At nearly two hours, this one is massive, but you know what they say: Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!
My friend MBI (🇧🇩🇺🇸) and I sat down to do something that sounds simple but turned out to be a seminar. In 2018, Apple became the first $1T company. Fast forward to now, and we’re living in the era of the Trillion Dollar Club, a small group of companies that collectively represent an almost comical amount of market cap (Nvidia, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, TSMC, Meta, Broadcom, and Tesla).
We went through all of them one by one and shared our honest thoughts, bouncing between the big picture and small details that may turn out to be crucial.
If the market is a card game, we wanted to figure out which hands we like best. ♥️♦️♣️♠️
We touch on many interesting ideas that help us better understand the forces at play for Big Tech these days. Early on, we dive into the “compute theory of everything.” MBI found this 1998 Hans Moravec paper with a sentence so good that he repeats it to himself like a mantra on his daily walks! 🚶♂️ (gotta get those 10k steps! 👣)
Among many other things, we discuss:
Jensen’s “circular financing” strategy, and why it might actually be brilliant 🔄
East Coast vs. West Coast investing philosophy.
Why the job of the analyst is getting harder, not easier.
How academic papers create trillions in value (cat paper, “Attention is All You Need,” Chinchilla).
Apple as “Switzerland,” and their risky bet that we’re at the hardware end-state 📱
Whether Google has the best hand but keeps getting in its own way, and DeepMind as Google's "reverse takeover" and saving grace
Why Microsoft seemed to have everything and somehow ended up in the doghouse 💾
TSMC as the true choke point, the bottom of the inverted pyramid, and why MBI is Zen about geopolitical risk 🧘♂️
Meta’s confusing inability to reach the frontier despite checking every box, and what are the necessary ingredients for a frontier AI lab? 🧑🍳🍜
Tesla as the ultimate “West Coast philosophy” stock and Musk’s loss of interest in EVs.
Broadcom’s IP blocks + custom ASIC enablement + networking… with the risk of hyperscaler disintermediation.
Amazon's retail business being underestimated and Walmart as a sneakily smart company 🛒
A tribute to Buffett and Munger, where our emotions come out a bit.
Which CEOs are overrated and underrated? 👍👎
We close with the hardest question: if you could own only one of these companies for the next 20 years, which would it be? We both landed on the same answer. Listen to the end to find out why 🎧
🎧 Listen on Spotify
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🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts
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📺 Watch on YouTube
Make sure to check out MBI Deep Dives, now with daily updates! 📬
🗄 More podcasts with MBI 🕵️♂️
🎧 Semiconductors Industry: Going Deep with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI) on TSMC, Texas Instruments, Nvidia, Intel, Hyperscalers, etc
🎧 Meta Platforms & Mark Zuckerberg: Going Deep with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)! 🕵️♂️🩻🎧 Microsoft: Going Deep with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI) 🕵️♂️🩻
🎧 Going Deep on Cloudflare and Datadog with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)
🎧 ‘Severance’ Season 1: Going Deep with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)
🎧 Going deep on Constellation Software with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)
🗄 More from the Archives 💡
🎧 Interview with David Kim a.k.a. Scuttleblurb (2025) 📈📉📊💰💸
🎧 White Mirror: 31 Stories, a $1,000 Puzzle, and Sci-Fi to Reboot Your Childlike Wonder 🦾🪞📖🦋
🎧 Jim O’Shaughnessy: Origin Story, Career in Finance, Groundbreaking Books, and Future with OSV 👶 🕵️♂️ 🏦 ✍️📚 🚀🎧 David Senra and Jimmy Soni: ‘The Founders’ Book Club on the PayPal Mafia 📖
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