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Google's Three-Front War

Google vs. Everybody Alphabet's latest earnings call was, on its face, a victory lap. The company posted strong double-digit growth in its core Search business, its Cloud division is accelerating, and CEO Sundar Pichai touted "breakthroughs in performance" from its new Gemini AI model. But the
Google's Three-Front War

The Price of AI Reasoning

Who Can Afford to Think? For a while now, a nagging question has lurked behind the AI infrastructure boom. The logic for spending hundreds of billions on Nvidia GPUs for training new models was clear. But what happened after that? The general assumption was that inference—the actual use of
The Price of AI Reasoning

The TSMC Bottleneck

The Empty Shelf One way to think about the US-China chip war is that it is a contest of government decrees. The US Department of Commerce says “you can’t sell that chip,” and so Nvidia can’t sell that chip. Then, after some high-level meetings and a change of
The TSMC Bottleneck

Kohlberg, Kravis, Roblox

The Roblox Roll-Up We were talking the other day about the bizarrely active market for mergers and acquisitions on Roblox, which raises the obvious question: Why? Why would a professional studio pay a teenager millions of dollars for a game that might be forgotten in six months? The answer is
Kohlberg, Kravis, Roblox

The Muskonomy

SpaceX's Side Hustle Here is a fun corporate governance story. Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, is investing $2 billion in his artificial intelligence company, xAI. This is part of a larger funding round for xAI, which is a private company. SpaceX is also a private company, but
The Muskonomy

Roblox M&A

Virtual Private Equity Here is a fun story about the creator economy. A 19-year-old who made a soccer video game on Roblox with an anime vibe sold it a few months later for more than $3 million. Not to a big game studio like EA or Ubisoft, but to another
Roblox M&A

The Browser Wars Are Back

OpenAI's Chrome So OpenAI is making a web browser. Which is a thing that startups do when they have a lot of money and are looking for new ways to spend it. But of course, this isn't really about building a better Chrome. It's
The Browser Wars Are Back

Why Is OpenAI Building a Web Browser

OpenAI, the company that ignited the artificial intelligence race with ChatGPT, is now preparing to launch its own AI-powered web browser. According to a recent report from Reuters, the browser is designed to directly challenge Google's market-dominating Chrome and fundamentally change how people interact with the internet. The
Why Is OpenAI Building a Web Browser

Managing Elon

Key Person Risk Elon Musk is launching a new political party called the "America Party." This is awkward, as it comes just days after a public feud with President Donald Trump, who threatened to cut off the government subsidies Musk's companies have built an empire on.
Managing Elon

How a Niche Memory Chip Dethroned Samsung in the AI Race

Samsung Electronics Co., a titan of the technology world, just saw its operating profit plummet by 56%, a result that wiped billions from its bottom line. The culprit wasn’t slumping smartphone sales or a weak TV market. The crisis stems from its failure to lead in a highly specialized,
How a Niche Memory Chip Dethroned Samsung in the AI Race