The Ledger, every show

“So then that culminated in the Tuesday kind of dramatic meeting with Hexeth and Secretary Hexeth and me and Dario with the Friday deadline that, that got blown.”

“Yeah, so they put their model in AWS GovCloud. And then Palantir serves it from there. And they refresh it. They held the control plane for the model.”

“These, the leaders of these companies say they're going to cause 50% white collar unemployment.”

“Grok's all in. For all lawful use cases across all classified and unclassified networks”

“The number one reason we were having this conversation at all is because they were deeply embedded.”

“I believe in 12 months codex is not going to be close.”

“If you don't want your stuff to be used for department of war stuff, you shouldn't be selling to the department of war.”

“And I was trying to work with them. Why would I spend three months trying to negotiate with them to get to a symbol standard if I would've just said, okay, guys, you're out.”

“Generally I do think warfare is going from big carrier ships that cost twenty billion dollars and a decade and a half to build To mass attributable, low cost things.”

“One of the reasons the primes are such a small number, it's not the only, but it's one, is they learn how to contract with the government. They learn how to go through the bureaucracy, and that became a competitive advantage.”

“It is true that Chinese have had the greatest military buildup in world history in the last 15 years”

“So, you know, in 10 years, it wouldn't surprise me if 20, 30% of the budget is, is, is spent on those kinds of systems.”

“The talent they brought into every department could then be deployed on other projects like the AI action plan that we did with Gen AI. So, because they were already, like, Elon chose technically sophisticated people. There weren't all engineers, some were law…”

“Defense industrial base sort of wasn't ready to provide what's necessary for the threat environment. And if you think about threat environment, what we've done in Iran, what we've done in Venezuela what we've done with the Houthis, like all just in one year, r…”

“The buildup, the military buildup in China is the biggest military buildup in world history.”

“SpaceX and Anderil and Palantir all had to sue the Department of War for their first contract.”

“So all these funding cycle mechanisms are a way to get at that valley of death. And I think we've got, we're really close to sort of pinching, pinching that. Into, to being very minimal if it exists at all.”

“For Golden Dome, which you've heard about, we're looking at how to take things out from space, which is a compelling, really complex, but interesting proposition.”

“A brushless motor goes into a drone. We're dependent on China for brushless motors.”

“I mean, you know, fiber optic cable, we don't make fiber optic cables in this country. Fiber optic, you know, basic fiber, which they're using in the Ukraine and Russia war to do drones because they're jamming and all that, and we use for telecom and all that.”

“I think we're already caught up in so many areas and surpass them, but they've made a lot of ground.”

“Which is why in two months of owning, being the chief AI, having the chief AI office run in my world, which was a new move, we were able to launch gen AI, which is Google's Gemini for four million, every, every employee, military and civilian in the department…”

“So we know how to build our own, But we have to do it more cheaply. We have to do it at scale. We have to do it, and it's a deterrent effect, right? It's just like we had nuclear missiles, and the Russians did, or Soviets did. If China, the China has them, we …”

“Palantir and Roland, SpaceX, all had to sue the government for the first big contract, because the primes were sophisticated at selling, sophisticated protecting their interests.”

“So what that does is it gives government loans to companies that can scale a technology that already exists. So we'll take a minute. It's for the defense industrial base. Half of it, half of two hundred billion dollars. So a hundred billion dollars is to make …”

“So they've developed certain capabilities in certain hypersonic missile categories, ah, at a price that, ah, that we haven't achieved yet, which is why one of my critical technology areas is high, scaled hypersonics at cost.”

“What you know it is now is a place where people are walking around with fear to not say what they think. They're not challenging their ideas. That means they're not coming out as fully formed adults with the ability to critically think through problems and sol…”

“You could, there is no way you could take a country that doesn't want to move into the 21st century Into the 21st century, no matter how many schools you bought.”

“99% of the people who went through Uber say it was the best experience of their life. What you read about is that one percent, and I think people are really longing for that culture again in business.”

“Uber over time has probably paid a hundred billion dollars to drivers. A hundred billion dollars.”

“I'd say that the deal that Was under my watch. I didn't like it at the time, but I, you know, it got done was Uber acquiring auto, which was the autonomous car division that that gets started out of Google guys. It was, and I didn't like it for different reaso…”

“I think we're at the end of the beginning, though, not the end of the end. The next phase is structured rounds, down rounds, like true down rounds and then sales were, unfortunately, companies sort of not making it, and I think that'll happen in Q one, you kno…”

“These pay to play things never work. It didn't work at bird. It didn't work at Lime.”

“Had I talked to him that day, I would have said, Travis, walk out of the room. If you want to rip up the papers in front of them and we'll get, you know, get a lawyer and whatever. This is ridiculous. You know, there's, this is unfair. This is coercive. And we…”

“The company's valuation Is lower today than it was when Dara took over. And even if you account for the macro environment, the Nasdaq's still up 50%, he's down 50%.”

“So I would have beaten door, we would have beaten DoorDash, guaranteed. We were ahead by 30 points when Travis Night left, so letting that atrophy was not an option.”

“And so more, the thing we, I wish we did more of Uber is give more investors liquidity when they get scared. I would be like Venturex sell. Like, I'll find you someone to sell to sell, go get the second G six and the, you know, the whatever. The discovery prop…”

“For founders, it's more a good thing than a bad thing. That means that there's more capital out there. So if your business model requires more capital, you can get it. And look, people are going to say, oh my God, it's loose capital, free money, blah, blah, bl…”

“And to win big, you've got to try to invest across multiple stages. And that's what Sequoia can do. That's what age can do. That's what rivet can do. That's what DST can do. And I think if you can't, You're just going to get, have to get lucky because there's …”

“We grew faster than any company in the world, both geographically And revenue wise, including Google.”

“18 months, you're going to see dead spat. Literally, they're going to disband and give the money back to investors. Maybe 90% of them.”

“Half of it, half of two hundred billion dollars. So a hundred billion dollars is to make sure that we have solid rocket motors, brushless motors, batteries, all of the components that go into our weapon systems. The other half of it's for critical minerals, an…”

“For these frontier AI companies, for example, I'm not gonna try to build our own model here and spend a hundred billion dollars. Why would I? Why wouldn't I work with the best minds in industry, have them make something that, for our use case, that builds on w…”

“I'm not only taking the frontier models and just making them available. I'm doing it across classification levels. I'm combining some of the most, you know, important data that the United States has from an intelligence standpoint, we're deploying it to warfig…”

“It's not like, it's not a Skynet thing, like, no. It is a tool like any other tool that you might have on your computer, or in your war room, or with your team, except it's on your computer, visualized where, but you still have Checks and balances. You still h…”

“And to protect your exquisite targets on your side against a very cheap drone, you have to use expensive countermeasures. And so the lesson there is how do you turn the dial from, maybe we should have more mass attritable, Weapons like drones or counter drones…”

“The original sin was In the past administration, choosing one AI provider and having no options, because it is a gargantuan effort to get these software things onto classified networks.”

“We're trending toward artificial general intelligence, a substrate, a layer, something that'll touch everything, but we're way behind in AI at the department.”