May 1, 2026 · 1h 1m · more-or-less
Elon Musk vs OpenAI Trial, Google Cloud Surge, Meta’s Blocked Acquisition, Anthropic Winning · More or Less Podcast
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of the More or Less podcast, hosts Brit Morin, Dave Morin, Sam Lessin, and Jessica Lessin break down major technology developments, including the trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Google's cloud revenue surge, Anthropic's market dynamics, and Meta's failed acquisition of Manus. The discussion spans public earnings, open-source AI models, consumer tech experiments, and personal wagers regarding future tech milestones.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 99.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 4.3 Guest teaching 2.5 Guest disagreement 2.7 The hosts pushing back 2.8
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 10:07 Sam dismisses OpenAI litigation premise
Sam rejects the importance of the Musk vs. OpenAI trial, arguing that litigating the past is pointless when Anthropic has already overtaken OpenAI in real-world performance.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 28:29 Jessica challenges broad claims on Meta's historical profitabilityJessica pushes back on Sam's assertion that Meta was profitable from year two, differentiating between early ARR scale and current AI startup economics.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 25:41 Dave reveals closed-source federal lobbying effortsDave informs the group that frontier closed-source AI labs are actively lobbying federal lawmakers to classify open-source models as illegal under the guise of safety.
The host holds their own ▶ 44:20 Jessica delivers real-time reporting on Google Cloud driversJessica brings real-time reporting from The Information team confirming that Google Cloud's earnings beat was heavily driven by Anthropic purchasing TPU compute capacity.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| More or Less Podcast Opening Title Sequence | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | Casual banter and housekeeping segment covering festival attendance and fashion choices like jorts. Very low stakes, relaxed peer conversation without substantive debate or technical expertise. | |
| Legal Drama: Elon Musk vs. OpenAI Trial and Narrative Strategies | 6 | 3 | 4 | 4 | Jessica cites her reporting and courtroom details regarding Musk's testimony and jury selection, while Sam contrarily dismisses the trial as irrelevant laggy law compared to Anthropic surpassing OpenAI. | |
| AI Market Dynamics: Anthropic, Open Source Models, and Token Economics | 6 | 5 | 4 | 4 | Dave and Sam dissect token economics, developer costs, and open source alternatives like Qwen and Gemma versus Claude. Jessica raises outcome-based pricing models, sparking debate over enterprise margins. | |
| Regulatory Capture, Geopolitics, and Foreign Open Source AI Models | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | Dave breaks the point that frontier labs are lobbying for federal restrictions on open source, while Sam challenges the feasibility of regulatory capture and suggests competitive algorithmic warfare instead. | |
| Meta's Aborted Manus Acquisition and Cross-Border Tech Investment Realities | 7 | 2 | 2 | 3 | Jessica leads the breakdown of Meta's aborted Manus deal, detailing Chinese government intervention and Benchmark's miscalculated timing on cross-border venture investing. | |
| Tech Earnings & Public Market Regrets | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | Discussion centers on Alphabet earnings outperformance, personal investment regrets around public tech equities, and the scale of the untapped enterprise agent market. | |
| Cloud Growth Drivers & The Storage Boom | 6 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Sam explains how developer spend is tilting toward Postgres databases and storage rather than inference tokens, and Jessica contributes live reporting connecting Google Cloud growth directly to Anthropic compute demand. | |
| Market Sentiment & Narrative-Driven Investing | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | The panel discusses Paul Tudor Jones's market warnings, arguing that excessive equity valuations force capital into speculative narrative-driven plays rather than fundamental analysis. | |
| Maria Sharapova, Podcasting Trends & Custom AI Audio | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | Jessica talks about her Sharapova interview while Sam demonstrates his practical use case of automated ElevenLabs synthetic podcasts customized for his kids on road trips. | |
| Top Songwriters & Elon Musk's Mars Bet | 3 | 1 | 2 | 2 | A lighthearted check-in on Brit and Sam's ongoing 2040 Mars million-dollar bet, tied to Musk's compensation structure, concluding with mutual humorous rationalizations. | |
| Met Gala Backlash & Pop Culture Bets | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | Brief pop culture wrap-up on Met Gala hosting controversies and crypto figure Justin Sun, keeping the dialogue collaborative and humorous. |
Statements from this episode (28)
Sam Altman and Greg Brockman attended jury selection in Elon Musk trial
“Sam Altman and Greg Brockman attended jury selection. Highly unusual. No one ever attends jury selection.”
Sam Lessin predicts The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI will fail
“That lawsuit, I just can't imagine that OpenAI, the cat's out of the bag. It's just not going to happen, that that, that lawsuit will be successful.”
Sam Lessin claims Anthropic has officially surpassed OpenAI as biggest AI company
“Anthropic passed open AI.”
Jessica Lessin reports OpenAI recently missed internal revenue targets for ChatGPT
“They added the information that, which is pertinent, which would certainly be newsworthy on its own, that they have also missed revenue targets for ChatGPT recently, although we don't know by how much and we already knew that they missed the user targets, but …”
Sam Lessin predicts AI spend will shift to cheap open-source models
“And so the vast majority of tokens and spend in the market, the good market, the good morning America audience is going to be going for cheap Quen effectively over time. And it's going to be because they care about the costs, right? Like that's going to be the…”
Dave Morin says every portfolio founder is replacing proprietary models with open-source
“Every entrepreneur in my portfolio is like swapping out open source models for everything. And of course you would. Right. Cause that's your margin.”
Sam Lessin calls frontier AI a commodity business trading at software multiples
“The infrastructure is worth not zero. It is infrastructure like you're on something in it. Right. But like it is it's a commodity business. Right. And it's a great one. I really enjoy it, but it's definitely like commodity business with tech multiples.”
Dave Morin hears frontier AI labs are lobbying to federally ban open-source
“Well, what I'm actually hearing is that they're trying to make open source illegal at the federal level.”
Dave Morin predicts open-source AI will always lag frontier proprietary models
“And so you have this thing where open source is also always going to be lagging the frontier. And so it's not going to be like a total replacement.”
Dave Morin argues China is rapidly outpacing the US in open-source AI
“Chinese innovation and open source models is really rapid and really impressive. Like these guys are doing extremely good work extremely quickly. And by the way, there's no great open source American model that is Truly open source.”
Dave Morin argues banning open-source AI is impossible due to local downloads
“That's the problem, Sam, is it's impossible to implement, and you and I both know it. Like, when you can just download the weights for these things onto your laptop, like, it's impossible, right? And so you have to think about policy from a totally different a…”
Jessica Lessin says cross-border tech investing between US and China never reopened
“Like, cross-border investing wasn't back. There was no window. Like, not at all.”
Dave Morin calls Benchmark's Manus investment a risky Hail Mary that failed
“This investment was extremely risky, like at the time. Like it was a Hail Mary and now it fully missed.”
Jessica Lessin reports Meta's Manus acquisition was unwound after Chinese government intervention
“And of course they interfered and they did quick soon after in terms of sort of challenging the deal, calling back some of the key team to China. So they were in clear integration limbo, and now the deal is off, and they're sort of unwinding it, but.”
Brit Morin predicts Google's Gemini will rise in AI rankings this year
“I think by the end of this year, Gemini is, is much higher in the rankings.”
Dave Morin predicts insane returns for Google from SpaceX and Anthropic investments
“Even just the returns that they're going to see from their SpaceX and Anthropic investment is insane.”
Sam Lessin says his database costs have far outpaced AI token costs
“The answer is it's Postgres. My Postgres bill is the thing that's gone up the most. It's databases.”
Dave Morin claims technology storage hardware is completely sold out worldwide
“Storage all the way up and down the stack is, like, sold out worldwide.”
Sam Lessin argues energy and memory are where AI money is made
“Actually this, it's going to be energy and memory. Energy and memory is where the money is made.”
Jessica Lessin says Google Cloud's earnings growth was heavily driven by Anthropic
“Apparently Google Cloud is up because of Anthropic.”
Jessica Lessin says Anthropic is buying spot compute, hurting their own margins
“Anthropic is so underserved in compute that they're buying, like, in last minute deals and on the smart market and all that kind of stuff, which is bad for their margin, but is good for the providers.”
Sam Lessin says AI venture asset pricing is driven purely by narrative
“Well, and the reality of the price of any of these things you're investing in has nothing to do with reality. It only has to do with the price That it already was, and then where it's going, and therefore, it's all just on story, right? Which is really scary, …”
Jessica Lessin says NYSE event attendees agreed AI financing is a bubble
“We had my colleagues we hosted an event on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, all about where we are, and it's specifically on financing AI and data center. So wonky stuff, good sentiment stuff, and everyone's like, about to burst, but we don't know when.”
Dave Morin compares Anthropic's AI safety narrative to Catholic Church fear tactics
“The Catholic Church's narrative that was so successful for multiple, whatever, many hundreds of years was a Doomer narrative, and that the anthropic Doomer narrative basically uses the exact same fear trick in order to create a similar narrative, and that mayb…”
Sam Lessin built an AI bot generating custom kids' podcasts on demand
“So now whenever they want to listen to something in a car, I just email my bot. I say, make a podcast on how Minecraft was made, or how the history of Nintendo, or how EI Sports FC Mobile XXX was made, or Jetpack Joyride.”
Brit Morin claims Elon Musk's compensation package is tied to Mars colonization
“Elon Musk is, his salary and comp package is now tied to the Mars colonization happening.”
Jessica Lessin says the Met Gala faces anti-tech protests over Bezos hosting
“There are a lot of people upset that Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos, or Lauren Sanchez Bezos and Jeff Bezos are hosting. This, and there would be a lot of protests, a lot of anti-tech sentiment, and apparently they're not selling tickets.”