? Anyways. No, he was like pulling 2% at the time.

Scott Galloway: So they revealed a project to build construction in America. They noted that their latest chips, including Blackwell, are now in full-scale production in Arizona, reflecting new investment in U.S.-based fabrication and supply chain. That will be a lot of jobs. He emphasized—at least in the short term to construct it—he emphasized the importance of accelerated computing, national AI strategy.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, he's a rock star.

Scott Galloway: And re-industrialization. They're hitting all the right words. Re-industrialization, that's a great word.

Kara Swisher: So any kind of bubble? Are you worried?

Scott Galloway: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not—the fear isn't that these things go down. The fear is, imagine Leo, when he was hanging onto that piece of furniture at the end, when he was going down, took Kate Winslet and 400 kids down with him. When he vanished into the darkness of the depths, what if he had 11,000 arms and took everyone down with him? That's the problem. It's not that these companies correct and their stocks go down. That happens to every big tech stock. That happens to every stock at some point. The problem is they may take the global economy with them down because 40% of the S&P is 10 companies, which represents 20% of the market cap of the entire publicly traded companies globally.

Kara Swisher: Actually, not everyone goes down. Berkshire Hathaway didn't.

Scott Galloway: That's because he's so good.

Kara Swisher: This guy's not.

Scott Galloway: Actually, that's not true. At the depths of the Great Financial Recession, Berkshire had been hit hard like anyone else. If you did the calculation on Warren Buffett at that moment, he was flat. Now, within 14 months, he was now up again 23% since the inception of his fund. But no one gets out alive if this thing—if these things. If NVIDIA, we should hope—

Kara Swisher: No, NVIDIA is keeping everybody up.

Scott Galloway: We should hope that OpenAI goes public at a really good market cap and that NVIDIA keeps announcing record quarters or that it's sort of a soft pullback. Because if NVIDIA throws up, everyone else has the stomach flu. Jensen, keep looking like that lesbian you do. You're an attractive, very attractive lesbian.

Anyway, let's also talk about Grokopedia, the encyclopedia powered by XAI and is rival to Wikipedia.

Kara Swisher: It sucks so bad. I tried it. I just couldn't.

Scott Galloway: Elon has complained about so-called propaganda on Wikipedia. He's been doing that for a while. Grokopedia went online with around 900,000 articles and briefly crashed after launching.

Kara Swisher: It was full of—it loves Elon. It loves Elon, that's for sure. It's full of errors. It leaves things out, like a lot of stuff out, factual stuff. And it's—does he—why is he doing this? Like, does he have just an extra five minutes to do something? I don't know. At the same time, Truth Social, which is a majority owned by President Trump and his family, is launching a crypto-based prediction market platform to compete with PolyMarket and, I guess, Kalshi. Truth Predict will allow Truth Social users to place crypto bets on outcome events. The guy in charge of the outcome events is going to have a betting platform. That's interesting. Also, I think Don Jr.'s on the board of both Polymarket and he's involved with them. And I just—I don't know what to say. And the last thing about Elon, of course, Tesla's looking for internal CEO candidates in case his trillion dollar pay package is not passed and he leaves. So any predictions here? Any of these topics? Grokopedia?

Scott Galloway: I think it's a nothing burger.

Kara Swisher: Well, Grokopedia is an attempt to sort of establish a new truth, right? And one of the things I like about Wikipedia is it's almost impossible to have a functioning democracy if we don't all agree that there is an objective truth. And Congress used to fall in line when peer-reviewed research would come in or data would come in. They wouldn't—I mean, they'd try and spin it, but they would acknowledge, "Okay, this is the data and we all need to rally around it." That's no longer the case. Everyone's decided there are, quote unquote, alternative facts. There is an alternative truth. And I just see this as an attempt to try and mimic what a lot of people—one of the things I love about Wikipedia, I was freaked out when my Wikipedia page went up because I thought there's no taking it down. That's the thing about a Wikipedia page. It goes up. And then what really struck me was some misinformation went up. It said, you know, it said one of my companies was now defunct. I'm like, "No, it's not. It's still—that company is still going." Other people weighed in. It's a community-based thing. And if you show your notes and your work, you get to edit a page. So it's like this kind of user generated, but they do try to pursue the truth. I find it actually quite apolitical, which I like. And what you see here, what you see here is they're saying shit like, instead of showing suggestions for gay pornography, it falsely suggests that porn exacerbated the HIV AIDS epidemic in the 80s. I mean, something like that, that's just not helpful.

Scott Galloway: Why is he doing it?

Kara Swisher: I think he cares if he's helpful, Scott. Like, really seriously.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, but I think you've said this. I think something happened to the guy, and he's traumatized and angry at the left and wants—I mean, he's talking about—he keeps going on and on about a white genocide. He's just—I mean, I use a lot of examples for how the term genocide has been perverted and overused in a lot of different regions of the world. But there's very few perversions that are less egregious or laughable than that right now there is a white genocide taking place. He's like a plot of White Lotus at this point. Like, you know, between him and David Sacks and they look like the next cast of White Lotus.

Kara Swisher: So why would he do this? Getting in on the action? Truth. Predict.

Scott Galloway: Well, so they've got to do something. The social media—okay, this is their second pivot. The social media company doesn't work. No one's going there. So they pivoted to become a Bitcoin treasury company and they took their cash and bought Bitcoin. That's sort of working, not really. So their next pivot is to become a betting market. Because there is—actually, I do think there's opportunity for new players there. And you're going to see Polymarket or Kalshi go out in a monster IPO. These things are the new casino, but they feel less dirty. Like, "Oh, it's about politics, so it's not just gambling."

Kara Swisher: Yeah, they do everything. They don't just do politics.

Scott Galloway: But on his—I mean, okay, so, but I got to give it to the guy. The stock is up 10% this week and 22% up this year, Tesla. The fact they're able to keep this thing in the air. This is Tesla.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, this is just amazing. And his stock package, he's looking for a grant of up to 12% of outstanding Tesla stock, which could feasibly be worth a $1 trillion package if the company hits a market value of $8.6 trillion, which I think is up six or sevenfold.

Scott Galloway: I actually—I think one of the things about capitalism that I think works is you can't get in the way—I don't think you should get in the way of limiting compensation at a gross level. I think you should continue to publish statistics showing what multiple of the average worker's salary the CEO makes. But I think one of the intoxicating things and the incentives that works in the United States is that there's no limit on the upside.

Kara Swisher: Well, here's the only thing. This is—look, first of all, it's offensive to people. That's part of it. I mean, the whole like hand-waving part of it is offensive to people. So he knows he's doing that. He knows he's trolling people. The other thing is, if it gets an internal CEO, we will all value it at what it's worth, right? It will not get the Elon bump. And it's not selling as many cars and it's not as good. And it will become what it's worth. Correct? A very good car company that has seen better days. And, you know, one of the things that it's cost—there was another Yale study out showing that his involvement is costing them, I guess, one million cars or something, some number. It was a massive number. So he's also a downside candidate. I think him out of there would be great for Tesla as a car company. But you're right, not for the stock.

Scott Galloway: But where I was going with this $1 trillion pay package. And you did something you almost never do. You didn't let me finish. That's really unlike you.

Kara Swisher: Oh, yeah, right. Do you like to see the statistics on the talking of this show?

Scott Galloway: I love what you say. You say, "No, you always say, is there a period coming?"

Kara Swisher: I know. 73%, Scott, but go ahead.

Scott Galloway: I occupy 73% of the words. That's right. Is that right?

Kara Swisher: Yes, you do. Yes, that's correct.

Scott Galloway: Oh, now I feel shamed.

Kara Swisher: Don't worry about it.

Scott Galloway: Anyways, where I was going with it is I like the idea of some CEOs and people making extraordinary amounts of money at a gross level. I also believe—and this book kind of changed my life, Daniel Kahneman's *Thinking, Fast and Slow* and his research around money above a certain amount you don't get any happier. And the whole point of a good tax is a tax that is the least taxing possible. I believe the two least taxing taxes are the following. Over $10 million in revenue or from stock income, from current income or from stock trades or selling your stock in Tesla, I believe we should have an AMT of 60 or 70 percent. And everyone grabs their pearls when they hear that.

Kara Swisher: I just grabbed my pearls, but go ahead.

Scott Galloway: That's the tax rate for people making over a certain amount of money for the majority of the last century, folks, when income inequality was not as out of control, when people felt better about America, when we weren't cutting off food payments to kids. So I just don't—because here's the thing, the person who's being taxed at 60% who made $2 billion in equity grants, they're no less happy. But that $2 billion divided among, call it, you know, 100,000 households, that's $20,000. $20,000 in universal child care credits, food stamps, vocational training, Pell Grants. Everybody's happy. That makes them significantly happier. And then the other one I can't stand is we should eliminate the deduction—pull the deduction on inheritance tax down from $30 million to $1 million. If your kid inherits $7 million instead of $11, he or she is no less happy. And there's going to be such an immense transfer of wealth. And that needs—a lot of that needs to be reinvested back in the middle class. Anyways, my point is—

Kara Swisher: Gosh, you know who you sound like? Zoran Mandami. But go ahead.

Scott Galloway: He hasn't talked about any of this shit.

Kara Swisher: You mean what? Government sponsored food lines? I'm just saying, when you said 60%, I was like, "Ow, no."

Scott Galloway: I am. I think taxes should be lowered on what I'll call the working wealthy. I think taxes should be lowered on Kara Swisher.

Kara Swisher: Yes, I do too.

Scott Galloway: You make an exceptional living, but living in DC, you're probably paying 51% of your income to taxes.

Kara Swisher: That is correct.

Scott Galloway: Whereas, I'm self-conscious saying this, Scott Galloway, who now makes all of his money from selling stocks and is a Florida resident, I'm paying about 20%.

Kara Swisher: I know.

Scott Galloway: That makes no fucking sense.

Kara Swisher: You're not paying your fair share.

Scott Galloway: That makes no fucking sense. I would agree. In fact, I think you should write me a check. That's what I think should happen. Anyway, make a trillion dollars, just put 600 billion of it back in.

Kara Swisher: Is he going to get that? What's going to happen? They're all against it.

Scott Galloway: I think the board—I think he's going to get most of it. So the board can say "we took a stand and didn't give him what he wanted." And I think he'll get most of it. But a lot of these groups, the shareholders are rejecting it.

Kara Swisher: Will he quit? He'll quit, right? Presumably.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, but you'd have to get over it. These shareholder votes, sometimes they're non-binding. I haven't looked at the bylaws, but for example, every year, Sir Martin Sorrell's pay package was rejected by the shareholders of WPP. And he was like, "Honey badger, don't give a shit." And then they'd go back and then the next 11 months of the year would click by and no one cared.

Kara Swisher: But he cares. If he loses, he's going to like stock off.

Scott Galloway: I know, but he'll stock off. But these shareholder votes are typically non-binding. It's the board that is supposed to take them into consideration and the compensation committee, which, by the way, I still maintain the hardest thing as a manager or the hardest thing for me, harder than clients, harder than hiring and firing, compensation. Compensation. It is so difficult to figure out the right number, keep people motivated, be fair, have the money to manage the company. How much do you pay employees versus shareholders? It's really…

Kara Swisher: So is he going to get this?

Scott Galloway: I think he's going to get most of it. I don't think he wants to give up the mantle at Tesla. Also, if he leaves, and I think he probably knows this, if this company starts trading like an automobile company, it loses 90% of its value and the majority of his net worth is in this company.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, he's got to stay there. Stop whining.

Scott Galloway: So they both, quite frankly, it's a bit of a suicide pact. And that is—the board knows if he leaves—here's the good news for him. He's invaluable to the company. Here's the bad news. He's invaluable to the company.

Kara Swisher: That's correct.

Scott Galloway: And the majority of his net worth is tied up in Tesla. This board will do a symbolic haircut. They'll give him, you know, 50, 70, 80 percent of the trillion dollar potential upside he's asking for. But this board, and I've seen this happen, they have made so much fucking money with this guy. They all want to name their first child after him. You know, these are these executives on the company. I mean, they're talented executives who—

Kara Swisher: But they're not that talented.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, I mean, there are probably people who are really good at what they do, had $3 or $5 million, and now they're buying fucking yachts because they met this crazy guy.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, we're talking to you, Robin Denholm, possibly the most egregious board chairman of history. But you made a lot of money. Good for you, Robin.

Scott Galloway: Anyway, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about the latest tech earnings. We're going to run through them really quick.

[Ad Break]

Scott Galloway: Scott, we're back. It's time to do some rapid-fire highlights of the latest tech earnings. First up, Microsoft. The company's Azure cloud service saw revenue jump 40% in the quarter. Amazing. And the total revenue rose 18%. Shares are up around 2% as of the last five days of the taping. As for Meta, the company saw a 26% rise in sales year over year and net income of $2.7 billion. Impressive, but it still didn't meet expectations. Meta blamed the net income shortfall on a one-time tax bill, but also warned of growing capital expenditures and spending enormous amounts of money on AI. Shares are down 12% at the time of the taping. They got a real haircut there. Lastly, Alphabet, the Google parent company, saw a 16% jump in third quarter revenue, topping $100 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time. Really impressive. Cloud revenue for the year rose 35% from last year, a little less than Microsoft's. Shares are up around 3% at the time of the taping. Anything sticking out for you?

Scott Galloway: And we'll note that earnings for Apple and Amazon are coming out after we record today. By the way, Amazon's laying off 14,000 corporate workers as it invests more in AI. But any thoughts on not, we'll talk about Apple and Amazon next week, but what do you think about these three, the three biggies? Nothing short of extraordinary. Advertising revenue at Meta up 26%, and you want to know why your employer is dying, CNN, or your partner, CNN, Instagram video time was up 30%. Up 30%. Much of that is me watching it, but go ahead.

Kara Swisher: I hate to say this. I'm embarrassed to say this. People constantly ask me, what are your sources of news? And I always say, the BBC, the FT, and The Economist, which is all a fucking lie.

Scott Galloway: Well, you do watch those.

Kara Swisher: I subscribe to them so I can signal. For me, they're self-expressive benefits. I don't read those, but go ahead.

Scott Galloway: When I go to Breakfast at the Crosby, I take my FT because I think it makes me look smarter than I am, and I barely read it because my eyes are going. And then I go back and I watch reels on my phone and I watch the Gio Hussar or Justin Wolfers or a reel from some economist or David Frum. And these little two and three minute hits of really thoughtful people on YouTube and Instagram. That is now where I'm getting my news.

Kara Swisher: Me too. I hate to admit it.

Scott Galloway: You and I both.

Kara Swisher: You and me both, sister. And they will take the best articles and they'll summarize them for them. And they'll put someone better looking to explain the article or more articulate. Remember when the New York Times started doing video about 10 years ago? It was like, oh, my God, that guy, that guy writes so much more handsome than he is.

Scott Galloway: That's why they glowed up Ezra. They're trying to glow up Ross Douthat, but that's impossible. When you find someone like Ezra, who's handsome and kind of dreamy in sort of a metrosexual way. He wasn't even close to this dreamy. They've glowed him up.

Kara Swisher: Or like an Andrew Ross Sorkin, because I worked with a lot of these journalists at the New York Times. I'm like, Jesus Christ, swipe left a billion times.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, yeah.

Kara Swisher: And then they put them on camera thinking everyone would want to talk to the journalist. And you're like, oh, God. No. Anyway.

Scott Galloway: Anyway. So get back to the results. These are kids who were traumatized and found refuge at the school newspaper.

Kara Swisher: All right, get back to revenues. Does cloud revenues up, everything? The stocks are not that up. The stocks are sort of. People are anticipating this.

Scott Galloway: The CapEx at Meta, you got to give it to him. He is not afraid to make unbelievable investment. As a result, though, the operating margins fell to 40% from 48%. CapEx reached 38% of revenue. That is crazy. I mean, Apple, I think, is in the high single digits most of its life. Mark, I'm going to pay you a comment. You are a baller. I have to say, he's like, I'm going this way. He's not scared. That's what control is about. He has full control of that company, so he can do whatever he wants. He's arguably one of the great business minds of the last hundred years. Unfortunately, he's done more damage to young people while making more money than almost any person in history.

Kara Swisher: Thank you for noting that. Yeah. So, okay. Their CapEx drew the harshest market reaction. He doesn't care. If you look at their valuation, it's up 25% year to date. It has some show me risks now, but for the most part, it's just unbelievable and can make these staggering investments. They have the cash flow. Alphabet. The thing that really struck me here, cloud revenue, 34%, up 34%, net income up 33%, their income up 16%. And all of this fear, this existential risk of AI is going to ruin the search business. The search business was up 15% this quarter. Up from... Because they have a lot of AI embedded in it now. It's not only growing, it's growing faster. Paid clicks increased 7% year on year. I mean, Google Cloud backlog...

Scott Galloway: I got to say, their AI is getting better, isn't it? When you search now on Google? They're like, no need to go to ChatGPT.

Kara Swisher: Let me say, it was terrible and now it's good. I don't say it's as good. It's not as good as ChatGPT. It's not.

Scott Galloway: It's not.

Kara Swisher: Their Google Cloud backlog, which is basically business that they've signed up, was up 46% quarter on quarter, up 82% year on year. Over 70% of existing cloud customers now use Google AI products. And the company signed more than a billion dollars in deals this year than the prior two years combined. It's also their cloud, unlike the Amazon cloud, which AWS has had a real issue with, which is still the number one by gross dollar volume. But what Gemini has done, which is really smart, is they have made it, quote unquote, the AI cloud. And it's become the preferred platform for AI workloads. Google offers AI startups $350,000 in cloud credits, access to its technical teams and go-to-market support. And nine out of the top 10 AI labs use Google's infrastructure.

Scott Galloway: Can I make a note? Many years ago when Amazon pulled forward in the cloud market, I had lunch with Sundar Pichai, who's the CEO, and I was like, you really missed the boat on this cloud thing. And he was like, we did because we were using our cloud for our own search service, right? And he's like, we had so much business over here, we didn't pay attention. I'm like, you should go in a cloud, like you missed the cloud turn. And since then, I have to say, they have recovered rather nicely, I would say. Like, and Microsoft, a revenue on a big number up 18%. Azure, again, as goes the cloud, goes the stock and the company. Azure revenue, their cloud offering was up 39% year on year, topping Wall Street's 37% estimate. Azure remains the core growth driver for the company. He expects to double, Satya said he expects to double its data center footprint over the next few years. And these companies, there's just no getting around it. They're extraordinarily well run. Stock seems flat, flat. Like this, you think it's gonna keep running up?

Kara Swisher: Well, I've said this over and over, it was my big tech stock pick for 2025. It's up 62% in the last 12 months. So I think it's, let me put it this way. The buying opportunity is over. It was trading at a P of 17, which made no sense. And now I bet it's up in the high 20s. So I don't, you know, I don't like to make, let me just say, I was a buyer last year. I'm not a buyer right now. I'm not a seller either, but I'm not a buyer right now. It's come up. It was undervalued a year ago because of the quote-unquote existential risk. Everyone thought within a year, OpenAI, Google Search, and it had gone from like 91 to 89. Everyone thought it was going to go to 50. It hasn't. Google Search gets 96 times the traffic of ChatGPT. It's big. It's big. And they've managed to be, you know, credit to apparently Sergey Brin spending a lot more time there. Credit to them for coming back from that or making certain that they didn't get their lunch eaten.

Scott Galloway: In any case, last thing, CNN has launched its new subscription streaming service. The service will be like, quote, close sibling of CNN's cable product, offering access to select live programming for $6.99 a month. It's not really CNN Plus.

Kara Swisher: I think it's all of these. How is it any different?

Scott Galloway: Exactly. How is it any different? It's not. It's not. Except now it's the Aslov and Mark Thompson's idea?

Kara Swisher: It's CNN with CNN. Remember when it was Plus and I said, how can you have CNN Plus without CNN? This has CNN. Oh, okay. Yeah. That's it. They have to do this. Seven bucks a month and subscribers will be able to access. My idea, and this was an idea that I said, you should have a bug on CNN Plus on their streaming thing where you're just live streaming live CNN.

Scott Galloway: And Mark Thompson implement, this is typically what happens with managers. You have one, you have a business that works and you think that's the playbook for the rest of your life. And he, to Mark Thompson's credit, he moved the company, he moved New York Times from an ad-based model to not an entirely subscription-based model. But the stock run up in the New York Times, which has been strong, not exceptional, but stock was largely because the revenue mix moved much more to subscription under the leadership of Mark Thompson. The problem is it just may be too late. CNN is struggling even in comparison with other dying cable news networks. In the September primetime slot, get this, Fox News averaged 2 million viewers, that's flat. MSNBC, 810, down 43%. And CNN averaged 543, down 36%. And in the coveted 25 to 54 demo, which is all advertised, the people buying their product, advertisers, they only care about people 25 to 54. Fox News averaged 280,000 in the core demo, down 14%. CNN averaged, get this, Kara, 87,000.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, we're bigger. I know. And MSNBC averaged 68,000. If you look at our downloads plus our video views, we're averaging, I think, around 350,000 or 400,000. 60 to 70% of our listeners are in the core demo. So we're getting about 150,000 or 200,000 in the core demo versus MSNBC and CNN at 68 and 87. Our tiny little selves. We have like six. We can fit everyone around us.

Scott Galloway: A table.

Kara Swisher: We did fit everyone around a table at lunch. And I flew back with Van Jones last night, and he said something really interesting. He said, all we're doing is bringing on people, encouraging them to yell at each other such that it gets clipped and goes on social and goes viral.

Scott Galloway: Which makes more money.

Kara Swisher: Which we know. But what he said that I thought was really insightful, he said, just two years ago, occasionally we would make news live. Something would happen live on the program that would make news and change things. Instead, it's like, how do we get this shit on Reels and on TikTok? And then it starts having an impact. They're all just essentially a content creation machine hoping to get to clear the hurdle such that it goes viral on one of these platforms. He is not a moneymaker. That's for sure. I don't think they'll sell many of these, I got to say. I don't know. I think it's all like, look, they're all going to get bought up altogether, whether it's Comcast or David Ellison. It's a trophy property, though. You know, NEPO money, which is fine. There's got to be a NEPO billionaire who's a Democrat who's going to want CNN and be willing to pay for it.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, well, unless Ellison gets it. But what about a guy like Michael Bloomberg? Why wouldn't he buy CNN?

Kara Swisher: I don't know. He's been a great steward of Bloomberg News. He's moderate. He has the money. I don't know. I just, I don't think they're really big businesses. That's all. I think they're little businesses.

Scott Galloway: Anyway, one more quick break and we'll be back for predictions.

[Ad Break]

Scott Galloway: Scott, we're hitting the road, bringing Pivot Live to the people. Seven cities, Toronto, Boston, New York, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and L.A., of course. You went to Oasis, you went to Beyoncé, you saw the remake of Wizard of Oz and the Sphere. All those suck compared to the Pivot Tour. This is the biggest tour. Same people that are organizing our tour that organized Taylor Swift's tour, they are much more excited about our tour.

Kara Swisher: All right, that's enough, Grandpa. It's going to be so good, and we're bringing our brand of whatever we do to the people, and we're excited to meet our fans. We love our fans. For tickets, head to pivottour.com. See you there.

[Ad Break]

Scott Galloway: Okay Scott, let's hear a prediction. What's your prediction?

Kara Swisher: I predict we're going to have a great tour coming up. It's one more week. That's right. And by the way, I predict your book is going to be at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. By the way, can I just make an insight before you start? The back cover is that your back cover that you sent? That is wonderful. It's a picture of Scott as a teenager. I don't know how old you are, 12, 13, 14, 13. And you, and I love, I thought it was both Amanda and I were like, wow, that was really good.

Scott Galloway: Oh, thank you. I didn't see the back cover. I love it. I love it. It's all Catherine Dillon. My partner for the last 15 years in business has been a professor of the arts at the Tisch School named Catherine Dillon. And she's a creative. Well done, Catherine. She teaches visual design and she's essentially run my companies. In addition to being a great manager, everything we do just has a certain level of aesthetic strength. It's very touching, actually. It's very hard to pull that off, but it was very touching. Thank you.

Kara Swisher: So, look, my prediction is the following. AI is now absolutely the equivalent of corporate Ozempic. And that is what Ozempic or GLP-1 drugs do is they turn off the switch, kind of the instinctual switch that if there's food in front of you, you need to keep eating. And I hadn't realized how obvious or how linear, when you're on a board and the CEO is planning the next year and trying to get approval on CapEx and hiring, he or she will come in and say, our plan is to grow revenues 8%. And that means we're going to grow our headcount 6% because that'll increase profits by, you know, 8 or 12%. And there was always a correlation. And if they came in and said, business is tough, I think revenues are going to be down 8% next year, then, okay, we need to lay off between 6% and 12%. So the corporate growth number, the hunger, if you will, was always matched by how much calories you were going to intake or get rid of. And then Meta said, using AI for better targeting, they announced what I still believe is one of the most seminal earnings quarters in history. They said, okay, we grew 20%, I'm sorry, we grew 23% last year with 20% fewer people. So there's this entirely different gestalt in corporate America, especially among information age companies that says, wait, just because I'm growing doesn't necessarily mean I need to eat more. I don't need more calories. I don't need more people. As a matter of fact, I may be able to pull off the ultimate gangster move for shareholders here. I'm not saying it's good for society. I'm not saying it's good for society, is that I can grow while reducing my headcount. So Amazon announced that they were doing a restructuring, 30,000 corporate job cuts, roughly 10% of its white collar workforce. They say they're aiming to reduce bureaucracy. Do you realize that Amazon has said on the retail unit that they think they can maintain the same level of top level revenue or they can double their top line revenue by 2032 or 33 while maintaining the same headcount? That's insane. That's insane. So I think the corporate ozempicking of AI is already underway. The number of managers dropped 6.1% between May 2022 and May 2025, while executive level roles fell 4.6%. The average supervisor now manages six direct reports, double the number five years ago. And Amazon isn't the only one. Meta cut 600 workers inside its AI division. Salesforce eliminated 4,000 support roles. Chegg reduced staff by 45%. Klarna downsized 40%. Duolingo plans to replace contractors with AI. Target, 1,800 people. Paramount, 1,000. Intel, 24,000. Nestle, 16,000. All announced reductions. And so some of this is a bit misleading because these companies went on a hiring spree after the pandemic, but these moves are still pretty big. And as the market normalizes, more workers are now moving down the ladder. 17% of workers who change employer saw a pay cut in 2024. That's up from 15% in 2023. The share of job changers taking a pay cut was even higher for tech, 18%, managers 22%, and managers transitioning to individual contributor roles was 32%. So look, the hard part is who's next. So I have some companies that I think are going to announce multi-thousand-person layoffs. And I did a I spent some time on this. Etsy, Pinterest, Apple, Airbnb, PayPal, and HubSpot. I believe, and this is my prediction along with a raft of other information age darlings, are going to announce 1 to 10 to 15 person layoffs in the next 90 days.

Kara Swisher: Oh, wow. That's a big one. In that vein, I'm going to have to be laying you off, Scott.

Scott Galloway: I knew it was coming.

Kara Swisher: I just replaced you with Scott AI.

Scott Galloway: I knew it was coming. Yeah, that's a good one. I like that. I love that. That's a great one. That's a great prediction. And just to add on this, this has real societal implications because unfortunately, what you have is one of the greatest threats to democracies right now is that the ratio of young people who are productive and pay more than their fair share of taxes is getting flipped upside down in terms of its ratio to old people who are unproductive and don't pay their fair share. And without, it used to be 12 to 1 workers to Social Security recipients. Now it's 3 to 1. And if it goes much lower than that, we're not going to have the money. 40% of our entire budget now goes to payments for seniors. And unfortunately, our tax code encourages in our stock market, which drives everything, is now encouraging people to hire robots, not people. And the thing about robots, Kara, they don't pay Social Security or payroll taxes.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, we're going to tax them. We've got to tax them. We've got to tax the robots. That was a Bill Gates idea. Can I just say, in this nature of what you're saying, is I sent Alex, Alex is doing great in school and he's a mechanical engineer. I think he'll be just fine. But I sent him the note about GM laying off a whole bunch of people, too, in the EV area, largely because of the tax credits, etc. He goes, I love how all young people are being out-competed by experienced workers and AI, so there is a zero opportunity for even the most qualified. Do you think we are totally cooked as a generation? Which was an interesting, and he'll do fine is the thing. But it was an interesting thing for him to write me, I thought.

Scott Galloway: Yeah, but this is, what you have is labor and opportunity and equality. And that is, your son is frighteningly bright. He's big, he's strong. And he's going to graduate from Michigan with a degree in computer science.

Kara Swisher: No, it's mechanical engineering.

Scott Galloway: Okay, even better. Which basically means when you show up from Michigan with a degree in mechanical engineering, I don't care if you're interviewing at Warner Brothers or Google, they just want you.

Kara Swisher: Yeah.

Scott Galloway: Because the assumption is this kid is really curious and really smart and really hardworking. There's no way of faking mechanical engineering at Michigan. There's no way of them going to go, oh, he's a NEPO baby. His classes are so hard. He's a NEPO baby. I recognize that name. But he's clearly one of these kids who, despite being born a NEPO baby, is really hardworking and really smart.

Kara Swisher: Let me tell you, I don't help him at all. He's so brilliant. But I'm just saying, but that's his mentality. Like, you know what I mean? Like, a lot of younger people, even someone as qualified as Alex, is worried. They're worried.

Scott Galloway: But this is the reality. A kid like that garners a disproportionate amount of wealth at a young age. There's more opportunity for, Alex is in the 1%. There's never been a better time to be a 20 or 22-year-old in the top 1%. There's never been a worse time to be in the bottom 90. And that is the kids who come out of a decent school, but not a great school, but had a lot of student debt and are good, but not great. A lot of us, I would have been fucked. I was not especially impressive at 22. And I got a job at Morgan Stanley because I lied about my grades and talked my way and I'm a good interview and I rode crew and the guy who ran the fixed income department rode crew. But in this age, if you don't have your shit together, if you're not one of the top 1%, and the problem is we all delude ourselves into thinking our kids are in the top 1% and I can prove to every parent 99% of our children are not in the top 1%. And so the inequality, I say this in my class, it's never been easier to be a billionaire. I say, look around. My classes are 160 kids. Two or three of you are going to be billionaires through tech, alternative investments. I said, but unfortunately, there's probably about 10 or 15 of you who are going to be living with your parents at 30.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's hope Alex is one of those billionaires because then I will live high on the hog. I go to Korea a lot for treatments. He promised me he'd buy me a house with a roller coaster if he got really rich, which I'm very excited for. I was not expecting that. Anyway, we have to move on because guess what? I'm going to be interviewing Scott Galloway really soon. That's right. For On. Talk about his book. Anyway, we want to hear from you. Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT. Elsewhere in the Kara and Scott universe. Gosh, you interviewed someone you made fun of on 60 Minutes recently.

Scott Galloway: This week on Profiteer Markets, Scott spoke with Andrew Ross Sorkin about his new book, 1929, Inside the Greatest Crash in the Wall.

Kara Swisher: I was making fun of Leslie Stahl, not Andrew.

Scott Galloway: Well, all right, Wall Street history and how it shattered a nation. Let's listen to a clip from our favorite Canadian.

[Clip plays]

Andrew Ross Sorkin: The truth is that you know over time the market goes up. You know a lot of people by the way since this book came out they said, oh, Andrew, you know, you're calling for a crash. It's all going to end terribly. What are you saying? And the truth is that you can have all the Cassandras in the room, you know, saying the sky is going to fall. But over time, things have gone up. And I do think that's worth noting, because being a professional optimist has been a better business than being a professional skeptic, again, over time.

Kara Swisher: Covering his ass on that one.

Scott Galloway: He's actually pretty bold, though. He's not afraid to make statements about CNBC.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, no, I love CNBC. First, I want Andrew to run for mayor of New York. And two, I want Andrew to be the trustee for my estate. I think he's just such an honorable, smart, nice man. It's a great book. I have it. It's really terrific, actually. I love those historical books. And he's a, we love Andrew. It took him seven years. We love you. We want you to father all our children.

Scott Galloway: Well, imagine he does all this while maintaining a status as an undercover operative for the Canadian intelligence unit.

Kara Swisher: That's correct.

Scott Galloway: I mean, it's really impressive he's able to balance all this.

Kara Swisher: Yeah. Yep. And he does all the pickup and drop off at preschool. Anyway, speaking of Canada, we're going on tour. We are sold out in Toronto, Boston, and San Francisco. But we still have just, I think, a few tickets in D.C., not very many. Some in New York, it's a big place, and L.A. and Chicago. Please visit pivottour.com for tickets, especially you, Chicago. It's a very big venue. We've got a big venue because you're such big-shouldered people. But come see us there. Okay, that's the show. Thanks for listening to Pivot. And be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We'll be back next week. Scott, read us out.

Scott Galloway: Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin, and Kate Gallagher. Ernie and Todd engineered this episode. Manala Moreno edited the video. Thanks also to Drew Burrows, Miss Avere on Dan Shalon, Nishat Kharos, Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Make sure to follow Pivot on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com slash pod. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Kara, I'll see you in a few hours.