Ed Elson

I felt like Mick Jagger out with a boy band.

Yeah.

Out with NSYNC when they were still in high school.

What was the highlight for you of the tour?

Well, we'll get to that.

I just loved reading this.

I think it's such corporate genius.

And a tech executive that doesn't get her due is the CFO of Alphabet, Ruth Peratt.

So first off, this is going to be the largest equity offering in history to date, unless, I don't know, one of the big three, the other three going out raises more money.

And it's kind of the story that, or the news story so far has been, if Alphabet needs to tap

the markets for additional capital with the kind of cash generative juggernaut it is, it's kind of like Warren Buffett taking out a mortgage.

It just gives you a sense for how thirsty this capex is or how much

how much is required to keep up.

Now, I would argue that's not this.

I think they could fund this off their balance sheet.

My sense is that a CFO's job is to find the cheapest capital possible and use that capital as a weapon to pull ahead of everybody else.

That's their job.

How do we raise more money less expensively than everybody else?

And I think what Ruth Peratt or

and what I believe is everyone else, Microsoft, NVIDIA, CoreWeave, Apple may do the same thing, is they're like, okay, look at the valuations that are being paid for, supposedly might be paid for, I'll call them the big three, Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX.