All-In's Best Ideas Pitch Competition: 4 Investors Present Their Top Trades Live
67m 57s
The transcription features two investment pitches from a "Best Ideas" event. Aaron, a veteran hedge fund manager with 29 years of experience, pitches MGM Resorts. He argues that MGM is undervalued, with hidden assets beyond its Vegas properties. Key catalysts include a license to open a casino in Osaka, Japan, by 2030, which he estimates could add $50 per share in value, and a potential gambling legalization in Dubai, where MGM already has a building with 300,000 square feet of empty space. He notes that Barry Diller owns 26% of MGM and has bid $48/share, but Aaron advises against tendering shares, believing the stock could triple to $100–$150. He emphasizes that the Japanese opportunity, a first-world gambling market, is undervalued by the market, similar to how Macau was initially ignored before its opening. Daniel pitches Talen Energy, a power producer with nuclear and natural gas assets. He argues that the company’s enterprise value ($25B) is below replacement cost ($45B), offering a potential double. Daniel warns of a massive power demand surge driven by AI and data centers, comparing data centers to refineries that consume electricity. He highlights supply chain shortages and regulatory hurdles, citing Microsoft’s deal to restart Three Mile Island at double the market price as evidence of panic among hyperscalers. Both presenters stress that the market is ignoring key catalysts—MGM’s Asian expansion and Talen’s undervalued assets—creating investment opportunities.
Maybe you could tell us a little bit about how you selected our presenters and your vision for this. I mean, for any of you guys who've been involved in Irosone, this is a gentleman that passed away from cancer far too young, and his family created this thing called the SONFoundation, and they would host this event, and it started in Lincoln Center, and they would ask these managers, and so at the time I was like a young venture investor, and I got this invite, and I showed up in New York at Lincoln Center in 2015, and I said, "Amazon's gonna be a trillion dollar company," and I was laughed out of the room. David Einhorn, who's a friend of mine, but who is totally wrong, said, "I know trillion dollar companies. This is not a trillion dollar company. Wrong." It turned out to be a great bet. I went back. I did Tesla in 2016. We picked the converts, and then in 2017, I was like, "All right, this is my. This is it. This is my magnum opus, and I said, "AI is the future, and then I pick box." If I had just picked in video, I would have been a legend. A legend that I could have retired. Well, anyway, so we wanted to recreate Irosone, and start to get these great managers who are making great picks, making a ton of money for their LPs. They don't get the distribution, and so it's just a chance to get to know some of these names. You don't have to see them on CNBC. You'll see them here more and more often. And we can just get to opine. Roll the video. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the best ideas pitch. Let's meet our contestants. Anyone should be able to trade any asset, anywhere in the world, anytime 24/7, with just an internet connection and a phone in their pocket. We're building a new financial system from the ground up here. People are going to want to own equities, and it's going to be fun in the next couple of years. Companies are going to invade and create products and applications, and that's where hopefully, wrong-short managers like us can make up for low money. My fund, ECHOR-1 Capital, which is based in San Francisco, thinks of investing in biotech in a slightly different way. We're looking for unfollowed, unloved, misunderstood biotech companies. It's an amazing moment in time for those types of companies. There has been a structural and permanent perception shift where both sides of the aisle are going to be leaning into nuclear in a big way. I'm massively optimistic. You know, all of this leads me to just the maximum risk on. Thanks the besties for having me, and this is obviously a fabulous event. You guys put on them happy to be here. For those of you who don't know me, I run a $4 billion firm in New York called Serena Capital. Before it's found in my firm, I ran the equity business for George Soros. I was at CIO for a steep co-ing, and I've been doing hedge funds now for 29 years. So definitely on the older edge of my peer group. So I was thinking about, you know, I run a generalist fund, and we own a bunch of tech stocks, but given this audience here for me to pitch a tech stock would be absolutely completely stupid. So I was thinking about what else, and, you know, obviously the theme of this conference besides tech is poker. So I'm going to pitch to you MGM. Now, most of you know MGM as you think about it as the Vegas company. They own 13 properties in Vegas. They're one of them in season, or the two largest owners of casino assets in Vegas. Now, if you notice the other day, Caesar's got taken out. And so we think Vegas is actually starting to improve. But I'm not here to pitch MGM because of Vegas. What I'm going to tell you is there's a couple of things we noticed. One is, this company has been very aggressively acquired by Barry Dillard lately. Barry now owns 26% of the company. Now, I put this presentation together two weeks ago. Yesterday, he actually bid for the company. Okay, so when I put the presentation together, the stock was about $37. It's now high 40s. He bid $48. Okay? I would not sell my shares to him for a second. When did we get this presentation? Did we get it early enough to try to sell? I would not sell the his. I would not sell my stock to him for a second. And the reason is also, besides him buying the stock, the company has also been buying the stock. Rarely have I ever seen a company in six years by half their float back. So you have Barry Dillard, who's the legend, aggressively buying the stock. And it's also now 80% of his NAV. Okay? So you, most people think of Barry Dillard as the ABC producer. He did IC, which owned assets like Expedia. And now he's a casino guy. What is going on here? So we spend a lot of time asking ourselves why. And why is MGM has two hidden assets. Okay? The first one is. And this is sort of the punch line of what we think the stock is worth. So you add the Vegas assets plus China, you get about a little low 60s. So from $48 or $37 when I started this, great return. What is. they. what they have now is a license to open a casino in Osaka, Japan. Japan, a couple of years ago, went through a whole referendum around the country. They have pre-fictures, the pre-fictures voted. The only one that decided to own open a casino is Osaka. Now, Osaka is. and this is what the asset's going to look like. It's going to open in 2030. If you go to the company's slide presentations, they sort of mention this, but they're not really talking about it. Japan, just for you people. sorry, I don't know, it's very slow. Japan actually has a reasonably large gambling market. They have porcine carlars and they have horses. That's about a $40 billion market. If you look at the market in Macau, that's $30 billion. And if you look at Vegas, it's only $10 billion. So this could be a massive opportunity. You know, we're estimated and they'll do about $2 billion of EBITDA. They own 40% of the property. They also get a management fee for this. If you also look at where Osaka is located, it's a great. So the Japanese like the gamble, but the Chinese really gamble. So if you look at where it is from Shanghai, it's shorter than Macau and Singapore, which is the two big gaming options in Asia and from Beijing. It's about the same distance as Macau and obviously much shorter than going to Singapore. So if you want to go gambling for a weekend and you live in Shanghai, living Beijing, Osaka is great. It's also a first-world nation. And if you think about it as an investor, where would you want to have your money? Look, Macau has issues. It's a low-multiple business. This is Japan, it's a first-world country. So we think Barry Diller understands gambling. He understands casinos. But what he's really doing is now trying to pick off the company to get the Japanese opportunity, which we think is worth more than double the stock. The final option, and I'm keeping this simple. What I love about this pitch is it's really simple. It's not that hard to do the math. MGM is built, somebody, they're brand, they're building a property into buy. Okay? Now, it's a grand complex. It has an area. It has an MGM and it has a belagio. Gambling is illegal into buy right now. Okay? But they have snuck in this building. 300,000 square feet of space. Well, one day, if Dubai decides to legalize gambling, guess where it's going? Right there. Next year, sorry, two years from now, wind is going to open a casino in a place called Armajon, which is 45 minutes away from Dubai. Now, any of us who want to go gambling in Dubai, we, Armajon, is a bit of a pain they ask to get to. We're going to want to go here. So we think there's a chance that, especially when wind opens, also look, there's a possibility of the war of, you know, Dubai wants to reestablish themselves that they open a casino in Dubai. And, you know, what that would be worth. So when you take the biggest assets, which would be thinking about worth about 60, when you take Japan, which we think is worth about 50 bucks. If Dubai happens, that's worth another 40 or 50 dollars. So we think the stock is a triple. Remember, Barry's bidding for the company, okay? He is not a strategic buyer. He is a financial buyer, and he's doing it to get rich. So therefore, I think this company is now in play. I don't know how it's all going to play out. But if you own shares, don't tender them. And the risk of the word is incredible right now. Because, you know, I'm telling you, I think the stock could be easily worth over 100. Could be worth 150. And now you have Barry Diller, who is a, has a firm bid owns 26% of the company, basically at the same price. So I think this is a cool idea. Well done. Okay. Anybody, let's do two questions. And, yeah, we'll put, I'll give you both questions at the same time. Proficiency. How much have you looked at, like, the monetization of the assets outside of gambling? I had heard from someone that Barry Diller was spending a lot of time trying to reinvent the entertainment piece of the properties. He was active on the board, and they were trying to identify that the entertainment property is way, the entertainment
values way under monetized and they could be making a lot more per. >> Okay, don't answer yet. That's question one. >> Okay. >> And then question two is how when you expand internationally, do you scale customer credit because that tends to be the thing that drives people to come back and- >> Well obviously, sorry, your question first. >> That was good. >> MGM has a massive database of customers, right? So I assume the Vegas properties have guys that come from China, they come from Japan. They'll use that database to do it. They also have a loyalty program. I unfortunately made a bad investment in the company called Rio, which was in Vegas, which we bought when they separate- when Caesars merged with El Dorado, they had to shed an asset. That was the Rio. I did an investment with a couple of friends and we were buying the thing at $200 per square foot. The thing we forgot was when you separated from Caesars, you lost a loyalty program and then ended up- >> And I had to invest. >> And I had to invest in the audience. >> Well, I got to ask a straight-house question. >> Hold on, question. And then from the audience- >> Okay, let me get his first. >> Yeah, okay. >> We entertain my question. >> I don't know the answer to that. If it's- if he can make them better, it will help. But as I'm saying, this is not really a Vegas play. This is an Asian casino play that- if you look at their presentations, which is really cool, they are not- they barely mention it. But one of the things we happened beside- we were hoping- so look, I worked at SAC and one of the things we focused on is Catalyst Path. So what was the Catalyst Path? The Catalyst Path was they would have an investor day, blah, blah, blah. Barry just showed his cards. So- >> But if- >> Aaron, two questions. Caesars left Dubai waiting for a license. Why would this be different for MGM? That's question one. And then question two is the Osaka casino was approved in 2023. Why was the market ignoring this hidden asset until the bid? >> Sure. Let me answer this. So what's also cool about this idea was- so I've been doing this for 29 years- when they open Macau. So when started as a Vegas property, then open Macau. The market started caring about it about three years before it opened. So that- the answer is they should care about it. The reality is it tends to be about three years before it opens. Well, we're almost in that timeframe, which is why we think it's opportunistically the right period of time. Regarding the question with Caesars, look, this is an option, as I told you. Somebody built this project for them. They are running it for them. And they were intelligent enough to leave 300,000 square feet of empty space in case they get a casino. Well, that happens great. If it doesn't, you're still going to double more than double your money. So if it happens, you triple your money. >> Reoption, you're saying. >> All right. >> Reoption. >> Well done. >> Well done. >> Round of applause. >> Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. >> Nicely done, Aaron. Next up, Daniel. >> Long time no see. So today we're just a talent energy. But first, the anatomy of a power cycle. So a power cycle typically goes like this. In normal times, power demand grows about GDP. So if GDP grows 2%, power demand grows 2. GDP grows 3, power demand goes 3. And there's moments in time where we get technological breakthroughs. And a lot of those technological breakthroughs are very power intensive. So power demand spikes. And once everybody adopts that technology, it trends back down to its on algorithm GDP growth. And then you go through the efficiency phase where we say, let's try to conserve and figure out ways to consume less power. And then the cycle starts all over again. So in history, the big technological boom that sent power demand skyrocketing was appliances and air conditioning. Everybody had to get their kettles and the air con. Then in the 70s and 80s and 90s demand normalized again. But then the 2000s were all about efficiencies. We had like LED lighting, smart HVAC, tinted windows, smart electronics. And at the same time, as I said earlier, we were ripping down all our power, hungry infrastructure, like aluminum and smelters and moving over China. So we had two decades of effectively no power demand. And now we're just coming out of it and starting a technological cycle again where power demand is going to really start to explode from these sort of high 2% numbers you're seeing on the screen. Now, I want to say something right now that is incredibly important. We do not need AI demand to keep the power markets incredibly tight for the next 20 years. AI demand just turbocharges. That's all it does. And it creates shortages. So just remember that. Early in my career, I was on a panel with Sam Zell. Interestingly, it was a panel on opportunities in Mongolia. I was looking at a copper mine and he was looking at real estate. There was one thing he said that stuck with me for the rest of my career is he said, if you can buy an asset, a hard asset, at below replacement cost for an asset that's going to be needed in the future where we're going to need to build new capacity of that asset, then you buy that asset at the discounted replacement cost. Now hold it and you sell it at a big premium to replacement cost when the market wakes up. That's exactly what we did with equity office properties sold at the peak of the market, but bought it at a discounted replacement value. Talent energy is a power producer. They have two gigawatts of nuclear power and they've got six gigawatts of natural gas base load power. Today in the stock market, as a good speculation, you could purchase this company at a $25 billion enterprise value, the replacement cost is $45 billion and because they've got debt, it means that the equity value just to get to replacement cost is more than a double from where it's trading today. If you follow Sam's playbook, then we ultimately end this cycle at a big premium to replacement value. When I see this, I say the plan for America on the power side has to be this. Make America great again? Copy China. If you look what China did, or last 20 years, we started out this cycle with having two X, the power generation that China had. Fast forward today, China has three times the power generation capacity that we have. Now, if you believe that artificial intelligence is going to be responsible for scientific breakthroughs, you either have it or you don't have the scientific breakthroughs, you believe that artificial intelligence can drive robotics. You either have it or you don't have that productivity from the robots. If you believe that artificial intelligence is going to be helpful for national security and military affairs, then you either have it or you're dead. This is an absolutely mandatory build out that we have to do otherwise we're going to fall behind because at the end of the day, what is a data center? In my world, in the commodities world, I look at the data center as the exact same thing as a refinery. In a traditional hydrocarbon refinery, you put oil in, crude oil in, you refine it into jet fuel or gasoline for your car. With a data center, you put electricity in and on the other end, instead of gasoline or jet fuel, it comes photons or tokens or intelligence, whatever you want to call it. But it's the same thing. Big capital intensive asset, $50 billion per gigawatt. Power, just electricity, just like oil, is the input to that refinery. Here's Jensen. He was just recently quoted that we need a thousand times more power than we currently have. But if that's remotely true, we need every single source of power that you can imagine. We need hundreds of gigawatts of nuclear, we need solar, we need orbital, we need it all. If this is even remotely true. But the challenge as we spoke about before is the supply chain, right? All of these, you know, a data center competes for the same supply chain of the critical minerals that space launches and orbital data centers do. Solar plants need all the same nickel super alloys that it takes to launch rockets and the silver that goes into these photovoltaic cells and so there's going to be shortages of everything and delays everywhere. My point here is we are just going to need every solution that we can throw at this for the foreseeable future. Here's a little region in the US called the PJM, Pennsylvania, Jersey, Maryland. This is a forecast from the grid operator where they say that over the next 10 years, we're going to need 106 gigawatts of new power in the PJM and just one little area of the US. Now in 10 years and geological time, that's like tomorrow morning, right? We're also used to internet time, you press a button and you get your food delivered to you or your car picks you up in two seconds. You know, building infrastructure happens in geological time. 10 years to build out 106 gigawatts is literally a nanosecond from now and you know, you see that thermal coal retirements. We ain't retiring those coal plants because there's no world where we're going to be building 100 gigawatts.
watts in 10 years. That's the size of what Japan consumes today for one little part of the US. And what I'll say is those that understand the supply chain and what goes into building all this, everybody's in panic mode because we know that we don't have the raw materials to meet this level of demand that's coming our way. So that's going to keep existing capacity and power prices very tight. Now, the data centers and the hyperscalers are in a panic. They're trying everything they can to source as much power as they can under long-term PPAs, power purchase price agreements at fixed prices for 20 years. There's a famous example. I thought Microsoft was a green company. But they went and convinced Consolation Energy, which is a company that owns a three mile island, nuclear reactor, the one that melted down and created the nuclear meltdown that gave nuclear a bad name for 30 years. It was Microsoft that told them they needed to start it up. And in order to incentivize to stimulate their hand to wallet reflex to start this thing up, they said, power prices stay are $50 a megawatt hour. We'll pay you 100 a year for 20 years, minimum price for you guys to start this up. And so here we have it. A three mile island brought to you by Microsoft Azure. So it's getting harder to do these deals because the regulars are saying, wait a minute, if you're taking all this power off the grid for your data center, how are we going to heat the homes of our customers? And so we're getting ourselves into the moment of what I call crunch time. So just to finish up, here are the numbers on talent. The stock today is sort of in the high 300s. If they just do absolutely nothing, just absolutely nothing. Just sit there and run the business, let their Amazon data center contract roll up. These guys will be generating $50 a share of free cash flow per year. Again, the stock is in the high 300s. It's about seven times free cash flow. Good infrastructure assets in the US traded about 15 times. So that's pretty good. You get a double for basically management just sitting around and doing nothing. But if they continue to figure out ways to sign contracts with data centers at premium prices, or if power prices go up, I mean, the amazing thing right now is in the PJM where these guys operate. The power price is still too low to stimulate new capacity. The math still doesn't work, which is really mind boggling. So if power prices go up a bit, they do more deals. You get to $70 a share of recurring annual free cash flow, put a 50 multiple on that, that's $1,050. But then if they get into building power plants, and right now the regulator is telling these companies to go sit in a room, power producer, data center, come in a room, make a deal so that you build power and get a good return on it. And the data center gets their power, gets a good return on it. And Talon is in a pole position to be able to do this. If they just build like four gigawatts or the 100 gigawatts that we need, you could get up to over $100 a share of free cash flow. The stocks in the high 300s today. So going by the shares, it's a good speculation. And we can chat. All right, not financial advice. Gavin go. - Gavin go. - I'm just very curious, how do you think about regulatory risks here? Nobody likes their electricity prices going up. AI is an increasingly political issue. Just, how do you think about that risk? - We need AI and we need to figure this out. And so there's different ways to skin a cat here. My personal view is during peak hours. If you go drive down a highway at four in the morning, you would sit there and say, why do we have all this highway capacity? This is crazy. But then you go on that same highway at rush hour. You're like, oh, we don't have enough highway capacity. There's not enough lanes. Power is the same thing. There's only a few hours a day where you really stress the system. And so I think the working solution to get around this regulatory issue is you do the PPAs with the data centers. You force the data centers to throw a ton of battery behind it and some peakers just to get through that really intense period. And then that's a good band-aid solution until we build more power. So there's ways to do this. Human ingenuity is going to win here. We're going to get our data centers and consumer power bills are going to be, I think, relatively under control. They're going to go up. They're going to be under control. - Okay, Dan, I have three questions from the audience. Really good ones. Number one, does your thesis actually need behind the meter of co-location to clear? Or is it just a bet that clean, firm, baseload is scarce enough that it doesn't matter whether power flows in front of or behind the meter? - It's the latter. And that's why I gave three scenarios. The $50 a share of earnings per share, again, a high $300 stock, right? $50 a share of earnings, nothing has to happen. You just sit in a double your money. Now, if you get more behind the meter or even front of the meter, that's how you get up to that $70 a share of earnings from 50. And then if you get up to the 70 but start building new capacity, then you get to the $100 plus. - Okay, question two from Brad. How do you think about competition for power from things like fuel cells, gas turbines, aerodarivate turbines, orbital compute, and other sort of IPPs, independent power producers? - We need all of it. We need all of it. Fuel cells and the caterpillar solar turbines, these are fantastic bridge solutions. But the cost to run these things, the LCOE is like through the roof. But to build a $50 billion data center, you don't want it to sit idle for three years, waiting for your base load CCGT. So you do whatever it takes, you don't give a crap what you pay for that bridge solution. And so we're finding ways through fuel cells, through caterpillar solar turbines, hopefully through orbital data centers, where we can alleviate this because I want AI to happen in a really big way and we're gonna eat all the above. - Okay, question three. By the way, great questions guys. Thank you for these. What is the right terminal multiple for talent? If the business mix shifts from merchant IPP to contracted infrastructure? - Fabulous question. - And the, and the, and what percentage of EBITDA needs to be contracted before the market should re-rate it? - So that's a great question. And I only had six minutes to do this, and I think I blew through my time. So I couldn't get into this kind of detail, but it's something I would have really wanted to get into. So whoever asked that, thank you. I just used the 15 multiple because it's sort of a blended multiple between the contracted stuff, which you'll get a big premium multiple because it's a bond-like cash flow stream and bond-like cash flow streams trade at a small spread to treasuries. And so treasuries, if they're at 5%, should trade at 20 times plus some growth or whatever, plus or minus. The uncontracted stuff, the merchant stuff that has spot market exposure is more volatile, less visible, that should trade at a lower multiple. We can get into the minutia, but just suffice to say the more contracts, the higher the multiple, the less the lower the multiple. Use 15 times as a good rule of thumb and you'll probably get to the right answer. Which is what I used. - That last question from Daniel Scher, thank you for that. Dan, thank you. That was great. - Oh, yes, great. Thanks. (audience applauding) - My name's Oleg Nobleman. I'm the founder and managing director of E.Core 1 Capital, San Francisco-based value-oriented biotech fund that I started about 13 years ago. Thanks a lot to the besties for having me here. I'm a huge fan of the pod, like I'm sure all of us are. And I know how challenged science corner can get. So I wrote this in a way that even David Sachs would appreciate and pay attention to if he were here. - Well, paradoxically, he's taking a nap, which is what he normally does during science corner. - Exactly. Generally speaking, investing in biotech companies is a horrible idea. Sandwich somewhere between movies, wineries and SPACs. In fact, our sector often feels a lot more like a casino than an actual financial market. And most of the tourists who are investing are playing the slots. Of course, at E.Core 1, we consider ourselves poker players. In the sector where virtually everyone else is a momentum investor, betting on science, we focus on margin of safety. We're one of the few funds not managed by PhDs or MDs, and that's by design, 'cause we don't want to fall in love with the science, we fall in love with the risk reward. And like the slide says, we want to monetize other kids, science projects. This is my 25th year investing in biotech. I started my career with an 11 year stint at another fund and launched E.Core 1 in 2013 humble beginnings with 13 million. Since inception, we've 10x to our investors and annualized at 20%. And today we have about two and a half billion under management. We're lucky to have long term partners, many of whom are biotech entrepreneurs themselves and have been with us since day one. And we recently reopened for the first time in four years. Today I'm gonna tell you about a company that's on the front lines of the war on cancer. Military terminology has been used when describing treatments for the disease since the early 70s, when President Nixon signed the National Cancer Act. The warfare analogy is actually perfect. The warfare in actually is actually perfect for cancer because both domains are trying to accomplish the exact same thing. Find the enemy, figure out the best weapon to kill them, and have minimal unwanted casualties along the way. First, a quick history of how this war is evolved. Early surgical cancer treatment and radiation was akin to a medieval siege. Level the entire castle, burn the surrounding village, and hope the enemy was left somewhere in the rubble. Kibo actually evolved.
from an accidental observation during World War I that mustard gas killed rapidly dividing tissue. Tumor cells divide fast, so doctors would flood a patient's body with chemo and hoped it killed the enemy faster than it killed allies. Unfortunately, hair, skin, gut, and marrow cells also divide quickly, and the poison doesn't discriminate. First generation targeted therapies were next, like a GPS guided munition. Instead of carpet bombing every dividing cell, you identify the enemy's commanding control center and destroy it. The problem with any weapon is that the enemy adapts and hides, and in cancer these are called resistant mutations. Immunotherapy was first introduced to patients a decade ago. With IO, you don't send in your own troops, you recruit local allies, also known as T-cells, and let them do the fighting for you. It's a spectacular when it works, but a highly dependent on the terrain or the tumor micro-environment. This brings me to the reason we're here today. Modern-day radiopharmaceuticals, like a swarm of micro drones, small enough to navigate the bloodstream and find their target by molecular recognition, then detonate a precisely sized warhead with a blast radius of 100 microns, or the diameter of a single cell, an autonomous assassination with the force of a bunker buster and minimum collateral damage. The company I'm going to tell you about today is Actus Oncology, the ticker is AKTS. The company has a billion dollar market cap, a $500 million in our prize value, and a stockpile of cash which should last them over three years. Long past critical milestones that are coming next year. Actus was started five years ago, but recently went public with a $300 million IPO that was 18 times oversubscribed, and backstopped with a $100 million order by Eli Lilly, the folks who bring you all the weight loss drugs. The company's designed a platform that can carry any radioactive payload is complex enough to go after a variety of targets and small enough to clear your body with minimal side effects. The beautiful thing about this approach is that physicians can verify target engagement in early clinical trials with imaging. This significantly de-risks clinical development because you know the drug is getting to the tumor. Another de-risking strategy for the first few programs, Actus chose known valid targets like Nectin IV and B7H3. Nectin IV is critical in bladder cancer, and the company's second program targeting B7H3 is even more ambitious, expressed on every major solid tumor, including the big three, prostate, colorectal, and lung. Actus started clinical trials last year, and is publicly guided to initial clinical data in both of these lead programs in 2027, with Nectin IV coming as early as Q1, so you won't have to wait long. If either program shows a signal, the company is likely to get value not only for those programs, but the entire mini-protein platform. This is the holy grail in biotech, getting value simply for the promise of what might come. What's even more compelling is there's an amazing amount of interest in radiotherapy from pharma. The big ones including Bristol, Novartis, Bayer, and Lily, who backstopped the Actus IPO, have been building radiotherapy capabilities, and they're hungry for assets to add to their pipelines. There's been 15 billion in M&A and deal-making in radiotherapy in the last few years, and we're very much in the early innings. The neatest thing about this modality is that it's very hard to replicate. Generics generally don't traffic in radiopharma, and because the class involves radioisotopes, it's off limits to China. So unlike most of biotech, there's a real moat. And now the obligatory safety warning. This is not for everyone. You should tell your biotech analyst before purchasing the Actus. They're sharing a position and causing increased anxiety reduced sleep to the night. Serious sometimes, there's drops in stock rates of current biotech. Immediately after investing, they experience sudden volatility due to handling risk for competitors. Stocking clients are experienced in their phone reasons, and client broker immediately to get your position. Remember, serious safety concerns over those in other companies, local development programs. Although safety concerns occur, then they act as a company, and they may in the future. The use of mini-proteons is liberated from sales because they're not proven. Actus is no market products, and thus no referring revenue. So we should refer to the offerings may occur. In the event of a secondary offering, immediately is a casual call with the Actus management team to discuss place in order. [Applause] It's notoriously challenging to value biotech companies because when you risk a just and discount back, you pretty quickly get to zero. For earlier stage opportunities like this, we like to triangulate. We think Actus could be worth $10 billion or $200 per share if even one of their programs makes it to market. And in this case, you have a lot of outs. I'm not familiar with why radio isotopes are off limits to China. So in this particular case, Actus's radio isotope payload is actinium, and actinium is manufactured from radium 233, which was used in our own nuclear programs in the US in the 50s and 60s, so it's a waste product from there. So actinium is not even available in other countries like China because they had a completely different. Their own program was completely different with enriched uranium with plutonium. But the risk for a lot of biotech and China replication came about that Amgen Sonofi Supreme Court case, didn't it, where you could make a small, because basically all patents are composition of matter patents. So you could change one amino acid, get around the patent. And China has basically done that with a lot of biologics that are patented in the US and Europe. They just rip them off and then you attach the radio emitting radio isotope to the molecule and you can kind of chase it. That's kind of why a lot of biotech has been depressed. Is that not true? Yeah, so with radio isotopes again, because you have to have a manufacturing supply that you have to source locally in the US, we haven't seen any competition coming from China at all. And if they have a successful readout though, would it not be like the case that someone in China would say, hey, let's go get some of the necessary radio isotopes? I'm sure they can do it for the Chinese market, but in terms of then transferring that over here, we haven't seen it or any wind of it at all. And so then my last question, I'm sorry for monopolizing. Why do you think the markets discounted the value so much since the IPO? Oh gosh, it's given the return on biotech value. It's pretty classic biotech. So it's traded flat since the IPO. Biotech investors are so insanely short term oriented that even though we're now call it eight or nine months from data, that's still way too long. And so our expectations in the folks will start accumulating this in the second half and anticipation of the data coming in the first quarter. Gavin, you had a question? Yeah, sure. Oh, look, so in the distant past, I ran a biopharmaceutical fund. And it's a very hard job, congratulations on those numbers. But I ran that fund right after the human genome had been sequenced. And there was an expectation that the sequencing of the genome was going to lead to this explosion in therapies, precise medicines, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't think broadly speaking, we've made much progress over the last 25 years, has maybe people thought in the early 2000s. And my hypothesis is that the genome is too big of a problem space for the human mind, or software written by humans. And AI is going to unlock a lot of kind of revolutionary therapies. So my question to you, I will just admit it's a self-disquestion. It is not about your stock pitch, which is great. It's what do you think the odds are that in the lifetimes of everyone in this room, the average human lifespan in a developed country extends well past 100 to 125, 150? I would take the over on that in no small part because we already have one of the best longevity drugs out there, and folks don't even realize it in the glip ones and the obesity drugs. So one of the only things that's ever been shown in actual data to extend life is chloric restriction, and that's literally what all the obesity drugs do. So I'm sure half the people in this room are on one of them, and that's just the beginning because it's trained people that you can inject yourself with something and have healthy living through pharmaceuticals. So I think that's only going to continue. Well, I have two questions from the audience. First one, as the launch costs per kilogram continue to fall, is there a credible pathway to use space and microgravity as a therapeutic variable given that cancer cells appear to behave differently in low gravity environments? That is a great question that's probably not applicable to this. Okay. And then the second question, what would be a technological breakthrough that could disrupt precision radiotherapy as a result of AI at scale to drug development and precancerous screen? Yeah. Another awesome question. There's a small scunks work project within ACTIS AI project. So with all these managed companies, they have their little proprietary data sets that they hope to leverage with various insights. So I'll come to you like this with their many proteins and everything else they're trying to accomplish. They have their own little tiny group of PhD data scientist nerds who are seeing if they can leverage that in a pretty decent way. So it's been really hard to get CAR-T in solid tumors. Is it the case that these kind of personalized peptide-based immunotherapies are showing some efficacy in some solid tumors and is that space that's going to expand and kind of intersect here? What's most promising that I think a lot of folks have probably heard of is a new drug for pancreatic cancer from a company called Gravmed with just another targeted therapy. So for now, there's not a huge amount of progress from peptide-based. Have you looked at deep proteins before? These kind of right-handed proteins that seem to be able to penetrate solid tumors? So one of the neat things about these many proteins is they're hopefully of the right size to be able to deliver their paleo-ethnic acid.
load inside of the tumors. Incredible. Oh, like thank you. Thank you. All done. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING] By the way, by the way, somebody just yo-loaded into the stocks while the whole lake was on stage. It's up 6%. Like the lot. Don't do that while we're all trying to buy as well, please. Come on. Morning, everyone. My name is Kyle Simone. Thank you for being with us at the All on the Quiddity today. Thanks to the best of these for organizing. Today, we're going to be talking about a little known asset, a little crypto asset called GeoNet, which is building the Rails for AI. So let's jump in. Quick bit about me. I found that I've found a multi-coin capital by 8.5 years ago. I stepped down a few months ago. And in my time there, I was probably most well known for leading all three rounds of investment in Salona prior to Salona's network launch in 2020. It had been deep in the crypto space for a very long time. And I thought this would be a very natural forum to talk about a very interesting investment at the intersection of crypto and AI. Also a big shout out to David Saxon, fortunately he's not here, but David did seed multi-coin back in the day. So thank you, David, for believing in me very early. All right, let's get into GeoNet. So the way to understand GeoNet, first is to look at GPS. Probably everyone in this room has been in this situation on the left where you use your phone, and your phone is in the wrong spot facing the wrong way. Right here, you can see this guy looks like he's facing a wall according to his phone. GeoNet, it fundamentally is a technology called RTK, or real-time kinematics, where you can localize your location down to about 2 centimeters. For context, GPS, roughly the precision is about 2 meters. So you're getting about 100x accuracy for a very precise geolocation. As you can imagine, any form of robotics can make use of RTK, drones being the very obvious example. I'll touch on a few more. There's a couple minutes here. Today, GeoNet is the world's largest RTK network in the world, and it's also the fastest growing. The three companies you see on the left here, Trimble, Hexagon, and TopCon have all been building RTK networks in some form or fashion for a call of 20 to 30 years. All of them combined have roughly 12,000 base stations deployed around the world. GeoNet was founded in 2021. Again, building out the network in 2022. And today, they are roughly twice the size of the next three guys combined. Today, GeoNet is live in 150 countries around the world, more than 11,000 cities, and covers roughly 80% of the global population, excluding some sanctioned countries. So this thing is really growing quickly. You might say, how did these guys build this network so fast? And the key is really this decentralized crypto model. So here, we're looking at literally a photo of a GeoNet base station on their roof of someone's house. The global GeoNet network, those 22,000 nodes, are not being built and deployed by someone that looks like AT&T or Verizon. Those base stations are being deployed by any random guy, or hobbyist, or professional, or small business owner, who wants to make some extra money. You can go on the GeoNet's website today. You can buy one of these base stations. There are a few hundred bucks. You put it on your roof of your house or your small business. It broadcasts radio waves. You make money. You actually get paid in GeoTocons, which is a really cool part about this incentive system to bootstrap this thing to get it off the ground. So the GeoNet network started out four years ago doing this. Today, it's not the largest task is growing in the world by pretty wide margin. If you want a sense of scale, here, we're looking at the coverage of the United States. Obviously, every single major metro is covered. But even if you look at most of the rural parts of the country, you're covering actually the vast majority of even the rural areas. Let's talk about some of the customers in use cases for this. We'll start with agriculture first. The USDA actually launched a couple years ago, a program to encourage farmers and ranchers to use precise act technologies, including RTK networks. Today, actually, the USDA is now actually subsidizing many farmers and ranchers all over the country to adopt high precision ag, most of which is powered by GeoNet. Getting into some specific examples of that. Here, we're looking at what's called a robotic mule. This is made by a company called Burrow. Obviously, this is transporting some grapes. You could put anything on this. It has pretty obvious application for almost any farmer ranch you can imagine with the advent and computer vision, CPUs, batteries, all the AI stuff. These things are growing like hotcakes, all of them are going to be powered by GeoNet or something like it. Here, we're looking at John Deere. They have a new service that they roll out recently called Global Unmanned Spring Systems, or Gus. These things drive around. They literally spray plants with pesticides and other things like that. I did actually confirm this morning there are wineries here in Napa that are actually using John Deere Gus vehicles. That was pretty cool. So if you have some wine tonight, maybe it was powered by Gus, which powered by GeoNet. Obviously, autonomous vehicles has a pretty obvious application for this. Tom Tom is one of GeoNet's customers. Tom Tom is a supplier to basically every AV program in the world, excluding maybe a couple. And today, Tom Tom is using GeoNet's data to update their maps to get them more accurate and precise as they need to cover every square inch basically around the planet. One of my favorite use cases are the next wave of consumer robotics, which are getting a lot of hype these days. I think the most obvious one are robotic lawn mowers. I don't think anyone loves to mow their lawn. Robotic lawn mowers are now actually rolling out at pretty good scale. They're estimated-- they're going to sell 1 million robotic lawn mowers this year, made by companies like Yarbo, Sunseeker, and others. All of those going to these guys are all powered by GeoNet. Next up, let's get to drones. The world's largest drone manufacturer, DGI, is a GeoNet customer. It's not all of their models, but it is in a lot of their models. And so obviously, DGI is sending a ton of traffic now over GeoNet. In the coming months and years, as DGI winds down in the US, and you have new wave of American drone manufacturers pop up, I'm going to venture to guess that most, if not all of them, are going to end up on the GeoNet network as well. The GeoNet team is based in the US as deep roots here. What I'm about GeoNet is it's a really obvious network effect-- network effects business. This thing looks like a natural telecom. You have base stations all over the world. You've got to cover the whole planet. Telecoms naturally form monopolies historically. I think the same is likely to be true here. Today, GeoNet is the world's largest and fastest-growing network, with also the lowest cost structure by a very wide margin because of this decentralized nature, where people just put these things on top of their house. In terms of where the business at, the business just crossed about $11 million in annualized run rate a few days ago. And it's growing more than 3X-0 over year. I think it's going to probably more than triple over the next 12 months. What's really cool about GeoNet is how capital efficient it is and how they're actually returning capital to token holders. So today, the GeoNet network is taking of that $11 million in revenue. Roughly-- excuse me-- 80% of it is being used to make open market purchases of Geo tokens. And this is all visible on the slant of blockchain. They have all the addresses or publishing stuff, so it's all verifiable in real time. That means $8.8 million right now per year is going into buying a GeoNet tokens on the open market. What's amazing is that last 20% is they're covering all their R&D costs and scaling out now their business development team. With the business like this, of course, like it's a pretty small network of customers. The guys who work at John Deere know the guys who work at DGI. Who know the guys who work at TomTom. And so this thing is now growing virally amongst this kind of core community of customers. And as you can imagine, with customers who sign up for a service like this, they tend to ramp up their usage of that service over time. So once someone starts rolling out GeoNet in the first year, they're usually spending about $60,000 per year. After two years, though, they're usually spending about $170,000 per year. So the average GeoNet customers growing their revenue with GeoNet about 3x in that second year. Obviously, then we look at their customers. They've signed up in the last two years. You can see they 5x their customer base last year. Those are net new customers. So applying some pretty simple math here, you can see they have a very clear path to more than 3x this year as this thing ramps up. Just wrapped things up summary. GeoNet is the largest R2K network growing the fastest. It has really obvious network effects. And it's likely to be a very natural monopoly. Growing 3x over a year with a bunch of flagship customers and brands that you all know. Obviously, we have this huge physical AI tailwind behind us now, robotics, and all of the other amazing stuff happening. And they're returning capital to shareholders. The token does trade on the salon of blockchain. If you want to buy trades 24/7, the ticker is GeoD. So if you want to actually get some GeoTokins, I encourage you to sign up for a crypto wallet, a salon wallet, and you can go ahead and buy GeoDokins from there. And with that, I think we are ready for some Q&A. Awesome. What's the market cap? Oh, sorry. It's rating about $150 million on a fully deluded basis. If you were to go look at any of the crypto price websites like Coin.Gaq, or Coin.Gaq, they're going to show you something like $60 or $70 million. That's because not all of the tokens are floating yet. But the fully deluded number is about $1 million. Is there a corporation behind it? Or is this just like a project in the Cayman Islands in Panama with a board that nobody knows who's on it? Tell us about governance. So the GeoNet team is a US-based corporation. The four teams in San Francisco, the CEO's name is Mike Horton. Really, really good guy has been building in this kind of IoT smart device space. Explain the relationship between the corporate entity and the token and which one should we own? You should own the token. I own a lot of the token, as you might imagine. I don't know any of the equity. The relationship is GeoNet. The company is facing John, dear DJI, all these companies. And they have a contractual relationship with the GeoNet foundation to use 80% of their revenues to buy tokens off the open market. And that's that corporation- Has that corporation raised venture capital or anything? Yes. My prior company, Multicoin, actually, led around in GeoNet previously. OK, Kyle, I have many questions from the audience. So bear with me. Question one. Do you like Helium as much, which is GeoNet for 5G signal? Yes, I actually led Multicoin Investment in Helium six or seven years ago.
and they continue to be a very big long term believer. They actually had big news go out this morning, but yeah, I'm a big helium fan. - Question two, there's a long list of deep in projects that have failed because people just don't value the token rewards. Why is this any different? - I mean, they're returning capital to shareholders. This thing is, you know, turning $8.8 million to shareholders, just trading at $150 million valuation, and it's going to grow a three X this year. It's an unbelievably cheap asset. It's just people aren't paying attention 'cause it's crypto bear market right now. - Okay, from Sam. - Can I just say, it's a securitized interest in the cash flows from the customers? - Effectively yes, it is a revenue. It is a-- - The revenue share token. - Correct, 8%. - 8%. - So the more John Deere pays geodnet the company, the more you basically deprecate the tokens which should cause the token. - They're buying token to open the open market, correct? - Yes. - Okay, from Sam, what a cruise value. The equity or the token, similar to the commercial. How does the value accrual mechanisms square or not with current securities laws or what's contemplated in the Clarity Act? - Yeah, so the one answer to your question is the tokens are the ones that claim value 'cause they're taking 80% and buying. The other 20% is obviously funding operations. They have engineers, salespeople, all that stuff. So that's all there being funded. If there's a securities laws, the Clarity Act passing is certainly very good for geodnet. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to tell you that it passes the bars set in the Clarity Act, but I can tell you I'm an optimist and I've been very involved in the Clarity Act. - And I'm not too worried about it. - Okay, can I ask about the business just real quick? So John Deere, I know this space somewhat well, I used to manage a company called Precision Planting in Agriculture. And John Deere makes their own RTK systems. So when you run a piece of equipment that relies on RTK, you're buying in the construction industry top con or like a Trimble or John Deere, and you install the RTK-based stations and you run your equipment, why would John Deere and others want to rely on this system as a different, like why is it better than like the systems that they're already using? It wasn't quite clear to me. - I mean, CapEx versus OPEX, right? Like these networks are all over the world now. They're running at very low cost. Geodnet is probably a third to half, sorry, a third to a quarter of the price, then buying up your own CapEx and doing it, and it's just available everywhere. So now it just reduces the sales cycle time for John Deere when they just say, "buy the tractor, it's good." - There's another big push right now for microsats to be an alternative to GPS in a way that they can actually provide sub-centimeter resolution, effectively replacing both GPS and RTK using a mesh network from SpaceX launched or actually SpaceX, I don't know if SpaceX looked at doing this, but I know that there is a very well-funded company that is trying to put up microsats to basically replace GPS and RTK. Doesn't that ultimately kind of wash out the need to have all these earth-based base stations? - There's no chance they can compete on cost 'cause just sending things to space, satellites, that's so, I mean, these geodnet base stations are a few hundred bucks. Like you're just not gonna compete on cost with geodnet. - You don't think that this is a viable replacement at scale and saturation for GPS itself? - No, GPS is definitely very different. - Because yes, LA is different. You've gotta have ubiquity for GPS, for GPS alternative, which is why you have to have the satellite, satellite, you gotta have enough satellites. But if you get enough satellites, you can actually get to RTK precision and you don't need to have the big expensive GPS. - You have a hybrid situation where you have a bunch of geo and Leo plus a bunch of base stations all over the place, that hybrid situation probably. - You could actually get, the Leo alone can replace all of the geo stuff. That's the goal. And then if you get enough of them, which is a sex unlock. - And Kyle, what about like other tokens when you think about other compute tasks like work to be done, for example, there's a bunch of tokens that have emerged in distributed training. How did you hone in on this and exclude the others? - For, I mean, I prefer this over that. - I mean, I met the geo nut founder years ago, he pitched us and I've gotten the know, I'm gonna follow it. The distributed training stuff, there's a whole bunch of people trying it. I'm pretty skeptical, I don't think anyone's gonna work. The distributed inference stuff is possible, although it has not worked as well as we would have hoped. I did put some money behind that a few years ago. It's working, but not A plus. One last thing, I should say, David, on your prior question, I wanna highlight, is those are energy use? Going to space just consumes way more energy than going to a base station that's on the ground. And so, yeah, for a tractor, maybe that doesn't matter, but for a drone or for any other battery-sensitive application, the ground is always gonna be the preferred solution. - Super interesting. - Well done. - Thank you. - Thank you so much. - Thank you, thank you. - All right guys. (upbeat music) - Before we vote, Jamal, give your feedback. - Here's what I like. I apply the Stan Druckenmiller School of Invest in Investigate. I really believe in it. - Yes. - If you don't have any skin in the game, you don't care. And this is the kind of stuff that I love. I love hearing ideas like this. I love all four. My difference is in sizing. So, there's certain asymmetric alpha that each one of these exhibits, and then there's very different downside risk for each of them. And then there's also liquidity issues. So for example, I love Kyle's idea. The problem is I could not get enough working for me where I don't even think I could get a million dollars in today. To scale in, it would move the market. So I would have to probably, I'd be like 10, 20, 30,000, and then maybe start to buy into it. Talon, I think, they could absorb tens of millions, and people wouldn't buy it in eyelash. The biotech company, the issue there is that, I think that there is, as you said, Freepurg, this discontinuous, illiquidity zero risk, but then there's the 10X upside. So there's just a huge, - Good point. - wide, little, little ill bid for it. - And then MGM, I think, is just that, so I think MGM and Talon are the ones you can have huge sizing in. And then the other ones, I think you have a piece because they're like lottery tickets. I think your point on MGM. - Okay, wait, hold on, let me just review. So company number one was MGM. - And that was Amazon. - Amazon, okay. Company number two. - Talon. - Talon energy. Company number three. - Actus. - Actus. - Actus. - Actus. - Yes. - And then, - Geodnet. - Geodnet, not company, but I guess token. - Yeah. - Company number four, Geodnet. - And you're buying the token, not the company. - Do you think the, maybe for you to Gavin, like the, - Gavin, you rank them. - Yeah. - Well, no, even before you rank, just tell us what you think of the format and then assess the companies. We'll do ranking at the end. We're gonna do four three two, we're gonna do four three two one on stage. But give me your general ideas about the pitches, what you liked, what you did. - I thought the pitches were great. I thought the format was amazing. I would for sure expand it next year. There are platforms that you guys could have say all in basket or ETF that people could trade in. So like, maybe that's something. - Will you do it next year? - Will I pitch next year? - Yeah. - Jake, I'll do anything against that. - Well, I, I, he's locked. - He's locked. - Actually, here's what I would ask Gavin to put you on the spot next year. I would, I think we would all learn and benefit if you would do Silicon and Memory Supercycle. - Sure. - Would you be willing to do that for us? - I'll do it. - Sign me up. - Perfect. - Locked. - Sign me up. - Okay. - So keep going. - Well, no, as far as the pitches, I do think, I think it's important to disaggregate. Like, what was a really great entertaining pitch? First, what I think is a really good risk reward. I thought Oleg and Kyle did a great job with the pitches, but I'm not a healthcare investor, nor my crypto investor. I thoroughly enjoyed the presentations. I actually thought, you know, it was very interesting. I'm happy to learn from Oleg that I might lift well into my 100s. That was good news for me and everybody in the room. I enjoyed all the military terminology and analogy. - Yeah, that was really great, huh? - That was great. - Really great. - I do think, from a pure risk reward perspective, I thought MGM was the best. Your downside is really capped 'cause of the very dillard bed, and then you have Japan and Dubai, as I think very valuable, future sources of value. And I do think talent is also a very compelling risk reward. I just think everything in AI is going to need to grapple with increasing regulatory risk, which we talked about last time, that I was on the pod with you guys. And I don't know how to dimensionalize that. And, you know, I've been. - Like the big negative externality for talent is nothing to do with talent. - Nothing to do with talent. - It's like something over the top from the US government, cap's prices, something something. - Yeah, you have. - Nationalizes the lava. - You have a change in administration, you have a change in Congress. There's laws that are passed that I think make it hard for terrestrial compute, which changes the utility supply demand. But I actually think outside of that, talent was super compelling. - So you got MGM, you got talent. Now it's the other two. - I thought they were both great pitches. Can I tie them for third? Just this. - Well, don't even give the score. Just any feedback on those two ideas, or those are just a little bit lottery ticket for you, or no, I thought Actus was very compelling. They're trying to do something different, as Oleg said, if you ever get a biotech company that can become a platform, and they have a mechanism, whether it's of drugging, whether it's targeting, if you have something that is broadly applicable, that is when you can get these really, really big, $100 billion plus outcomes in biotech, which are rare. So I thought that part of. - Right. super compelling and you don't play crypto.
I don't play crypto, but I thought the entire GNO GNO discussion was fascinating. Is there anything that would get you off the bench and make you jump into the crypto game? Why are you not playing the crypto game? I feel about crypto exactly the way I do about snowboarding. Okay. I'm not a very good athlete. I've spent a lifetime learning how to ski, and I'm okay. And just the idea of getting out of snowboard, having thousands of hours of ski instruction. You don't want the pain for the game? Yes, and I have 25 years of lessons, learnings, pain, scars from investing in equities and public securities. And just crypto, it's a little bit like snowboarding for me, but like, you know, everybody wants to snowboard, that's great. Everybody wants to do crypto, that's great. Just please don't go sideways down the mountain, ruin the powder. I think you're a set of MGM talent. Okay. So I think MGM, I look at the kind of return upside, the downside and the timeline. MGM's like probably a 3X. I think it's also missing this point that I've heard a lot about on you can actually upgrade the monetization on these Vegas properties. We were talking to a friend of ours in Vegas. They're making a million bucks a day in incremental EBITDA every day that they have a show at the sphere at the Venetian hotel, which is an unbelievable statistic, which tells you that when you have the entertainment draw, the gambling revenue just flies. And so very dillr, I have heard separately has been spending a lot of time on trying to reinvent the entertainment at these properties and thinks he has an idea on how to do it, which will cause the gambling revenue to fly. So I think even if you discount the upside on these new locations, there's probably a lot of work to be done. And I do like the floor on the bid and then you've got to call it 3X in two years, even if this bid goes nowhere and they keep the thing running and they're like, we're going to reject the bid and keep running independently. Talon is maybe 3X upside, 5X upside, but it's 8 years out. And I think one of the other challenges with Talon that I would kind of use as a valuation metric is I think it's more interest rate sensitive than MGM is because the power purchase agreements really are where a lot of the revenue comes from. So you're going to get a discount rate that's a function of where interest rates are sitting. So I think if interest rates shoot up, which some might argue there's risk there, you actually get margin compression from that 15X outlook that he has for Talon. So that would be my kind of downside scenario on Talon in the time ahead. In act this, I do worry because I'm an investor in a company that's got a deprotein conjugate that shows really strong efficacy into getting solid tumors. I think that there are new modalities for therapeutics for solid tumors that are being discussed that may kind of put this at risk. I think the China risk is legit because I've seen it across the board in biotech. Everything gets ripped off and people go to China, but they could have a hit and Lily could bid on it in six months if they actually get a good readout. So there's certainly upside, but the downside's probably 50, 75% if they get a bad readout or China or some new modality comes out. So I think the ranking is probably NGM Talon Actus and then for me the GeoNet piece, I just think the space thing is likely the path that's going to replace all RTK and all GPS in the next decade. It's inevitable piggyback on systems that are already going up. All right, great. So I think I've got everybody. For me, I put them into two buckets. I think AKTS and GOD, those are like lottery tickets, could be crazy returns, but there's a big probability of a zero there if they don't actually work. And then NGM and Talon, obviously got the downside protection and those feel like people will always gamble and leave the lights on. So I kind of like both of those. I put 200K into each in real time. I think it will leave the lights on. So that's just like, I don't have a public visa book. Did you actually buy? I'm just day trading. I bought half of his action. I don't have a Robinhood account. I have to call my office. So I was like, just take it. Do you lose, buddy? I'm up 7. I didn't see you with your thumbs. I'm up 7% to cross the portfolio. So I don't think I can include you here. I waited the three and the order I set on my. So anyway, I'll just give mine really quick. I will go MGM, Talon, GOD, AKTS. Gavin's only going to make it be $3,000. Let's bring up $4,000. We have $5,000 on our social media. Two men hugging statue. Wait, wait, no, before you announce it, I need the extremely alpha male heterosexual trophy. The all-in heterosexual alpha male trophy please. And I need our four pictures to come on stage. It makes it more exciting. It makes it uncomfortable when they show the five people for Best Actor. Yeah. Yeah. Don't give up, he'll put those on the table. Wait, where's my award? It's your beautiful mark, they're here. Where's your award? Please bring me the extremely heterosexual alpha male award. You'll see why when I show you the award. Pestie this. It's not a real award. All right. Bring me that award. Let me show you how we three D model. I guess no one wants to see this award. Look at this. This is two men uncomfortably hugging. And the way you did this, see it? It's the best you work. I'm here freeberg. I'm not doing it with you. Come on freeberg. You do it tomorrow. Freeberg, okay, fine. You guys, you guys, you guys, you guys, you guys, that's David and I. It's David you, but let's show them how we modeled this. We just did a long, uncomfortable, and we all did five extra seconds. At two minutes you get the release of osteo-goses. And there it is. OK, so gentlemen, this is it. Do you guys have the results? Go ahead, audience award. OK, right? Audience award. So based on 150 votes from the audience, do I just go four to one? Four to one. Four to one is more exciting. OK. Fourth place with 5% of the vote was Kyle Simani. OK, well done. On the board. A very close second place. No, a third. Third place with 21% of the vote. Oleg. Rock, leg. Oh, boy. We're closing in here. You're high school. OK, very dramatic. And with 50, 50, 5, 0% of the vote. Who's the number two? I'm going to go. No, you say number one now. OK, OK. No, OK. Well, OK, sorry. Yeah, you're right. With 24% of the vote in second place, Aaron Cowan from GM. Number one with 50% of the vote. Dan Dreyfus. Hey. Wow. Unbelievable. Give it up. Nicely done. Now the best-- Hold on, before you do the bestie, how do you feel right now having won this-- pass them the award? You guys look so uncomfortable. Oh, my gosh. No, it's very-- But pass him his award for a second. Let him hold it. Give it a Academy Award. Thank you, everybody. I got to this place. Say a few words. Say a few words. You know, I got my award. I got my tequila. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Well done. OK, now, OK, pass your award. 4321. So relatively similar here. Fourth place was Kyle Simani. Third place was O-Like. Second place. Dan Drape was first place, Aaron Collin. Big upset, flip the audience vote. There you go. All right, so MGM win. All right. Thank you. Thank you guys. This was amazing. All right, thank you all for participating. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for coming. And we'll see you-- [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING]
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The event recreates the Irosone platform to showcase top investment managers who have made successful picks (e.g., Amazon, Tesla) but lack public distribution.
Aaron pitches MGM as a triple opportunity
Barry Diller owns 26% of MGM and bid $48/share, but Aaron argues the stock could be worth $100–$150 due to Japan and Dubai options.
Daniel pitches Talen Energy, a power producer with nuclear and natural gas assets, claiming its enterprise value ($25B) is far below replacement cost ($45B), offering a potential double.
Daniel highlights a massive power demand surge from AI and data centers, predicting shortages and high prices; he cites Microsoft’s deal to restart Three Mile Island at $100/MWh as a sign of market panic.
Summary:
The transcription features two investment pitches from a "Best Ideas" event. Aaron, a veteran hedge fund manager with 29 years of experience, pitches MGM Resorts. He argues that MGM is undervalued, with hidden assets beyond its Vegas properties.
Key catalysts include a license to open a casino in Osaka, Japan, by 2030, which he estimates could add $50 per share in value, and a potential gambling legalization in Dubai, where MGM already has a building with 300,000 square feet of empty space. He notes that Barry Diller owns 26% of MGM and has bid $48/share, but Aaron advises against tendering shares, believing the stock could triple to $100–$150. He emphasizes that the Japanese opportunity, a first-world gambling market, is undervalued by the market, similar to how Macau was initially ignored before its opening.
Daniel pitches Talen Energy, a power producer with nuclear and natural gas assets. He argues that the company’s enterprise value ($25B) is below replacement cost ($45B), offering a potential double. Daniel warns of a massive power demand surge driven by AI and data centers, comparing data centers to refineries that consume electricity.
He highlights supply chain shortages and regulatory hurdles, citing Microsoft’s deal to restart Three Mile Island at double the market price as evidence of panic among hyperscalers. Both presenters stress that the market is ignoring key catalysts—MGM’s Asian expansion and Talen’s undervalued assets—creating investment opportunities.
FAQs
The SONFoundation was created by the family of Irosone, a man who passed away from cancer. It started hosting events at Lincoln Center where managers presented investment ideas, and the current event recreates that format to showcase great managers.
The presenter pitched MGM because of hidden assets like a casino license in Osaka, Japan, and a potential opportunity in Dubai. He estimates the stock could be worth over $100, potentially tripling from its bid price of $48.
MGM has a license to open a casino in Osaka, Japan, expected to open in 2030, and a property in Dubai with 300,000 square feet of space that could be used if gambling is legalized there.
Power demand is rising due to technological breakthroughs like AI, which requires massive energy for data centers. This is creating shortages and keeping power markets tight, even without AI demand.
Talen Energy is a power producer with nuclear and natural gas assets. Its enterprise value is $25 billion, but replacement cost is $45 billion, suggesting the equity could more than double as power demand grows.
Data centers are compared to refineries: they take electricity as input and produce intelligence or tokens. With AI, demand for power is soaring, requiring massive buildouts of new capacity.
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