Week of 12/11/23

Prepared by Will Nelson for Tom Donohue

After an extended Thanksgiving break we are back to it with a great roundup, and an all time reading list. As always, hit reply to share any feedback you have! - Will

Stories that drove the last few week

• Whatever happened at OpenAI

• Hostage releases before the ceasefire broke in Gaza

• The future now looks like the future as Tesla launches the Cybertruck

Domestic News

• Politics

  • 2024 Race

    • Republican Primary Polling

      1. Trump (59.3%) [-0.6% since the Dec. 1)

      2. Desantis (12.6%) [-0.1% since the Dec. 1)

      3. Haley (11.6%) [+2.1% since the Dec. 1]

      4. Ramaswamy (4.8%) [-0.3% since the Dec. 1]

      5. Christie (2.8%) [-0.1% since the Dec. 1]

  • Less Shocking: Doug Burgum (who I haven’t even been including in polling) suspended his campaign for President

  • More Shocking: McCarthy heads for the exit early

• Big Stories

  • Old news: What the hell happened at OpenAI? My best attempt at a backwards looking summary is below.

    • Sam Altman out after board coup, another board member is ‘relieved of duty’ and removed, interim CEO in, interim CEO tries to hire Sam back, interim CEO replaced with a person I will refer to as ‘interim CEO the second’, interim CEO the second threatens to resign if not shown evidence of Sam’s wrongdoing, entire company (including the person who was the tipping vote in the board coup) threatens to resign if Sam isn't reinstated, Sam joins Microsoft and tweets hearts at former coworkers, interim CEO the second seems to advocate for a slowdown in progress, Sam rehired and board reformed, news leaks that this may have been precipitated by a breakthrough in a mathematical reasoning model everything goes back to normal??

  • New news: Tesla launches next gen Cybertruck

    • The truck is 4 years in the making, and the first few reviews are highly positive (Youtube)

    • One reviewer talks about going into his time with the truck and the team expecting to hate it, then meeting the engineering team and experiencing the truck and coming away completely stunned. You can see how astounded he is (Youtube)

    • As a reminder, Tesla is the only company making EVs profitably at scale in the US. The below are PER VEHICLE profit/losses for various automakers

      • Tesla: $8,500 profit per vehicle

      • Rivian: -$30,500 loss per vehicle

      • Ford: -$36,000 loss per vehicle

      • Lucid: -$433,000 loss per vehicle

• Markets

  • Equities

    1. S&P 500 (+0.8% last week)

    2. NASDAQ (+1.9% last week)

    3. DJI (+0.2% last week)

• Big Stories

  • Strong holiday spending is enabled by record buy now pay later lending

  • Chart of the week, income inequality since ‘78:

Global News

1. Conflicts

   1. Israel

      1. Iran backed Houthi’s continue to attack ships in the Red Sea

      2. Quatari PM and Jewish business leaders (plus Lex Fridman) met in New York to discuss the conflict

      3. Israel reportedly had information about the October 7th attacks months ago but doubted Hamas had the ability to carry out the attacks.

      4. The ceasefire expired after hostage release and fighting resumed with Israel launching attacks airstrikes and Hamas firing rockets into Israel

   2. Ukraine

      1. Zelensky coming back to the White House amid funding uncertainty and stalling war effort

      2. Defense Secretary Austin warns troops may need to be deployed to Ukraine if additional funding is not passed

2. Russia

   1. Inflation accelerates under the pressure of war

3. China

   1. XI Jinping says China wants to be friends with the US and won’t fight a war with anyone

   2. US and Chinese Navy continue to disagree about boundaries in the South China Sea

4. Other

   1. COP28 Climate Talks in the Middle East

Reading List

1. I have quoted Munger in this section before and was sad to see his passing shortly before his 100th birthday. A few pieces of content about him I’ve seen in the last few days:

   1. “99 Years of Charlier Munger Wisdom in 44 Minutes”

      1. This is Applications of Charlie Munger Theory 101 (51 minutes [Youtube])

   2. “Notes from my dinner with Charlie Munger”

      1. Notes from a true student of Munger and many of the other greats shares takeaways from his meeting with Charlie a few months ago. (30 minutes)

   3. Taking the other side of the argument: A less charitable take on his legacy and actions during 2008

2. VCs pivoting their focus to defense tech and “American dynamism” (The Free Press)

   1. Katherine Boyle @ Defense Ventures Summit (19 minutes)

   2. Anduril launches a next gen anti-drone UAV

3. Building the Berkshire of the internet (66 minutes)

4. Bari Weiss spoke at the Federalist Society and tied the rise of antisemitism to a broader cultural shift. (The Free Press [Transcript and video])

5. Cruise CEO steps down over regulatory issues in SF

   1. I will be writing a longer form article on self driving tech in the next few weeks to elaborate on my thoughts about the industry writ large

   2. A hint for the theme of that article… Its coming faster than you are expecting

6. For a laugh: An amusing misuse of a well known Reagan quote