Aman Verjee

[trading places @TradingVCs]

The 10-year treasury just crossed 5% for the first time in nearly 20 years. There are several possible reasons why.

"It's just economic growth is creating demand for capital. If it were the budget deficit, if it were something specific to the US, you would expect the dollar to be weakening.

But...it's generally been rising. It's sort of flattened over the past couple of years. It actually substantially increased just after Trump's election and then has been normalizing, but doesn't seem to be losing ground against major trading currencies."

-@AmanVerjee on Trading Places Podcast EP50 with @davemcclure

[trading places @TradingVCs]

Investing in defense tech used to be taboo in Silicon Valley.

Those days are over. 

"Probably the number one factor is just the advances in AI technology. It's just time for the category because the technology is working.

To paraphrase Kyle Reese in the Terminator movies, the machines just got smart...

But in this case, it works better than human pilots, and it works better than what's on the ground right now."

-@AmanVerjee on Trading Places Podcast EP49 with @davemcclure

[trading places @TradingVCs]

WHY A SPACEX-TESLA MERGER IS LIKELY 🚀

@SpaceX's ambitious AI compute buildout could require $400 billion in CapEx over the next 12 months.

Combining SpaceX and @Tesla could give @elonmusk the capital, infrastructure, and scale needed to pull it off.

“It's much easier to do it if you're SpaceX and Tesla together.” -@AmanVerjee

Aman breaks down why a merger could be increasingly likely by 2027.

[Joe Lonsdale @JTLonsdale]

Starting to get to a meaningful amount of scale at this company we built.

At this pace, I’d worry Addepar runs out of wealth to serve - but cheap and plentiful intelligence is going to create quadrillions more!

[Aman Verjee @AmanVerjee]

@Jason @Jason minimum wage is your obsession not the voters … economic studies demonstrate when you increase the cost of labor past the point productive return, unemployment follows

[trading places @TradingVCs]

Two-minute map of the entire AI industry:

"At the very bottom you have the guys who provide power to the ecosystem. Above that you got the chip makers... like NVIDIA. The chip makers have probably something like 10 trillion dollars in market cap right now.

The power guys... the entire S&P 500 is under three trillion in market cap right now for the power players. And only a subset of those are powering the AI revolution.

Then the cloud guys... the hyperscalers are folks like Amazon and Alphabet, Oracle, Azure, and then Meta... as well as SpaceX. And then you've got some of these neoclouds, folks like CoreWeave or Grok, who are specialists in just supporting AI.

Here's the higher end of the stack. We've got maybe five trillion or so of market cap. A lot of this is the closed source frontier models in the US, so Anthropic, OpenAI. Then you have the open weight models, many of whom are Chinese right now.

Note that there's not that many companies at the top of this pyramid, the application layer... Harvey among them. There's Replit, there's Cursor. But if you add up the market cap of all those companies today, it's only about a trillion bucks."

-@AmanVerjee on Trading Places Podcast EP48

[Saritha Komatireddy @sarithaforny]

Just fight crime.

[trading places @TradingVCs]

Google's Gemini quietly joined OpenAI and Anthropic in the "AI models that broke out and hacked real companies" club:

"They've also announced that they are just as much a bad boy as OpenAI and Anthropic, and disclosing that they did some AI hacks to three companies as well."-@davemcclure

"Let me ask you this, if you're about to go public... and you have to explain, my product will break out of the sandbox... would you invest in that company at a trillion dollar valuation?"-@AmanVerjee

[trading places @TradingVCs]

What if AI regulation isn’t just about safety?

The argument: closed-source AI companies could use regulation to shield themselves from disruptive open-weight competition — much like the ICC helped protect incumbent railroads.

@davemcclure and @AmanVerjee break down the potential strategy behind AI companies embracing regulation.

[Aman Verjee @AmanVerjee]

@BernieSanders Yes fringe … you just made up these numbers clearly. 70% of Americans do not want socialism. … the ones who do are financially illiterate, downwardly mobile voters that you appeal to with misinformation.

https://t.co/e8r8EdBx7T

[trading places @TradingVCs]

SpaceX was already worth $73B when Aman Verjee’s fund got in — and it wasn’t even public yet.

In 2021, Practical Venture Capital bought SpaceX shares directly from existing investors through the secondary market, making it one of the fund’s top five positions.

Now, that position is its biggest — up roughly 20x from where they entered, despite dilution along the way.

@AmanVerjee explains on The Claman Countdown with @LizClaman how secondary investing lets funds get into companies like SpaceX years before they reach the public markets.

[trading places @TradingVCs]

The U.S. can keep running $2 trillion annual deficits — until the market decides it can’t.

With roughly $40 trillion to refinance, rising rates could make the cost of carrying that debt increasingly painful. And if entitlement spending isn’t addressed, the pressure only gets worse.

The optimistic case? A return to the bipartisan fiscal discipline of the late 1990s. The alternative is waiting until the market forces the issue.

How long can the U.S. keep deferring the pain?

@davemcclure and @AmanVerjee break down the consequences of America’s growing deficit and why the market may eventually force a reckoning.

[trading places @TradingVCs]

The AI pause may not really be about slowing AI down.

It could be about protecting the companies already leading the race.

As open-weight models become more competitive, regulation could become a moat: higher compliance costs, more liability protection, and fewer hurdles for companies with the resources to absorb them.

It’s the “Marlboro strategy” — use regulation to make the playing field harder for everyone else.

So is the AI pause really about safety, or about keeping competition at bay?

@davemcclure and @AmanVerjee break down the potential strategy behind the AI regulation push.

[trading places @TradingVCs]

Meta's @Muse is #1 on the App Store, ahead of ChatGPT. @alexandr_wang 👏

@AmanVerjee: "If I had to short one company right now… I'd short Instinct." A $10B valuation, with Sequoia and Benchmark rumored to lead.

@davemcclure isn't so sure. Who's right?

Episode 49 of @TradingVCs is here:

1:06 - [ tech and vc news ]

3:29 - Fed rates jump to 4%, gas @ $4.50/gal
8:16 - @AnthropicAI delays IPO; @OpenAI raising @ $1.2T
12:00 - Does AI need govt regulation?
16:54 - @nscale files for IPO
20:45 - EU AI rising: @MistralAI $24B, @cohere @ $20B
24:07 - @Gemini joins AI hacker club
25:33 - @Meta @finkd launches AI agent Muse; Instinct raising @ $10B @sequoia @benchmark

33:47 - [ intvw: Dan Gray @credistick, research lead, @JoinOdin ]

39:48 - Venture has eaten the IPO
41:19 - Shifting VC strategies
58:45 - How AI could upend VC industry
1:13:39 - Contrarian take on upcoming AI IPOs

1:13:21 - [ valuation corner: @shieldaitech seeks $20B ]

1:17:08 - Impressive founding brothers @brandontseng2 @rtsengusa
1:18:30 - Why VC defense investment is growing
1:22:18 - Breaking down world-wide defense budgets

[trading places @TradingVCs]

THE SECRET BEHIND THE COWBOYS’ $10B+ VALUATION

Why are the Dallas Cowboys the most valuable franchise in sports?

It’s not just ticket sales or TV money.

Jerry Jones negotiated a special deal that lets the Cowboys keep a much larger share of apparel, licensing, stadium, and hospitality revenue than other NFL teams.

That means more revenue stays with the Cowboys — and more value accrues to the franchise.

With roughly $1.2B in annual revenue, the Cowboys have built a business model that looks very different from the rest of the league.

@davemcclure and @AmanVerjee break down how the Cowboys built the most valuable team in sports.

[trading places @TradingVCs]

Catch up on full episodes of Trading Places Podcast! Subscribe to our YouTube channel!

https://t.co/9xpXU5iKSR

[trading places @TradingVCs]

WHY WOULD YOU BUY A $3B SPORTS TEAM?

Because the tax bill can look very different from the sticker price.

A franchise buyer can potentially amortize intangible assets over 15 years, creating massive tax deductions along the way.

For a $3B purchase, that could mean billions in deductions over time — plus potential state and local tax benefits.

The real cost of a sports team may be far lower than the headline price.

@davemcclure and @AmanVerjee break down the math.

[Aman Verjee @AmanVerjee]

@Sofia50020Sofia Iowa

[trading places @TradingVCs]

Check out the latest episode of Trading Places Podcast! https://t.co/1lo4KcEDzj

[trading places @TradingVCs]

WHAT IF AI COMPANIES PAID THE GOVERNMENT FOR LEGAL PROTECTION?

@sama and @DarioAmodei might accept an “AI tax” or even a government stake — if it bought them something critical: legal certainty.

Pay upfront. Get protection from potentially unlimited liability as AI scales.

@davemcclure and @AmanVerjee break down the tradeoff.