Tesla, every mention

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every year anyone David Rosenthal 93Ben Gilbert 46Doug DeMuro 13Michael Mauboussin 7David Senra 4John Bathgate 3Jason Calacanis 2Brinton Johns 2Steve Ballmer 1Packy McCormick 1

Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Tesla comes up

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Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio) · Acquired Mar 5, 2026 · 2 mentions

10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired Dec 15, 2025 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 37:08 Ben Gilbert We started broadening with the Tesla episode in, like, twenty-nineteen, maybe, 18.
  • ▶ 2:02:13 Michael Lewis But Tesla and NVIDIA and, and, and Microsoft and Google and they, people don't really get them explained to them.

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired Oct 6, 2025 · 32 mentions

  • ▶ 6:39 David Rosenthal Ilya Sitzkever, founding chief scientist of OpenAI, who along with Jeff Hinton and Alex Korczewski had done the seminal AI work on AlexNet and just published that a few years before all three of them were Google employees, as was Dario…
  • ▶ 54:07 David Rosenthal Wait, well, it can't be Tesla, because Tesla is older than that.
  • ▶ 1:02:07 Ben Gilbert In a weird way, it sort of leads to Tesla self-driving, too, with Karpathy.
  • ▶ 1:13:18 David Rosenthal Also, in the intervening months to year after this meeting between Demis and Elon and Elon investing in DeepMind, Elon also starts to get really, really excited and convinced about the capabilities of AI in the near term, and specifically…
  • ▶ 1:14:09 David Rosenthal That sounds like it would be a pretty good idea for Tesla.
  • ▶ 1:14:12 David Rosenthal So, Elon starts trying to recruit as many AI researchers as he possibly can and machine vision and machine learning experts into Tesla.
  • ▶ 1:14:52 David Rosenthal So Elon's excitement channeled initially through DeepMind and Demis about AI and AI for Tesla starts ratcheting up big time.
  • ▶ 1:18:26 David Rosenthal He immediately calls up Demis and says, I will buy the company right now with Tesla stock.
  • ▶ 1:18:35 David Rosenthal Tesla's market cap is about twenty billion dollars.
  • ▶ 1:18:39 David Rosenthal So, Tesla stock from then to today is about a 70 x run up.
  • ▶ 1:18:52 David Rosenthal But to your point, they have the same issues with Elon and Tesla that they had with Mark.
  • ▶ 1:18:59 David Rosenthal Elon wants them to come in and work on autonomous driving for Tesla.
  • ▶ 1:31:36 David Rosenthal Wanted to bring DeepMind into his own AI team at Tesla and gone out from under him.
  • ▶ 2:04:29 David Rosenthal Meanwhile, I'm here building SpaceX and Tesla.
  • ▶ 2:04:33 David Rosenthal Self-driving is becoming more and more clear as critical to the future of Tesla.
  • ▶ 2:04:38 David Rosenthal I need AI researchers here, and I need great AI advancements to come out to help what we're doing at Tesla.
  • ▶ 2:04:56 David Rosenthal I'm happy to take full control of OpenAI and we can merge this into Tesla.
  • ▶ 2:05:02 David Rosenthal I don't even know how that would be possible to merge a nonprofit into Tesla.
  • ▶ 2:55:09 Ben Gilbert He proposed, oh, let's just go buy Tesla, and that'll be our starting place, and then we'll just put all of our self-driving equipment on all the cars.
  • ▶ 2:55:16 Ben Gilbert David, do you know what it would have cost to buy Tesla at the time?
  • ▶ 2:55:19 David Rosenthal I think at the time that negotiations were taking place between Elon and Larry and Google, this was in the depths of the Model S production scaling woes.
  • ▶ 2:55:32 David Rosenthal I think Google could have bought the company for five billion dollars.
  • ▶ 3:01:48 Ben Gilbert This is obviously way more expensive of a solution than what Tesla is just doing with cameras, but Waymo's party line is they believe it is the only path to full autonomy to hit the safety bar and regulatory bar that they're aiming for.
  • ▶ 3:02:07 David Rosenthal Yeah, and look, as a regular user of both products, you know, happy owner and driver of a Model Y in addition to regular Weibo user,
  • ▶ 3:02:15 David Rosenthal At least with the current instantiation of full self-driving on my Tesla, vastly different products.
  • ▶ 3:02:15 David Rosenthal At least with the current instantiation of full self-driving on my Tesla, vastly different products.
  • ▶ 3:02:22 David Rosenthal Full self-driving on my Model Y is great.
  • ▶ 3:02:22 David Rosenthal Full self-driving on my Model Y is great.
  • ▶ 3:02:40 Ben Gilbert I think I trust my Model Y FSD more than you do, but I get what you're saying.
  • ▶ 3:02:40 Ben Gilbert I think I trust my Model Y FSD more than you do, but I get what you're saying.
  • ▶ 3:02:44 Ben Gilbert And frankly, regulatorily, you are required to still pay attention in Tesla and not in the Waymo.
  • ▶ 3:04:48 Ben Gilbert One total market size thing you could do is try to sum the entire automaker market cap today, and that would be two and a half trillion globally, if you include Tesla, or 1.3 trillion without.

Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired Aug 26, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 3:40:05 David Rosenthal His collaborator on the AlexNet paper, Ilya Sutskiver, founding scientist of OpenAI, Dario Amadei, co-founder with his sister of Anthropic, Andre Karpathy, until recently chief AI scientist at Tesla, Chris Ola, Noam Shazir, Ian Goodfellow,…

The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired Jun 2, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 1:15:29 Steve Ballmer You know, I think Tesla gets good at certain things in software because it is a different form of mobile.

Rolex (Audio) · Acquired Feb 24, 2025 · 1 mention

TSMC · Acquired Jan 21, 2025 · 4 mentions

Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired Dec 16, 2024 · 3 mentions

IKEA (Audio) · Acquired Nov 18, 2024 · 4 mentions

Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired Jul 22, 2024 · 3 mentions

Renaissance Technologies (Audio) · Acquired Mar 18, 2024 · 1 mention

Charlie Munger (Audio) · Acquired Oct 30, 2023 · 2 mentions

Doug Demuro on Analyzing the Car Industry, Creator-Led Businesses, and Porsche Follow Up (Raw Video) · Acquired Sep 20, 2023 · 17 mentions

Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired Sep 6, 2023 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 27:12 Ben Gilbert So in 2015, Andre Karpathy, who was then at OpenAI and went on to lead AI for Tesla and is actually now back at OpenAI, writes this seminal blog post called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Neural Networks.

Nike (Audio) · Acquired Jul 25, 2023 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 3:31:04 Ben Gilbert You can't wear certain types of shoes that have ill-defined rules, and so Nike stages this event with their shoes that provably make you four percent faster than you've ever been before, and they drive a Tesla with a laser and a whole…

Porsche (with Doug DeMuro) · Acquired Jun 27, 2023 · 6 mentions

  • ▶ 37:56 Ben Gilbert Doug, the way the value chain evolved for selling cars, there's this very clear delineation, in the U.S. at least, until Tesla, of separating the dealership from the manufacturer.
  • ▶ 2:35:46 David Rosenthal I guess the, the Tesla Model S came out 2013, 20 12.
  • ▶ 2:50:38 Doug DeMuro Uh, it's, I'm Model Three.
  • ▶ 2:59:05 Ben Gilbert You could imagine at some point Tesla's a heritage brand.
  • ▶ 3:07:55 David Rosenthal The broader universe of BMW, Mercedes, all the Japanese brands, Tesla, et cetera, um, in America, Ford, you know, all the Ford brands, the Chevy brands.
  • ▶ 3:16:58 Doug DeMuro And like, did you see that the thing that went viral, like on Twitter and elsewhere of the Tesla that was on like 20 foot tall wagon wheels?

Lockheed Martin (Audio) · Acquired May 30, 2023 · 3 mentions

  • ▶ 1:07:55 David Rosenthal It's Tesla's landlord today.
  • ▶ 2:29:37 Ben Gilbert I mean, it's a Tesla, basically.
  • ▶ 3:35:31 Ben Gilbert They make effectively the Tesla of lawnmowers, and growing up, I had, like, a big gas lawnmower, and you'd, like, pull a cord to start it, and it was loud, and it was smelly, and it was dirty, and it was, like, gas, and these are…

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek · Acquired May 18, 2023 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 1:28:52 Daniel Ek Um, and then you see another cultural expression with like a Tesla where incredibly top down, incredibly focused company actually for this type of scale, um, that they're doing.

Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins on The Art of Business in Gaming · Acquired Apr 26, 2023 · 2 mentions

Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast) · Acquired Mar 29, 2023 · 4 mentions

Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired Dec 19, 2022 · 1 mention

Enron · Acquired Nov 29, 2022 · 3 mentions

  • ▶ 29:48 David Rosenthal It was the Tesla of the 19 eighties.
  • ▶ 48:45 Ben Gilbert Like, if you bought Tesla at 20 dollars a share, and it's now worth 200 dollars a share, you should reflect that you have a gain, albeit an unrealized one.
  • ▶ 49:10 Ben Gilbert Even though you haven't actually received the cash, you know, just because you haven't sold your Tesla shares, it doesn't mean that you don't have an unrealized gain, or just because the VC hasn't realized the liquidity event from that…

Qualcomm · Acquired Nov 15, 2022 · 1 mention

ACQ Sessions: Jason Calacanis · Acquired Oct 4, 2022 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 2:20:14 Jason Calacanis When Elon got the first P-one of the Roadster, he was like, I got it.
  • ▶ 2:20:27 Jason Calacanis A spirited drive along Sunset Boulevard, and we did it like five times, and five out of five times, the Tesla just destroyed the Corvette, and I was like, I'm doing something wrong, and you know, then we switched cars, and we, and I was…

Amazon Web Services · Acquired Sep 6, 2022 · 1 mention

Amazon.com · Acquired Aug 16, 2022 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 3:03:27 David Rosenthal Well, they would, uh, take the money that they made from this company and roll it into another little company that they would then start after this in 2003 called Tesla Motors.
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