The Pomp Podcast
00:24:13 · Jordi Visser
[00:24:13] S2: first of all, x has a huge part of this. As someone who looks for news stories to cover, there there is no middle rational line. Like, in my head, I I have no problem being bearish on things. If I see something... I mean, I talked about the AM mid cycle slowdown. If we go back and pull all of the things that I was talking about in in March and April, but also in, I wanna say, a year ago today, I was talking about how tech is going to have issues outside of the AI trade, and we've gone through that. Salesforce.com is still down for the year. Now it was down big. The soft... The true SaaS names have had a bad year. The hyperscalers. I mean, as of yesterday, this is before what'll happen today with Amazon. The four equal weight, or the four hyperscalers, it was flat for the year as a group. One of them was up 9% Microsoft. I do wanna expand on the Microsoft thing, because I think it's important for people to hear this, because this is a a very important story, which I won't get into it, I've talked about this a couple times in interviews recently. The Microsoft news does not get enough press. 60,000 people is 27% of their employees, 27. Now Is that a lot? Well, to put to put it in perspective, I mean, when you have 223,000 people and you're saying, okay, 60,000, you can take a buy up. Now they obviously don't expect all of them to do it. They did this once before, but they did it with 8,000. 60 thousand's a big number. And what do you think those 60,000 people that have been offered the buyout? Are they, like, feel secure in their job going forward?
00:26:01 · Anthony Pompliano
[00:26:01] S3: Mhmm.
00:26:02 · Jordi Visser
[00:26:02] S2: Or was this a message that this is our hope? Now you said, are they using this for my... I mean, I've run a business. I I know what micro... Like, you can go through their compensation. So let's assume it's $400,000 a person when you add in health care at Microsoft. That's $24,000,000,000. Not 24,000,000,000 for one year. That's every year going forward unless they go hire more people. That number, if they all took it, would take them back to 2,020 levels. Their revenue has grown... Will have grown 70% if they just meet numbers into next year. So revenue per employee's gone through the roof. So this has a lot of issues to the government, and this is why it's positive Bitcoin. This is why I wrote a substack about this whole thing, comparing what Microsoft was doing to what was happening in France, where the common thread is gonna be affordability. Because on the one side, what do employees making 400,000 have to pay in taxes? Yeah. 50%, 50 plus, depending on where they live. What does Microsoft pay on corporate taxes? There's an arbitrage here that's becoming a bigger story to the government because if Microsoft doesn't have to pay the same amount, you're you're losing receipts Mhmm. From this if people don't get jobs or if they end up taking less of a job, whatever the case is. I think this is becoming a labor capital story that is much, much bigger than people realize because we're just entering the productivity boom. That's the other message that Microsoft is saying is they believe they can do this buyout at five to six... Or six to seven times the last one. What is that saying about their expectations about what AI is gonna enable their business to be like in the future?
00:27:44 · Anthony Pompliano, Jordi Visser
[00:27:44] S3: Listen. I can can talk about this from a personal perspective, because we just went through this with our own public company. We have done two things, a massive cost cutting exercise, compute cost down substantially, Compute cost literally... I... I've talked about publicly. $550,000 in March 2026 [00:28:04] S2: Mhmm.
00:28:04 · Anthony Pompliano
[00:28:04] S3: Per month. Yep. Down now 50%, give or take. My hope is... Hope that we're actually gonna be able to get completely off the frontier models, run everything on our own software and models and hardware. If we do that 97% cost savings on a token for token processing, massive cost savings. Going to all of our key vendors, finance, accounting, legal, etcetera. Hey. We we gotta do something here. I know you guys are using the technology. So are we. Let... Let's reorient here. Okay? Mhmm. We mutually separated with some of our executives. Cost savings there as well. So you take basically the, you know, the most well paid people at the company, and you're like, hey. Can we do this for cheaper? Look at that. What we publicly said is we think we're gonna save $10,000,000 between cash equity, etcetera, in this whole exercise. Okay. But that's actually, to me, what people will pay attention to is because it's like a headline. Mhmm. The more important thing is we have a public company. There's 10 people there. I'm not claiming we're Facebook. I'm not claiming we're whatever. But if you go and you look at the product, this week, there's five days in the workweek. We launched five separate products or features, one every single day. And these are features that aren't like, hey, let me just put a prompt in Claude, you know, or something, and you just get it. You gotta be very thoughtful about it. You're dealing with people's sensitive financial information, etcetera. But I explain to people, think about what that means. If we're launching something every single day, and we only have 10 total people, including the nontechnical people at the company, When you extrapolate that out to a Meta, an Amazon, you know, right now, actually, SpaceX. If you look at the updates to Grokbot
00:29:48 · Jordi Visser, Anthony Pompliano
[00:29:48] S2: Mhmm. [00:29:48] S3: They're releasing something like 50 to a 100 new features a week. It's just you're cutting cost while that productivity is just exploding. I don't know what this looks like in two, three years, but, like, you start getting pretty excited about just how productive any of these companies can be. Right?