Tech Wreck Scar Tissue & AI Hype with Steve Milunovich
33:16 Share

To be invested with Betterment is to believe in better. Whether it's saving for today or building wealth for tomorrow, they help people and small businesses put their money to work. They automate to make savings simpler. They optimize to make investing smarter. They build innovative technology backed by financial experts for anyone who's ever said, I think I can do better. So be invested in yourself, be invested in your business, be invested in better with Betterment. Get started at Betterment.com.

Welcome to the Risk Reversal Podcast. I'm Dan Neath, and I'm joined by a very good friend and an old friend of mine named Steve Milanovic. Steve was a longtime sell-side analyst at Merrill Lynch all throughout the 90s covering hardware, some of the hottest names in the markets in the lead up to the dot-com bubble, if you will. He spent years as a strategist, as an investor, and now he is a consulting analyst at Tech

advisor LLC. Steve, welcome to the pod. Dan, thanks so much for having me. It's great to see you again. Yeah. So this is really important to me because there's very few folks that I kind of grew up in the markets with who I really looked up to and I read their work every day who are still in the markets. And I would place you as one of them. I know that you retired

from Wolf Research after spending decades at Merrill Lynch. I know you did a time at UBS and you did strategy. Like I said, you did a lot of individual stock coverage, but you also keep pretty involved here. I hope that involvement is more than just watching Fast Money every day, which is one way that you and I have been able to connect. But it would be great if you could give the listener a little 411 on your background, because I think it's

You know, folks like you who had a front row seat to multiple, you know, multiple tech cycles, I think is really important now, especially as people are trying to get their arms around this generative AI cycle. Well, sure, Dan. Yeah, I think your emphasis on old there is probably appropriate. I started in the business in 1983.

and continued through 2020 and essentially was a sell side analyst the whole time, that being working for brokerage firms instead of on the investment side for the buy side. And I think my personality and skill set, you know, fit the sell side probably better than the buy side. So I enjoyed the career very much.

I remember even in business school, I knew I wanted to be able to research. Nobody at the time interviewed on campus for research. It was only for sales and trading. So I was fortunate to start out at first Boston in New York, which became Credit Suisse, which now, of course, is part of UBS. And at the time, they said, do you want to cover computers or coal?

And I didn't know much about either, but I think our computer sounded like it had a bit of a better future. So I covered mainframe computers, covered IBM, which relative to the market actually peaked in 1987. So there were many times over my career when people said, you've got to get a new group. So I covered tech, but it wasn't the sexiest part of tech. It was computer hardware, IT.

IBM, Sun, HP, EMC, Apple, of course, a little sexier, and then tried to work in some tech strategy to get an overview. So my approach was kind of top down. I always looked for the big trends and then tried to identify the companies that would benefit from those macro trends.

Yeah, let's talk about some of those macro trends, because I think a lot of folks in the markets did not have the experience of witnessing some. I mean, like you could make the argument that the PC, the mainframe, like the transition, right? The dot com and what kind of, you know, grew out of an implosion. Then you had this 10 years later. So you had

know mobile and social and cloud right and here we are this probably feels like the next biggest one is generative ai so let's just go back to the 90s let's go back to the build up you just said that maybe the the hardware wasn't that sexy but if you think about sun micro and you think about some of these other hardware names whether it's dell it was compact i mean they're they're right in the middle of all of this you could also throw some names like in there like motorola and research in motion which are probably not names that you covered but

Hardware was sexy for a while. Just give us a sense of like how that kind of, you know, the life cycle of that trend moved like solidly away from hardware, but into, let's say, the Internet. And despite the fact that they really enabled a lot of that growth in the Internet.

Let's first talk about the waves of technology, because I think these 10 to 15 year waves are pretty well accepted today. But when I started talking about them in the 1990s, it was, I hope, a reasonably original insight. So, again, I began in the 80s, but you sort of think of the first wave of centralized computing with mainframe and minis, kind of from 1970 to 1985.

85 to 2000, maybe the client server wave, you know, led by PCs and then networked PCs with Novell. And then you get into the 90s, as you point out, and that's really the internet. So kind of 95 to 2010. Mobile sort of subset of that, you know, begins in the late 90s and ultimately with the iPhone in 2007.

And then the cloud, I would say, is kind of 2010 to 2025. That's the current period. And now we're all kind of arguing, what's the next major wave? It looks like it's probably artificial intelligence. And you could argue that that's kind of beginning now. The 90s really kind of was my peak because you had the Internet. At the time, I was at Morgan Stanley. I was working near Mary Meeker. And I remember the Netscape IPO and people literally were faxing in.

interest in orders to her office, mistakenly, but nevertheless, that's really when that craziness kicked off. And my companies were the Levi Strausses of that era, right? They were the pickpins and shovels. And you couldn't do the internet at the time without Sun Servers and Cisco.

routers. And I remember being in Boston at a lunch and an investor said to me, you know, kind of 1998-ish, 99, you know, the stuff is going great, but whatever happens if these internet companies maybe stop buying as much stuff. And I'm

Like, wow, you know, that would be really bad. And that's exactly what happened around 2000. So it was a great ride up for Dell and Cisco and Sun and many of the companies I was involved in. But obviously things went the other way. I remember, you know, I saw you had Dan Niles on the other day. He mentioned that NVIDIA today is kind of like Cisco was back in the Internet era in the 90s. And that's very true. Cisco is just benefiting from the growth in every which way.

And I remember as a tech strategist writing the piece, if you extrapolate the growth rates people were expecting the internet to grow at at the time, Cisco's revenue growth, you know, in 30 years, Cisco is going to be half of GDP or something. So you sort of knew that wasn't going to happen. So that probably began my era of skepticism, which unfortunately continues up to the current time. But that was kind of the last big hurrah of what we would call the traditional hardware names.

It's funny that you mentioned that. I still have a little scar tissue from that period too because I was skeptical in the lead up in the late 90s and I was working at a hedge fund where we didn't have to take long-term views about our holdings. We had to just process the information that was here and now. We had to think about catalysts in the near term. We had to think about

whether it be product announcements from competitors, that sort of thing, when companies were going to reach profitability. And I think those estimates were always a bit too near than really what materialized back then. But the implosion felt as best

bad as the way up felt great, if that makes some sense, right? Because the bear market that started in March of 2000, no one really knew that it was a bear market then. But you did know by the start of 2021 that things had really come unraveled. And a lot of folks were expecting, you know, at some point, a bottom to be put in place, you know, definitely in the NASDAQ, because to the downside, it was massively, you know, underperforming to the S&P 500. But it kept on going.

and it kept on going and the nasdaq lost 80 percent and think about that never again in our lifetime will an equity index at least here in the developed world lose 80 percent but people just don't know what that felt like every low was you know a lower low until there was really

No more room left to go down. Do you remember that period? And that was probably, you know, late 02, early 03. Yeah, it's kind of a blur now, but you're right. Things began to fall apart in 2000, but it really wasn't clear that we were going through an implosion until 2000, 2001.

And I just remember red every day, every day. Now there were some big rallies in between, certainly. But I just remember a sea of red. I had stocks all over the place like Sun and EMC and Cisco going from 100 down to five. And I think it's probably unimaginable for investors in the market today who weren't around back then because then we got the Greenspan put. And ever since then, the set has just stepped in. And it really has been about the liquidity in the marketplace.

But I think, you know, with the context of these waves, it's really important for investors to recognize where they are in these waves, because the golden rule of tech that came out of that period was when you've got change in technology, disruptive technologies, Clay Christensen introduced the term back then, you really want to get out of the winners or out of the old companies and into the new companies. So the previous winners you want to move out of.

And you want to identify who among generally a sea of new startups who claim they're going to all be successful will ultimately be the winners. And it wasn't so obvious that that was the case. Now I think that's very much taken for granted.

And in fact, it's been a lesson hard learned, but that's really helped companies like Google and Microsoft and Meta who are now much more aware of potential disruption. Because when you give something like AI, normally you would think it's going to be all new companies who benefit from that. But in fact, so far, it's mostly the same cloud companies plus NVIDIA that are the winners from that. So I have a table I used to use, probably one of my best charts that showed the top 10 market caps by decade.

And of course, in the 80s, it was IBM and the many computer companies. In the 90s, it was very heavily Japanese, believe it or not. And there were lots of arguments about how the Japanese were going to take over the tech world. That didn't happen. And then around 2000, it was Cisco and Intel, Microsoft and Oracle. And all of that changed.

And now you look at it, of course, NVIDIA is way up there, Apple's way up there. But the goal as a tech investor with a longer term view is to really think about who are the top 15 market caps in technology, who's going up and who's going down. And it's always a lot easier to figure out who's going down because they're generally the more successful companies today that are starting to show cracks. The harder thing is trying to figure out who's going to

who's going to go up and who's going to be the next Nvidia. - You know, it's interesting. So I talked about that scar tissue that I have from the dot-com implosion. So let's talk about these magnificent seven as they are called Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Tesla. And I look at the seven of those and I've looked at these stocks, I want to say for two decades. I mean, obviously Meta went public in 2012 and Google went public, I think in 2005 and the rest of them had been around for a while. Tesla went public in 2000.

and 10 and I'm hard pressed in the next, let's say bull market. Who knows if we're in, you know, this kind of what, what, what happens here? Maybe it looks like 2022, you know, maybe we have a S and P that's down, you know, 25% or something like that. And NASDAQ that's down 30%. That's what we basically had in 2022, which,

wouldn't be a disaster except for the fact that Tesla, Meta, Netflix, and Nvidia, they all lost 70% of their value, right? Peaked to trough, but obviously they're much bigger market caps. Now, I'm hard-pressed to think that any of those seven stocks will not

be $2 trillion market cap companies. And again, when we come out of this, does that make some sense? Is there something different this time around? Because Apple, even if they were to kind of seed some market share or not have the AI tools that cause, you know what I mean, a

big upgrade cycle or so, they still generate a shit ton of cash and it's still an installed base of one and a half billion devices, iOS devices, Nvidia, they could have competition and they could be closed off from a whole host of different markets.

Still, they have probably the best ecosystem. Microsoft, you've been following this name probably since it went public. It's still here, you know what I mean? It's one of the top three market caps. I don't think 10 years ago or 15 years ago, people would have placed that name in there. Amazon's still chugging along. Google, there's definitely some major headwinds. Meta, it seems like it's everyone's favorite.

And Tesla, it really is about sci-fi stuff, in my opinion. I think their best days in EVs are over. But I'm just curious, when you think about that relative to what you just said about every decade with the top market caps, do you think this rings a little different this time around? I think it may. First of all, the size of these companies, you know, even the IBMs of the world who've had trouble the last 20, 30 years have not gone away.

And the cloud basically reinvented Microsoft and Apple, or excuse me, Microsoft and Oracle. IBM's even had a little bit of a renaissance lately. So I wouldn't imagine even if trends move away from the Mag7 that these companies are going to die off quickly.

But again, given that these companies have seen this play before, they're much more sensitive to disruption and dealing with that, the so-called innovators dilemma that Christensen talked about. Obviously, they're spending tons of money on this. And so it's definitely ask forgiveness, not permission. So everybody's at this point saying, hey, look,

history suggests you've got to invest in the next thing. So if we have to, let's risk over-investing rather than under-investing. So in that sense, I think they're protecting themselves a bit. But I do want to talk about a concept that I think people are aware of, but I'm not sure it's gotten the full credit that it should have in explaining this explosion of market cap in tech, first from 90 to 2000, and particularly from 2010 to today. And that is the idea of platform companies.

Platform. They're different from traditional companies in that most of the value is created outside their corporate walls in an ecosystem. Bill Gates has said, you're not a real platform if there aren't third parties making more off your technology than you are.

And there's two types of platform companies. There's transaction platforms. There's sometimes called multi-sided platforms. Those are companies that sit in between customers and enable a transaction like eBay, Google and advertising, Facebook connecting people. And the key concept here is network effects. The more you get a one side of suppliers or supply side, the more you get on the other side of demand and customers.

And this is a concept that Brian Arthur at the Santa Fe Institute introduced, I believe, in the 1990s. So this network effect idea, of course, people talk a lot about that today. But that to me explains what's different about the explosion in market cap here in tech in the last decade or two relative to history. The other kind of platform is innovation platforms like Apple and Microsoft, where they create the underlying technology that third parties play off of.

A great example of that is cloud infrastructure, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud. The scale of this, both from a revenue and CapEx standpoint, is just unprecedented. So these platforms have some unique characteristics. They grow really fast, but they require less capital than we're used to in tech. They're very high margin.

and they get stronger as they get bigger. That's a big difference. IBM and most large corporations don't get strong as they get bigger. They get slow and lazy and they get disrupted. That hasn't really happened yet to the Googles and Microsofts in the world. Also, these big companies, the Mag7, historically has had their own categories. They haven't overlapped too much. That's beginning to change now, to be sure. But they've each kind of dominated their own categories, so they've been able to grow at a fast rate without getting in each other's way.

So I do think that there are some differences in time. Nevertheless, I think you always want to be out on the lookout for the next big thing. Imagining a better future is the first step. Investing that future with Betterment Advisor Solutions is the next. Whether you're launching your own practice, looking to streamline client onboarding, or

or just searching for efficient ways to scale your firm, Betterment is here to help. They automate to make tax optimization simpler. They provide support to make administrative tasks easier. At Betterment, they're building innovative technology all for anyone who's ever said, I think I can do better. So grow your RIA your way with Betterment Advisor Solutions. Learn more at betterment.com slash advisors. Investing involves risk, performance not guaranteed.

Yeah. So in the meantime, though, the next big thing is likely to be built on like one of these hyperscalers backs. Right. So if you think about Microsoft, Azure, Amazon, AWS, Google Cloud, we know that Oracle is making a push there. Does that change things, Steve, a little bit now? Because these platform companies, they do have what you could say is kind of the backbone of.

of building other platforms that will get the benefit, right. Of the use of, of the spend that these guys have had. And one of the biggest, obviously issues right now, as it relates to these companies and you just mentioned it is like, you know, the way that they were building, they were going to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. Um, and I'm just curious and you'd like to think about things in waves. I know that you, you know, have quoted, um, you know, uh, Carlota Perez and, and you talk about, uh, you know, the waves there and there's two, um,

major ones right and so if you think about it it's the installation phase and the deployment phase and usually as you're kind of getting to the middle of that there can be some massive disruption at least from a market cap value if you're thinking about public markets like help me think about that a little bit because there's very clear that the last two years has been the installation phase of Perez's work the deployment phase I think a lot of folks

We're hoping that we got there quicker, but we're not there just yet because we haven't seen all the use cases. We haven't seen the ROI on a lot of these investments or at least from their customers too.

Yeah, so for context for the listener, Carlota Perez wrote a book, Technological Revolutions in Financial Capital, about 25 years ago. And you see Marc Andreessen and a lot of folks in tech now kind of alluding to this. And the idea was that technology drives global economies in waves of 50 to 60 years. So it's kind of like the Kondratiev wave, but very specific to tech.

And she talked about five ways historically, starting with the Industrial Revolution. She argued currently we're in the age of information, which she says started around 1971 with the microprocessor. You have this, as you said, Dan, the installation period. So the first half is about invention and innovation, capital being attracted to these disruptive innovations. And then you typically get a bubble. And we could certainly argue the Internet bubble in 2000 was an example of that. And then you move into the

deployment period where you get strong growth built on the infrastructure that was created during the installation period. And you even get a period she calls the golden age of increased productivity. So you kind of think of electricity, right? It took years and years for the infrastructure to get put in place. Then once it was, you know, productivity just kind of exploded all over. Now, applying this to the current time is a little bit tough, you know, from just a

from a mathematical standpoint, 1971 was one wave. You'd argue we're probably at the end of this wave, beginning a new wave. In her recent writings, that's not so much the sense I get. She actually argued we needed to, she kind of got into greenness and the climate stuff, and she argued until we find green solutions, we're not going to fully be in the deployment period here. But I think we could kind of argue that we are, in fact, at the end of one wave and beginning another.

And, you know, we were ending the information age, maybe the next one is the intelligence age, right? We're all hyped up on AI. So maybe that's what we should call it. And maybe it is beginning now. And maybe we are in the installation period. And it's kind of typically you've got incredible capital spending, like we had with railroads, like we had initially with the internet. And it looks like it's going too far too fast, which it probably is.

You know, I remember back in 2000, we used to work with George Gilder and George had a technology newsletter he would put out and he was super optimistic. But I remember in one, he said that the entire internet traffic can be put across two fiber strands or something. I'm like, wait a second, that doesn't sound like really great from a supply standpoint. And sure enough, you know, global crossing and all these things collapsed.

So I don't know if we're going to end up seeing a collapse here due to inference costs going down with deep research and all that kind of stuff going on. But I think you've got to expect we're going to have huge capital spending, probably overspending for a while. And it's probably going to take 10 years until we kind of figure out what to do with this, what the models are. Because I don't think we have the network effects we had during the internet wave. I'm a little unsure, it sounds like you are, in terms of what's the profits?

going to be here. It looks like first you build the infrastructure with the semiconductors and NVIDIA is a big winner there. Eventually you want to get the applications and the stuff in the middle ends up being commoditized and today that's probably LLMs.

But eventually you want the agents, the applications on top of this. So that's kind of the way most of us think is software is the place you want to ultimately be. But it feels like we're kind of far away from that. I know we're all talking about agents. And we just did a survey with the executive council, which is an expert network of Microsoft users. And people are using Copilot, but the ROIs are still very mixed.

It's still very early days. Maybe 10% of your employees are using it. So I think we're still probably 10 years away from the big payoff here. So in the meantime, things could get a bit hairy. Yeah. And I guess one of the things that accelerated the downward spiral

in the internet was really a recession. If you think about it, an economic recession. And that's one of the things that I guess I'd be worried about because a lot of these kind of build-outs have not been stress tested against weaker macro situations, right? Which will obviously cause less demand. It will obviously cause a lot of these big platform companies to pull back

um on their spend and if you're telling me right now the use cases have not materialized then i just have a hard time thinking that we are not going to go into a very difficult period you know and dan niles who was on with me a few days ago you know he's been talking about this for a while right this kind of digestion phase and i know you've seen this

over the course of your career. And no one really wants to kind of acknowledge it in the beginning, but then it just becomes, it just hits you right in the face, right? And I'm not a technologist. I'm thinking this through the lens of the stock market. But I think like Meta is a really interesting example to me because here's a company that had a lot of spend. The stock got killed. This was in 2021, right? They renamed the company TechnoSense.

to meta, they build out this infrastructure where they never really get to see it materialize. They kind of move that spend somewhere else. They're an early beneficiary of serving better ads, right? And monetizing that spend. But now here they are, they don't really have a lot of use cases for the technology that they have deployed across these huge different platforms that they have, right? Whether it's WhatsApp, whether it's Instagram, whether it's the blue page, you know, all this sort of stuff. And so it,

It's just interesting to me. I think a lot of investors are going to be left scratching their heads if we do, in fact, have a recession because these businesses are cyclical, whether investors want to acknowledge it or not. And that's something I'm sure you've noticed again and again and again. Well, advertising obviously is cyclical. So that's where Meta and Google could get into trouble if we have a real economic downturn.

It's funny because everybody kind of understands the wave idea at this point. So everybody the last few years has been trying to figure out what is that next wave to ride? Is it crypto? Is it NFGs?

Andresen Horowitz was talking about Web 3.0, which I never really got. And then for a while, people thought it was augmented reality and virtual reality. And Meta changed the name of their company based on that, right? They wanted to get away from the social network to be the metaverse. Well, I mean, maybe that'll come back. I think AI could enable that. But right now, the consensus is that it's much more likely to be artificial intelligence. So perhaps it will be the intelligence age.

I think, you know, you pointed out Dan came into the year kind of expecting we could have a little pullback maybe in some of this cloud spending until the AI ROI was very clear. The venture capital firm Sequoia has talked about this, right? They've estimated that there's a $500 billion revenue gap between AI revenue today and the revenue required to get a decent return on the infrastructure build-out, which I think they put in about 25% ROI.

So, you know, 500 billion of revenue even these days is a chunk change. Yeah. That report by Sequoia came out, I want to say nearly a year ago. We'll put it in the show notes. It was like a fascinating read. And it's one of those ones that you kind of have to bookmark because there's going to come a time in the next call it three to, you know, months to a year or so where they're going to be proven, I think,

very right. But who knows? Let's Steve talk a little bit about investing in individual names. We've talked about these big cycles as a strategist, obviously from the top down, these are things that you were very focused on, but as an analyst, you're also, you know, working from the bottoms up a little bit. So what are some of the frameworks that you think about when investing in individual companies? Sure. Well, you know, for,

For one thing, I was a fundamental analyst, meaning looking at earnings and tech trends and so forth, as opposed to a technician looking at price charts. And of course, anybody who got an MBA was taught that prices don't predict anything. I would argue fundamentals don't predict much either. But-

I always enjoyed looking at charts and I think that right now at least the charts are pretty negative. I mean, everything's broken its 200-day moving average. We've had a bit of a rally here and I was just looking at tech stocks this morning and everything is closing in on its 50-day moving average from below. So there's a lot of overhead supply you would think. It'll be impressive if it can just blow through that.

But I think right now the betting has to be that we may be in a bear market and we haven't seen the lows. And again, I'm a little bit skeptical and older. And, you know, I'm the guy you don't want running your money when things are going great, which they have been the last 10 years. But I would be pretty cautious going forward. In terms of looking at specific companies, I'm always interested in differentiation. One of my favorite marketing strategists wrote a book called Differentiate or Die.

And if I were to kind of look at one place to help investors, there's a book that Hamilton Helmer wrote called The Seven Powers. And he looked at the seven ways he thought companies could differentiate themselves. So I think if you had kind of a list of these seven powers, apply it to a company, I think it helps you quite a bit figure out if they're sufficiently differentiated to succeed and ultimately create return on capital. Return on capital over cost of capital is where value is created. So just to give you a few of these,

Scale economics is one, you know, being bigger means lower cost. Amazon, for example. We talked about network optimization.

a sector network economics, that's a big one. Switching costs was huge for me, right? You get a big installed base at Apple or IBM, it's very expensive to switch vendors. And that's still the case, although open source is trying to attack that. A cornered resource is a proprietary access to a technology or asset, maybe like Corning's Gorilla Glass. Process power would, I think, be in the semi-equipment space, TSMC, ASML with their manufacturing processes.

Brand, which I actually spent a fair amount of time thinking about brand, which most technology analysts don't. It probably matters more in consumer markets where, say, an Apple plays. But the idea is that business is a battle for your customer's mind and that brand really does matter. You don't get fired for buying IBM. So that stuff still does matter. And the final one, which he thought was the most interesting, is counter positioning. When you go opposite the leader.

Examples historically could be Vanguard doing cheap investing versus Fidelity.

Avis versus Hertz. Why go with us? We try harder. They got long lines because they're number one. We don't. In technology, DEC doing mini computers, smaller computers versus mainframes. Or Tesla doing electric versus gas vehicles. So ultimately, I think the holy grail is to find a company that's creating a category, a new category. And it actually, if successful, becomes the name for the category. Xerox and copy. Intel for microprocessors.

you know, arguably Tesla to some degree for electric vehicles, Google in search. So finding new companies, creating new categories with differentiation is what I look for. Wow, that was awesome. We're going to put Hamilton Helmer's work in the show notes too. All right, I got last question and this is off the board and I really hope you're going to come back because I love this. It was just a great refresher, you know, using these sorts of frameworks, top down, bottom up, great stuff, Steve. And I know that this is, you know, you've spent, um,

hundreds and hundreds of hours speaking to investors and doing your research. And so this stuff is battle tested. But my last question for you, Steve Jobs,

Or Elon Musk? Who is the better entrepreneur? And Elon Musk, his story is clearly not over. And I think and without trying to influence your answer, I think Steve Jobs would have hated Elon Musk. That's just a guess of mine. But I'm just curious, how do you think these two guys stack up to each other? It's funny because when I was I did clean tech stocks for a couple of years and.

And it was horrible. They were literally the worst performing part of the market every year. But as part of that, I got to pick up Tesla right around after it IPO'd.

And so I was certainly one of the first technology investors, not auto analysts, but technology analysts covering Tesla. And they loved me for that reason, because I would position it more like a technology company. I was always scared to heck that I don't know anything about the auto business and I'm going to get screwed here. And I remember the CFO back then was saying, we're never going to have to raise money again, as you can imagine that. But I went to the sales force at the time and I said, Elon Musk, I think he's the next Steve Jobs.

And I put them in a similar category, but Elon is more of an engineer. Steve was a little more of a marketer. I think it's really hard for anybody to match what Elon has created in terms of going after space and autos and the three big problems he's addressing. There's really nothing like it in the world, but that's not to take anything away, of course, from Steve Jobs, who probably would have hated him because he hated most people.

And I should say that I do have a very small piece of money in XAI. So I have some interest in Elon being successful. But it killed me because when I changed firms and went back to cover computer stocks, they took Tesla away from me and they gave it to the auto analyst who had a sell on it for the next seven years. And the stock, I picked it up. It was like $25.

And I don't know if that's even a pre-split, but it's really hard to argue that, at least from an entrepreneurial standpoint, anybody matches up to Elon. We'll see about his management style over time and how that plays out as these companies get bigger. But he's one of one. One thing that is interesting to note that if you think of cumulative revenue since Tesla went public, I mean, Apple is like probably 500x or something like that.

I'm just saying over the last 15 years or so, Steve Jobs built a platform of products and infrastructure from a supply chain. Obviously, Tim Cook was very instrumental in that, and he's really executed over the last 13, 14 years. I think the jury is still out on Tesla, and I think that is obviously a little bit of a contrarian thought process. But

Listen, Steve, I really appreciate these insights. I know our listeners will, too. I really hope you'll come back because this was great stuff. And maybe we'll drill down a little bit more on the here and now. But I think the frameworks that you outlined are really important to think about, especially in periods like this where folks have just it's been easy to stay invested, easy to stay long some of these things. And now you really have to stress test them.

Well, my pleasure. And thanks for letting me exercise some of the old muscles. And I'd love to come back. All right. Thanks so much, Steve. I appreciate it.