Apple just announced the biggest stock buyback program ever in the history of the world, $110 billion dedicated to strictly buybacks. That money that apples going to spend on buybacks is more than the entire market cap of Chipotle. They could buy the entire company and have $30 billion to spare. They could buy Airbnb, the whole company and still have 10 billion to spare. With this amount of money for buybacks, Apple could buy Ulta Beauty five times over.
That is a big number, a number so big that it's hard for us to even wrap our head around. Analysts are calling it an astonishing number, but they're also saying that Apple may be acknowledging that they are becoming a value stock the returns money to shareholders rather than a high-powered grow stock that needs its cash for research and development or expansion. Is Apple no longer the company they used to be? Has Apple reached the top of its ingenuity, its innovation, and its growth?
Well, that's what we're going to be discussing in today's episode. We'll be going over this recent report, this massive buyback program, the huge stock price boost that Apple's getting from this whether it's deserved or not, and answering the important question of whether or not Apple is done growing. Now. Of course, it's been a busy week, and Apple wasn't the only company that made news this week.
There's another, much smaller company that's a big position of mine, Texas Roadhouse. The restaurant company just reported earnings yesterday along with Apple. Now, unfortunately, Texas Roadhouse is not in the position to announce a $110 billion buyback program, but they did have a great report nonetheless. This investment has been an insanely good investment. Texas Roadhouse is crushing almost everything else in the market at this point. It's a company that's a small company.
It's only $10 billion. So relatively speaking to the rest of the S&P 500, to the QQQ. This is a smaller company. It's not even in the S&P 500, it's not in the QQQ. Index holders don't own Texas Roadhouse, but their execution and outperformance makes me believe that it's only a matter of time until they're introduced into the indexes. Something is happening here with this company. The stock is appreciating quickly, but it's following
along with the fundamentals. We're going to be diving into what's driving this stock higher, what's powering its incredible share price and what I believe happened in this most recent quarter. How is Texas Roadhouse doing in 2024? Now, of course, there's some other companies that recently reported earnings. We have MasterCard having a bit of a pullback. Another company that recently reported earnings this week is Moody's. This is another position in my
financial category. And then finally, I want to play this clip from Sam Altman. This is going viral because it's giving a lot of people some red flags. So we'll see what's causing a few people to have red flags with Sam Altman. So we have a lot of news to get to. Let's go ahead and get started. Now, as we jump into these earnings, it's important to understand that I have significant investments in many
of these companies. The reason that I follow them so intently, the reason that I follow them so closely, is because a lot of my net worth, in fact most of my invested net worth, is wrapped up into these individual stocks. The reason that I choose individual stocks is no mystery. I do so because I believe I can beat the S&P 500 / a long period of time. Now there's debates on this subject. Many people think that's nearly
impossible. They've been convinced that nobody can beat the collection of 500 companies in the S&P 500, but I don't believe it's impossible. And so far, this portfolio has been doing really, really well either way, whether or not you invest in the S&P 500 or you buy the market or you buy the total stock market or the total world market. Either way, you can follow my results for free. If you subscribe to the channel, I'll show you my total portfolio value.
I'll show you my all time gains and my returns over time of this portfolio transparently on a weekly basis. So you're going to see everything, whether it comes out good or bad, whether I make money on certain positions or lose money, I'll show both ways. Now this weekend earnings turned out incredibly well. Every position I own and every company had strong earnings across the board. I have trouble finding weakness in how these companies are
performing. And Apple and Texas Roadhouse are just the latest 2. The stock is up today around 6.7% and that's off of news like this. And it's a beat on the top and bottom line for Apple plus the largest buyback in corporate history. Let me go over the numbers. First, EPS is a beat here at $1.50, Three St. was looking for $1.50 revenue, a slight beat, 90.75 billion versus the 90.01 billion expected.
And As for that buyback, $110 billion like I. As this reporter is talking, Apple stock price is climbing further and further from 1% after hours to 2% after hours. When he mentions the gravity of this buyback, the size of it Apple stock goes up even further. That's the largest ever announced, that's according to Birani Associates. And then a dividend is increasing to $0.25 a share and just a couple of little segment
revenues here. Let's go over iPhone, a slight miss of expectations at 45.96 billion, that's down better than 10% year over year. And then services, a slight beat here, 23.9 billion, that's up nearly 14%. And then As for China, I know that's a big question. Going to hear sales in Greater China down 8%. It doesn't seem to matter what the actual business lines are
doing. As investors digest the gravity of this buyback, the amount that Apple spending the stock price continued to gain by the 2nd, it's climbed up to an almost 7% gain even though the stock price is racing up. Not every investor is on board with this move, but I think putting the size of this buyback in context is important here. Apple owns the record for the largest buybacks over and over
and over again. This move of them announcing a $110 billion buyback is actually not that revolutionary. It's not anything new. It's business as usual for Apple. While it is true that they just announced the biggest buyback in history, it's also true that they've announced a $90 billion buyback as recent as 2023 and in 2022. And in 2021 and going back to 2018, they had a $100 billion buyback. Apple holds the record for the five largest buyback
announcements in the market. They hold all five positions. Apple's the king of buybacks. They're like the Michael Phelps of buybacks. It's what Apple does. Being concerned that Apple likes doing a lot of buybacks is like being concerned that Michael Phelps likes to swim, or that Tiger Woods likes to play golf, or that Steph Curry likes taking a lot of three-point shots. There's no cause of alarm that Apple's doing a large buyback program.
This has been their strategy for well over a decade. In fact, if we rewind time around 10 years, we can see the start of this. In 2013, Apple had 26.49 billion shares outstanding. This was the absolute peak of their shares outstanding. For the prior decade, they had
only been issuing shares. Like many companies that were getting up to scale, Apple had achieved enormous success launching the iPhone in 2005, and they'd scaled up to huge size all the way up to 2012. In 2012, they reached a breaking point where Apple is generating enough cash that they could both reinvest back into their business, creating new products, new experiences, new services for customers, while returning enormous amounts of cash to shareholders.
Apple has reduced their total float, which is a word for the amount of shares outstanding in circulation. They've reduced that amount by 41% over the past decade, meaning that if you bought Apple here and you owned 1% of the company outstanding, you would own roughly 1.8% if you held on to it during this last decade. They've increased your equity in the company by almost double over the past 10 years.
To achieve this accomplishment, illustrated on this one chart right here, I think is a a big understatement by a lot of people. I don't think people realize how few companies can actually pull this off. There's only a few of them in the market and some of them are businesses you wouldn't expect. AutoZone loves buybacks even more than Apple. It's one of the few companies that has really pulled this lever.
AutoZone has reduced their shares outstanding by far more than Apple, going from 150 million down to 17,000,000. What I think is important to highlight is that Apple's accomplished this feat of doing massive scale buybacks and reducing their total float by 41% while reinvesting back into
their company aggressively. For example, if we also bring up the two different indicators of reinvestment back into a company, it can simply be defined as the CapEx of the company and the research and development. Those are the two biggest financial metrics to show how much a company is reinvesting or at least building out new
facilities and new products. Well, if we look at just these two different indicators that are representative of reinvesting back into the company, we can go back to 2013. This is when Apple started to buy back their stock right there. The growth since 2013 has been exponential spend on reinvestment back into their stock. Now Apple best reinvests not by having additional CapEx, but instead by having research and development. If we look at that alone, it
paints the picture more clearly. Again, Apple started their buyback program right here. Do you see any slowing down of reinvestment into research and development after starting their buyback program? Did it change their trajectory at all? No, because Apple first reinvest back into the company and then gives you buybacks on top of that after they made all of the reinvestments that they can.
So when we see these analysts make these claims or make these judgments that Apple may be acknowledging that they're becoming a value stock that just returns money to shareholders instead of putting the cash needed for R&D and expansion. What is this Based on? What number does this claim come from? Apple's doing the exact same thing they've been doing for the better part of a decade. They're investing back into their company aggressively and you see that showing up in the numbers.
There's very few companies on planet Earth that spend more money on research and development than Apple. Apple is spending a fortune on research and development. So no, I don't believe that's correct. I don't believe this is an indication that Apple's spending less on growth and expansion and research and development. I believe it's a continuing sign of a company doing the same thing it always has. It's returning its enormous amount of excess cash back to shareholders.
One of the big challenges that Apple has, a greater challenge than any other company on planet Earth, is they make too much money. Apple's the most consistently profitable company in the world, and at the pace they're going, they're making more than $100 billion of cash flow per year. Apple's net income last quarter was $23.6 billion, and that's roughly the same amount of free cash flow they generate.
A company that has $160 billion in cash and is generating an additional $25 billion in net income every quarter has a problem of too much cash. And the way that they've chosen to solve this problem is through the most tax efficient capital allocation policy possible, which is returning the huge majority of it through buybacks. The other thing I'd like to highlight, and I think this Third Point is also important, is that Apple's not even doing something unique to just Apple.
Many companies are copying Apple's blueprint, Google being one of them. If we go down further on this list, we can see the series of Google buyback announcements. Google announced a $70 billion buyback in 20/24/2023 and 20/22. They're seemingly doing this every single year. If we look at this buyback in proportion to Google's economics, it's revealing. How much money has Google made for the past three years? Well, last year they made around $70 billion. The year before that, they made
$60 billion. And then the year prior to that, in 2021, Google made around $70 billion. So for the past three years, Google made around $70 billion each year. And then for the past three years, they announced the buyback program for around $70 billion each year. Now, when Google does this, nobody freaks out. The market doesn't get super excited. Investors don't think that this is the end of Google and they've reached the top, and that they're no longer investing in their future.
Nobody's reaching that conclusion when Google's doing the exact same thing as Apple, only on a smaller scale. Apple is investing roughly 100% of its free cash flow into buybacks, and it can do that because it has $160 billion in cash. So they can do that for a number of years. And Google likewise is investing roughly 100% of their free cash flow into buybacks. Because Google likewise has excess cash, they have around $100 billion in excess cash. Both of these companies are
doing the same thing. The only reason that Apple's buyback is bigger than Google's is because Apple makes more money than Google. If Google is making as much money as Apple, they would also announce a $110 billion buyback
program. So if Apple's over, if this is the end of Apple and their innovation and their product development and the future growth of the company because they announced a large buyback program, then that should also mean that it's the end of Google that this company's over, that they're no longer investing. They're no longer creating new products because they also announced a large buyback program. In either case, these
assessments are wrong. The analysts going on CNBC saying that this is an indication of a value stock are wrong. It's an indication that these stocks make a fortune. They simply make too much money. And the biggest take away is that Apple makes more money than any other company. Warren Buffett chooses to invest in stocks that have high amounts of predictable free cash flow. So it's no wonder that he has Apple as 50% of his portfolio.
Now finally, we move on to this recent quarter with Apple. What actually happened this quarter? We can dive into some of the numbers here. First of all, one of the recent updates we did on Qualtrim is we introduced something called KPIs. We have a nice little pink badge there to denote that this is a KPI chart. KPI means Key Performance Indicator. It's just a nice term to define something that is something you want to track that's unique to this specific stock, to this specific company.
It's different for every different company. For example, with Apple, we have the revenue by segment and this is something I always like to look at well, we can look at the growth of these different segment lines over time if we filter just the iPhone. I think that the growth here is the biggest concern for investors. There's really no reason to buy a new iPhone. I have the iPhone 15 Pro and this thing has such a nice processor, such a nice screen, so much battery life.
It's basically the perfect phone, and these phones are now lasting longer and longer. It's true that the battery decays over time, but you can swap out the battery for like $100. So iPhones are lasting longer and longer, and that's a little bit of a concern for Apple, even though they price them higher. It means that people can hold on to their phones for multiple years. You can buy a phone in 2020 and you don't need one in 2023. You could wait all the way until 2025 to get a new one.
That's great for consumers and it's nice to have devices that last for multiple years, but it is making it more difficult for Apple. They're having a harder time creating new reasons for you to upgrade your new phone. When we move down this list, we get into the Max. Mac revenue was 7.17 billion last year. This year it was 7.45, so it barely grew. You have barely any movement in Mac revenue. iPads declined year over year from 6.67 billion down to 5.56.
When we look at the wearables and home accessories, this again is another decline year over year. Last year it was 8.76 billion, this year it's 7.91. Right now, the only part of Apple that is steadily and consistently growing is the service portion of the business. And if we look at this in comparison to their total revenue, it's a minority of their total revenue, but it's
still a significant portion. So looking at this overall, it shows the continued trend of most things being mostly flat for Apple and the services continuing to grow. When I look overall at this quarter, I was pleasantly surprised because I had very low expectations. I wasn't going into this one expecting Apple to have some massive beat. I thought that most lines of
business would be down. So the fact that they are able to pull this off, they have such an enormous buyback program to actually grow services was a positive thing. Another thing that Apple tried to mention on the earnings call is of course their pivot degenerative AI. Apple's taking the approach of not doing large language models. What they're doing instead is making their devices support artificial intelligence and generative AI with their newer
chips. So that's going to be a huge improvement for Apple. That's another potential growth path. Another thing they mentioned on the earnings call was the Vision Pro headset. And this is where you can try to decipher what they said. They didn't give out hard numbers, but they basically said that half of the Fortune 100 companies have purchased Vision Pro headsets. To me that doesn't say much. So did they purchase one or two or did they purchase 1000?
We still really have no insight on that. And as far as I can tell right now, anecdotally from what I see, I don't see the Vision Pro being this grand success right now. It seems like it's very limited with the amount of customers that have it. But overall right now, even with these doubts, the buyback program alone was enough to lift Apple share. Now moving on, we get to Texas Roadhouse, which is a company that has just been astonishing to me.
There's not many companies that I've ever owned that I've been this pleased with the investment and the performance and the continuing operations of the company. Texas Roadhouse is now a $71,000 position in My Portfolio with 35,600 of that bean gains. So this company's over a double since purchasing it in my current portfolio. Texas Roadhouse has gained so much value.
It is now my third largest position, just behind S&P Global and MasterCard. It is a bigger position than Microsoft, Costco and Intuit. And again, I didn't size it to be this big of a position. I bought into it and just let it grow. It's the same reason that Costco's such a large position. I have not been buying Costco anytime recently. Costco's just grown into a large company, so My Portfolio in many cases, and the portfolio allocation is a result of just letting these companies grow
organically. After making my initial buys, even after going up 33% year to date, Texas Roadhouse has gone up an additional 3% after earnings because of how good these earnings were. Now I got to be honest here, when we were going into this earnings report, I was slightly concerned. I was a little concerned because I saw the massacre that happened to Starbucks. Starbucks was just destroyed. The earnings report was so bad
across the board. I I I went through that earnings report and that's one where I had a really tough time finding a silver lining. Starbucks is down 21% year to date and they got blindsided by this bad report. So when I was looking at Starbucks, I realized that Texas Roadhouse is a very different business with a very different
value proposition. So I was crossing my fingers that there wasn't going to be any overlap, that Starbucks wasn't any great indicator of the overall economy or consumer, but Starbucks just had Starbucks problems. And that turned out to be the case. Texas Roadhouse is not Starbucks, and it's a company that I believe offers a better value proposition to customers than Starbucks. It's also a company that I believe has less competition than Starbucks.
There's many food companies, but there's not many food companies that have the same recipe and operations and formula and branding as Texas Roadhouse. Now if we look at the earnings report, there's a couple important things to highlight for this company. First of all, of course, we have the revenue growth and the earnings per share growth that we look at for every company and these numbers are impressive. In the last quarter, Texas Roadhouse grew its revenue by
12.5%. So double digit revenue growth. They grew their diluted earnings per share by 31.4%. What these numbers should prove is that you don't need to have a large language model to have good returns. You don't need to be a leading technology company and have a huge research and development budget to have good returns. The way companies get good returns is by having earnings growth and free cash flow per share growth.
And Texas Roadhouse has both of those at a faster clip than the majority of companies in the S&P 500. Now if we look at Texas Roadhouse and we want to put these numbers in context with recent quarters and see the overall growth of this company, we have some other cool KPI charts specific to Texas Roadhouse. We have, for example, the number of restaurants. And this is where people, I think, have the wrong idea of what this company is. Texas Roadhouse is a company
that owns multiple brands. They own a company called Bubba's 33, They own a company called Jaggers, and they even do some franchising. So there's wholly owned Texas Roadhouses and then there's a number of franchised ones and franchised Jaggers. So this is a company that has a few different parts to it, but the majority of it started with company wholly owned Texas Roadhouses. These are the ones that the company opens every single quarter and the ones that they operate themselves.
You can see this number growing steadily over time. Back in 2011, at the end of the first quarter in 2011, they had 276 Texas Roadhouse locations and that's grown over time. Every single quarter you see the slow and steady growth. They're always opening up more locations. In the most recent quarter, they ended the quarter with 591 locations. Then in 2014, they started a brand called Bubba's 33. This is more of like a Bar and Grill concept. It's performed really well.
All of these get really high expected returns each time they open one, but because the company hasn't been around as long, it doesn't have quite as much brand value. It doesn't have as high of returns as a Texas Roadhouse
location. So if we look at both of these compared to each other, you can see that they focus more on their company owned Texas Roadhouses than they do their Bubba's 33. Again, along the way they're always experimenting, opening up new concepts and one thing they've wanted to go into is QSR quick service restaurant, things like Chipotle, McDonald's, those type of restaurants, they open up their own brand called Jagger's. This is something where they've worked on this concept all the
way. Back in 2013 they had one Jaggers open, they kept it the one and then they opened up a second one in 2015 and they've worked on revising the concept. They don't want to expand unless they get the concept perfect to where they're getting the high expected returns they want. So they kept this at 2 restaurants. From 2015 to 20/20/2020, they opened up three. In 2021 they opened up another one. And then in 2024, they now operate 8 of them.
They're learning from these restaurants, they're learning the QSR business. But Texas Roadhouse has a great team. They know how to revise restaurant concepts. They know about processes and processes at scale. They know about incentives and ownership structures. They know about creating long
term value. So they're trying to take the learnings that they have from operating their company owned Texas Roadhouse restaurants and take those learnings and implement them into a QSR concept, which is Jaggers. So right now, if you look at this chart, Jaggers barely shows up. You can barely see it because it's so small, but represents great potential.
If Texas Roadhouse becomes convinced that they can scale this quickly and earn high returns, you could see these numbers shoot up exponentially quarter by quarter. The strategy that they've taken with Jaggers is 1 where they don't want to just own Jaggers in and of itself. This is where they want to get into a franchise model and we have right here them starting to work with different franchise operators just in 2023 and in 2024. You can see right here a few franchise Jaggers opening up.
So they have one in 2023. The franchise owners opened up another one in 2022 and then they just recently opened up their third one. Again, these are small in comparison to the rest of the business. This isn't a huge revenue line. In fact, it's not meaningful. But Texas Roadhouse views this as an additional growth path for the company. As their restaurants meet more scale and saturate the market further, they want to have different ways to offer value to customers.
And if they can get this concept right, which I believe they can, you can see this become a meaningful portion of the business over time. During this time period of Texas Roadhouse having their own restaurants, they also have franchise owned operations and they do this strategically. If we break out just the franchise Texas Roadhouse locations, you'll see that it's not growing as fast. In some cases, the numbers even go down. They went down in 2016 and in 2021 and a little bit in 2020.
The reason that they go down is not because the franchise owners struggle, it's not because these locations are shutting down. It's because Texas Roadhouse likes to buy some of their franchise operators out and own those companies outright. O what the company does strategically here is they use their franchise locations as a OOL to pick different companies to acquire fully and that's a strategy that I think has very
high returns. They can look over all the franchise oerators, see the ones that have the best operations and purchase and pluck those companies specifically out of the pool. But overall, when we look at the restaurant locations over time, we see the same trend going. The company is growing over and over again every single quarter and I don't believe it's going to slow down anytime soon.
On top of the growth of their total locations now getting close to 800 locations, they're also growing the size of their location. New locations are bigger than older ones. They're doing bump outs on older ones, They're redoing the kitchen and making to go orders on the older ones as well. So they're constantly enhancing the older locations as they're growing the total number. The other most important KPI that we look at specific to restaurants is their comparable restaurant sales.
They highlight this as the first bullet point on their report because sales increasing per location is a key indicator for how this company's doing and we can look at this and give it context on a greater scale here. Now this isn't the total average volume per year of the restaurant. This is their total weekly sales. That's the way that they define it, total weekly sales. So if we look at this on a quarterly basis back in 2011, their weekly sales was around 73,000.
It goes up and down based on the quarter, whether it's a longer quarter or a shorter one, whether it's the holiday season or not. But you can see it growing steadily overtime from 70,000 to 80 to 90 to 100,000. And then we had the COVID quarters. The COVID quarters, it dropped from around 102,000 to 41,000. At the same time, during that first COVID quarter, the To Go sales went up dramatically. They doubled their normal average up to 54,000. We'll revisit those to go orders
in a second. But we look at the rapid recovery in weekly sales, It went all the way back up to where it was prior to COVID in early 2021. So we had a very rapid recovery and investors that bought the dip here did really well in Q1 of 2023. Their average weekly sales was $148,000. That is incredible, but they still beat it this first quarter 159,000 setting an all time record weekly sales for the
company. It's hard to look at this and see that there is any trouble at all with Texas Roadhouse. They're not only opening up additional locations every single quarter, but they're also increasing the amount of weekly sales every single quarter as well. Now one thing that Texas Roadhouse is getting much better at is their to go orders and this is where the numbers look a
little off. We have this first one here and this is unusually high because they are basically only accepting to go orders in early 2021. During that quarter they had 54,000. It started to normalize in 2022. That's where it hit the low, but over the last two years, it started to increase again at an accelerated pace, more and more percentage of their customers are ordering to go. This year there was 20,800 weekly. So it's improving year over
year. We're back to a growth trajectory where previously it was going down from all the pull forward from the pandemic. And they mentioned on their call, they're getting better and better at the technology. They have the app making it very easy to order for to go and they have a special pickup station and a digital kitchen that's specific to to go orders and they're seeing more repeat orders from the same customers. So we see these number of
restaurants grow. We see the average weekly sales rise and that translates into the overall revenue of the company, 12.5% revenue growth reaching a record high. The free cash flow also reached a record high this quarter, $165,000,000. That's an increase of 35% year over year. The net income was up 31% and the earnings per share was up 32%. They've maintained 0 long term debt on their balance sheet and they've grown their cash balance from around 100 million to 213
million. And finally, on the earnings call, when they're asked about the value proposition to customers and whether prices are getting to them, Texas Roadhouse said that after their last price increase of 3%, they actually saw an increase in traffic trends. More and more people coming to the restaurant because even though they're increasing prices slowly, other places are increasing prices much faster, making their relative value
proposition better and better. So overall, when I look at the stock, I think this is about as solid of an earnings report as you can get and that's why the stock continues to sail higher after already being up this much. Now finally, we get to MasterCard. This is another large position in My Portfolio. This quarter, MasterCard came in a little bit weaker than expected. I mean they they did fine.
It was mostly business as usual, but they did predict that things were going to slow down a little bit for them and that did 'cause investors some alarm that the CFO says shouldn't really 'cause alarm. The reason for the slowdown is simply because outside of the US is growing really quickly. It's a large portion of Mastercard's revenue and the US
dollar is becoming stronger. So when you have that foreign exchange, when you have that currency conversion, it simply makes it so that they lose one to two percentage points in earnings. The most important takeaways that I see are the similar things they're saying at MasterCard that they said with Visa, we continue to see good solid consumer health and consumer spending trends. And this is true globally around the globe.
People are spending money, the MasterCard doesn't really care what they spend money on. It makes no difference for them. They even say quote, so for $1.00 spending taking place at a restaurant or $1.00 spending taking place at a value store generates the same revenue for us. That's the incredible thing about Mastercard's business model. You don't have to predict which company will do well, You just have to predict that people will spend more money digitally with cards in the future.
And I think that's a very safe prediction. So far nothing has changed with my thesis in MasterCard. Another stock in My Portfolio worth noting is Moody's. This is a brand new investment of mine. It's roughly flat, down slightly since purchasing in, but they just had their earnings report and overall it was really strong. The company beat their estimates both on the top and bottom line. The revenue grew to $1.79 billion, which is a 21% increase.
The free cash flow came in at around $775 million. Now there's different ways you can adjust this free cash flow. Moody's adjusted themselves down to around 695,000,000. Net income was up 15%. Earnings per share were up 15% as well. Moody's adjust this down to around 13% earnings per share growth and they are paying down debt quickly, which I like to see. Last quarter, just quarter over quarter, they paid down around $700 million worth of debt. So I like seeing that go down.
I think it's good capital allocation strategy and while they paid down debt, they had additional cash. There's not too much to say about this report. It was strong all around, every financial metrics looking strong and their core businesses, both Moody's Analytics and the credit rating business are both on track. That about wraps up the earnings reports this week and overall it was a great week for My Portfolio. Now one last thing I must mention.
Sam Altman of Open AI recently went on an interview and like many of these tech billionaire big people that have blown up in this category, he says a lot of things. He says a lot of things and some of them are very grandiose. But some of these strike me as not just grandiose or dreaming, but they strike me as as almost a red flag, something I feel like I have to be cautious of when looking at people like this. For example, here's one of the things he said during this interview.
Whether we burn 500 million a year or 5 billion or 50 billion a year, I don't care. I genuinely don't. As long as we can, I think, stay on a trajectory where eventually we create way more value for society than that. And as long as we can figure out a way to pay the bills like we're making AGI, it's going to be expensive. It's totally worth it. Now I get it. He wants to create AGI. He's very focused on his goal.
That's a good thing. But the indifference he has towards the magnitude of money between $100 million or 5 billion or 50 billion is a little bit alarming. It's almost like he treats capital as this endless thing that money just sprouts on trees, grows indefinitely, and you'll never have trouble ever receiving funding for his goals and his dreams of creating AGI. And not only is he not concerned about receiving funding, but he also doesn't seem to care.
He seems entirely indifferent, even clarifying that he genuinely, genuinely doesn't care. 5 billion or 50 billion a year, I don't care. I genuinely don't. Five billion? 50 billion? Who cares? I don't know. At least for me, when I watch this type of thing and I see people talking about this type of money in real context, saying they don't care, that raises a red flag. So I hope that Sacha or anybody working with them is careful about that, that he does not seem to respect or care about
burning investors capital. Now that'll be all for this episode. If you want to see more content or you want full access to qualtrum.com, you can try it out with a free trial. If you join today, you'll get the rest of the month for free.