Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What does James Murdoch's acquisition of Vox Media signify for digital media?
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Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Cara Swisher.
And I'm Scott Galloway.
Scott, things are happening at Vox Media. We're going to do something a little different today and start with a voicemail from a listener who's going to explain the situation. Let's play a clip.
All right.
Hi, after listening to Pivot Today, I saw that James Murdoch is buying part of Vox Media, and I was curious how that might change the freedom you guys have on your various podcasts. Anyway, love your shows.
Just finish Burn Book and listen to all your podcasts. Keep up the good work. Jenny from Texas.
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Chapter 3: How does SpaceX's IPO filing raise concerns about its valuation?
CNET lost 94% of its value. Vice was, I think, basically went bankrupt but sold some assets. It's down at least 93%. Mashable off 80%. I mean, just on and on and on and on. Tumblr, my favorite, 1.1 billion to 3 million.
If you're an investor in Union Square Ventures, thank God that the guy with the Caesar's haircut, I forget his name, was able to convince probably one of the weaker CEOs in digital history to buy his bag of shit for 1.1 billion, Tumblr.
That was Marissa Mayer at Yahoo.
Marissa Mayer, right. So effectively, this is just not worked out. Now, Jim, our guy who we like, has always said, Scott, be honest, and always told us to be honest, so let me be honest. They spent a lot of money to create a company with negative synergy. There's some real assets there. New York Magazine is a trophy iconic asset.
The sites themselves, the digital assets, actually do pretty well financially. But again, see above, they're swimming upstream against giants. And then the smaller division that started out as an afterthought has become the growth engine and the crown jewel.
And Jim is a smart guy and realized that the hole was less than the sum of its parts and basically decided to break them up into what was going to be three buckets. But my understanding is—and I do not have inside information here, and I don't want it—
is that Jim Murdoch or James Murdoch, who wants to be in the media business, said, I'll take New York Magazine because I think he likes it and it's an iconic asset. And what I really want is the podcast network, which is growing. I'll stop there. Where did I get that right or wrong?
No, you got that all right. And I think Jim, of all of them, has cannily moved that into a space. Obviously, BuzzFeed, just bought by Byron Allen. You know, they've all, Vice has had a much less happy, You know, Mike, I don't know where that went. Like, there were a lot of them, and it was very exciting.
And one of the reasons I sold my tiny little site to Vox many years ago, Recode, was because they were ridiculously priced and were sort of pricing me at. I was even a smaller minnow. And so when I got to Vox, I understood the ad market was really a problem here, although we did great—
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Chapter 4: What are Jeff Bezos's views on income tax and his own tax contributions?
My second one was that picture of Jim Bancroft and James Murdoch, where it looks like the 30-year reunion of Abercrombie and Fitch. They're both very handsome. They're very handsome. And I wrote, Romeo and Michelle's high school reunion, too. Post-transition. That one I'm especially proud of.
Oh, okay. Last one.
What was my third one? Oh, God. I wrote something about, I don't know, late, late stage capitalism. But anyways, and then I started doing it and I'm sitting there in the park and I'm like, Do I really need to be an asshole?
Not today.
Yeah, tomorrow. Tomorrow. I'm like, give them their moment. Give them their moment. Give them their moment.
We'll be an asshole later.
Before we start making their lives difficult. No. You know what?
Let me just end this. We've got to end this. So two things. Jim Beckham, he said, we can say whatever we want. I don't see that problem from James Murdoch or Catherine Murdoch at all. They might be irritated by us, but there's going to be no change in that. And let me be, I hate to say this, but Rupert Murdoch never asked me to change a thing.
Like, that is one thing I never experienced when I worked at the Wall Street. I just don't, I think he's a heinous piece of, I think he's heinous the way he's done Fox News and the other stuff, but, and has degraded democracy quite a bit. But he's not, James is not him. And so, but that said, Murdoch never meddled in my stuff, and he certainly could have. for my entire time there.
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Chapter 5: How is Mark Cuban collaborating with Trump on drug prices?
That guy gets a lot of credit for using this number because even the stuff they're promising seems problematic. But he hasn't done it before. He just moves from one lily pad to the other in terms of, from Tesla to this. But The big winner in this that I read is Starlink does great. The others, Grok and the Rocket Company is not so much. Go for it.
I got a lot.
Okay, good. I can't wait. I'm excited.
Yeah, what was... Spit it out, Scott. At 3 a.m., I was reading the S-1. I know you were. What were you doing? So first off, I have some notes here. The first 14 pages of the S-1 are pictures of rockets. AI is mentioned 1,200 times in the S-1. There are 277 pages of the perspectives. For context, it's longer than the Great Gatsby and the Catcher in the Rye. And some direct quotes from the filing.
These are direct quotes. We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs. Well, thank God you're here, Elon. For decades, a reality where humanity travels between the planets and the stars has felt tantalizingly close, but still locked in the pages and screens of science fiction.
The Sun contains approximately 99.8% of the solar system's energy and, as a result, we believe it is the only truly scalable solution to terrestrial energy constraints in the age of AI. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. All right, hold on.
Talk about woke.
We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding, space-faring civilization.
Can you use that in a sexy voice, please?
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Chapter 6: What insights can we gather from Nvidia's recent earnings report?
Well, let's just talk about SpaceX, the best business. It's growing 20% a year and is trying to go out at 100 times revenue. When Google went public, it was growing 240% a year and went out at 10 times revenues. So just back to XAI, XAI is losing money on the way to losing more money. And in Q12, 2026 alone, the net loss of 4.3 billion on 4.7 billion in revenue.
Total CapEx, 10.1 billion in 90 days, 7.8 billion of that for AI. Cash on the balance sheet cratered from 25 billion to 16 billion in just three months. They burned 9 billion in cash in a single quarter. That's $100 million a day. That's not investing in the future. It's the future building you in advance.
Right. This anthropic thing is critical. Do you think he's moving into being the infrastructure player rather than the AI player here?
No. It's him having spent too much capex thinking that... X AI, his AI would need it. And he woke up and realized he didn't. It's like this has happened to me a million. Every time I start a company, I raise too much fucking money. I go get a giant office space in Soho. And before I know it, I'm renting it out to a bunch of shitty startups to try and recoup some of the capital.
That's what happened here. Total debt on the balance sheet is $29 billion.
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Chapter 7: What predictions are made about the future of SpaceX's valuation?
So just for context, that's more debt than it's on the Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and American Airlines combined with all their planes. And they carry passengers. SpaceX has Starship, which has cost over $15 billion in development and is still on its 12th test mission.
So, look, the bottom line, you're being asked to pay $1.75 trillion for a great satellite internet company, a rocket business that loses money, an AI product losing $6 billion a year and falling further behind its competitors that has $29 billion in debt, and a CEO who—and this is my favorite part of the filing— purchased $131 million of his own recalled Cybertrucks with company cash.
He's propping up Tesla. Propping up Tesla.
That's right. So in sum, Starlink is the golden goose, an amazing company. Everything else is Elon's hobbies. And at this valuation, you're paying full price for all of them. So, you know, Snow White is fucking hot, but you gotta, if you marry her, you're taking on these little non-value add weirdos.
This is, so this company, you have an amazing company buried in all of these other money furnaces. Right. And he's asking you to pay essentially a hundred times revenue.
And people will. So talk about that because look, it is not, I read it. I'm like, wow, this is not a, There's one good business in there, right? Really good business. And by the way, easy to disrupt that business. People will come into this business and there'll be more competitors.
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Chapter 8: How does the podcast address the implications of billionaire actions on public perception?
And so that's my worry about Starlink. It's like, sure, he has the win for today. It doesn't mean he will have the win forever, just like Tesla. The second thing is... Well, it doesn't matter because people will just buy into this and run it up because it's him. And these promises that you, which you left out a little bit here is there's going to be all these robots in your home.
There's going to be, he made a lot of promises in this, in this prospectus too, about the future. Like you have to assume he's going to kill it in robots. And by the way, I have heard from many people, his robot technology is really advanced, but it has to get to people, right? It's got to, it's got to get to people. It's
And so just it feels very hand-wavy, this entire thing, but I don't think it's going to matter. I mean, be a Wall Street person and say, you know, what would you do as an investor?
You might want to play it for the pop, but I actually think that there's going to be a ton of people and analysts that will look at this thing. The more scrutiny on this thing, the worse it's going to be for the IPO. And does it go out at 1.8 trillion? I wouldn't be surprised if the bankers try and manufacture scarcity and it gets a small pop.
But I think by the end of the year, it's well below a trillion dollars. There's just no there's no way to justify this thing as a cash incinerator. And also certain components of the business feel very WeWork-y in the fact that as they grow, they burn more cash. There's no operating leverage.
Even with this entropic deal, because that's all he can sell. It's like he's selling the chairs or something, right?
Yeah. He built out infrastructure that he doesn't need because his AI is not growing the way he thought.
Right, exactly. And he's got it. He's got this colossus. And, of course, he's facing lawsuits all over the place because he's going to buy more of these methane engines. And trust me that they're going to put a stop to that eventually. So how would you do it here? People are listening. What would you do here?
I won't tell you what to do because I have been wrong about Tesla. I thought Tesla was a sell in 2017, and it's gone up 8x.
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