Well, do you trust Sam Altman?

Hello and welcome back to equity TechCrunch's podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, May 15th. I'm Kirsten Kurosak, Transportation Editor here at TechCrunch. And I'm joined as always by our weekend editor, Anthony Ha and senior reporter, Sean O'Kane. Well, I wanted to start with something that happened kind of at the end of last week. And I'm curious if you caught this. This was a report that Anthropic put out about issues that they had last year with AI agents, blackmailing developers in some testing. And they basically are now blaming that on how the internet describes AI and that there's so many evil portrayals of AI. I'm curious, what did you guys make of that? I thought it was hilarious and like, you know, an ominous way. I don't know. I mean, I guess AI has always been kind of mysterious, right? So the way it's portrayed, because it has been sort of the sci-fi throughout our history. And now it's real. So I mean, I don't know. I guess it's plausible. Listen, this is like that torment nexus tweet, right? Like you go and you make the torment nexus, you gotta expect that the torment nexus is going to come back and bite you a little bit. Yeah, I think in Silicon Valley, there's always this sort of tension between the future as imagined in science fiction and the future that we're actually building. And then that relationship is particularly kind of tight with AI because AI is essentially, you know, especially things like generative AI LLM's are essentially just like pattern matching and predictors, right? And so what they're doing is as I understand it, you know, simplified is they're basically just if they're trained on a lot of stories to say, this is you behave in this evil way and want to take over the world and want to like blackmail people to survive, that's essentially how they're going to behave. And that is, yeah, very, very funny. I guess Anthropic has said that in later models, they're not blackmailing anymore. And also one of the things they're trying to do is to train these models both on sort of like the anthropic constitution. So it sort of unders, quote, unquote, understands moral principles. And also on stories where AI behaves more, you know, benevolently. The newer models aren't doing it as much or they're lying and waiting, letting us get a false sense of security. I mean, like this is one of the problems with, you know, essentially building the plan as you're flying it, right? Like these are clearly, we have, we have some real products from some of these companies. I'm not saying that they're only putting a research experiment out in the hands of millions of people, but there's an element of this being a very new technology that has shipped before, you know, the full consequences can be understood. And so, you know, here's one of the consequences that we're coming to find out more about. Yeah, I don't want to swear on the show. Although in the past, historically, it's been an open forum for that, but I think this is, you know, in the blank find out stage, we're in the find out stage of AI right now. I wonder what you could mean. We have a lot to talk about today on the show. We have three deals from Andrew, Mind Robotics, which is a spinoff of Rivian. And then Vappy, I believe that's how it's pronounced. Then we're going to dig into the Elon Musk Mafia and the latest updates from the OpenAI trial, which wraps up this week. Let's get on with Andrew. And they've raised what? Even more money. Yeah, spins wheel. How many billions this time? Five. Seemingly, you know, no one is leading the charge into where defense startup more than Andrew has over the last decade. They at least set out to do this and are not necessarily pivoting like so many other companies we're seeing now. But this was, yeah, $5 billion series, H, getting up there, almost halfway through those letters. And their evaluation is now, you know, get ticking ever closer to $200 billion. They're up to $61 billion now. We've talked a lot about defense startups or companies pivoting to defense lately. I'm curious what you guys think. There's been some reporting out there about Andrew's execution, maybe lagging behind its fundraising abilities. And also, you know, the company I think has been fairly open about, you know, an acquisition strategy to basically get a lot of the products that it has versus developing everything in hosts. So I'm curious where you guys see this going. I mean, that as far as I know, you know, Andrew has said it, it's revenue is still around, you know, the low single digit billions and that maybe doubles next year. And certainly they have support from the administration. But, you know, what do you think this means for a company like Andrew? I live in an area where there's a lot of what I would call legacy defense in Arizona. So Raytheon and other companies along history. And so I have, you know, made friends in these areas. And I can tell you that what Andrew is about to find out and probably already does is you can have the best idea and you can get that great defense contract. It moved slow. The government moved slow. And even if you want to move very fast and even in an administration that wants to move fast, they oftentimes can't make up their minds. These things take time and you really have to build out, you know, the logistical like human structure of getting compliance contracts. You know, it's not just developing tech and putting it out in the world. It's a very different world defense tech. So I think a lot of startups right now, Andrew being the best example, but a lot of smaller startups right now are finding like, hey, there's this like open wallet. Great. Let's go after that. What they're going to find out though is that actually the process is pretty convoluted and lengthy. It's a very different world than just putting something out in the private sector. I think the other thing I wonder about is, you know, you would time out execution. And I think I think in the past, I've talked a little bit about sort of, you know, companies like Palantir and Daryl that are clearly like incredibly valuable and are seem to be doing well at least by some metrics, but also they're very opaque to the general public. And so, I mean, this is definitely a case where, you know, the numbers are very big, but I don't have a great sense of like how widely deployed these things are yet. And to what extent is, you know, winning these contracts about, you know, a very serious vetting process of the technology versus, you know, certainly there's been, you know, these profiles of Palmer Lucky is one of the founders and the sense that certainly within the Trump administration, he's kind of seen as one of the main tech guys. He's the guy who's evangelizing for, you know, bringing autonomy to all these aspects of the military. So to what extent is, are they winning these big deals because Andrews Tech is incredible and is being tested out. And to what extent is because people sort of buy into the Palmer Lucky vision? I mean, I think a little bit of both and we won't really totally know, but it's interesting. You brought up Palantir and we have seen sort of they put their tech into the private sector and also sold to like law enforcement agencies and defense. And so they're a little bit of a different animal. Also, they're not building necessarily autonomous like drones as weapons. And so a weapons company is a very different thing in terms of like who is the timeline for deployment. You know, all these other pieces, obviously, Palantir surveillance piece could could end up being in some of these weaponry, but it's a little bit of a different animal. I will say to something that struck me because we talk about Palmer Lucky. Obviously, every time we talk about Andrewl, and I think for good reason, but Palmer's the founder, there's actually a CEO of Andrewl that I think some people might be surprised to learn that it's not Palmer Lucky. It's Brian Schimp. And key to my eyes was far, far and away out in front of the news organizations this week talking about this raise more than I've seen in the past. I just, you know, I want to file that away. I think that's interesting. Palmer clearly has other things going on. He certainly is no stranger to fund raising. It is quite good at it. Apparently, having raised so much for Andrewl raised so much for the bank that he's trying to build Air War. But, you know, it's just thought it was interesting to see the more sort of like kind of engineering focused CEO talking to Bloomberg News this week versus the easy book of Palmer Lucky on TV. So you know who else investors love and simply can't say no to? I think Sean, you know the answer to this question. RJ Scarrange, maybe you've heard of him. Founder and CEO of Rivian. I had to double take when I saw this this week, genuinely, because I saw the Wall Street Journal reporting exclusively that mind robotics, which is a spin off of Rivian that we first learned about late last year and his focus on industrial robotics industrially. I raised $400 million and I thought, boy, that's, did somebody like, republish a story or something? Like what's going on? Because they just raised $500 million in March. No, new raise, new investors and brings their total funding to over a billion dollars now for mind robotics, which you know, is a lot of money for a company who we haven't seen really anything from. We've heard a lot about what Scarrange's vision for mind robotics is, kind of the thesis and how he thinks about it, but it's all been, you know, very sort of generalized speaking about what he wants to do at this startup. And we certainly haven't seen any demos. We haven't even really seen exactly what it is that they're working on. And I'm curious how much investors have seen. exactly what he's working on. You know, you like to think that they're probably seeing something, but that's not always the case. Like, if we learn last year, when we first wrote about Slay and Auto, we know that people were investing in that company and getting hired to that company without even seeing the vehicle to a certain extent. Yeah, reading about this deal kind of made me reflect on just sort of the difference about, like both reporting on deals like this, reading about deals like this versus, you know, consumer internet companies and how, back when most of the deals are consumer internet companies at least, and you saw a dollar amounts like this. It was actually like products you could go out and try. You get a sense of whether they were like popular or not. And in some ways, like this is really exciting because it's actually tackling things that problems that maybe seem more real or more impactful, but there is still that kind of black box quality of like, man, I have this sound, but basically like this sounds cool. I hope they can build it. Yeah, but I'm never going to be able to try it. Well, in the case of also, it's a, it's a micromobility company and Sean has done a lot of reporting about that. In the case of mind robotics, yeah, it's like industrial automation. I spent some time in talk to RJ about this, actually back in March at a Rivian event at Southby, but I talked to him a lot about this. And, you know, his whole premise, which is kind of interesting. It's like, we're thinking about humanoid robots all wrong. We're making them look like super, look and act like super strong humans. We don't need like a humanoid robot to do a backflip, like no factory worker can do that anyway. So that's kind of the premise, but we haven't really seen anything. We've gotten hints of things, but haven't really seen anything yet. Yeah, we should say to, you know, previously mind robotics was sort of seated with funding from Eclipse. This round brought in Client Park. And so it's not like RJ's out there, you know, wooing sort of just anybody who's throwing money at robotics, like he's going after some pretty blue chip, Silicon Valley firms and raising some serious money from the other thing that really stuck out to me was the, one of the venture arms of Volkswagen through in this round, which is interesting to me for a number of reasons. One, you know, does that portend a sort of potential customer for what, you know, what it is that they're working on, automating different processes inside factories. I can see there being a lot of interest from Volkswagen on that. The other thing is there's been, you know, if you pay attention to the German trade magazines, which I do a lot, doing so much automotive coverage. Nerd. There's pen. Listen, I can't read it, but like I can read through Google Translate. But he, there's been a lot of reporting there over the last year or so, call it about potential tension inside the joint venture that Rivian has with Volkswagen, where they're sort of collaborating on software and electrical architecture to basically, you know, modernize and make better Volkswagen's new cars coming out. And, you know, if you're only reading that stuff, you could kind of start to believe that maybe there's been some fracturing or something like that. But, you know, not only seeing Volkswagen continue to put more money into Rivian and into the joint venture, but also see them, you know, go out to this level of, you know, backing something else that RJ is doing, I think is, you know, you could take that as a sign that the, the relationship is not sort of like teetering off a cliff like some make you believe. Volkswagen, I'm glad you brought them up because your story, which you covered on this week about the mind robotics race sort of inspired me to, you know, actually kind of talk about this, you know, internally. And then now write a story about just how much money RJ and, you know, the people around him have been able to raise. And I calculated about $12 billion, the bulk of which, and this is not counting Rivians IPO to be clear, this is all like strategic institutional investors, like, you know, T-Row price, and then VCs like Eclipse for three startups. And the bulk of that funding, like literally 11 1/2 billion of it happened from 2018 to now. So we're talking like seven years, three startups, nearly $12 billion. And that's not even counting Volkswagen, which has also made a pretty big bet. I mean, it's, it's a direct investment, but it's a joint venture. So there's a little bit of, you know, hey, we're giving you this money, but we're expecting something in return. And that's going to be $5.8 billion. So the mind robotics piece is interesting if Volkswagen is thinking about maybe using that industrial automation, particularly because that's kind of the area where Volkswagen is known to have, you know, have the expertise, whereas Rivian has the software expertise. So if they're tapping that startup for automation, when you would think they'd be the experts, I think that's notable. But we'll see. I mean, we don't really know. We're kind of speculating. - So we have one more deal to get to, which unlike Andrew and my robotics is one that I think is new to equity. So I'm excited to talk about this startup called Bappy. I mean, it's not scrappy. It's just raised like a pretty, pretty big round, but we wants to explain the deal with Bappy. - I'll just jump in really quickly. They raised $50 million Series B. They are now valued at $500 million. And then I've kind of been excited about this story because of it's sort of like a feel good startup story. I'll leave it at that. - I'll give him this, you know, just at the outset, a durable press image that they sent for us to use in the story that Jug Meat wrote for us, the sort of two co-founders standing on the bridge in San Francisco with phones. And you know, as a photographer myself in a former photo editor, I always appreciate it, especially at these days when you have so many early stage startups that are just throwing like AI slop images in their press packets. Like, so, you know, good on them for that. I like this story because these guys, you know, sort of identified, they had been working on essentially kind of like an AI therapy product, which we've seen where that can go as people have increasingly used voice agents and chat pods. And they realized that they might be better off pivoting to something, you know, more opportunistic at the time, which was getting more into, you know, these becoming a voice vendor. And the big thing that really, you know, seems to have popped for them was winning this contract to handle customer support for Ring under Amazon. And it does, Jummi wrote in the story, they beat out 40 plus other potential vendors to take the whole thing, which, you know, that seems like a pretty sturdy line of business there. So, you know, it's a nice example of a company, you know, a young company being nimble and seeing it pay off pretty quickly. - Right. And if I remember correctly, I think they won that contract kind of before the holiday season. So I mean, this was like a pretty serious stress test of their systems, I would imagine. I think, you know, zooming out a bit, I mean, obviously, so this is in the kind of customer, automating customer service space, which is one of those things that it seems like, in general, when we sort of debate, what can be automated by AI, what cannot customer services often kind of one of the first examples. And I think there's a lot of, you know, pragmatic business reasons for that. And also as a person who calls customer service, sometimes it's not something I'm crazy about. Yeah, you know, like I think a lot of people have been on the phone and been like, I just want to talk to a real human being, although that can also be frustrating for other reasons. But, you know, given that that's probably the way that things are going, certainly you want that experience to be as good as possible and to be able to fall back on humans when it makes sense. So I'm hopeful that, you know, the fact that Amazon did this and seems to happy with them, maybe this is a system that does it in a way that's not going to make us all completely frustrated. - So we've talked a lot over the years about like the frustration of using AI customer service. And I'm just wondering, I think it's gotten better. And I, but I'm still waiting for, yeah, I know, you're not in your head, like back and forth. But I've had a couple of recent experiences where it hasn't resulted in me yelling at the phone and just being like, operator, operator. So I guess that's progress. So I don't know, I don't have a ring. So I can't, you know, test out the customer support, but maybe one of you two can and then report back at how their product is doing. Because now I should say they started by doing the holiday search but now they're 100% of handling 100% of the customer support. - Yeah, I hope that, you know, and I am optimistic like Anthony, to a certain extent of, you know, the pre-existing systems that are like, you know, really poor crude automation were never going to be real solutions and something like this has a better shout at it. And hopefully over time, you know, as they are able to train on more calls, they'll just be able to sort of brute force their way through it. I will say my, one of my only real interactions with one of these kind of like newer era AI voice agents was trying to resolve an issue with like insurance on my house, you know, a particular kind of insurance and trying to talk to the underwriter and the company that I called the AI voice agent hooked me into another call with another party that I needed to talk to and was just absolutely not listening to the thing that was being said from that person and not understanding it all and getting details wrong to the point that I just had to hang up and start the whole process of Rick and I finally got a human. So we'll hopefully get there, but you know, I haven't had evidence of it otherwise. - How happy were you and that was happening? I would have liked to have seen that. - It was, it was a morning for sure. (laughing) - Yeah, it really feels like we're at the moment where like a lot of, the pundits saying this makes sense. We're about to see how much it actually practically makes sense. But we do have some pretty meaty themes to talk about. The first is someone we've. It starts with something that we've talked with about a lot on this show, Elon Musk. But it's not just about Elon. It's also about this network of founders who've emerged from his different companies. Justin, do you want to walk us through that? Elon Musk is part one of a few people who's part of sometimes referred to as the PayPal mafia. A lot of those folks have gone on to create their own companies. Elon Musk, of course, did not found Tesla but came in as now labeled as a co-founder. He did found SpaceX and a bunch of other companies like Neuralink and Boring Company and things like that. In many of those top executives or top engineers, some people who actually rose to their ranks and got pretty high up there have gone off and created their own companies now. We have the next layer ripple effect, I guess, of the Elon Musk ecosystem or universe. We actually talked about one of them, or we wrote about one of them this week, by our climate tech reporter Tim D'Achein. Elon was at the company for 18 years and Elon has never been someone to put his ex-frontend center. He would occasionally put Drew in front of the center. Drew left at a critical time, all these layoffs, about two years ago and in that time he's now started two companies. Here in power is one and Tim got the scoop. He hunted down the next secretive startup around heat pumps called Saddy Thermal Machines, which is a scientific nod to a inventor. Here we have a second one. We don't know if they've raised any money. The assumption is that they have. This is interesting because for a couple of reasons, one, I'd distinctly remember Drew Baglino talking a lot about heat pumps when he was working at Tesla. This is not surprising that he's still going down this road. This is a very deeper technical thing that the company never really got a lot of credit for, but it started using heat pumps, I think in particular on the model Y in the early days. That change to the architecture of how the vehicle itself would move air throughout all the places that it needed to go just gave itself a huge boost of efficiency. It's one of the reasons that those cars have been some of the leaders on range in the electric vehicle world. To see him jump back into this is not surprising. You mentioned all these other things. We have really seen for a long time in the early to mid-2010s, we started to see a lot of companies get that kind of shine of former Tesla people. I think SpaceX more than any of them though was the one where if you were at Bennett SpaceX and you had stepped out to start something of your own, having that shine of like former SpaceX engineer, former SpaceX VP, former SpaceX, whatever, it was like a real shortcut to attention to funding and sort of credibility. I think maybe in some ways even more so than Tesla, if only because SpaceX is arguably a more hardcore engineering company, it's not really all consumer facing. It's a more focused organization than Tesla, which is up to like over 120,000 employees worldwide now. It's interesting to see the Tesla folks, like even this week I wrote about Redwood Materials, which is created by JB Straubel, the former CTO and co-founder of Tesla. That company just hired Deepak Wahoojo as the former CFO of Tesla, a long time CFO. I talked to him a little bit about what he expects to do at Redwood coming into that role there, but it's these SpaceX folks, and especially with the IPO looming, we're now mirror weeks potentially away from that of one of the probably the crater wealth creation events we've seen in this country ever. It has me really curious what that's going to look like now because there was already this engine of founders and engineers and technical people coming out of SpaceX well before the IPO, and now they're all going to have, they won't need to panhandle as much if they want to get their own ideas off the ground if that's really what they want to do. Yeah, it feels like when we talk about that formulation of the PayPal Mafia, and then you guys incorrect me if I'm wrong, but I feel like people have tried to make that work, the X, something Mafia for other things, but it's never quite stuck the way the PayPal Mafia does, but there's a few different things that are embedded in that, Sean, you're talking about just money, when there's a big liquidity event, a bunch of people get rich, then they can start new things, they can invest in new things, and suddenly you have a whole potentially a bunch of other successful companies that came from this IPO event or whatever. There's also the pedigree of, hey, if you're trying to raise money and you put this at the top of your slideshow or whatever, that's the thing that's going to get you a big check. There's also the question of these networks of connections and people who are maybe philosophically aligned, things like that, but certainly the PayPal Mafia, the biggest names like Teal, David Sachs, Musk, they're also politically aligned, and some curious to what extent. It sounds like it's not just that, hey, put SpaceX on your resume, you can raise money, but it is also like these guys like to work together and maybe they picked up other things from their time at SpaceX or Tesla. Sean can speak to this, but we've both done a ton of reporting around working conditions in Elon Musk companies. We have a lot of color from that, and it is like being in the trenches. It is essentially being, let's say not war because that's a very different thing, but it is like your cohort, these are people you're spending sometimes 80 to 100 hours a week working with. You're spending certainly more time with these people than with your own family, and it's very mission oriented. I think that you're correct in that it's not the same as a PayPal Mafia because the people who are part of that all were equally huge personalities, people who went on to have a lot of power and influence. This is more of like a breeding ground for startups and ideas based on the fact that they're working in very mission driven environments like safe humanity as SpaceX is, right? X is their whole premise when he took it over was like fighting for free speech and censorship, whether or not you believe that that's true, that was the pitch. People was when it was first taken over by Elon Musk, it was about climate change, big, big, big ideas. You get these people together who are really smart working on things. I think it's only natural that they go off eventually and create a startup, which also requires really long hours and building things. Yeah, I will say if you look at this sweep of companies that Musk has been involved in, I would argue Tesla probably had the cleanest of those missions, the sharpest, you know, for a while, at least until the last like two years because now they're changing it to something more gauzy and unspecific by, you know, talking about amazing abundance or whatever and not necessarily talking about, you know, distinctly trying to move everybody to a more sustainable energy economy. SpaceX also sort of had one that was maybe secondary to Teslas. But this focus on, you know, getting to Mars and establishing a presence on Mars, but that has also changed recently too and it makes me wonder, you know, that was a pretty whiplash decision. Like it was a little over a year ago that Musk was calling the moon a quote distraction and was saying that, you know, SpaceX was still focused on Mars and that's the goal and, you know, everything else that comes along the way is in service of that. And, you know, as crazy as that sounds, I think a lot of people were still pretty bought into that vision. I mean, like the very few people who even give interviews from inside that company in different forums would still cite that as like their, you know, one of the reasons that they were mission aligned with the work that was being done there. And so like, with that changing recently and this liquidity event about to happen, it makes me wonder how many people will stick around and who will stick around versus who will sort of take a break and then and then see what they want to do. And that could create some tension for SpaceX because like not only are those talented people that you're probably losing, but also they have big plans like the company itself has been talking this week about wanting to operate multiple space ports around the world to launch Starship, which you know, we're about to see the first launch possibly next week of the third version of Starship, which looks, you know, genuinely capable in a way that some of the earlier prototypes have and and they need that talent like and if they're going to keep expanding in the way that they are, like it's one thing if we were, you know, you think about their star based site in Texas, they've been building that out for a while and still are and that's a monumental effort of its own to replicate that around the world and go even bigger makes me wonder, you know, how many of these people do they still need? How will they attract new talent? All of this kind of stuff. Yeah. will very briefly caveat that with the idea that Tesla once wanted to have factories all around the world, 20 factories, multiple on every continent, and that idea felt like a waste of time too. So we should always keep those things in mind as well. - I mean, I think you get to one interesting point which is this sort of idea of like moving from, not getting away from totally from rockets, but this new focus on space data centers. And that reminds me of a company called Cowboys Space, which just recently raised like $275 million to build them. This is the latest startup, and I'm so sorry for asking this name, but it's Bajubat, I believe. We had him on the show last year when it was still either flux. So this is a company that is pursuing it. And I believe that they're launching with in partnership with SpaceX. Am I correct on that one? - The way I read it is that, Bajubat is one of the co-founders of Robin Hood. He started AetherFlex as an attempt to basically solve the sort of energy crunch on the planet with a pretty out there idea that lines up with SpaceX and what it wants to do of basically beaming energy down from space solar energy that was collecting in orbit. And they've pivoted now to basically wanting to build their own sort of like quote unquote space data centers. And he said he went to, he talked to Tim Fernholz for the story this week. He went to the launch providers like SpaceX and others that the few others there are. And it was just becoming increasingly obvious to him that there is not gonna be a lot of capacity. I think a lot of people over the last five or six years have looked at what SpaceX has done with the Falcon 9 being able to launch again and again. Look at what it's plans for, starship were, and think, oh my gosh, like the cost of space is coming down, the access to space is going up. We've heard this from a lot of other startups over those years too. And like, oh, it's gonna be so easy to get stuff into space. It sounds like from his conversations he believes and I think this is probably true. That's not gonna be the case anymore. SpaceX has been ticking up its launch prices over the last couple of years. It remains to be seen how much capacity they're going to lend out on starship versus their own starlink plans and everything. And so now we have, you know, by Jubat basically saying, we're gonna pivot my company into basically a bespoke rocket that is built just to launch my own products into space, which, you know, I think Tim says in the piece, like it's nuts, like, and like it rightfully so. So like more luck, you know, more power to him and best of luck. But is, you know, it's gonna be a long road ahead and also it's a sign of sort of like how crunched this market really is at the moment with so few providers. - Yeah, so we have one more thing to get to, like this is like news that's been kind of going on in the background for the past couple of years, weeks. You've talked, we talked about it on this show a couple of times, which is the Musk OpenAI trial and how that's kind of, I think, bringing a lot of the Jerti laundry from OpenAI's past into the light. And, you know, that led to this really provocative headline from Tim Furnholz about who trusts Sam Altman? Does anyone wanna take a stab at answering that? - Yeah, Anthony, I'm gonna throw it right back to you. Do you trust Sam Altman? - It's an interesting question because, you know, it feels like-- - That's not a yes. (laughing) - It feels like something where this is, I, that's kind of a wild question in some ways, at least to discuss and kind of a good journalistic context. But actually, like, that's sort of the core of the trial and all that was, and it actually seems to be like a core of, like, understanding so much of, like, what's happened at OpenAI, especially this big kind of, like, executive power struggle that they, I guess, they now call the blip, that it just seems like a lot of people who've worked with Altman don't trust him. And he's sort of acknowledged this a little bit because he'll talk about the fact that he recognizes that he's been kind of conflict diverse, kind of telling people what they want to hear and he's trying to work on that, which I find, I mean, it's like, sounds plausible and like, I can understand how that can, like, lead to misunderstandings in some situations. I'm also a very conflict diverse person and I don't, I'd like to think that, you know, if any of this stuff went to trial that people would not be like, asking is Anthony Haach, trustworthy? - Still not a yes. - I would, I will say that this isn't just that question while provocative, doesn't just encapsulate what this trial was about, but actually, I would, I would actually zoom out even more and say this is a fundamental question. I think a lot of tech journalists, policymakers, and I think more and more consumers about all the AI labs. It's really come down to trust because we don't have the kind of insight necessarily. I mean, these are all privately held companies. There's a lot behind the veil still. Maybe when they all IPO this year, you know, we can get a peek, but it is fundamentally about trust and misuse and do we believe the intent? And, you know, what I would throw back is, sometimes the intent can be, you know, worthy, noble and still misuse. But I think it's more about, I think it's more than who trusts Sam Altman, although that was very interesting in this trial, but more of that bigger question that we can apply to the entire industry. - I'll say it, I don't trust him, but, you know, I don't trust most people. So, I guess that's just the baseline. And, you know, I, we'll see where this goes, like, the trial sort of wraps up today. I'm very curious to hear, you know, how the jury decides this all. I think we're kind of where we were at the start of this. This, you know, a big motivator. This was Elon Musk trying to sling mud at a sort of perceived rival and someone who really feels slighted him. And I don't know if, you know, if we know enough yet to say that that was completely accomplished and whether or not he has a shot at winning. But, you know, I think all these people came out of this looking a little bit worse. So, yeah. And just to get specific, since we have been suggesting maybe that we don't trust him or some, certainly some of us don't, that why this is coming up this week is that he was on the stand and he was basically getting grilled about some statements he's made in the past in, in, in testimony to the government, basically saying he didn't have any equity in open AI. And that is not true because he had a stake through Y-combinator, which he used to run. And he kind of tried to brush that off by saying, well, you know, I assume that, you know, everybody understands what it means to be a passive investor and a VC fund. And I think the lawyer somewhat, you know, fairly said like really think like the, you know, the congressman who is interviewing you, you knew that? - Yeah, I mean, he was playing with like the whole semantics game. What I thought was so interesting about, and there's been some reporting from us and others, is this style of how Sam Alman asked answered questions and Elon Musk on the stand. So Elon Musk, who also could, in many, many, many scenarios and many instances, we can point to the fact that like, he put something out on Twitter that was a lie or a bit of a fib and on the stand corrected the record. So there's a history of, you know, I would say non-truthfulness slash lying, blatant or otherwise, (laughs) in Elon Musk world, but how he treated it was like incredibly combative and very different than Alman who really took this like, I'm working on it and tried to seem sort of atvable. And I don't know if it'll work for him, right? Because it really comes down to the core facts. And hopefully that's what the jury pays attention to. But I thought that that was really interesting like that sort of style, both being untruthful, but like how they dealt with it was very different. - Well, I'm sure we'll have more to talk about as we actually find out what the verdict is and what the consequences will be, but in the meantime, equity will be back next week. And of course, you can follow us at equity pod on X and X. (upbeat music) - Equity is hosted by TechCrunch Senior Reporters and produced by Teresa Lokinsolo with Editing by Cal. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and find out what's next at techcrunch.com/events. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.