Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads.
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Shorter days.
The Seahawks are showing their private equity ownership.
Our next CAPEX numbers and Congressional hearings are months away.
Ennui.
News
Now Cancel ByteDance
The flow of GPUs to Chinese companies would be an excellent topic for Congressional investigation. First witness: Oracle.
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Useful Idiots, Fellow Travelers and Unregistered Foreign Agents: Oracle Part II, Oracle, You May Not Be Interested in Geopolitics, But Geopolitics is Interested in You
Cybertruck Elegy
As the saying goes, never bet against Elon: Cybertruck, a million cybercabs on the roads, DOGE cutting $2 trillion from the Federal budget, Senator Paxton…
Maybe deleting some Tweets will save Elon from Congressional appearances.
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Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk, Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk: Just a Matter of Life and Death, Space (Twitter IPO Index) Jam, Jammed, Space Twitter: A Boon for Direct Indexing?, Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk: Space Twitter S-1 Edition, The Price-to-Elon Ratio, Follow the CAPEX: Space Twitter, Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk, I was beaten to dubbing it Space Twitter, The great Matt Levine on Space Twitter, Useful Idiots, Fellow Travelers and Unregistered Foreign Agents: Elon Musk Part II, Elon/Twitter
Private Equity in Action: Apollo (and Elon)
Private equity is defined by pouring more money into opportunities than they can sustain and cosplaying as “operators”. Needless to say, they’re all over the AI trade:
Last week, SpaceX’s announcement that it would lease $40 billion worth of Nvidia Vera Rubin chips was a further signal of Elon Musk’s grand ambitions in the AI race. The deal also underscores the arrival of a new big player in that competition: Apollo Global Management, a 36-year-old private equity giant.
In the deal with SpaceX, Apollo will purchase the chips through a subsidiary, then lease them to Musk’s company. The arrangement follows a supersized Apollo deal announced in June, one that also involves Broadcom and Blackstone, another large money management firm: a $35 billion fundraising for Apollo to buy Google’s tensor processing units and lease them to Anthropic.
Apollo’s Congressional appearances will focus on their founder’s prominence in the Epstein files. I see a rebrand in Apollo’s future.
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Private Equity in Action: Time to Rebrand the Asset Class?, Private Equity in Action: Foursquare, Private Equity in Action: Xbox, Private Equity in Action: Seeking a Government Bailout, Perfidious Private Equity, Software Migration Alerts for Private Equity Owned Companies, Private Equity in Action: “We’re ‘AI Winners’, Really”, Private Equity in Action: You Can’t Spell Extraction without AI, Private Equity in Action: Medallia, Private Equity in Action: Come for the Subpar Returns, Stay for the Illiquidity v2, Private Equity in Action: Come for the Subpar Returns, Stay for the Illiquidity, Private Equity in Action: From Famed to Fraught, Private Equity in Action: I’m Lovin’ It, Private Equity in Action: Narrative Collapse?, Private Equity in Action: The Great Garage Door Service Wars, Private Equity in Action: Having to Show Their Math is New Experience, Private Equity in Action: Underperforming
Software Migration Alert: Unity
Not an easy migration so better get on it! Middle Eastern money needs some Congressional attention too.
Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk: NASA Edition
The House Committee on Elon’s Unamerican Affairs is going to have to systematically examine what Elon’s companies got from the government in the last two years. Look beyond the revenue to the regulatory relief.
The 120th Congress
It is nice to see Congress returning after two years of recess. They have a lot on their plate and we’ll see if they’re up to their Article I duties.
They could take the easy path. Bank some good Tik Tok clips in theatrical hearings and take their turn using government to wreak vengeance on their enemies.
The harder path is real investigation and substantive reform. After Nixon there was a flurry of government reforms to prevent future abuse and restore norms. The task may be greater today.
Over and above all the obvious reforms, I would like to see a law that requires all political email and text mailing lists to be purged. Future lists must be opt-in. Violators will spend time in the stocks and pelted with spoiled vegetable matter.
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Quick(er) Hits
While medieval in almost all respects, Iran is the first nation with a virtual leader: Mojtaba Khamenei. Is this the future of national leadership? Will Max Headroom or Lil Miquela embark on political careers? Do deep fakes make better leaders?
The Quest for a New Media Business Model: crossword puzzle and chocolate chip cookie purveyor New York Times seeks to diversify into crowdsourced movie reviews.
AI skeptic and litigant New York Times delves into an “A.I.-assisted New York Times review of Mr. Trump’s comments”. We want more disclosure! Which model? What data set? Prompts? Token budget? Readers should be able to replicate this analysis.
The Quest for a New Media Business Model: local newsletter Seattle Times copies the Eater 38, a mere 22 years after it was created (and unlike Eater which credited a Hungarian blog for the idea, the Times would have you think it was their idea). No word on what the Times’ AI team is up to.
OccupySAAS – amusing but blinded by anger about what customers buy when they buy software.
