Bezos' $100B AI Plan, Nvida Chip Smuggling, The Mansion Section | Diet TBPN

**John Coogan** (0:00)
First, I wanted to chat more about the breaking news from yesterday. Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100 billion for an AI manufacturing fund. There was a funny post that was like, he has $200 billion, why does he need to raise more money?

**Jordi Hays** (0:15)
No conviction? No conviction?

**John Coogan** (0:18)
Oh, yeah.

**Jordi Hays** (0:19)
It was funny. This broke containment and got into the anti-capitalist part of acts and they were like, wait, why are you asking people for money? You have all the money.

**John Coogan** (0:31)
Yeah.

**Jordi Hays** (0:31)
He wants to let other people in on the action.

**John Coogan** (0:33)
Well, I do wonder what his GP commit will be.

**Jordi Hays** (0:36)
That's what I was saying yesterday. I was like, I would expect him to be like, yeah, I'm good for 20

**John Coogan** (0:40)
20 or 30 or something like that.

**Jordi Hays** (0:42)
I don't know.

**John Coogan** (0:42)
Maybe he'll go even longer. But in general, I think the idea of going around the globe, because he's an international person at this point, hoovering up money from all over different sovereign wealth funds and then deploying that to help rebuild the American manufacturing base is a good thing. I wrote about it today in the newsletter, tbpn.com, and I also tried to do some searching and think about like, what do you actually buy for $100 billion? What does a portfolio look like if it's a private equity style roll up? If you're just taking out the market caps and you're assuming the debt and continue to operate the business, but then bring more efficiency to bear, what are some of the top options? What do some of the options look like?

**Jordi Hays** (1:24)
The other thing is I saw a very viral post about someone that seemingly read the headline and thought, don't you have enough money already to buy all these companies and fire them? They saw automation and they just assumed job loss. And when I look at this, I'm like, OK, if he's successful, we will actually start adding a bunch of new manufacturing jobs which we've been shedding over the last year.

**John Coogan** (1:48)
Yeah, exactly. So headline number is funny. If he had done 99 billion or 101 billion, I don't think people would be making as many SoftBank comparisons. But of course, as soon as you hear $100 billion for a mega fund, you instantly think it's SoftBank. He's got vision. It's a vision fund for America. I like the idea of an American SoftBank, of an American Vision Fund. So I'm generally pro. But of course, people are going to make comparisons to SoftBank, which has had some huge winners and a few black eyes. Moss is a high vol guy. He's been the world's richest man briefly during the.com boom. It was reported that he was worth more than Bill Gates. It was pretty temporary, unclear exactly how much. Of course, there was no liquidity at the time. But he's also held the crown for the man who lost the most money in human history after losing $76 billion in two years.
You're supposed to do the wham-wham for that. But he made it all back.

**Jordi Hays** (2:43)
I was preemptively hitting it.

**John Coogan** (2:44)
OK, yeah, yeah, he did make it all back. He's made almost $100 billion twice. I think maybe there was a moment when he had the title of making $100 billion twice. One on Alibaba and then the second one on Arm. He's made money on NVIDIA and lots of other things. The idea of an American soft bank, especially one focused on revitalizing American manufacturing, I like that idea. There are a million reasons why this is an important project. Job creation, economic independence, national security.
You might just get more cool stuff. Like as manufacturing gets cheaper, like the tools that you use, the cars that you drive, the washing machine in your home, the tires on your cars. All these different things get better, not just cheaper, but actually unlock new capabilities and new things that people enjoy. So I'm in favor of more manufacturing, more economic development basically. So the question about Jeff Bezos' role. He's a great operator and I think he's the right person to take the reins and actually deliver here. So like Masa, Jeff Bezos has been through the ups and downs of the dotcom boom and bust. At one point, Jeff Bezos lost 85 percent of his net worth in like two years.

**Jordi Hays** (3:51)
But he made it back.

**John Coogan** (3:52)
He did make it back and more. He was worth like eight or nine billion and got down to his last one billion basically because of the stock drop in Amazon. But he not only kept Amazon alive, which I think everyone knows that Amazon went up during the dotcom bubble, and then crashed, and then built back up. But he also kept Blue Origin alive during that time, because he's founded Blue Origin in 2000 Wow. Before the crash.