Does OpenAI Need a Bailout? Mamdani Wins, Socialism Rising, Filibuster Nuclear Option

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
Brad Gerstner is here joining us, hot after crashing the stock market and popping the AI bubble. Well done, Brad, when we get into it. All of our portfolios, thank you, rolled down 15% this week.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:14)
Can we ask OpenAI to just put a moratorium on any more public statements or appearances for another couple of months?

**Jason Calacanis** (0:21)
Good job, Brad. You decided you'd be a podcaster. You're like, hey, let me ask a couple of hard questions here, and you pop the AI bubble.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:29)
Yeah, something like that.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:30)
Do as I say, not as I do.

**David Sacks** (0:49)
Are we getting into it? Because I think it is interesting, actually.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:51)
It's super interesting. Super interesting. Let's get into it.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:54)
Sam, of course, if you're not in the industry, Sam Altman appeared on the fabulous BG2 podcast last Friday, and it got a little frisky when our fifth bestie here asked what I thought was a completely legitimate mundane question. Hey, you're making 13 billion.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:18)
It's actually a softball question, to be honest.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:20)
It was an underhanded pitch.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:22)
The way that it was asked, I think you did a very reasonable job of asking a good question in a very fair way.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:27)
Let's just show this clip here, and then I want to go behind the pod with you, Brad.

**Brad Gerstner** (1:32)
I think the single biggest question I've heard all week and hanging over the market is, how can a company with 13 billion in revenues make 1.4 trillion of spend commitments? You've heard the criticism, Sam.

**Sam Altman** (1:48)
We're doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer.
I just, enough. I think there's a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares. I don't think you want to sell it.

**Brad Gerstner** (2:03)
Including myself.

**Sam Altman** (2:04)
I think there's a lot of people who talk with a lot of breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever, that would be thrilled to buy shares. So I think we could sell your shares or anybody else's to some of the people who are making the most noise on Twitter, whatever, about this very quickly. We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. Revenue is growing steeply. We are taking a forward bet that it's going to continue to grow. There are not many times that I want to be a public company, but one of the rare times it's appealing is when those people are writing these ridiculous, open AI is about to go out of business and whatever. I would love to tell them they could just short the stock, and I would love to see them get burned on that.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:39)
So Brad, you asked, I think, like Chamath and I were just saying, a pretty mundane question. You said it very nicely.
I guess we could give Sam a little bit of grace. I don't know if he was being a little cheeky or maybe he's tired of answering the question, but the internet took this and ran with it in a very viral way that he was angry and he was hostile. How did you take it?

**Brad Gerstner** (3:04)
That's the interesting thing, right? I mean, listen, we bust each other's chops all the time. We get feisty with one another. Sometimes it runs amok. Like we don't know if somebody's being serious or not serious.
And, you know, Sam and I had a good laugh after, you know, I think Sam was he was feisty. But I think he also intended it as a joke. He knows that I don't want to sell my shares. He knows that I would like to buy more shares in the company, et cetera. But I think the reason that it went so viral is because it is a super important question. People are really nervous. They're wondering, are we walking in to an AI bubble? Like, how can these huge numbers? How can you be talking about 1.4 trillion in spending when you have gap revenue that's been reported to 13 billion this year? So I was a little disappointed, and I tweeted about this afterwards, that the feistiness got in the way of the answer. But if you listen to his words during the rest of the segment, he basically said, listen, we think we're going to have 100 billion in revenues over the course of the next couple years. And Jay Cali sent the team a chart that basically just shows the information's forecast for what OpenAI and Anthropics revenues are going to be over the course of the next several years. And like the information is reporting that their internal numbers are both over 100, you know, billion dollars.