The CoreWeave IPO with CEO & Co-Founder Mike Intrator 3/28/25
47:31 Share

Under Biden, Americans' cost of living skyrocketed. Food, housing, auto insurance. Lawsuit abuse is a big reason everything's more expensive today. Frivolous lawsuits cost working Americans over $4,000 a year in hidden taxes. President Trump understands the problem. That's why he supports loser pays legislation to stop lawsuit abuse and put thousands back in the pockets of hardworking Americans.

It's time to make America affordable again. It's time to support the President's plan. Hello, I'm Laura Castleton with Janus Henderson Investors. Is a brighter future possible? At Janus Henderson, we think it is. We've worked to help our clients achieve superior financial outcomes and fulfill our purpose of investing in a brighter future together. We never forget that this means our thinking and our investments are helping to shape millions of futures.

At Janice Henderson, we are committed to helping you invest in a brighter future. To learn more, go to JaniceHenderson.com. Bring in show music, please.

Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. The Doge team and special government employee Elon Musk go public. They weren't like big balls and 20 years old. Rooting out inefficiency and stemming a chaotic identity. Senator Chris Coons on the fast-moving, fast-changing first two months of Trump 2.0. I don't think people elected him to put tariffs on, take tariffs off, put tariffs on, take tariffs off and raise our costs.

And the biggest tech IPO we have seen in years, AI infrastructure company CoreWeave goes public and CEO and co-founder Mike and Trader spoke to our team before the first trade. We have a wave of demand that we are unable to build fast enough to see. Plus the rest of today's news that got us squawking. It's Friday, finally, March 28th. SquawkPod begins right now.

stand becky by in three two one cue please good morning everybody welcome to squawk box right here on cnbc we're live from the nasdaq market site in times square i'm becky quick along with joe kernan andrew is off today

Almost. Almost. Almost the same color. Again. I definitely have something much closer than this to that. It's pretty close. Did you watch any of that last night? Any of the sports history? You know, it's a long story. Yes, I watched a little bit. I can't say it that late. Nine. No, there are games being played in

Newark. I know, at the Rock. I saw it. I was watching it. You can't bet on them. Oh. I just, I was thinking it would have been really fun to go watch them. First I went to Fanatics. I'm like, what's the problem? You were going to bet on Alabama or? I was probably going to take, I think. And I was. There were two Rutgers players, former Rutgers players, Cliff Amore and Mag...

malot mag who were opposing each other i had to you know why i watched it you know i figured it out perplexity i at first i tried to it's like i looked fanatics nope not there okay going over to draft kings uh see if the prudential center yeah yeah and you can't in state anything in state uh you're not allowed to bet because you never know i might drive over there really quickly and see some of the players going in and say hey i'll give you ten dollars if that way they do it

I think they're worried that you have undue influence. I don't know. You tell me. But it ruined, you know, and that was a game that came on at seven. So that was when I was...

Tonight, you're gonna watch them tonight. And it's happening again. Not all the games are bettable tonight. Cloud computing provider CoreWeave pricing shares in its IPO at $40 a share each and raising $1.5 billion. The share price was well below the earlier indicated range of 47 to 55. So all the way down at 40.

Also, the company is able to sell 37.5 million shares and wanted to sell 49 million. So the implied valuation for the company now around $19 billion. If you use a fully diluted number, it would be above that. But still, it got ratcheted down. And, you know, we finally get an IPO in tech that everyone was looking forward to. And you can't just say it was unequivocally just great. They're going to raise $1.5 billion versus $3 billion that they had hoped. Right. And I think that the...

valuation would have been much higher. Yeah, and also of that, about a billion dollars is already slated to go to pay down debt, pre-existing debt for some of these issues. It's an AI play, right? They provide access to NVIDIA graphic

processing units for AI training and for workloads. And despite the reduced size of the offering, it's still the biggest IPO, tech IPO since 2021. It should provide investors a barometer of the demand for tech offerings after a couple of quiet years. Shares are expected to begin trading today on the NASDAQ symbol CRWV. And it's the age old question. Do you want to price it low enough to get a nice jump?

when it opens or are you leaving money on the table that you could have raised by doing it that way? Always talk about that. I mean, this is such a fascinating... Do you want to get as much as you want or do you want the people that buy it... Right, to buy it to get a little bit of a pop to ride with this too. It's been such a fascinating thing to watch. They build these data centers. It's really CapEx intensive to do that. So they've got close to $8 billion in debt already on the balance sheet. But they've also been growing incredibly rapidly

700 and plus, 700 and almost 50% growth in revenue over the last year. They started out as building data centers for crypto mining, you know, and things along those lines. They shifted over to AI, hit it right at the sweet spot. So it's been an incredible growth story. But they're coming at a time when there are questions about the continued demand

for these data centers, especially in the wake of what we heard from DeepSeq in China earlier this year. - And don't miss Becky's interview.

where she is going to... I'm actually super excited about this. Any questions you have about the inner workings of this company and the actual technical expertise that they have, she's going to... I'm super excited about this. You actually have studied. I have. Mike and Trader is coming on, and there's some huge questions to ask about this. There's so much excitement around this. All right. You know you're going to... Microsoft is their biggest customer, and so that's raised some questions as well. There are issues about how they...

violated some of the terms of their covenant for this loan that they took out. But, I mean, there's some really interesting things that they've done. And it's amazing. It's also, by the way, NVIDIA owns about 6% of the company. Well, I'm glad we're going to have all the other viewers watching to learn about it and plus one. I had some other things I had to look at. And Chris Coons, who voted against keeping the, you know, voted against the president. And, you know,

I really thought Democrats wanted to keep the government open at all times because they gaslight so hard with the possibility of Republicans closing the government. And then, you know, poor Chuck Schumer is going to get thrown out on his tuchus because he, you know... Because he wanted to keep the government open. We'll talk about it. But we have a lot of really big guests coming up. We do. And this is one of them, the Corweave CEO, and I'm super excited about that. Me too. Now I am. It is. Now I am. It's a fascinating, fascinating story. Thank you.

Elon Musk, in the meantime, explaining his attempts to cut federal spending with the Department of Government Efficiency. In an interview on Fox News with seven other Doge staffers, Musk detailed the team's goal of cutting the deficit in half from $2 trillion to $1 trillion.

We want to reduce the spending by eliminating waste and fraud, reduce the spending by 15 percent, which seems really quite achievable. The government is not efficient and there's a lot of waste and fraud. So we feel confident that a 15 percent reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services.

Some of the fear around what Doge is doing has been focused on changes to the Social Security Administration. Musk tried to reassure viewers on that front. As a result of the work of Doge, legitimate recipients of Social Security will receive more money, not less money. All right. I want to emphasize that point and let the record show that I said this, and it will be proven not to be true.

Also featured in the interview was Tesla board member and Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia. He is said to have joined Doge to help the antiquated paper-based process of retiring from the government.

We really believe that the government can have an Apple store like experience, beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems. And that is one of the things we talked about yesterday with Sandy Weil. If you can actually get in and fix the systems there, these antiquated systems that exist, which is long overdue, something along those lines to do that, that would be incredibly helpful. But

But this has been a big issue. My guess is they're going out publicly and talking about this because there has been some public pushback and real concern about what happens with Social Security. Because of the narrative that has been spread by the people that are organizing the big demonstration for this week at Tesla dealerships. It's a fear factor. Anytime there's change, you're going to have fear. I would strap every person. I'm not going to say just Democrats, but I would strap every person that is...

circulating whatever it is, hysteria or lies or misperceptions. Those guys I watched and one by one, they said why they were there, who they were and why they were there. They were one of the most impressive groups of people

that one guy was running four or five companies. Why'd you leave? Because I think I want to do this. This is my chance to be able to do something. Even Elon, either we're going to be a bankrupt country or we're going to have to take these steps. But they were so thoughtful. They weren't like big balls and 20 years old. And they weren't just at all. Well, and they're smart. They're some of the smartest people I've seen. And, you know, if you were if you got to have Congress to do it,

The Biden administration had four years to start on this. We've had the previous Trump administration could have said we're finally at least looking at ways to do it. And these were some of the most impressive people and patriotic people given their time. And they could be doing a lot of other things. So, you know, when they're firebombing a dealership this weekend or having a big demonstration or keying a Tesla or whatever it is that these people are doing, I would strap them in front.

and make them watch the half hour with Brett Barrow. That's what I would do. What I will say is I wouldn't question the reasons for any of these people getting involved with this. They want to help their country. I think the question becomes if you move too fast, if things... Like the idea of shutting down Social Security call centers and offices makes it hard for seniors who don't know how to get the technology. They addressed all of those concerns and said, yeah, there will be...

where we don't get something right, but we immediately try to... We immediately try and fix it. We try to fix it. I don't know who else I'd rather have trying to do this. Congress is useless. There's... I wouldn't... No, but again, it goes back to the questions of the Constitution, the power of the purse strings going to the Congress. Look, I...

I think we need somebody. These guys would be great to come up with all the solutions. Okay, how are you going to do it with Congress? It's part of the problem. You can't get a Democratic vote on a single Republican proposal. You don't need it. You need 60 a lot of times. You don't need it right now in order to get majority issues through. They have both houses. Well, you know, it...

I'm not going to point fingers, Democrats or Republicans, on who can't do it, but we've seen what they're capable of. Nobody can do it. We've seen what they're capable of. They don't do it. Maybe you can vote on some of the stuff these guys find. I mean, here's the latest thing on, you know, oh, there's no fraud in Medicaid right now. Medicaid, billions of dollars, because if you get...

You've got an insurance company that gets paid in one state. If you move, the insurance company can still get paid in the state you move from and the new state because they don't know. Right, and this is part of it because the systems don't talk. And this is a huge part for upgrading those systems and getting some real technology. I mean, we've seen the problems with government technology on the whole thing. I think one of the things Elon was saying last night was he looked at a survey that cost $1.

What was it? A billion dollars that he said could have been done on SurveyMonkey for ten thousand dollars. Ten questions. Very simple thing. It's been a huge problem that you don't have the most up to date technology in government. And that's because you can't get the most up to date people who will agree to work for the government wages on some of these things. So we are getting a good service by having these experts coming in and offering what is top quality technology.

And people, this is why they voted for Trump. And actually his approval ratings right now are at a higher level than they ever were in November when they voted for him and through the entire stint of the first administration. So people see what's happening. My guess is the reason they're getting out there and doing this is because there are so many questions and so many people who are nervous about changes. Well, the mainstream media would never take one side in this. Thank you.

The European Union is likely to hit Apple and Meta with relatively light fines under the bloc's digital competition law. That's according to the Financial Times, which says that Apple is expected to be ordered to revise its App Store rules. It said a separate investigation into the design of Apple's web browser choice screen will also be closed. That report says that the lighter regulatory touch from Europe is meant to avoid upsetting President Trump.

It says Meta is likely to face a fine and an order to change its practice of forcing users to consent to data tracking or pay a subscription fee to go ad free. That's really interesting. An example of where this president's unpredictability is definitely going to help American countries because this law was seen as an absolute way of just taking revenue and huge fines from our biggest companies.

I'm ready to tell the EU to just butt out. When you succeed at something in terms of technology or to the extent that all our companies do, then maybe you can... It seemed incredibly unfair the way they were going about this. And so this is probably some...

much needed and kind of necessary news to hear back here on that front. You know, there are a lot of... There have been a series of things that have happened that would not have happened if he wasn't as mercurial and... Right. And sometimes I worry about the unintended consequences. Well, yeah. This is a case where it definitely pays off. When two countries both have like a thousand nuclear warheads, there's times when you're thinking, let's tread lightly. Yeah, this is...

Thousands, I think thousands. This is something I know how irritated so many of us were when the EU first came up with this ridiculous plan, because they can tax your entire global revenue and take a huge hit from the entire situation with it. It seemed patently unfair. So here's where that pays off. Definitely a positive. All right. Thank you.

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking yesterday in Murmansk. That's the world's largest city north of the Arctic Circle. He warned it would be foolish to dismiss U.S. President Trump's, in case if I said President Trump, you wouldn't know who I was talking about, but President Trump's push for control of Greenland.

saying the move is unsurprising, given America's longtime interest in the mineral-rich territory. He noted that the U.S. had such plans as far back...

He says it's the 1860s and offered to buy Greenland from Denmark again after World War II. He described it as, in his words, an issue that concerns two specific nations and has nothing to do with us. I don't believe that. Putin's comments came ahead of today's visit to Greenland by Vice President J.D. Vance.

His focus is on the minerals, not on the idea that this would also be a security issue to prevent the world from Russia making some moves we weren't able to counter.

Teas will be next. Coming up next on Squawk Pod, the political division around the doging of American government. Democratic Senator Chris Coons joins Joe and Becky on the Squawk set. Lots of Delawareans have called to express concern about their personal financial information being accessed by this unelected team from Doge. And I'm getting calls with complaints about wait times on phone calls for either Social Security or veteran services. Stay tuned. We'll be right back.

Under Biden, Americans' cost of living skyrocketed. Food, housing, auto insurance. Lawsuit abuse is a big reason everything's more expensive today. Frivolous lawsuits cost working Americans over $4,000 a year in hidden taxes. President Trump understands the problem. That's why he supports loser pays legislation to stop lawsuit abuse and put thousands back in the pockets of hardworking Americans.

It's time to make America affordable again. It's time to support the President's plan. I'm Cindy Lauper. My psoriasis was all over, even on my scalp, which may mean four times the risk for psoriatic arthritis. But Cosentix works on both.

Some are fatal.

Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms like fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches, or cough. Add a vaccine or plan to. Or if inflammatory bowel disease symptoms develop or worsen. Serious allergic reactions and severe eczema-like skin reactions may occur. Learn more at Cosentix.com or 1-844-COSENTIX. Ask your doctor about Cosentix. You may get a little excited when you shop at Burlington. They have my favorite bread!

Welcome back to Squawk Pod. Standby, Joe. Here's Mike. Cue.

You're watching Squawk Box on CNBC. I'm Joe Kerner, along with Becky Quick. Elon Musk, we're going to just take a quick look at a soundbite in a second, explaining his attempts to cut federal spending with Doge in an interview on Fox News with Brett Baier. With seven other Doge staffers, Musk detailed the team's goal of cutting the deficit in half from $2 trillion to $1 trillion.

You technically are a special government employee and you're supposed to be 130 days. Are you going to continue past that or do you think that's what you're going to do? Well, I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that timeframe. So in that timeframe, 130 days.

And the process is a report at some point, 100 days? Not really a report. We are cutting the waste and fraud in real time. So every day that passes, our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week. And so far, we are succeeding.

Some of the fear around DOGE and what it's doing has been focused on changes to Social Security and to the Social Security Administration. Mr. Musk tried to reassure viewers on that front as well.

It's going to affect people very positively. So the changes that we're doing here will ensure the solvency of the American government, of the United States of America. This is what we're trying to do, is ensure that people do receive their benefits in the future. And you can only receive your benefits if the country is operating in a healthy and competent way.

And joining us now, Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Appropriations Committee, in studio with us. It's good to have you on. Great to be on, Joe. Good to see you.

Senator, did you get to watch any of it or are you just hearing about it? I didn't. I'm just hearing about it now. But I'm well aware of the widespread concern among constituents that Doge broke into and got access to everyone's information out of the Treasury master file, lots of Delawareans' information.

have called to express concern about their personal financial information being accessed by this unelected team from Doge. And I'm getting calls with complaints about wait times on phone calls for either Social Security or veteran services. I think the overriding thrust of what Mr. Musk and the other members were saying last night was

that we are on a course in this country of insolvency in a lot of different areas, including entitlements, if we don't do something, and including just overall government spending, the total debt at $36, $37 trillion. And as a percentage of GDP by 2050, the numbers are staggering. So that was the point, was we are trying to address where we can and in the most

prudent way possible, we're trying to address it now before it's no longer addressable. Is there any empathy or any understanding that that's something we might want to do in the Democratic Party right now? - You started to say, is there any empathy and then you changed it to, is there any understanding? And let me get to that point. The core challenge for Democrats is how Republicans are going about with what's called a reconciliation bill that's moving through the House

and headed to the Senate that will slash $800 billion, mostly from Medicaid. I did an event last week with patients who rely on Medicaid for their health care. They're caregivers, they're families. These are disabled children. These are folks with medically complex conditions. These are seniors in nursing homes.

There's broad agreement that we have a deficit that is out of control. There's deep disagreement about how to go about dealing with it. And the bill that we are seeing come through will explode. The deficit will dramatically increase how much America is spending by giving, again, one of the biggest tax cuts in American history. And so you're slashing. You're calling spending not money.

collecting enough taxes. It's not actually spending it. You're saying that... As you know, the two are... I mean, a balance sheet is how much comes in, how much goes out. I understand. So, for example, laying off thousands of people from the IRS, one of the things Doge is doing, is projected to reduce Treasury receipts by 10%. Senator, Medicaid... I mean, this is just one story here. I mean, there's plenty of things to look at with Medicaid. Every one of the... Most of the $10 million...

The illegal immigrants that enter during the Biden administration, if they need health care, it's Medicaid. Not that you don't want to give people

But it also it's also been expanded. It's also been expanded for constituents in Delaware. Two hundred and fifty thousand of my one million. It's been expanded far beyond disabled and poor people. It's been expanded far beyond that. It's providing substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment, chest hair with lessons after school. It's it's and the eight hundred billion that you're talking about is it's you're not cutting.

Medicaid itself, you're cutting the increases that are built in over the next 10 years into Medicaid. That's all that's good. It's still growing every year, right? Look, the priorities of our parties are fundamentally different in terms of where we'd like to reduce spending and where we'd like to invest. One of the things that got broad bipartisan support in the last Congress was investing in chips manufacturing here in the United States. The Chips and Science Act passed with bipartisan margins

in both the House and Senate. Trump is determined to cut this program, to claw back investments in chip manufacturing. That both hurts manufacturing and hurts our competition with China. - Do you think it was a good idea that you voted, you didn't go with the majority leader on keeping the government open? Democrats have gaslit Republicans so many times about keeping the government open. And yet with this most recent time,

You know, the majority. I'm sorry. He was a majority. He was. Now he's minority. I know what you mean. Minority leader was left out hanging out to dry. He had to get, you know, a couple of, I guess, a coalition of the willing that went along with him on this. But you decided not not to. And that would have shut the government down.

Well, I'm an appropriator and I thought we should have voted for a 30-day continuing resolution that kept the government open but continued our negotiations to actually do our job and do a full year appropriation. I'm the senior Democrat on appropriations for the Department of Defense.

We have never had a full year CR for the Department of Defense. It is harmful to our national defense. That was the position every previous time we debated a CR. We should not have a full year CR for DOD. Would you have closed the government down? Would that have been the center? That isn't what was really in front of us.

But the debate inside the Democratic Party over exactly whether we should have voted for or against that CR is dwarfed by the unanimity in the Democratic Party that we shouldn't be cutting Medicaid to pay for more taxes. Do you think that Chuck Schumer did the right thing?

Look, he had a credible argument, a strong argument, that to shut the government down right now, given the widespread cuts to different federal programs that are in violation of law and, according to several court decisions, unconstitutional, I understand why he made that decision. I do. Who's the...

Figurehead now, do you think? Is it... Figurehead. Who's the leader of the Democratic Party right now? We don't have a president that's a Democrat right now. So you've got a leader in the House, a leader in the Senate, a new DNC leader. Is he damaged at Senator Schumer at this point? You think he will... Will he be minority leader in a couple of years?

That depends on whether he chooses to run again, if you mean, you know, four years from now. Look, I think he will likely be our leader again in the next Congress. This is something we choose at the beginning of every Congress. He's tough. He's a New Yorker. He's aggressive.

And that's what I think Democrats are looking for in this moment. There was a striking outcome in a state Senate race in Lancaster, where my wife is from, where a district that was plus 15 for Trump just elected a Democrat for state Senate. As you saw in your previous segment here, all the indicators, consumer confidence,

projections for inflation are going in the wrong direction. And there is widespread anger among those who said, I voted for President Trump 'cause he was gonna bring my costs down. Costs aren't going down, they're going up. - Well, he's got the highest approval rating

He didn't have it ever this high in his first term. We've got the highest right track. - A majority of Americans disapprove of what he's doing on the economy. - Okay, now you're parsing. - And business leaders who come in to meet with me. - But it's still the highest they have. And right track, wrong track, highest level at 45% since 2004. People elected him to do these things and they're still on board with him for the most part. - I don't think people elected him to put tariffs on, take tariffs off, put tariffs on, take tariffs off and raise our costs. I think people were concerned.

for example, about the cost of groceries. We heard that was eating your vegetables. You got to eat your vegetables before you eat your dessert. And the vegetables that we eat come from Mexico, about half of them. And the housing we want our kids to be able to afford relies on plywood from Canada and drywall from Mexico. If you look at the two biggest accomplishments of the first Trump administration, two real accomplishments, USMCA and the Abraham Accords.

He's undoing both of them. This crazy suggestion that he would bulldoze Gaza and build some Riviera casino has really... But he closed the border immediately, which you said you couldn't do, for four years, and you let in 10 million illegal... A lot of our problems right now stem from...

a totally open southern border. The problem we have, and he has not deported as many as President Obama. No, but they're not coming in. But what is right in front of us... You know that it's not happening anymore. What is right in front of us is his so-called Liberation Day next week. Can you tell me what he's going to slap tariffs on? Can any business tell us how...

they're going to plan for manufacturing and for production? You're going to know by then. I will know by then. And then the next day you'll know what changes. Business leaders, I think, had very high expectations coming in to this administration. They may have been put off by what they are seeing with these flip-flops on things. But if you ask a lot of them, they will say, we

we didn't think we were going to get a fair shake at all under a Harris, Kamala Harris presidency. So is there a move within the Democratic Party to try and woo any of those business leaders and try and say, OK, we would be a party that you would want to support? The sentence I just said, business leaders I'm meeting with. Yes, part of the point of my engagement is to talk to folks who are leaders in businesses that I want to attract to Delaware, that I want to help grow, that I want to make sure are employing Delawareans. And that's how I approach this.

Frankly, I think they're surprised somewhat about the tariffs and economic policy. They're also concerned about this signal issue where the very top national security leaders were violating sort of the basics about classified information and the lack of truthfulness in dealing with it. Executives know when someone makes a mistake,

You own it. You deal with it. There's accountability. You move on. And for Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, they have concerns about how Hegseth and Waltz have dealt with this. It did not have an impact on the mission carried out against the Houthis, but it could have. Sharing exactly when and how and where pilots were taking off and munitions were being dropped puts our service members at risk, and there should be accountability. You know, it did have an adverse effect.

consequence was, and you know where I'm going, was Afghanistan. Did you call for Lloyd Austin's resignation? Not only did we lose 13 service members, we left $70 billion worth of equipment that fell into the hands of the Taliban. A couple of years later, he was out of pocket for two weeks and didn't tell the White House. Did you ask for him to resign at this point? Are you actually asking for Hegseth and Waltz to resign when you didn't ask for Lloyd Austin's resignation? There is nothing that Lloyd Austin did by...

getting health care treatment. Okay, what about Afghanistan? What about Afghanistan? Did you guys forget that? The statute of limitations is over for four years? The fact that the Secretary of Defense was getting health care is fundamentally different from the Secretary of Defense sharing on an unsecure platform attack plans. You just said it was a success with

Afghanistan was not a success. I am not saying that the attack on the Houthis was not a success. I am saying that he demonstrably violated a directive that was just shared in the Pentagon about don't use Signal for classified information. It is not reliably secure. And one of the folks on that group chat was in Russia at the time that that information was being shared. On a secure line. Look, all of us use apps like WhatsApp and Signal. You're running out the clock on Afghanistan. But not for classified information. You're running out the clock on Afghanistan.

It was a mistake for Donald Trump to negotiate with the Taliban an agreement for winding down the Afghanistan war. Afghanistan was Donald Trump's fault? If you'd let me finish my sentence, I will actually come in your direction. You did say that. It was a mistake to negotiate an end to that war that put Biden in a box. The execution of the withdrawal from Afghanistan was badly handled. And the loss of those 13 Marines was a tragedy.

Should you have asked for Lloyd Austin's resignation from that? I don't know whether Lloyd Austin's the person who should have been held accountable for it, but there should have been accountability for that. When General Miley said he would tell China if we were ever going to launch an attack on China. Because he was so concerned about signals that the Chinese believed we were about to. So, again.

You don't have a problem with him giving them a heads up and telling the Chinese leaders, you'll hear from me if anything's planned? I think you're mischaracterizing that exchange. That's pretty close. I think it's a whataboutism. I mean, I think we can all look at the signal. The point is that you're going to complain about a splinter in one eye and ignore a two by four in the other eye. I don't think that is. I don't think, Joe, the career of anyone.

any military officer would not survive what just happened. - How about this? What about it? - And it shows a blindness to concerns about informational and operational. - How about Mayorkas? You let him stay for four years as 10 million people came across the border. Should you have asked for his resignation?

Look, what you're trying to change the subject from is what just happened in the Trump administration. It is a willful and demonstrable lack of accountability for violating basic requirements for confidentiality. Are you calling for either Waltz or Hegseth to resign? Yes. You're calling for both of them to resign? I have. But not Lloyd Austin? Lloyd Austin is not the Secretary of Defense. You didn't back down. Okay. I just, I think that's the splinter two by four. I appreciate the scriptural reference.

Most Democrats wouldn't. That's what I said yesterday on Twitter. None of them have heard about the Bible. All right. Thank you, Senator. Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Becky. You knew it was going to be fun, right? You always get my blood pressure up. That's good. I do. I don't want mine to go up. That's the last thing I need.

Next on SquawkPod, today is set for the largest technology IPO in years with the NASDAQ debut of CoreWeave. This is a software company that provides access to heavyweights like NVIDIA and AI for graphics processing and other artificial intelligence infrastructure needs.

That's a mouthful. The company's CEO, Mike Entrader, joins us before CoreWeave's opening trade on Wall Street. There's a lot of headwinds in the macro. There are headwinds in the AI trade. And we definitely had to scale or right-size the transaction for where the buy interest was.

Under Biden, Americans' cost of living skyrocketed. Food, housing, auto insurance. Lawsuit abuse is a big reason everything's more expensive today. Frivolous lawsuits cost working Americans over $4,000 a year in hidden taxes. President Trump understands the problem. That's why he supports loser pays legislation to stop lawsuit abuse and put thousands back in the pockets of hardworking Americans.

It's time to make America affordable again. It's time to support the President's plan. Tax Act knows you probably don't need help filing taxes. But if you get stuck, we have live experts you can talk to. And who knows, you could hit it off and become long-term tax friends. Staying up late at night, talking about deductions, refunds, personal exemptions. Heck, you could even fall in love and create a little dependent of your own one day.

Or they could just answer your filing questions. Tax Act. Let's get them over with. This is Squawk Pod from CNBC. I'm producer Katie Kramer. And this next interview is a conversation with the CEO of CoreWeave, the morning the tech company listed on the Nasdaq market site. This is exciting for a couple of reasons. First, it's an IPO, a technology IPO. They have been few and far between since 2022.

And nothing's been this big of a listing in years. Now, CoreWeave was originally hoping to sell shares at a valuation over $26 billion. But the night before the listing, it priced at the bottom of its expected trading range. So that landed at around $19 billion in valuation before it opens. It's a big write-down.

But this size, this $19 billion, makes it much bigger than any venture-backed tech IPO we've seen since Lyft's debut in 2019. It's largely serving as a test for the IPO window and investor appetite for new listings. Now, another reason it's exciting is what CoreWeave does. It's an AI infrastructure company, and its customers include Microsoft Meta, IBM, and most recently, OpenAI.

kind of the culmination of AI hype. But given the write-down, there are some headwinds to think about. CoreWeave co-founder and CEO Mike Entrader spoke to our team on the SquawkBox set before the company's very first trade. Here's Becky.

CoreWeave going public today on the Nasdaq. It is the biggest U.S. tech offering since 2021. The company priced the IPO at $40 a share. That was below its expected range. It's going to be trading later today under the ticker symbol CRWV.

And joining us right now, first on CNBC, right here on set, is CoreWeave's co-founder and CEO, Mike Entrader. And Mike, thank you for being with us today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited for the day. I'm really excited for CoreWeave and looking forward to speaking to your audience. I know this is a really big deal for you all.

Based in Livingston, New Jersey, you all have come a long way from what you started out. You are building out databases and you started doing that for Bitcoin mining and other operations. You jumped on the AI trend and you were there early and you got to these data centers and are building them out at an incredible pace.

building up revenue at amazing, phenomenal speeds. I think revenue growth of more than 725 percent for the last year. But you're also taking on a lot of debt to do it. And the IPO that came out is the biggest tech IPO since 2021. But it was below expectations. What happened when you were out there on the roadshow selling this? Yeah. So so look, it's

It's clearly a tough tape, right? Like, you know, there's a lot of headwinds in the macro. There are headwinds in the AI trade. And, you know...

We definitely had to scale or right size the transaction for where the buy interest was. This is gonna be a very, very exciting transaction for us. It does an enormous amount to move the company forward. It positions us for the next stage of growth for Corweave. And this is just an incredibly fantastic time to begin that journey.

Going public is just a day in the life of an incredibly long-term transaction and business that we're building. You're raising about $1.5 billion. I think expectations at the high end would be that it could be as much as $3 billion. Still, $1.5 billion is a big chunk of change. I think about $1 billion of that is slated to pay down debt. Is that the case? Yeah, so we're going to...

Pulling the billion and a half dollars later today is very exciting. And then we're going to use that to pay down some debt. We're going to use that to continue to expand our footprint, to invest in the human resources, to build the business and continue to scale it at what has been an absolutely unbelievable pace over the past several years. It's really exciting. The pace has been breakneck.

It has been phenomenal to watch, but there have been questions that have been raised this year by what we heard from DeepSeek earlier this year about whether all of these companies will continue to spend at the same pace, whether they're still going to need the same computing power. What do you say to investors who are looking at this and have some of those questions? So so, yeah.

Deep Seek was one of the most amazing dislocations that I've ever seen right like from the perspective of folks who watch your show Deep Seek triggered a bedlam, right? But on our side of the table on the compute side of the table where the rubber hits the road There were only two things that actually happened there was a massive spike for spot computing costs and then there was

My phone just blew up and it was all of my clients trying to figure out how to build bigger, how to build faster, how to bring on more infrastructure as they continue to move forward. - Why did DeepSeek spark them wanting to bring on more computing power? - Because they looked at it as this is a normal kind of progression of how compute is going to be used. And as the space continues to move forward,

as the compute becomes cheaper, they're going to have an opportunity to integrate their solutions into a broader part of the economy, which will lead to more demand. - So Jensen Wang of Nvidia has said the same thing because Nvidia shares took a big hit when this news came out. He has said that it means that it's gonna move beyond just the biggest companies, the Microsofts, the Amazons and others who are investing on this.

Have you seen that yet? Have you actually seen smaller customers who have come in and said, we want to get on board with this? Yeah, so we've seen all kinds of customers. I mean, it's been everything from the AI labs like OpenAI that just did an amazing contract with us a couple of weeks ago to JP Morgan, to IBM, to Jane Street, right? Like it's just an incredible breadth of companies and enterprises that are really moving forward to begin to integrate this infrastructure into-

into their business models, into how they drive their business forward.

Let me bring up a couple of things from just the last week or so. On Tuesday, Joe Tsai, the Alibaba CEO, got up and said in front of a conference that he thinks that there is a bubble forming in the data center business at this point. The second is Microsoft passed on an option to, I think, spend another $12 billion with you. I know you placed that with someone else immediately, but what do those two things kind of add up to? What would you tell investors? Because that is something that made some investors nervous.

So look, one of the things that's made us incredibly effective. I'll have a chairman. Yeah. So one of the things that's made us incredibly effective as a business is that we kind of take a really long term view of where this space is going. And you're you're sitting at the at the first inning of a super cycle as artificial intelligence begins to integrate itself into space.

the economy into society. And our position on this is that our clients are telling us universally to continue to build.

We cannot keep up with the scale. And so, you know, are there going to be places where there's too much infrastructure built? Sure. But that's not the day to day impact that we have. We have a roadmap of infrastructure. We have a wave of demand that we are unable to build fast enough to see.

How long is your average contract? - Yeah, so we enter into a very specific part of the compute market. We really focus on four to five year deals and we have deals that are anywhere between three and five. They have extensions and options that go into the sixth and seventh year. It's pretty exciting.

And so, you know, in those contracts, our clients come to us. They buy a specific piece of infrastructure at a specific price for a long term. That allows us to go ahead into the debt markets and underwrite that with some of the most sophisticated lenders in the world. And we marry the debt up to a commercial contract.

That is incredibly accretive for our company. Right. One of those is with Blackstone. I think they loaned you close to $8 billion. Yeah. With them and a group of others. Yeah. It's a whole syndicate. It's Blackstone and BlackRock and PIMCO and Magnitar and Carlisle. I mean, it's really a who's who within the private lending space that came in and understood our contracts and understood the technology and understood...

the offtake and we're able to underwrite that transaction at enormous scale because of the quality of the entire package that we delivered to the market. - One of the knocks though has been that your account, your oversight on some of these issues was not what it should have been. You violated some of the terms of the agreements by using that money to grow in Europe

and you didn't tell the lenders within three days. Now, they came back and they didn't charge you to change any of the agreements on this, which is good news, but some people have pointed to that and said, what happened with the oversight here? Yeah, so look, we take any kind of technical...

issues around a contract very, very seriously. And we have been working furiously to scale our business, but in particular to scale the part of their business that addresses the controls within an organization. But you're exactly right. Look, private lending businesses are not in the business of not charging for technical defaults. They're not in the business. So if they're looking at it and they're not charging us, they're sending a very clear message

that these were truly technical defaults that didn't require any type of action. Those lenders proceeded to go ahead and continue to lend us hundreds of millions of dollars after all of these issues. And I do want to kind of highlight that all of those issues that were in the S-1 were self-reported. We went to them and said, hey, this looks like a little bit of a misstep here. Let's clean this up. And they were like, absolutely no big deal. Let's keep going.

Okay. Your partnership with NVIDIA is key. NVIDIA owns about 6% of the company, and they ended up picking up, we've heard, $250 million of the $1.5 billion of this offering. How key is that partnership, and are we right in our understanding of that? Yeah, so NVIDIA is an extraordinary partner force. They are an extraordinary company. They're building...

technology that is moving the world forward. We really, really appreciate their support. We are really excited to be part of the solution that drives technology to help bring the most performant configuration of that technology to the clients that consume their hardware, that consume our product. They've been great for us. If you are looking at where you expect to be, let's say

two years from now, five years from now? What's your outlook? - Yeah, look, we've got a business model. We've got a client set. We've got the most sophisticated demanding consumers of this infrastructure in the world. These are the companies that will change the way that we

function, right? And the way businesses function. And, you know, our job as a company is to really remain on the bleeding edge of this technology to continue to scale, to build a global business that's able to fulfill the needs of this seismic change that's occurring around the world. What would be a great first trade for you? What do you want? What are you looking for?

- So in spite of my background, I try really hard not to think of my business in terms of trades. I think of it as what is the best strategy that I-- - Wait a minute, it's IPO day. - So I'm a big believer in the stock and we have-- - You're not even gonna look. I'll bet you you're not even gonna know where it opens today. It's like, hey, I'm long-term. - I spent a weekend with-- - Would you take 48?

I don't think I'm allowed to do this from the SEC rules. Let me address it this way. We're bringing a different type of business model around how you build and deliver this technology to market. We believe that it's incredibly effective

Our partners in the private market have believed it's incredibly effective. They're so supportive of what we've done. They've been investing with us round after round as the company continues to grow and expand. And we believe that as the public markets get to know us, get to know how we execute, get to know how we build our infrastructure, get to know how we build our client relationships and the incredible capacity of our software solutions,

the company is going to be very successful. - Well, let me ask you this. With the size and the price, would it indicate something even bigger than what you're considering is maybe there's some fly in the ointment if even at 40 with a lower offering size, if it still wasn't, if it opens below 40, that would indicate something is amiss.

Look, I'm very hopeful for the stock in the short term, and I'm very hopeful for the stock in the long term. I'm way more comfortable with my belief in where the long-term stock value is going to be. In the long term, we're all going to die.

Well, hopefully it'll get to where I'd like it before that happens. Or it may cause me to die. That's just the expression I always hear about the long term. It's got to go in the afterlife. It is. Mike, it's been an incredible journey since you guys were founded in 2017. Good luck today. We appreciate you coming in here. Based in Livingston, New Jersey. So this is not a Silicon Valley company. It's right here. Won't tell me where. I think, you know, near the Bottle King? Yes. I know where that is. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you for coming in today. And we hope you'll come back and talk to us again soon. I sure would like to. And I want to thank the entire CoreWoof team. This has been an unbelievable journey. And it's just so exciting to have an opportunity to do this. Thank you.

And that is Squawk Pod for today and for the week. Thanks for listening. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross-Sorgan. Andrew will be back on Monday. The gang is getting back together. You can tune in weekday mornings on CNBC at 6 Eastern or listen anytime you want to this podcast. When you follow Squawk Pod wherever you get your podcasts, you won't miss a thing. We'll meet you right back here on Monday. Have a great weekend. We are clear. Thanks, guys.

Under Biden, Americans' cost of living skyrocketed. Food, housing, auto insurance. Lawsuit abuse is a big reason everything's more expensive today. Frivolous lawsuits cost working Americans over $4,000 a year in hidden taxes. President Trump understands the problem. That's why he supports loser pays legislation to stop lawsuit abuse and put thousands back in the pockets of hardworking Americans.

It's time to make America affordable again. It's time to support the President's plan.