Meta's $2B Manus Acquisition Falls Through

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to the podcast today. I have some exciting news, and aside from the fact that Meta is unwinding their $2 billion Manus acquisition, I have some even more exciting personal news, and that is that last week, my wife and I welcomed our newest member of the family. We had a healthy baby boy, his name is Clay, and it is absolutely exciting in our household. So if you're wondering why my podcast posting hasn't been super consistent over the last week, and maybe for the next week or two, it might be a little spotty, I'll do my best, but I'm spending a lot of time snuggling that little guy. Currently, him and mom are sleeping, so I figured this would be a good time to get a podcast episode out. But everything went incredibly well with the birth. Everyone is healthy and happy and doing great and growing. He's pooping lots, so we're pretty happy. He's now five days old. This year, I turned 30 and this is our fourth kid. So we definitely have our hands full, but we feel super blessed. I always tell everyone to have as many kids as you can as soon as possible. They are the best thing about life. Okay, let's talk about what's going on in the news. I mentioned Meta unwinding this $2 billion Manus acquisition. This is because Beijing told them that they had to divest it. By this point, we've all seen the headlines that Anthropics Fable 5 got banned over the weekend and polled, so you no longer get access to that. But it turns out that an Amazon security paper is what triggered the White House banning this. We'll get into that. Apple's Craig Fredgerski says that the new Siri is going to refuse romantic role play. We're going to talk a little bit about where Siri is going in the future and what it can and can't be used for. Jeff Bezos' Prometheus company has just raised $14 billion at a $41 billion valuation for physical AI. There's some interesting things being built there. The White House says they suspect a China-linked group accessed Anthropics' Mythos model. This isn't even their Fable 5 This is their Mythos model. There's some other drama falling out from there. The first thing we want to get into is the Meta story. This is absolutely crazy. I mean, this was a $2 billion acquisition. What was interesting, just for like two seconds of context on the story, basically, it was started in China. It had a completely different name. It was like Butterfly or something like that. Then they moved it to Singapore, and I believe the CEO and the CTO were still stuck in China, although they moved the whole team to Singapore, and then changed the name, and it scaled, became incredibly popular. Meta acquired it because they can acquire a company out of Singapore, but I think because the CEO and the CTO were still locked down in China, like they were banned from leaving. This is how they got them to unwind the deal by holding them hostage. It's interesting because in this particular case, when they first came out with the news telling Meta to unwind the acquisition, Meta said, we believe we have legally acquired it, we're allowed to do this, we're going to discuss this in court with them.
Meta is a company that is banned in China, like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, all of their different social media platforms are banned in China because China censors the Internet and stuff.
It's interesting that they still are unwinding this deal, even though Beijing doesn't really have that much, you would assume they don't have that much sway over Meta. They can't really tell Meta what to do.
They can't blackmail them like, hey, we're going to ban your other apps. They don't have as much leverage. It's interesting to me that they're still unwinding this deal. I'm assuming it probably has something to do with holding their co-founders hostage over there and probably some other things.
The co-founders are in preliminary talks to raise about a billion dollars to buy the company back from Meta. So I guess this is the way that they want to do it is, you know, Meta bought this for $2 billion, but I think China's like, okay, fine, look, we'll basically let them raise money elsewhere and pay back Meta. So I'm curious to see how that goes. Although from what I'm seeing, they're in preliminary talks to raise a billion dollars, and Meta bought it for $2 billion. So I wonder if Meta is going to just straight up lose money or how this whole thing will work. Meta has cut Manus off from their internal systems, they're blocking employees from using Manus tools. Now what's interesting is I actually have a friend that works in advertising, and he works in a marketing firm that does Facebook ads. And he was telling me that he loves Manus, it does a lot of stuff inside of his company, it's been super useful. And so it's interesting to me that once this is getting rolled back, he's going to get cut off from that. Now what I will say is I feel like this actually isn't that terrible of a thing for Meta, and I think it is a pretty terrible thing for Manus in my humble opinion, because Claude Cowork, even my friend that works doing a lot of stuff inside of Facebook ads, he's like, yeah, I use Manus for these three things because it has access to these three files, but then I just plug it into Cowork and it gives me more stuff and it actually does more of the doing for me. So what's interesting is I think Cowork is much more powerful. I think Meta could build a Manus clone or Cowork clone themselves. They could build that tool. I'm not sure if they will because I'm not sure what their strategy is. That's kind of just a more general purpose, whereas they kind of bought something that they could plug straight into Facebook ads and they kind of had a good use case there. So I'll be curious to see what they do, although Manus was for kind of general purpose as well. So I'll be curious to see if Facebook rolls out their own version.