The Ledger, every show

“I don't think humans, as much as people like Dario, who I respect a lot, might say, like, well, we're just gonna give everybody a check and, like, everybody will just kind of live off universal basic income. I just don't think humans are wired to just collect …”

“Buffett always says, like, the business is more important than the leader, because eventually, like, I kind of disagree with that. I think if you look over 30 years, sure, but over any period of time, like, businesses are just people, and if you have amazing p…”

“For a while we were seeing Chinese internet companies, like, they didn't want to beat earnings. Because if you beat earnings, your stock goes up too much. You know, you might be flagging that, like, you're over-earning”

“I would tell you, like, NVIDIA is, we can have a debate about what the earnings are going to be in a few years but it's not expensive. Like, NVIDIA trades at twenty-something times multiple. that's, you know, I think within reason, and I don't think there's…”

“And Dara just did that better than almost any CEO I've seen since Bezos.”

“You've just seen with Cloud Code and even OpenAI's API business, like, these are durable businesses, and yes, can you switch? You can, the same way you could switch AWS or Azure but it's not worth it for a lot of businesses to do it, and there's sufficient dif…”

“If you look at the underlying margins of these companies, they are not the margins that you see in a commoditized industry. You know, the gross margins are quite high.”

“At this point, you probably have four or five LLMs that will be relevant in the long term. I don't see that changing. Not that there's not sufficient talent out there. It's just that the capital required to get into this business is too great in these companie…”

“If you were to say, like, what is an important difference of Netflix versus these models is Netflix's content was differentiated. The models are more similar than they are different in that, like, you know, at any given time OpenAI may have a better model, Ant…”

“I think if you're Google or you are OpenAI, the differentiating factor will not necessarily be that Google gives you a better answer. Like if we were just like to, you know query Gemini or ChatGPT on something I don't think it's the case that we would say defi…”

“Anthropa took a different approach and just said, we are going to focus on enterprise. They tried consumer early on, but it became clear they didn't have traction, so then they just went all in the enterprise.”

“At some point in the next five to 10 years, they'll be generating enormous amounts of free cash flow. When that happens, I think that, ah, they're likely to insource the compute.”

“Over the next 10 years, I think the business, these hyperscalers, AWS, Azure, will grow fast. I think the margins, my guess, will be challenged, both because the businesses are getting a lot more capital intensive, because AI is capital intensive, more capital…”

“In our letter, I said, like, there are going to be a lot of shorts, some longs because of AI. And software's the first one.”

“So I think I mean, systems of record are going to be difficult to displace. I think companies, while You know, it's neat to create software for small productivity enhancements. If you really want to run your entire business on something like an ERP system or a…”

“You know, betting that scaling laws are gonna stop is, like, a really low probability assumption. I mean, there's just nothing to suggest that's the case. In fact, everything suggests the opposite”

“It is likely that at some point in the future, everything that we do is, ah, you know, arbitraged away by AI.”

“I saw a podcast recently with a Google researcher who left, and he said, like, oh, I don't even tell my daughter to study. It's just like, go out and have a good time. I think that's like a very destructive, like, way of going through life. Like, you should go…”

“First of all, we never came close to going into business. That was just nonsense.”

“I think that the cost, they've come so far down the cost curve, I think that in a relatively short amount of time, like months, few years they are going to be dramatically cheaper than, Any other form of delivering broadband.”

“I don't think hedge funds are a good business. Our business, like, it's horrible. It's like, it's amazing cash flows. The cash flows really well. It has no terminal value.”

“Japan's probably gonna become a military power at some point in the future again”

“If that supply chain were to get screwed up or disremediated, we would have, like, a, Incredibly bad economy. On the order of, like, depression type economy.”

“The biggest mistakes are selling the Costco's too early, because you know, the IRR is totally dependent upon what you assume the exit multiple is, like, and that is difficult to be precise about, you know, what the right exit multiple is for a business.”

“That's the nice thing about the private markets is that Once you invest, you can't sell, and usually for the best companies, that's a huge benefit ultimately.”

“If I hire somebody laterally, who's a portfolio manager in another fund, that's rarely been successful, almost, almost never.”

“Risk management cannot happen after the fact. Like, anything you do after the fact is not risk management. It's actually just destroying capital. Risk management has to happen before the fact. Meaning, like, you size these positions so that, like, When it goes…”

“I don't use, I really don't use derivatives at all. The problem with derivatives is like, look, At the end of the day, when you break down, what is a derivative? It's just leverage and implied volatility. Like, if I want leverage, I can go, you know, get lever…”

“Like, the U.S. Is pretty quick at, like, seeing change happening, and then pricing in that change. In Europe, I find you know, once a company, like a company like Rolls had underperformed for so long, I guess that European mutual funds, they just kind of got i…”

“You're always gonna make the most money from multiple expansion. Just like it's hard to have that differentiated view on a company's growth rate.”

“I think that gas turbines are going to be in shortage for a very long time.”

“Electricity demand in the United States grew at zero percent for the last 20 years. And so, if you think about the next 20 years, I think electricity demand will grow at four percent.”

“G Renova trades at two x the enterprise value of Siemens energy, just to give you a sense of like, and ultimately, there's no reason why the margin should be higher at G Renova. The revenue base is the same.”

“At some point, they're going to say like, well, we're asymptoting out, like the returns on this new investment are actually not working. That's when I think you'll see a pretty big correction.”

“And I think that will continue in a way that probably surprises people, in that like, I think SpaceX will probably capture more of the global, Telecommunications market than people expect.”

“Like, I look at it and say, like, I think the business can triple Without having to make any big bets about people traveling 30 minutes across the world or, you know, data centers in space.”

“I think he's a better business person than he is inventor. He's amazing at both, but like, people don't understand, like, he just naturally understands, like, just get the cost down, and that's very hard to compete against.”

“I mean, if I ran a private company like Stripe, I wouldn't go public.”

“It should be correctly priced because everyone has access to the same information. It's actually gotten less efficient over time, for sure.”

“I rarely have seen any company succeed trying to do, go after Multiple end markets at the same time. You know, it's usually you have an A team. An A team is focused on one thing. Your culture as a company is oriented towards either consumer or enterprise.”

“Early on, we invested in OpenAI, this is probably a year and a half ago, I said to them, like, you have to do ads.”

“If you're going to do it ultimately one, you can't really compete against companies that are using ads if you're not. Very hard. If you're ultimately gonna do it, you might as well start earlier, because you have to build a culture around, you know it just tak…”

“I certainly would not make the case that they are fantastic businesses, but I don't think they're going away like people thought. Because I think they're better at Running GPU clusters than the traditional hyperscalers are.”

“Not in that the stock selection, all of that was gonna be the same, but the portfolio construction was gonna be done in a way that was much less risk-prone, and the analogy I gave was like, we're gonna hit singles and doubles.”

“Autos are a bad business. It could be software autos, hardware autos. It is a bad business, and it's a really tough business to scale and very capital intensive.”

“There are tons of people investing in things that are just based on stories, like because of social media and because of Robin hood. And so there's just endless amounts of shorts.”

“Europe is economically stagnated, so I'm not sure anyone should pay attention to it, other than if you are a pure fundamental stock picker, it's an easier market.”

“90, 95% plus.”