Stargate, Executive Orders, TikTok, DOGE, Public Valuations | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner

**Brad Gerstner** (0:00)
Elon is 100% right. Nobody has $500 billion. In fact, nobody has $100 billion to contribute to this on day one. Hey, man, great to see you.

**Bill Gurley** (0:24)
Good to see you.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:25)
I mean, never a dull moment. Incredible.

**Bill Gurley** (0:29)
This goes well beyond being a dull moment. I think we have a year worth of activity in about 48 hours this week.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:38)
I had an amazing weekend in DC. There was a tremendous amount of optimism. I've been saying to you and our friend group that I remember during Trump 1 in 2016 I mean, every morning you woke up, you were holding your breath at what had changed since the night before. It was really the first administration that lived on Twitter. Here we are again. In some ways, the last year certainly, I feel like not a lot was going on in the world. I wasn't stressing out every morning that I woke up. Man, this administration has kicked off with a bang, and a major, major bang at the end of the day yesterday with Stargate, which we're going to talk a lot about today. This morning, I have to say, even for those of us who are fascinated by the back and forth in Silicon Valley, Bill, the back and forth this morning among perhaps the most seminal figures in Silicon Valley, Elon, Larry Ellison, Sacha Nadella, Sam Altman, etc. over what is and what is not going on with Stargate, is truly a situation where I think in some ways, facts are more intriguing than fiction. But why don't we start off by you just level setting for folks. There was a huge announcement at the White House yesterday with Larry Ellison, Sam Altman, Massa Sun, and President Trump. Talk to us about what was announced.

**Bill Gurley** (2:04)
Yeah. Maybe I'll do it in how it rolled over me. This is the day after the inauguration and the kind of high-profile performance Trump had with the EO signing, and rumors, I don't know, they started flipping out on Twitter or I don't know where, maybe I saw it on the TV, but there was going to be a big press conference, and it revolved around this thing called Stargate. Reminding everyone, Sam Altman at Open Eye had been talking about the concept of Stargate for a while now.
He had suggested maybe him and Microsoft were going to do it. I think that's important. We can dive into that later, that it's the same name that had been thrown around. I don't think there was ever any verification from Microsoft that they were in on the Stargate project, but clearly this is something Sam's been thinking about for some time. And so it was supposed to happen at four. I think they finally started at 5.3 or something. So it was like 90 minutes late. And then this door opens and Trump comes in, and then Masa San representing SoftBank, Larry Ellison representing Oracle and Sam representing OpenAI. It looked a little haphazard. It looked like it had been thrown together kind of quickly. And clearly one of the... My interpretation, one of the reasons that it might have been thrown together quickly is Trump was looking to show that he was having quick momentum right out of the gate in terms of having an impact. And the things he said would suggest that that was part of the reasoning for doing this now and so quickly. I think if you just go to like the post that OpenAI put out, it's probably got the most detail. This thing's lacking in quite a bit of detail, which is why there's so much speculation. It says the Stargate Project is a new company. So even that, I think, is in question. So that's going to be a new corporate entity which intends to invest 500 billion over the next four years, which I guess Microsoft's the highest right now at 80 billion a year. So this would be 125 billion a year if they met that commitment or target. They says we will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. There's a lot of talk of American leadership. There's talk of this being in America. It says the initial equity funders in StarGator, SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX.
Maybe you can tell our listeners who MGX is in a minute. It says SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masa-san will be chairman and it lists key initial technology partners ARM, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI. Yeah, so I'd say that's the gist of it. I mean, it sounds to me like maybe an even better funded version of CoreWeave, but there's a lot I don't know. I'm asking questions like a lot of other people. How do you see it?