Spyglass - Spending Apple's Cash

Yes, I'm back at it, coming up with ways to spend Apple's money in the latest post below for members of The Inner Ring. But as we're seemingly on the verge of interest rate cuts, we're going to need more of these creative ideas as money flows (hopefully) flows back in the system. Sadly, I have nothing more creative for Intel as that's just a completely yikes situation at the moment, sadly. (More below.)

The Inner Ring

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Apple Should Sign Howard Stern and Launch ‘Podcasts+’

They may not care about podcasting, but they *do* care about Services…

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

Some Thoughts...

👷 Founder Mode – Paul Graham's latest essay riffs on a talk Brian Chesky gave recently which essentially boils down to: listening to what seemed like obviously good advice from others, "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs", didn't work well at Airbnb. One takeaway might be that founders should trust their own instincts. But really, I think the point is that all companies are different and most people a step removed from the company, including most VCs, have no idea what you should be doing despite speaking in a way that often conveys otherwise. But I also think "Founder Mode" applies just as well to non-founders like Satya Nadella and Leonard Riggio, whose obit I linked to yesterday, and didn't technically found Barnes & Noble. It's really about living and breathing your own company – whether you're the founder or just stepping in and up to have that mentality – and knowing what will work and what won't. I also suspect a big part of the reason why Chesky's talk resonated is the way in which he gave it. Someone else knew the importance of that element... [Paul Graham]

📲 Apple Helped Nix Part of a Child Safety Bill. More Fights Are Expected. – It feels like this is a new tech battle that's going to ramp up in a major way soon: who should be in charge of kids' usage of apps, social media companies themselves at the app level or the smartphone makers at the OS level? Mark Zuckerberg has been slipping in such talking points recently when talking about tangential topics (as it's another easy way to get digs in at Apple). But it's one of those battles where all sides end up looking bad and that they should be doing more. Certainly more than just literal lobbying to pass the buck... [WSJ 🔒]

🏈 Inside ESPN's Survival Plan – This reads and feels like a very different ESPN from even just a few years ago. Embracing not only social media for viral video clips and potentially leveraging AI for personalized SportsCenters, but even embracing not "sticking to sports" with some of their personalities – as it's seemingly once again all about the talent. Oh yes, and gambling. A lot of gambling. Will it work as cable continues to collapse around them? On one hand, it feels a bit like a spaghetti-to-the-wall approach. On the other, I see a pretty clear path to ESPN owning sports streaming in similar but different ways than Netflix owns "regular" streaming now. 9 years since "9 bullet points of doom"... [Axios]

💰 Taxing Unrealized Capital Gains is a Terrible Idea – Tyler Cowen walks through just how convoluted this proposal would be in practice. It's one of those things that sounds "winning" on paper but actually makes little sense and would be pretty detrimental on a few fronts – certainly to the startup economy. Cowen skirts over the notion of taxing money borrowed against assets, but this feels like a pretty good starting point as to how the square the circle. While that money isn't technically "income" it effectively is used that way and you could offset the interest owed on it and future tax liability for assets eventually made liquid that were borrowed against. It's obviously not that simple but it seems far more simple than pre-taxing gains which may or may not ever materialize and/or incentivizing entrepreneurs and startup employees to sell shares to be able to pay taxes owed on them. [Marginal Revolution]

Some Analysis...

OpenAI’s Messy Metamorphosis

As it morphs from the non-profit past to the must-profit future…

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

As An Aside...

• Many fans are looking back in anger about the way the Oasis ticket sales went down. Which is to say, went up. Way up. The UK government is looking into it, another potential black eye for Ticketmaster – if only another band from the 1990s had highlighted such problems 30 years ago... [BBC]
• Grid-scale batteries beyond the hydroelectric variety are finally becoming a reality. Long the key missing piece of the clean energy revolution... [The Economist 🔒]
• One new potential idea to help save Intel is selling off Altera, the programable chip company that Intel bought for $17B almost a decade ago. [Reuters]
  • Intel may also be removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average as its stock continues to sink. It was one of the first tech companies to join it, alongside Microsoft, in the 1990s boom times [Reuters]
  • In more positive news, the company did roll out new processors today, but the naming schemes and spec sheets are so convoluted that I can't quite follow them. They really need a marketing makeover. Bring back the Pentium people! [The Verge]
  • Back to the negative, the news doesn't appear to be helping the stock price at all – as it's down nearly 7% right now (overall, the NASDAQ is down about 2.5%). But hey, at least NVIDIA is doing worse at the moment, down 7.7% as that stock's whiplash continues.
• Fuck everything, we're doing three folds. While I do think Apple should probably get into the foldable game sooner rather than later, I'm not sure Huawei holding their "tri-fold" event the same day as the iPhone 16 event is going to pressure Apple down that path... [MacRumors]
• xAI apparently just lit up a new data center with 100,000 NVIDIA H100 chips. That makes "Colossus" the largest GPU supercomputer in the world, according to NVIDIA. It was built in 122 days, according to Elon Musk. And they plan to add 50,000 H200 chips as soon as NVIDIA can actually make them. [Fortune]
  • Unclear if some of these H100s are the ones xAI rented from Dell and Supermicro, after Oracle backed out of its plans to rent more to xAI so they could rent some to Microsoft – which they could then give to OpenAI. I'm not sure this could get any more convoluted and conflicted...
  • Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that Meta was buying 350,000 H100s (well, specifically 340,000), but presumably those aren't all in one data center...
• It's not just Spotify and Epic constantly complaining about the changes to the App Store that Apple may or may not be making in good faith, there's a little company called Microsoft as well, which still says a cloud gaming service on iOS is a no-go with Apple's updated requirements. [The Verge]

A Golden Oldie...

GPT-4o & the End of ‘Her’

Must AI life imitate art about AI?

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

And I Quote...

"I do not look forward to other posts I need to write, about everything that’s gone wrong with HOUSE OF THE DRAGON… but I need to do that too, and I will.   Not today, though. "

-- George R. R. Martin, who is totally looking forward to writing a post ripping apart House of the Dragon. This is a bit weird since he previously has praised the show – including earlier this past season. But they also clearly failed to stick the landing this season – sound familiar? – perhaps due to Warner Bros Discovery cost cuts... We'll see what the creator himself has to say soon enough – unless we're on the Winds of Winter timetable for these comments as well...