Philippe Laffont
speaker
118 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Philippe Laffont’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So I think that's what's going on.
Yeah. Dave, in fact, a couple of things I was wondering your opinion on is one, I was with this retailer, gigantic retailer in the US. And there's this sort of false narrative that when you have tariffs, like 100% of tariffs are going to get passed through in pricing and therefore tariff is like a tax, right? That retailer told us that they think only about 50%
of the tariff gets passed in pricing. So I sort of agree with you. There is going to be a net net positive and that retailers have way to work things around and stuff like that. I would also say today, post this announcement, the market's very strong. And initially I was a little bit surprised because we're taxing 10%. not only the most friendly country, but one where we actually have a surplus.
So it's like, if it's 10% when we have a surplus, what is it when we have a deficit? But on the other hand, the market is speaking as we speak. And I also think that there were a lot of announcements that seemed to make it like, hey, we're going to make a deal with China. We want China to do well, but we need to do well too. It seems to me that at some point,
Maybe there'll be a bit more of a win-win versus such an acrimonious, and maybe that's why the market's reacting a little bit more positively.
You know, when you ask a tech investor for his opinion on macro, this is the beginning of the end, right? I think I've predicted seven of the last three recessions. My track record is pretty weak.
I think for tech guys, by and large, a lot of the tech is in services. So that's out of the picture for now. But there's obviously going to be a lot of tariffs for semis and then for the assembling of the motherboards into computers. So those are the two key areas. And one of the difficulties is we have these sort of base tariffs, but we also have these sector tariffs. And we've had sector tariffs
In cars, 25%. There's rumored to be sector tariffs in pharma that could come out next week. And there's also been potential sector tariffs, you know, in semis. So it's been pretty disruptive. And I don't really know how to think about it. And I think nobody knew, which is why the market just took a 25% peak to trough down. And then after that, we learned, well, the government is actually smarter.
One of the things that I love to see is all these executives that get to come to also plead their case in Washington. And maybe that was never the case, you know, a few months ago. And there seems to at least be a feedback loop. Okay, we do something, we see what breaks, we listen, we readjust and stuff like that. But to be honest, I don't really know how it's gonna play out.
I sort of was very conservative for a period of time, just waiting. And then to me, what happened last week with Microsoft saying that like AI had really picked up, that was like a really big deal. And I almost like coined it in my own mind, like tokens greater, greater than tariffs. And I think like one of the reasons why the market's moving up to right now- Just hold on, hold on.
What do you mean by that?
Tokens, I don't know. I put the greater, greater sign. Tokens are much greater than tariffs. Tokens, you mean AI tokens? AI tokens, yeah. So I sort of view tokens, I don't really understand as well as Dave for sure, all the AI models and stuff like that. But I sort of view tokens to an AI model is like fuel to a car or electricity to a computer, right?
And Microsoft said that in their Q1, they processed 100 trillion tokens, 50 trillion alone in March. And so the tokens are really going basically vertical, which is probably because of these reasoning engines, which are much more sophisticated and require more compute power. And I think the market, it's a bit unfair for Trump, but the market did not just go down because of tariffs.
If you remember, it went down because people freaked out, we're in an AI bubble, AI is not really working, what's the ROI on AI? That was maybe, I don't know, half, a third to a half of the problem. And I think what Microsoft said is like,
capex is going up and everybody has a gigantic shortage of chips right now that i know for sure from all of our private companies public companies there's a shortage of chip a shortage of compute power and so i think that's also maybe why the market's going up and so for me it was sort of a way emotionally i got so drained with the tariffs and thinking about tariffs and having to think about something i don't really understand and i feel now there's a chance
When you look at the next year or two, at some point, tariffs goes away. Trump makes this big deal with deregulation. The tax breaks sort of cancel out the tariffs. We move on and what are we left with? We're left with tokens. And I think the world of tokens, for me, I've been doing this for 35 years. It's maybe the most exciting trend and thing that I've seen.
And all these people that say, oh, this is the end of American exceptionalism. I almost wanted to say, no, you guys are wrong. This is the beginning of American exceptionalism because we've got Wall Street, we've got Silicon Valley, and we still got a pretty good government that at least tries to get stuff done. So I'm pretty excited by that.
Well, I think you guys have summarized the situation pretty well. I would just add just a couple of small things. One is the market cap of Google is like $1.8 trillion and that of ChatGPT is, let's say, $300. So Google is worth $600. chat GPT and is that the correct ratio into the future or not? The second one is I was around, sadly, in the times of the yellow pages.
And I remember when the yellow pages, the way you go somewhere to bounce and go somewhere else. And basically these yellow links got replaced by the blue link and the yellow page companies went away. Now, part of the reason they went away is they were very levered. Google has no leverage, sits on a lot of cash and Imagine what someone like Elon would do if he had to re-engineer Google.
I think it's a much larger company, let's say, than Twitter. So the part that I'm wondering about, I haven't made an opinion on Google, is like, hey, is this the next IBM? You're going to stick around for a really, really long time, but you're just not going to be a company growing as fast as you used to, and maybe there'll be little growth, and you just sort of struggle ahead.
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