Transcript
SPEAKER_1: Apple just posted a massive quarter. One hundred eleven billion dollars in Q2 revenue, up seventeen percent year over year. That beat estimates across the board. SPEAKER_2: Yeah, every major segment came in strong. iPhone was up twenty-two percent year over year to just under fifty-seven billion. Services hit nearly thirty-one billion, up over sixteen percent. China was a standout too, up twenty-eight percent to twenty and a half billion. SPEAKER_1: Tim Cook called the iPhone seventeen family the most popular lineup in Apple's history. But there were some supply issues, right? SPEAKER_2: Right. Cook said demand was off the charts but supply constraints held iPhone back. The Mac Studio and Mac mini could take several months to reach supply-demand balance. Buyers are snapping them up for AI and agentic tools. Apple also stopped offering the two hundred fifty-six gigabyte Mac mini globally. The entry point is now five hundred twelve gigabytes at seven hundred ninety-nine dollars. SPEAKER_1: And memory costs are a big part of that story. SPEAKER_2: A huge part. Apple's CFO warned memory expenses will climb significantly higher in Q3. And it's not just Apple feeling this. Samsung projects the memory shortage will actually worsen in twenty twenty-seven, with customers already placing orders for next year. SPEAKER_1: So the memory makers, Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron, they're raising prices rather than shipments? SPEAKER_2: Exactly. They're prioritizing revenue over volume, raising DRAM prices, not increasing supply. And that's squeezing hardware companies downstream. Nintendo's share price has fallen around forty-five percent since August twenty twenty-five because rising memory chip costs are pressuring Switch two margins. SPEAKER_1: So the question becomes, if chip makers are intentionally constraining supply to raise prices, who ends up paying when every hardware company needs more memory at once? SPEAKER_2: That's exactly the right question. And Apple's Q3 guidance of fourteen to seventeen percent revenue growth above estimates suggests the market is rewarding anyone who can prove AI demand is real. Apple shipped seventy-one point six percent of all smartphones with satellite connectivity in twenty twenty-five, by the way. SPEAKER_1: Let's shift to the Musk versus Altman trial, because there were some pretty significant revelations this week. SPEAKER_2: The biggest one was about Shivon Zilis. OpenAI's lawyers told the court that she, a longtime Musk employee and mother to four of his children, allegedly acted as a covert liaison between Musk and OpenAI. SPEAKER_1: So the allegation is that while Musk was publicly distancing himself from OpenAI and building xAI, Zilis was feeding him information from inside the organization? SPEAKER_2: That's the claim. And it completely reframes the case. It shifts Musk from a passive donor who was betrayed to someone who was actively running intelligence on the company he now says wronged him. SPEAKER_1: And then there was the distillation admission on the stand. SPEAKER_2: Yes. Musk was asked whether xAI ever distilled technology from OpenAI, and he said the claim is partly true. That single word hands OpenAI's legal team evidence of the exact cross-contamination they need to flip the narrative. SPEAKER_1: The judge also put some limits on what Musk's team could argue, right? SPEAKER_2: She told Musk's lawyer she didn't want talk of AI's existential threat seeping into the trial. Focus on the facts about OpenAI, she said. That guts Musk's most emotionally compelling argument, that he backed OpenAI to save humanity and Altman sold that mission for profit. SPEAKER_1: Without that framing, it becomes a narrow contract dispute between billionaires. SPEAKER_2: Exactly. And separately, OpenAI has its own internal issues. Employees have raised alarms over failures to alert law enforcement when users describe plans for real-world violence to ChatGPT. Seven families of Tumbler Ridge shooting victims are now suing OpenAI. SPEAKER_1: And there are business pressures too. OpenAI missed its goal of reaching one billion weekly active users by the end of twenty twenty-five. SPEAKER_2: And missed multiple revenue targets in early twenty twenty-six. Internal projections show the eight-dollar-a-month ChatGPT Go subscribers growing around thirty-six times to one hundred twelve million in twenty twenty-six, while the twenty-dollar-a-month Plus subscribers fall eighty percent to around nine million. SPEAKER_1: OpenAI pushed back on that, calling the report prime clickbait and saying they're firing on all cylinders. And the CFO has privately suggested waiting until twenty twenty-seven for an IPO. SPEAKER_2: Right. Meanwhile, Cerebras is seeking to raise four billion dollars in its IPO at a forty billion dollar valuation. And Intel had its best month on record in April, climbing one hundred fourteen percent, pushing its market cap past four hundred seventy billion. SPEAKER_1: There were also some major government AI deals this week. SPEAKER_2: The Department of Defense signed classified AI deals with AWS, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Reflection AI. And the US Navy awarded Domino Data Lab one hundred million dollars to teach underwater drones to identify mines in the Strait of Hormuz. SPEAKER_1: And on the venture and deal side, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund raised six billion dollars, its largest haul ever. GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen made an unsolicited offer of around fifty-six billion dollars for eBay. And Anthropic is finalizing a one point five billion dollar joint venture with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs. SPEAKER_2: It's a lot of capital moving fast. The market is clearly rewarding anyone who can credibly connect their business to AI demand. SPEAKER_1: To recap: Apple beat on every line that matters, but memory costs are climbing significantly higher and the shortage gets worse in twenty twenty-seven. The Musk trial took a dramatic turn with the Shivon Zilis liaison allegation and Musk's own admission about distilling OpenAI's technology. And big money kept moving, from government AI contracts to billion-dollar venture raises. Next time, we'll dig into what all of this capital movement means for early-stage founders trying to navigate the current landscape.