BAN PICLORUM

“Private equity is the last stop because when they come in and they'd layer in billions and billions of dollars of not just equity but also debt, and that has to then be completely predictable and paid back, their only lever is to raise price. They can never cut price to take share. They don't they can't underwrite that to pay back their debt holders. And so Saks, part of the big problem here and why nobody wants to touch these companies is that they are overpriced.”

“Piclorum is a pesticide that was developed by the Dow Chemical Company in 1963. This is the chemical formula for that pesticide. It's related to auxin, which are these hormones that plants make. And in the nineteen sixties, there was this big rush to try and make synthetic plant hormones that you would then apply to a plant. It would cause the plant to overgrow, and the plant would quickly die. And piclorum became a very widely used herbicide in our environment. The problem with piclorum, one of the things that's been known about it is it's very persistent. It doesn't biodegrade very well.”

“You're right that the SPLC allegedly did fund $270,000 to help plan Charlottesville. In addition to that, they secretly funneled more than $3,000,000 to a bunch of violent racist extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, Aryan Nation, United Clans of America, and it goes on from there. So this group that was supposed to be fighting racism, in fact, was fomenting racism by paying these groups to basically organize protests that SPLC could then point to and say that America has a huge racism problem, donate to us. And that's basically what happened after Charlottesville. They increased the amount of money that they were able to fundraise by $81,000,000.”

“I've always hated when founders take on Worse. Venture debt. And I know, Jake, how you agree with me. Part of it is that founders forget that they have to pay it back. They treat it like venture capital, and they forget about that. And then they get surprised. But the other thing I've never liked about it is it makes you more fragile. It basically subjects you to a bunch of business covenants, and it makes it harder for you to do an abrupt shift in your business because now you've got a bank looking over your shoulder.”

“Where is SpaceX today? Let's call it a trillion. Where could it be, just for the purpose of this argument, let's say 2,000,000,000,000. So when the deal gets done on a stock for stock basis, it's going to be if, again, if it's 60,000,000,000 in tomorrow dollars, effectively, Elon's gotten a 50% discount. And what has he bought? He can issue $60,000,000,000 of stock at a $2,000,000,000,000 valuation and get a model and a service that I think is extremely compelling in coding, which is where we know all of the immediate and short term revenue gains are.”

“I've been in debt. I mean, I've had a 420,000,000 credit line. And I had a moment where it was reflexively kind of collapsing inward because the assets that I was using to secure it shrank in value in a moment of market disruption. I was scrambling. And then at the same time, there was a risk. It was the worst moment of my professional working life. I had like a couple $100,000,000 sitting at Credit Suisse and they were about to implode. And so on a weekend, I was trying to figure out whether my money was still there. I had always had this rule, don't have debt, and then I violated it to try to run the number up. I almost got run over. I almost lost everything.”

“Look at the amount of money that Steve Jobs returned to shareholders in his tenure at Apple. It's easy to count. It was zero. He loved to keep that money on the balance sheet and he probably, or maybe I'm guessing, would've directed that at some huge shot on goal. In the Tim Cook era, it was very different. He shrank the share count by almost 50%. I think it's like 44%.”

“With an NGO, nonprofit, what have you, they raise money. They don't sell things. They fundraise from donors in order to engage in an activity. But what happens over time is the actual activities may stop mattering, and all that really matters is they're able to keep fundraising. Right? Because they're just trying to figure out a justification to keep going back to donors to get more and more money out of them. That's what perpetuates the organization.”