Michael Dell – Invest America Act Becomes Law, AI Talent Wars, Compute Demand, Market Update | BG2

And it's a powerful way to convey thoughts and emotions at the same time. And I love audiobooks. I love going outside and walking, hiking, and turning on a good audiobook is a great way to do it. Totally. Well, in the spirit of storytelling, Michael, do you remember when you first met Gurley? Yeah, I do remember when I first met Gurley. This was in the 90s, and Bill had written this research report that was super thick. And I'm reading this report, and I'm like, how the bleep, bleep, bleep does this guy know more about our business than we do? It's like, what? We must be totally screwing up here. And he had uncovered a whole bunch of analysis and thoughts about our business. And we were so busy, kind of distracted by growth that we had missed a few things. And Bill shined a massive light on that. And it was super helpful. So I became a fan instantly of his work and have been a fan ever since.

Brad, that was 32 years ago. Even though when I read the report, I was like, damn, we should have figured this out. This is 32 years ago. I was 28. Michael was 29 and running. public companies. And I've always cherished the fact that Michael's a year older than me, so I always have time to catch up. It's great to be here with the kids.

Well, let's transition from 32 years ago to the present. Cash is king. Everything else is an opinion. No doubt. No doubt. So you two just had a big win with this Invest America program that was just announced as part of the big bill. And I know that, Brad, this was your baby and you spent a ton of time on it.

But Michael came on board and helped out as well. So why don't you tell everyone the details? We've talked about it before, but tell them the details of what landed. Yeah, thanks. And, you know, I remember last 4th of July, we were talking about this bill, and I was sitting right here. And honestly, I thought the chance of getting this passed into legislation was, you know, maybe 10% at best. And we had some good fortune. As you know, the legislation was called the Invest America Act. It was a bipartisan standalone bill. And it ended up, like a lot of other pieces of legislation, getting assumed by the reconciliation bill. Right.

So a lot of these things got packaged together in this one bill. And of course, it was signed into law on July 4th down at the White House. You know, I've been at this for years. You know, I tried to get it done under Biden, but the stars just aligned in this moment. And Michael was pretty early to get on board and support this, joined the CEO Council for Invest America, but played a critical role with the president to help get it into the reconciliation bill over the course of the last 60 days. But let's just talk about exactly what it means now that it's become law. So I think of this as a pretty significant evolution in the social contract.

Act. It creates private investment savings accounts, privately owned for every child at birth, seated with a thousand bucks in the S&P 500. So parents, companies, philanthropists can add money. Anybody can add money to these accounts. You can't take the money out of the accounts, right? It just compounds in the S&P 500 until you're 18 years old. So we will spend the next year putting the program in place. It has to be launched under the terms of the legislation by July 4th, 2026, the 250th birthday of America. And basically we got it expanded. So all kids under the age of 18, that's 65 million kids are eligible. And I give a lot of credit to Senator Cruz who fought to expand the pool of eligibility here. So what that means is that they can open up an account, but only children born after January 1, 2025, get the $1,000 from Treasury, right?

The others will have an account that someone else could put money in on their behalf. And they can add money to it. There are a lot of advantages for their parents adding money, for companies adding money to it. So it makes a lot of sense. And for Michael and I, I think the key performance indicator here is if we're having this conversation a year from now, we want to have 50 or 60 million kids signed up. Now, of course, if your child is born after July 4th of 2026, then they're going to automatically get an account set up when they get their social security number and they will automatically get the thousand dollars. But we have this one-time group, all kids under the age of 18, we're going to have a big campaign to get all those folks signed up over the course of the next year. And I guess for me, I was reflecting on this over the course of the last few days. And, you know, at a time when you have an avowed socialist like Mamdani, you know, winning the primary in New York, it seems like, you know, the Invest America Act is really just the exact opposite, right? You're both trying to attack the problem of the wealth gap. But this is by getting everybody into the game of capitalism, making

everybody actual owners in the upside of America's success, rather than resorting to price controls, attacking businesses and success and creating really more dependency on government. So I think we're at this critical crossroads in America. And I think the Invest America Act comes at an important point in time. I think a lot of people think of it like a 529 account bill. But I think that dramatically underestimates what this is. This is a lifetime investment account. So they can compound over the course of your life. If you start with $1,000 and you add $750 per year, at 18, that's worth $50,000. At 30, that's worth $170,000. And at 50, it's worth a million dollars, right? So it really is a platform for unlocking dramatic compounding and savings and the upside of capitalism from birth. And it wouldn't have happened without Michael.

Well, and Brad, look, you deserve 99.9% of the credit. So I'm going to give it to you. You really drove this thing passionately for several years. And it's amazing that it got done. I do think you'll see many companies provide matching contributions. And a number of companies have already said they're going to do that. And it'll be like a benefit, you know, come work at our company and have a kid and your child will get this. And it's just going to be super easy for anyone to add to those accounts. I think it's also a chance to teach every child about financial literacy and about capitalism and free markets And, you know, look up in 15 or 18 years and you've got 70 million kids with these accounts.

I also think you're going to have philanthropists. Susan and I will definitely be a part of that, that will say, hey, you know, this is a really good way to get money directly to the next generation in a way that it's going to compound. and have a difference in their life. Our foundation has studied this very carefully, and we believe it's worthy of a significant contribution. And Brad's been working with the Treasury Department and others to set this up so that any philanthropist would be able to say, hey, here's a zip code, here's a county, here's a state, here's a group of kids that I'd like to help.

I don't know who they are exactly, but I want to help them, and I want to help their future. I think you'll see a lot of philanthropists get very excited about this. I've had a discussion with a number of them, and this could be a major platform for philanthropy in our country. And just to put a sharper lens on that, Michael, they might back every kid in a state. or everyone in the nation on a year. Yeah, adopt a state, adopt a series of zip codes. I think, again, it'll be a platform for philanthropy. Yeah, I think of it, Bill, in some ways like the Giving Pledge 2.0. I mean, we've had massive wealth creation in this country, like unprecedented.

Incident wealth creation in this country, right? But one unique feature of America that I don't think there's any other civilization in history that you can point to, okay, that has this character, which is the super wealthy in America by and large want to give away the vast majority of their wealth during their lifetime or shortly after they die. I certainly know that Michael's in that group. Okay, think about this. In Europe, they invented generation skipping trusts. It was about coming up with legal mechanisms for creating dynastic wealth so as to not give any of your money away. And we have a culture in this country where people want to give away large sums of money. The challenge is the charitable infrastructure has not necessarily scaled to meet the needs of people who want to give away billions of dollars at a time. And I asked Michael and Susan the question over a year ago, I said, if you wanted to give away a lot of money in the state of Texas today, how would you do it directly to kids? And there's not a good answer, right? Because there's not a financial infrastructure in place that has a set of rules associated with it, where you could have somebody like the Treasury Department, we're going to have a pooled Invest America account at Treasury,

where Michael and Susan or other philanthropists could give money to this pooled account, And it would be dispersed to all these kids' accounts, subject to all the rules and regulations of use so the kids can't take the money out, but they can see it compound. That simply does not exist today. It's impossible to do that at scale today. And at the long end of the curve, if you think about my family as an example, we do a lot with the East Palo Alto School District, some of these low-income school districts in the state of California. where I can just adopt that school and say, for every kid in that school, I'm going to give $1,000 a year or two. So this unlocks, I think, massive creativity, Michael, around philanthropy. And that's what I mean. We know in Silicon Valley, if you build an open platform, a million applications can bloom. A million ideas can be built on top of this. I mean, we've heard from states that want to add $10,000 for every kid born in the state if they graduate from high school in the state.

So I think we haven't even scratched the surface of the beautiful competition and the beautiful philanthropy and the long tail of philanthropy, churches and parents and friends that we'll be able to give to these accounts. And so our job is to make sure that we make it as frictionless as possible, that we work and that's one of the core things that we're doing now. And you're describing those accounts don't solely take money at the initiation. They can take money all along the way, which is how you could support a school or something like that. Correct. So the way it works, Bill, is, and all of this, I mean, Michael and I, I think, learned a lot about the act of legislation going through this because, you know, it's one thing to

Hey, Bill, I know you've been involved in financial literacy and education for a long time. Tell us about the organization you're partnering with and, you know, perhaps as a, you know, kind of a potential partnership for Invest America. Yeah, my wife and I have been giving to an organization called Next Gen Personal Finance.

There's a gentleman there named Tim Ranzetta, who has just been pushing for financial literacy in high school. So we can add a link in here, but from 2021 to 2025, in only a four-year window, we've gone from 11 states to 29 states. And Texas just passed this very recently, a few weeks ago. And so the idea, which sounds obvious, it's actually quite shocking that it's not true, is just to add a semester of financial literacy to the high school curriculum. So, you know, we send kids out to get jobs and we haven't taught them, you know, how credit cards might take advantage of them and how to build a monthly budget and how to use a checkbook and, you know, how to plan.

And so I think, you know, these two things complement each other quite a bit. But that's another movement that it's nice to see gaining momentum simultaneously with this one. Yeah, you know, I talked to Tim. Texas just became. you know, like you said, 29th state, I think, to require a semester of financial literacy education. And, you know, some people said, you know, the Treasury Department, Invest America, they're not going to own the financial literacy. What again, I think when you create a platform of ownership, now it makes all of these financial literacy programs and organizations across the country just way more effective, right? Because when you're talking to a kid who actually, that you say, open up your Invest America account on your phone. Let's talk about how you got $12,000, $14,000 into that account. Let's look at how it's compounded. Let's talk about what it means to own the companies that are listed there, what it means to be a shareholder. I think you just have a much more engaged student, right? Because today, 95% of those students don't own anything. And they look at their parents and their parents don't really own things. And so it's a lot harder to get motivated to learn about something when you don't think you're going to have the prospect of

ownership. There are so many great organizations like Tim's out there, and I look forward to seeing how they take this platform and run with it to turbocharge their own efforts. Brad, I know you wanted to mention the budget deficit and the funding for this program and put it in a little bit of perspective, just with all the talk and concern about how big the budget deficit is? Yeah, I mean, listen, you know, we've had a huge debate among our friend group about this. And, you know, and some of my friends were even critical that, you know, this is part of the problem, if you will. So, you know, to break this down, the max cost of this is $3.7 billion a year. We have 3.7 million kids born every year.

If you give them each $1,000, that's $3.7 billion. So just to kind of put that in context, $3.7 billion is about what we contribute, we give to Afghanistan and Nigeria in the terms of foreign aid every year. So I think one of the things as a country we just have to ask is about priorities. Is it more important to give every kid in America a private investment account, a little seed from birth and get them on the right track, or to give $3.5 billion to Afghanistan and Nigeria? And I think those are the type of choices we're going to be forced to make. And I'm not saying that the dollars going to Afghanistan, Nigeria are wasted, but we make these decisions every single day in our budget.

And so for me, this is, you know, that's one angle. The second angle is just as a percentage of our national revenue, this is one one hundredth of one percent of our national revenue. So it's pretty inconsequential in terms of the overall budget. But the final point on it is, as you've heard me argue, according to the studies that were done on this, this will actually be revenue contributing 20 to 30 years out because the taxes you have to pay when you exit the accounts on the capital gains will be more than what the government is contributing on an annual basis into the accounts. And so among the things we should be worried about when it comes to the budget, I don't think this is one of them.

However, I would say unquestionably that I remain as concerned about the budget deficit as ever and been a supporter of a balanced budget amendment for a long time. I happen to think that this is something that is aligned with that, not at odds with that. Making every kid a capitalist from birth is going to better align us with the policies that allow the country to continue to grow. And I think growth is a critical element to making sure that we get our deficit to GDP back in a manageable place. Michael, I know you care a lot about that issue.

Let me ask you a question about that. Well, first, maybe to level set. So the argument out of the White House is that the reconciliation bill cuts the deficit. So the deficit was about $1.9 trillion. Their argument is that it cuts the deficit by about $150 billion a year, so $1.5 trillion over 10. And then they also argue you get another $250 billion in tariff revenue, incremental from the start of the year. We saw that in the run rate revenue in the month of May. So you add those two things together.

now you're at $400 billion. So if you're at $1.9 trillion deficit, now you're down to about $1.5 trillion deficit. By my math, that drops it to about 5% deficit to GDP. Besant has said he will get it to 3% deficit to GDP, which is what most people say is reasonably healthy. I think people would like to not have any at all. But I think most people view 2% to 3% as reasonable. He thinks he can get there by 27 or 28 through the two things I just mentioned, tariff revenue and the deficit reduction in the reconciliation bill, plus an incremental 100 to 200 basis points of growth in the country caused by lower taxes, less regulation, AI productivity, etc. So is your view that we just have to wait and see.

You know, like, does that show up or does it not show up? Well, obviously, we have to wait and see. I think on the trade and tariffs front, I think this is very tricky, right? We have products flowing back and forth and we have services flowing back and forth. And if you think about, you know, the market cap of the U.S. companies versus the rest of the world, hey, guys, the U.S. is doing really well relative to the rest of the world in market cap. And the reason is that we have a substantial lead in the most valuable industries in the world. Correct. And so the issue there is that if you think about the trade in products, you also have to think about the trade in services and how that's going to be dealt with in a negotiation.

I don't know how they'll all get sorted out. But I don't think it's a simple one-line item fix. Right, right. No, I think it's, you know, it's all relevant right now. Elon's talking about forming a third party, the American party, really in response, what appears to be frustration over Doge and the budget deficit, and the concerns by folks like Ray Dalio about, you know, a debt spiral in the United States. You know, you got guys like Scott Bessent saying, you know, Elon, you catch rockets, leave the finances to me. Besant seems very confident that he's going to get this back down to 2% to 3% deficit to GDP. I actually like the suggestion, Bill, by DeSantis.

Rather than forming a third party, which seems to me just chaotic and a lot of overhead and has not historically been that successful, I would love to see Elon, if this is his main issue, if it's the budget deficit and debt, which I would love to see him take on, right? He could do a series of things. Number one, he could really sponsor a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution of the United States under Article 5. If he put $10 billion against that effort, it would be the single largest constitutional effort in the history of the country. I think there's broad bipartisan support for a balanced budget amendment. We have 30, 32 states that have supported this in the past. I think you only need 34 to get a constitutional convention called, 38 states to get it ratified. It hasn't happened. The founders made it hard to amend the constitution for a reason. But I actually think if he put those type of dollars and that type of focus behind it, we could get it done. And then on top of that, he could target both Democrats and Republicans in primaries around this issue. And to me, it just seems like that targeted approach, that very focused approach to balancing the budget would have all sorts of positive impacts.

Number one, it keeps the country focused on this issue. It keeps this administration focused on this issue. And, you know, I think you have an outside chance of getting a constitutional amendment. And you certainly are going to have a lot of Republicans and Democrats who will run on that issue if they think they'll get, you know, Elon support. So I'm not sure how this will all evolve, whether there's going to be a third political party or not, but I would love to see this issue get dealt with. I remember Ross Perot tackling it 1992, 1991, Michael. I know, you know, you knew Ross and, you know, to me that that type of attention is the type of attention that we're going to need. Why don't we, why don't we shift gears?

here for a second. This one, I've been dying to ask you both about. There's this really unprecedented war for AI talent going on. And it was kicked off by Zuckerberg and Meta. They made the aqua hire of scale for $15 billion. They brought on board Alex, Alexandr Wang, to help lead that effort. Then they brought on board Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. They've poached a bunch of people from OpenAI, a bunch of people from Google. And now today, another announcement of somebody from Apple. The talk is $75 to $100 million annual pay packages, massive signing bonus, really dollar amounts, Michael and Bill, I've never heard of in the tech industry. So Bill, given that recent set of facts, is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing?

in Meta if I didn't think, you know, in fact, I remember back in 22 when, you know, When we took our big position there and people said to me, oh, what are you doing?

This is a founder-controlled company. He's never going to become more efficient. He's never going to do these things. I said, the whole reason I want to be all in on this company is it's founder-controlled. I think it is a massive advantage that he has today, right? And he's talking about risking 1% of his company, right, in order to reboot around AI. That seems to me to be a very, very rational economic decision. And there's no – this is just a talent war. He's got to – Lama 4 was not where it needed to be to compete heads up. But he has one advantage none of those other companies have. He has the world's biggest printing press shooting out billion-dollar bills, right? He's not relying on the beneficence of venture capitalists.

The guy has a business model that is generating the cash to fund all this, and so he's leveraging that cash as a source of competitive advantage, which seems to me to make a lot of sense. I think it's going to make it very difficult, and that's why I was asking about the downstream implications bill. If you're a company that's trying to compete against that, I don't think many venture companies can compete against that on a durable long-term basis, and certainly not the real startups. Yeah, I was having a discussion with a real AI startup founder this weekend. And, you know, he was asking about talent. And like, I don't know what you do. I mean, I don't think you hire anyone that's top thousand in the Bay Area. You won't be able to afford them.

But I do think there is a fundamental question because it's easy to say, and I want to get Michael's opinion on this. It's easy to say the percentage of market cap and make that bold decision. But there are cultural implications, right, of bringing in employees that make radically different amounts of money than the other employee base. How do you think that will be? How difficult will that be to manage? I think it'll be a challenge culturally, for sure. He could have a long line outside of his door with people wanting this or complaining about that, and that could be a distraction. So I think people generally have a sense of fairness, right?

And they want to be treated fairly relative to others and relative to the opportunities that they have out there in the overall market. And if they feel that they're not being treated fairly, that's going to be a problem. So I don't know how that gets sorted out. I do think the math could work for them, given everything you guys just talked about. And obviously, if you reduce this down to a race to superintelligence or something along those lines, the size of the prize is tremendous. And they do have an incredible business that is aided by these advancements in a big way. And there aren't a whole ton of companies that can go do this.

Yeah. And by the way, Brad, you mentioned that they have this unfair advantage of this huge printing press. But Apple and Google have the same exact printing press and chose not to do this. Yeah, but neither of them are controlled by founders. And, you know, that's what I was the point I was trying to make. Like, these are the type of bets that I think it's very, very difficult for a Google or an Apple to make for the reasons you mentioned, Bill. You know, can they sell it to the public markets? You know, do they have the type of decision making in the boardroom that allows this to occur? I mean, at the end of the day, I think at Meta, if Zuckerberg wants to do it, that's what's happening.

And that board, you know, gets on board. In fact, he's reshaped. the board over the course of the last couple of years with folks who are, I think, signed up for this mission with him. Michael, to your point, that's why I think he reorganized this into the kind of super intelligence division. I think the way they'll try to manage this culturally is to say, listen, there's going to be an elite SEAL Team 6 group, which is called super intelligence, and we're going to pay them elite pay because it's good for the entire business. That doesn't mean we're going to inflate everybody else. And in fact, what I think that Meta will do is, you know, you'll probably see them rolling back like you see with Microsoft, like you see with Amazon.

My sense is that companies are generally going to get smaller, right, on the backs of the productivity gains from AI, but they'll redeploy some of those profits into these areas. If you're in the model business and you want to be on the frontier competing for super intelligence, and there are only whatever, five to seven companies that really are in that game, then I think you're going to have to have something similar. Now, in the case of OpenAI, it's only 2,800 employees, and they're all part of that division effectively. But you have to really get scale quickly, because if you're not bringing in 10, 20, 30, $40 billion of annual revenue, I don't think you can stay in this game. And so the question is whether or not Anthropic and X and OpenAI have a sufficient escape velocity, right, that they can take on this frontal assault by Meta and still compete. My sense is OpenAI does, my sense is both of those companies do, but it's not a long list that can compete with them.

And by the way, the Nat Friedman edition was particularly interesting just with his GitHub background. You know, we had talked in the past that Meta had made a couple of hires on the enterprise side. And we'd heard rumors of, you know, certain payments when they pass through the cap on the open models. But, you know, you have to wonder with that coming on board, if there are more aspirations on the enterprise side. Yeah, it's a great point. And certainly want to create some optionality there. Hey, Michael, question for you, you know, on this

right you know it's it's uh it's hard yeah you're you're i was wondering if you could expand on that

What is your, you know, when you look at just kind of the relative distribution between, you know, kind of the custom ASICs world, what you see happening across, you know, folks like AMD and NVIDIA, you know, there's obviously a lot of chatter. you have an interesting perspective, both as a consumer of these products, also as a builder and distributor of the products. Are there any pending big changes? Or as you look ahead over the course of the next year or two, that's probably as far ahead as you can see, does it look like the relative landscape is stable? Or are there big breakthroughs coming that may unseat somebody like like NVIDIA you know NVIDIA is in a great spot i mean to your question i think uh for the larger um model companies and hyperscalers uh certainly custom asics are gaining a lot of share and when you have control over the workload and you can uh you know take the time to Workload, you know, that's certainly going to be a part of what occurs in the infrastructure.

But it's not a large number of customers. You were talking about the number of companies developing models. It's sort of that number of customers. But they're large, right, as you've seen with Google and Meta and others who are deploying the ASICs. And maybe just to be respectful of time, Bill, I could talk to Michael for hours about this particular subject, but maybe to one of the people I talk to when the market's going wild is Michael. We certainly saw that earlier this year. It's pretty incredible to see the snapback that we've seen out of the NASDAQ, the S&P. The NASDAQ is now up 32% off of its bottom two months ago, just as a data point.

I think Dell got as low as, I don't know, 75, 72 bucks. It's back at 120 bucks. Now, that is an incredible bounce off the bottom, but it's still basically up, I don't know, 5% or 10% on the year. It's not like it's in this astronomical range when you look at kind of year to date or over the course of the last 12 months. And so when I look at the markets, and I want to get your read on this as well, Michael. Here we are. We have the NASDAQ and the Qs and the S&P at an all-time high. Bitcoin's near an all-time high. The VIX is back to 15 or 16, basically where it was in February, despite all of the things around tariffs.

The 10-year, everybody talks about this, the great debt spiral. that we have in the country. But the 10-year has been between 3.7 and 4.7 for the last two years. It's at 4.2, kind of smack dab in the middle, if not at the lower end of that range. And then you see companies like TSM and NVIDIA and Microsoft, Oracle, Booking.com, Uber Dash, they're at all-time highs. But notwithstanding the fact that they're at all-time highs, You have Tesla down over 20% on the year, Apple down 15% on the year, Google's down on the year, Amazon's basically flat on the year. So you have a lot of dispersion in the market.

When you look at the market, does it feel to you, again, like we're in this bubble territory? Does it feel as a company that it's kind of accurately reflecting? Set aside your stock. I don't want you comment on your stock i'm just talking about the market writ large are the u.s markets higher in three to five years are they are you know or are they not given given where we sit today i would bet they're higher i would bet that more and more companies figure out how to you know grow their businesses you know i talked earlier about the productivity and efficiency i think the ultimate benefit is going to come from the speed at which companies transform and the growth that they're able to create. That's certainly how we see it in our business. And yeah, I think a lot of these companies will be able to compound their earnings on a double-digit basis and the market largely, overall indices will become more valuable.

Yeah, I do think that this moment in time, we're seeing a lot of dispersion. I mentioned it, right? Some companies being down this year, some companies up a lot. I really think the companies that are leveraging AI, that are in a position to leverage it and to capture that margin expansion, we're going to see a reacceleration. And we've heard this out of folks like McDermott and Sridhar and jensen you know at all these companies how they're re-accelerating top line but they're not adding people right that you know it's kind of net flat we see this out of uber we see it out of dell when the market dipped down uh our share buyback program went into went into high gear you know right and then we bought back 22 we bought back 22 million shares so you know that worked out well for you as i look at this flight path we just we just landed you know the reconciliation bill. So there was a lot of uncertainty in the world to start the year.

One was what was going to happen. Was this reconciliation bill going to pass? Now it's passed. So we have tax predictability, right? You have an extension of the existing tax regime, and then you have the no tax on tips, the no tax on overtime. So you have this incremental stimulus now coming from the reconciliation bill. On top of that, you know, tariffs while still up in the air, the market kind of has digested the tariff stuff, right? And absent some big blowup between us and China, if we follow the Besson Accords that they reached in Switzerland and then reiterated in London, it seems like the big pieces of the tariff puzzle are falling in place. And then on the rate front, the market is estimating that the next move is down, whether we're going to have one or two rate cuts at the end of the year.

is the question. Some people, the Fed is saying we're on hold. We're going to wait and see whether or not inflation re-accelerates this summer due to tariffs. So that's what everybody's eyes are on over the course of the next six to eight weeks. Does core PCE tick up due to those tariffs? I'm taking the under on that, but we're going to have to wait and see. And then on fundamentals, I think what we're hearing from companies, and this is where the rubber meets the road. Earnings, I think we had 85% of companies beat in the S&P 500 in the quarter. And if you just go through and look at keywords, it was accelerating. It was AI. It was reinventing our business. There is a real growth feeling in the market and among these companies.

And so from our perspective, and we try to give people an indication of where we are, I mean, I was as negative as you well know, Michael, early in the year. I was as negative as I've been in 10 years, because I thought if we were going down the path of Navarro and $2 trillion of tariffs, that it was all, you know, every, all bets were off. That was a scary path, you know, and, and, you know, we talked about how if they went down that path, I thought they would reverse course because it wouldn't work. You know, and this, I think this is a very iterative team that will experiment, lay some stuff out there.

Not all of it's going to work. there'll be some bad ideas, and then they'll reverse course. Yeah, I hope we don't. We didn't do that. I hope we don't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory here with policy, though. I think going back into the tariff game, some type of bold confrontation with China and our AI policy. I mean, one thing we didn't talk about in this past week, the AI moratorium got removed from the bill, and we're going to have 70 state laws in the United States, which is not great for AI startups. So anyway, I hope we don't – I hope we don't – I hope bad policy doesn't upset what would be an otherwise very potent landscape based on AI.

Yeah, I fully agree. I think it's one thing that the three of us are in violent agreement on. And one of the things that's moved this country forward for the last three decades is we've led globally in technology. And we've led globally in technology because we've allowed our best technologies to move freely around the world and to compete and to win. This is the first time since I've been in this business that we're talking about export controls and AI diffusion laws that are restricting the ability of our technology to go compete and win, right? And there's both the question mark as it relates to inside of China, but also the question mark outside of China.

And while we've seen the repeal of the Biden diffusion rule, what I'm told is that no new licenses have been granted for distribution of AI technologies around the world, despite all of the discussion around this. So it's critical that Washington follows through and that we accelerate diffusion around the world of the entire American AI stack, that we don't regulate that out of Washington. And then I think there are some legitimate regulations that you can have as it pertains to China. But even there, I would much rather let our deprecated chip. out of NVIDIA go compete against huawei in china keep the developer mind share in china because it's going to make it easier for us to win globally and elsewhere around the world um and i think it's important that that michael myself everybody else bill you are those voices are being heard we're not out of the woods on this by a long shot by the way and you you reminded me one of the thing

Michael, it's awesome having you here. I wanted to say, you know, Michael and myself, Dara Khashrashahi, David Solomon from Goldman, Renee Haas from Arm, you know, Bill McDermott from ServiceNow, and a group of us were at the White House a few weeks ago to testify on the Invest America Act.

And Michael kicked it off. And if you haven't seen the video of it, we'll include it here. You should watch it. But he reminded everybody, captivated the entire room. We view this initiative as a powerful platform for philanthropic innovation aimed at helping children. thrive wherever they come from, particularly those families who have been historically left behind. Mr. President, you articulated it perfectly. These Invest America accounts will give every new American child a genuine opportunity to participate in history's greatest engine of economic growth, the American economy. The funds in these accounts invested in American enterprise and innovation will grow over time into substantial nest eggs, providing support for education, home ownership, and starting families. The ability of families, friends, benefactors, and employers to match the government's generosity amplifies the life-changing potential of this initiative. Thank you, Mr. President, for your visionary leadership on this critical issue.

These Invest America accounts will profoundly impact countless young Americans, ensuring they truly benefit from what Abraham Lincoln described as a right of every American, the right to rise. As I sit here on the 4th of July weekend, I'm super grateful to you, Michael. You did a huge service to the country by helping us get the Invest America Act passed. And I think everything that we just talked about here, including allowing American technologies to go compete, remember, these Invest America accounts are only worth something if America does great. Right. And the fact of the matter is Warren Buffett has said Warren Buffett has said the smartest thing he did was just bet on America.

He bet on America. And I'm I'm betting that the next 50 years, next 100 years are going to be an American century again. But we can't get in the way of the innovation and the entrepreneurship, you know, and the the creative destruction, frankly, that has allowed America to be so great. and finding that balance between government and Silicon Valley has always been challenging, as you just related, Michael, with MTOPs. But we have to show up. We have to have a voice. We have to continue to push in that direction. I think if we're allowed to compete, our best days lie ahead. If we get in the way, Bill, like you talk about, then I think we can upend our advantage.

Thanks for joining us, though, on short notice, Michael. Thank you, guys. It's great to see you. Appreciate it. Great to see you. Bye-bye. We'll talk soon. Take care. As a reminder to everybody, just our opinions, not investment advice.