00:00We're hoping the end might now be in sight, right? I think what we're reporting in truth is that
00:04there is progress on this $100 billion or more round. And so I think, you know, the part that's
00:10new is that it's kind of phased. So portion number one, $100 billion or more comes from just a few
00:18names, Amazon, SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Microsoft, pretty much in that order. And, you know, there's
00:26some math to be done on pre-money and post-money valuation. Our understanding from a source is
00:31that the pre-money valuation kind of remains fixed at $730 billion. But because of its sort of
00:38increasing goal in how much it wants to raise and the reporting that it will later, once it gets
00:44through those strategic investors, go to the sovereign wealth funds and the venture capitalists
00:48and ask for more, the net result is the valuations at $850 billion, which post-money, that's a lot.
00:56Either way, it's a lot, no matter what you're looking at in terms of its fundraising. You
01:01talk about the next phase of the deal where sovereign wealth funds and more institutional
01:04investors come in. What's the timeline for that? And is there a pretty long list of companies that
01:09are ready to sign? Yeah, it's very interesting. So I think like the chronology is that the end of
01:16this month, February, that's when we'll see that first phase or first portion close or at least have
01:21those mega cap tech names commit their commitments, right? Say, this is what we're doing.
01:26I imagine there is a long list of people that want an allocation in the world of venture capital.
01:33VCs already sit on the cap tables, of course, like Thrive Capital is one. They just raised
01:37a $10 billion new fund this week. And then that process plays out over March.
01:42You know, it's a little bit unprecedented to raise at this scale and remember that in the
01:48background, you know, OpenAI has an unusual structure. You know, it takes time for the
01:53commits to be made, but also then the mechanics of wiring the money. And the last bit that I'll
01:58say is that, you know, that people are basically dealing with Sam Altman directly on this, you
02:05know, trying to appeal to him, like, let me in on this because they see it as being a, you
02:09know,
02:09a once in a lifetime kind of thing. Use of proceeds, Ed. What do we know about what the
02:14company is doing with these funds? Well, it's super interesting, right? Because, you know,
02:18what can you do other than go against a publicly traded proxy in terms of like the valuation as a
02:24multiple of whatever? We know that, you know, OpenAI hit annualized revenue of about $20 billion,
02:30$20 billion in 2025. But it's massively compute constrained. You know, their argument has been
02:36quite consistently. If we had more compute, in other words, data center capacity, we would have
02:42more products, more different software tools, variations of the API. And it's the compute that's
02:47holding us back. So, you know, we've done endless reporting about where they're committed around the
02:51world in terms of infrastructure build out. And that will be the mainstay of it.
02:55Ed, before we let you go, we also have to ask you about how Amazon has now replaced Walmart
03:00as the biggest company by revenue. It sounds like an impressive title, but I guess the question
03:06here is, are we comparing apples with apples? It feels like Amazon's a very different company
03:10than Walmart. It's like when the red headline hits the blue moon, you're like, oh my goodness,
03:14what a moment in time. But so the numbers are like Amazon 717 billion, Walmart 713, or just north of
03:23that.
03:24The reality is that with Amazon, if you stripped out its cloud computing division, AWS,
03:29it would be 588 billion, and we wouldn't even be having this conversation, right? So it's not
03:35apples to apples. But, you know, just study the history of Amazon, read Brad Stone, editor of
03:42Business Week's books, like he's documented this. A big part of what Jeff Bezos wanted to do was study
03:48the Waltons and what happened in the early days of Walmart and how it grew to be the retail behemoth
03:53that it is. And so at least I guess from their strategy, it's an apt comparison.
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