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Low-budget films created by YouTubers are delivering outsized box office returns, signaling a new collaborative phase between digital creators and Hollywood.
Several films led by online creators have emerged as major financial hits in 2026. Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms” opened to about $81.5 million domestically and $115 million worldwide on a $10 million budget, while Curry Barker’s “Obsession” surpassed $104 million domestic gross on roughly $1 million in costs. These returns far exceed traditional studio benchmarks.
The strong performance of these films highlights a shift toward lower-budget, high-return productions. Markiplier’s “Iron Lung”, made for $3 million, grossed over $51 million worldwide, reinforcing the idea that smaller investments can yield blockbuster-level returns without the risks associated with $100–200 million studio projects.
Large online followings do not guarantee box office success. A film based on the popular children’s channel Ryan’s World reportedly grossed only $624,000 against a $10 million budget, underscoring that creative quality and audience alignment matter more than subscriber counts alone.
Successful projects share a common trait: creators who control multiple aspects of production. Many come from backgrounds where they write, direct, edit, and iterate quickly, developing skills through direct audience feedback. This “full-stack” approach reduces costs and increases creative coherence.
Viral internet content is increasingly serving as the foundation for film development. “Backrooms,” for example, evolved from a single viral image into an expansive online mythos before becoming a theatrical release. Studios are now exploring obscure online communities and viral trends as sources of new IP.
Rather than replacing traditional studios, creators are entering into hybrid partnerships. Studios still provide distribution, marketing, and scale, while creators bring built-in audiences and proven concepts, creating a mutually beneficial ecosystem.
Industry dynamics are prompting reconsideration of capital allocation. Instead of concentrating resources into a few high-risk blockbusters, there is growing interest in spreading investments across multiple smaller films, similar to venture capital portfolio strategies.
Historically, creator content lacked the shared cultural reach of major films. The recent success of creator-led movies suggests that gap may be narrowing, with some projects achieving broader recognition beyond niche online communities.
The rise of YouTuber-led films marks a structural shift in filmmaking, where low-cost production, digital-native creativity, and studio collaboration are redefining how hits are made and financed.
We have some really exciting news. We heard you loud and clear. >> You might have noticed on the Chiron, which is area.com back. >> We are back and we're going to tell you about ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, billing, and a whole lot more >> all in one place. That's right. You wanted ads, we are bringing you ads. Uh, and we're very excited that we have more. >> We are >> more supporters of the show. incredibly back. >> Uh yes, we're very excited. So, expect to hear ads throughout the show. >> It's funny. We we heard over and over and over, I'm not joking. I know I get sarcastic a lot. >> Uh but we heard over and over and over that they're a nice pallet cleanser. It's like turning the page, right, in between different topics. And uh we are excited >> and we love these companies. We want to help them grow. We've always been huge fans of the companies that we work with. So, we're very excited to have them back. Let's turn over to YouTube and Hollywood. Uh breakout news uh in Hollywood. Uh YouTubers winning at the box office. YouTubers finally breaking through to Hollywood. Feels super long overdue. Ben Thompson had a good victory lap post because he predicted this all the way back in 2017. It took a decade to get here, but uh YouTubers are fully in control of Hollywood. And there's a bunch of crazy statistics, but 2026 really is the year that Hollywood and YouTube finally, it feels like they found a way to work together in perfect harmony. It honestly seems win-win here, but >> not total disruption. >> Yeah. >> Right. Collaboration. >> Not that actual collaboration. And so, I mean, we all know Hollywood's been faced with a ton of challenges. I was just listing them off the top of my head. What's this? >> Trey says, "A TVPN without ads is like a human without a heart." >> Couldn't say it better myself. Um, I was >> calling Ryan says calling in to the waiting room and not the reream waiting room was a crime. >> Yes, that's true. Um, so I I was just listing off like all of the challenges that Hollywood has faced over the past couple decades and it's so bad. It's piracy. Like you used to just be able for a lot for all through like the mid 2000s people would just download movies. uh than better TV shows. Like TV just got so so much better that that really took a lot of gas out of Hollywood because it used to be if you wanted something cinematic, you had to go to the theater. And then Game of Thrones came out and all of a sudden TV uh we went through like the era of great TV. Uh streaming obviously that moved a lot of people out of theaters. Uh COVID that shut down the the movie industry entirely. There were strikes, the double strike, writers and uh directors strike and a whole bunch of other strikes that went on. Uh there was competition from other production markets, lower cost, and that you know that can sometimes help certain elements of Hollywood, but it also hurts Hollywood the physical place. >> Yeah. Mean meanwhile, streaming just created such a massive boom in spending on like a bunch of random projects. Not necessarily like like blockbusters, but just like every platform needed more content and there was a lot of competition. >> Yeah. So throughout all of that there was sort of a silver lining. I mean the the streaming thing is a big one of that that there were jobs and projects that were getting green lit on streaming platforms but also just the creator economy like even though the number I was looking at the number of uh like shoot traditional Hollywood shoot days in Hollywood it's fallen off a cliff postcoid never fully recovered but the number of people working in front of the camera behind the camera around the camera in broadly has obviously gone up throughout the creator economy boom this was always unsatisfying to cophiles though because no matter how viral a Tik Tok goes or no matter how much money Mr. beast or some other creator like makes uh it never feels as uh as culturally important as the Godfather or some other or the Titanic or some some movie that everyone comes together. Everyone has this shared cultural experience around we were all in these like little bit of these like isolated niches and oh yeah I I'm really into this creator. Uh but anytime I try and bring it up to anyone they don't know what I'm talking about. >> Our our our shared our our moment is I see a meme starting to grow. Yeah. >> And I tell I make the call to you >> and and then we just kind of bet on it basically. But even those, it's very hard for them to break out to such a degree that you can bring it up to anyone, your your little nephew or your uncle, and they both have an understanding like they did during the Titanic era, like they did during the Godfather era, like they did during Star Wars, which is uh at the center of this story because The Mandalorian and Grou is the latest Star Wars project, and it's actually been declining in the box office. It's been eclipsed and there's been three movies that have been uh really really breakout performances. So also the Oscars are going to be streamed on YouTube in 2029. It feels like by 2029 this this whole this whole trend is going to be in full force. So look at the stats. So uh Kane Parson's backrooms opened to roughly 81.5 million in North America and 115 million worldwide on a $10 million budget. Reportedly, Curry Barker's Obsession climbed uh is climbing in his third weekend and hit 104 million 104.7 million domestic becoming Focus Features highest grossing domestic release from a movie widely reported to have cost around 1 million. That seems >> and right now on X every single day there's a post that goes viral about Obsessions return on their budget. Yeah. They're like this milliondoll film. >> Yeah. >> You know, it's just happening over and over and over. Yeah. And so like the business story to me is like way more is I mean is everything. >> Definitely. Definitely. Uh and then we also talked about this earlier and it's sort of looped in with this, but Markiplier, another YouTuber, released Iron Lung, which he financed himself, $3 million production budget reportedly, uh and opened to 18.2 million domestically before grossing 41.1 million domestic, 51.2 million worldwide. Huge return on investment. And so, uh, it's easy to point to these as sort of the story is, uh, YouTuber with a big audience just converts that audience into ticket sales. Uh, but that's not exactly it's not really that clean. And there's a bunch of counter examples. So, are you familiar with Ryan's World? Ryan's World is this massive kids YouTube channel. >> Oh, is it like a toy unboxing? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ryan would unbox toys and it became a huge huge uh channel. Uh, and they actually made Ryan's World, the movie, Titan Universe Adventure, but it grossed only $624,000 on something like a $10 million budget. And so he wasn't able to convert that audience directly over. And I think with someone like Ryan Young, uh, >> was he encouraging children to take their parents' keys and wallet and just go down to the movie theater? Because that's part of the issue with these channels and and monetizing them is there's somewhat of a there's a disconnect between the audience and who the actual like buyer is. The person that controls purchasing Yeah. >> power in the household. So you might have like an 8-year-old kid who loves these videos, but anytime they actually want to act on >> the content, they have to >> there's a translation step. Sometimes that can work though. You know, you see the advertisements of the the toy on the cereal box and the kids demand the toy. What is different about Back Rooms, Obsession, and Iron Lung is that the filmmakers had they'd shown they didn't just have huge audiences like some of these Markiplier is a truly large creator, but the folks behind Back Rooms and Obsession are in like the single-digit millions. that alone if if they didn't have the creativity if they didn't have the the risktaking abilities to actually produce something that could sort of you know draw attention in theaters I don't think they could have just converted their subscribers over like the conversion rates just don't match up because if you're on 1 million subscribers and you did a h 100red million in box office that the math just doesn't match up. Did some did everyone go did all of your subscribers go see it five times and pay $20 each time? No way. Like that's not what happened. the idea of like this creativity, risktaking, uh, new IP, this is like at the core of, uh, of Hollywood successes. I, uh, I was reading the Hollywood Reporter, they were saying like this hearkens back to like the 1970s, George Lucas's first film. Ben Thompson has a great analysis that we can read through, but uh, these creators aren't just big influencers with millions of fans. Uh, they do have big audiences, but they also stand above their peers in terms of artistic vision. So Curry Barker had a YouTube sketch channel called That's a Bad Idea where he learned how to quickly and effectively write, act, and edit for a tight audience feedback loop. Back Rooms has a similar story. Kane uh Kane Parsons, who goes by Cain Pixels, produced his original series, The Back Rooms, in Blender and After Effects. Uh and the internet myth had laid a bit of the groundwork and we can go into some of the lore of back rooms. It's a very fascinating story. It all started with like a single image of a furniture store that was being renovated at the time. And that picture just went viral and went and just like kept building lore and became one of these like creepy pastas and then eventually, you know, turned into his YouTube series which turned into this film. And uh it's one of these like very interesting origin story behind a piece of intellectual property. Typically, you don't see just a random image go viral and become a movie, but let alone a successful movie. But here we are. Being able to create something engaging for social media virality is probably somewhat important to creating a film that works in theaters. I think there is some stuff that translates. We're seeing this with the sort of like youtubification or retention editing on Netflix, but I think the bigger value is being like a full stack filmmaker. So gone are the days of showing up to Hollywood with a manuscript and just expecting the studio to do the rest for you. I think that the traditionally segmented teams on productions are simply too expensive to do to be deployed on anything but existing IP. So the dedicated writer, the dedicated cinematographer, the dedicated sound designer, that'll show up for the Mandalorian and Grou because they know that there's a certain amount of people that will just see every single Star Wars movie. But to take a risk on new IP from a new creator, you have to understand that that creator is going to be able to leave their fingerprints and actually drive every piece of the production. >> Yeah. How do how do you think the big uh studio execs are processing, you know, these two these two films? Because you would think, okay, movies are a hits driven business if you have a hund00 million budget. Like thinking about it like an if you're an early stage investor, >> like super early stage seed series A >> and you have $100 million to invest, >> like sometimes the best move would be putting $100 million into one team. But there's a reason that people say like, "Hey, we're going to make 20 to 30 investments across this fund. Maybe maybe more depending on the strategy." >> They're doing a lot more $10 million films. >> Yeah. Yeah. And so and so it it feels like it makes so much sense because one film can generate the entire >> funer >> uh can be a fund returner, but at the same time is it is it studio execs that just love the rush of just like doing a big deal, right? Is it is is there some >> as opposed to not basically like direct financial incentive where like there's just some like the status associated with putting together like a blockbuster? >> I don't know. I do think we will see more $10 million films, more more lower budget films. Um, it feels like there's definitely a certain breed of Hollywood executive that their whole skill set is aligned to how can we put a 100 million 200 million to work and actually guarantee a return on that. So, they're going to be working on the Avatars and the Marvel movies and the DC movies and the and the Harry Potter movies. Um, but for the next generation, uh, that that track feels like very much bought in. So there are already more of these sort of like YouTube adaptations in the works. Uh one is from Wesley Wang who went viral for interestingly uh Obsession and Backrooms are both horror films which are notorious for being cheap to produce and potentially very high return. He went viral for a nonh horror YouTube short called Nothing Except Everything. Tristar picked it up with Darren Aravnowski's Prozoa producing and Wang set to adapt it as writer director. Uh, and then there's also the much sillier but extremely viral Skibbidity Toilet, which was created by Alexe Gerasimov in 2023. And that project has been going back and forth, but reportedly Michael Bay was attached at one point. They were thinking maybe TV show, maybe uh movie, but that as silly as that sounds and as ridiculous as that series is, it did build like a little bit of a lore world. It captured a lot of people's fascinations and the numbers are really staggering. Um, there is a little bit more nuance there because on the IP side because it was created in Source Filmmaker, which is basically like HalfLife or Counter-Strike. Uh, so you design the level and then you can move the camera around through that. He didn't use Blender and he didn't shoot it with a camera. He actually made the whole series in a video game. Um, and a lot of the assets pull from HalfLife 2 or Counter-Strike Source. And so, uh, if you want to maintain that, you have to go do a deal with Valve, which, you know, is a private company owned by Gabe Newell, doesn't necessarily need to just allow someone to do this. And there's already been back and forths on like takedown notices. So, that's a whole different negotiation if that winds up making it to the silver screen. Um, but I do think there will be uh more unpredictable breakouts in the coming years. Uh, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see Hollywood executives combing through obscure YouTube playlists for new gems. and uh some members of our production team saw both back rooms and Obsession and I want to get some reviews. What do you What did you guys think? Which one was better? Take us through it. >> My votes Obsession. >> Obsession. >> Scott, what do you think? >> Obsession. >> Okay. And what did you like about each one? What did you dislike about each one? >> So, Obsession was great. I feel like the filmmakers have gotten too good at making horror movies sometimes recently, like this like Ari type wave. remember leaving Midsummer and just feeling like like like gross for like days and I felt like Obsession like walked it back a little bit and it was a bit of a comedy too so it was fun. I felt like the the memes are all over it which is great. >> Yeah. >> Um back rooms we all kind of walked out. I love back rooms. Production design should win an award but something was missing from the movie I think. >> Apparently they built 30,000 square ft of actual set for back rooms. They really designed it. As you said, the production design was fantastic. And that feels like I mean the source material is literally in Blender. It would be so tempting just to be like, "Yeah, just send us the Blender files. Like, we'll just continue using like you're already working in CGI." Like, it's not like, "Oh, this isn't true to the source material." Like, it's actually less true to go build the set. But they did. And clearly, uh, you enjoyed that look and feel and sort of worked out. >> I thought it was really fun. Scott's got something. >> I want to shout out Haley Johnson who produced Obsession, too. She went to our film school. >> Uh, fantastic. Um, let's go over to Ben. >> Your guys's your guys' class at your film school, which I think no longer exists. Truly insane caliber of talent to come out of that school. So, well done. >> So, uh, Ben Thompson reflected on this as well. He was, uh, taking this victory lap on calling this in 2017. He said in in 2017 when the first public allegations were made against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, I wrote Goodbye Gatekeepers about how the traditional structure of Hollywood where the supply of people who wanted to make and be in movies far exceeded the demand for movies to be made by Hollywood created the conditions for his predation. So he had a lot of power. uh as he noted in the article, a similar structure used to be the case in newspapers, which not only gated what news was reported, but also leveraged that gate to monetize via advertising. However, the internet had long since broken down the gate in both regards. Meanwhile, I raised the spectre of something similar happening to movies. Don't forget YouTube. Video is a zero sum activity. Time spent watching one source of video is time spent not watching another. And YouTube showed over a billion hours of video every 2016 >> with two phones >> watching two things >> wheels on both phones and subway surfers screen just going like this. >> Well, if you have VR you can have way more screens open because you can just >> you can when is Subway Surfers getting an adaptation that feels like that's due for a trilogy. Subway Surfers the movie. I think we got something. Are they Have they has We cannot be the first people to think of Subway Surfers. >> Angry Birds is like a you know. Oh, yeah. They're making a third one or >> No, but I want it to be a movie where you're just like you're basically just going one direction. >> No, it has to be a gritty horror film that takes place in in the subway servers universe. Um, so Ben Thompson continues. He says, "It's not a surprise that the breakthrough moment for YouTube stars in film took nearly a decade to materialize after that article. I've long noted the sequence through which the internet and digital media has affected media. Text first, then music, then short form video, etc. Movies, the pinnacle of traditional media, are the hardest to both make and distribute, particularly if the goal is to make it into theaters. And of course, movies ask the most of customers in return. They actually have to leave the house. Ben Thompson continues. He says that leads to two true but ultimately unsatisfying answers as to why YouTube stars might succeed in movies. First is that uh this is simply a new place to discover talent. And that's certainly true. The analogy I would draw is to the impact of AWS had on venture capital. uh cloud computing reduced the cost of starting a company to nothing more than the opportunity cost for the founders's time and perhaps a bit of seed funding for a few engineers and that created an entirely new asset class of angel investors. Venture firms meanwhile didn't evaluate companies based on a power point to f to fund Sun servers but rather on actual products and market signals. So it is with this new wave of talent the cost of production has plummeted such that a creator can be evaluated on their creations not that not just their ideas. That's what I was talking about the YouTube growth and the YouTube product and the YouTube series that gets 82 million views in the in the example of back rooms like that is the audition tape that gets you the production workforce behind Hollywood to to actually marshall behind you. And that's the same thing with, you know, the startup that shows up on Sand Hill Road raising a series A that already has a product and some distribution and some customers and ARR. Um, and all of that is possible because you don't need $10 million to do a single prototype. You can just build it. Um, more true than ever in the age of AI. >> Ben Scott, how do films actually get funded? I've been I've been uh I've been pitched like invest in my movie before. But given that I don't watch movies and feel like it was really my strike zone, but how does it typically get structured? Like if a film needs a million-doll budget, are the investors getting like an independent film needs a million dollar budget? >> Yeah. >> How does equity work? Any any rough ideas? >> Typically, there's there's a series of buyers and investors >> distracting you guys from running. very similar to we'll do it live. So, so so so Scott's job is oftentimes a screenwriter will sell an option to to make a movie to a producer uh some sort of production team. They are the the the production company is oftentimes the investor. They buy it and then they might invest more money to bring on revisions, other script writers. uh they they might attach a uh they might go pitch a do the deal to to bring on a star and then from there they go to another producer and then the last the last time the last moment is uh is the actual like marketing phase and so those dollars are the biggest. So when you go and you get Universal or Disney to be the distributor, they're putting in a ton of money because they're going to buy the billboards and like the Super Bowl ads and that's really expensive. The movie has to be made at that point. But there's a series of sort of gates in the typical Hollywood uh fashion. And so when Markiplier says he spent $3 million, that means he spent $3 million paying the >> Yeah. Because even with Obsession, >> Yeah. >> I was seeing Obsession billboards everywhere around LA. >> Yeah. >> Like a at least a million dollar campaign. Yep. >> Right. When the videos were coming out saying like Obsession just turned 750K into $100 million. And so I was like, well, >> so a lot of times that might happen after the fact. >> Yeah, that's an after there's more money being spent to like, you know, it's like, hey, we have a hit now. Let's like >> and then and then basically at every phase there can be sort of an inkind investment where you get they call it like points on the back end basically, but it it's basically uh like the the the most famous example of this is probably Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man. He he took a very low salary upfront, cash upfront, but he got a huge stake in the downstream cash flows from that series. >> You're saying he's goated. >> He's goated. There's also a a cool uh video here of the history of liinal spaces. We should pull up because back rooms, of course, is pulling from a lot of interesting videos. Let's play this. Can we zoom in this at all? There we go. Truman show. Haven't seen it. I've seen it. It's great. I can't believe you've never se Truman show. It's so good. >> Should we get some liinal spaces here in the Ultradome? >> The the Ultradome is a little bit of a liinal space. We should make it more of a liinal space. Uh there are some there are some podcasters that have liinal space type setups. Uh Unbox Therapy is a famous one. >> You guys haven't seen it, but do you know like the tape on the wall? Do you know what that is? >> No. What's that? >> Okay. I mean, I guess no spoilers, but Oh, >> okay. >> Yeah, we can put tape on the wall. People have seen it will know what that means. Anyway, we can just vibe out to liinal spaces for the rest of the show. Let's see what Dan Shipper has to say. Uh, this will happen two with AI in about a decade. Studio executives and producers are racing to find movie material in corners of the internet they once dismissed as some of the greatest threats to their business. From YouTube to anime to video games, we talked about subway surfers. Uh, we're seeing the tide shift from these more conventional Hollywood narratives to something that feels more organic. Ooh, all the simulators. Maybe there will be Data Center Simulator the movie. Can you imagine? We got Data Center Simulator or uh what was the other one? Coconut Simulator. We got to get Coconut Simulator the movie. Realistic mode. >> Capibara Simulator the movie. >> That's just a nature documentary. Get get David Atenboroough in there. You're done. Uh well, Bernie Sanders is uh talking about taking a stake in the AI labs. He says, "AI is built on humanity's collective knowledge. The wealth it generates must benefit humanity, not just Elon Mus, Sam Alman, or other AI oligarchs. That's why I'll be introducing the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act to give the public a direct ownership stake." And he penned a full oped in the New York Times. Senator Bernie Sanders proposing a one-time 50% tax directly in stock from the AI labs which will be used to fund the American AI sovereign wealth fund. This would give the government voting rights and board seats and then directly pay a dividend to the American citizens. That's interesting because so you take it 50% like when would these companies actually produce a dividend? I mean it takes many tech companies like decades to actually uh return cash to shareholders. They're known for >> maybe he wants to just be fire selling. >> Yeah. >> After the IPOs. >> He's just He's just like, "This is the >> I didn't tell you how there was going to be a dividend >> dividend in in sales." >> Um, no. It's I mean, the the positioning I'm I'm trying to get into the New York into my New York Times account, too. But the positioning blank is built on humanity's collective knowledge. >> Yeah. >> What is not built on humanity's collective knowledge? >> Yeah. I was looking at a lot of >> TBPN is built on TBPN is built on humanity's collective knowledge. >> True. >> If if humanity hadn't figured out wheels and roads and combustion engines. >> Hey, be careful what you say. The the United States American citizens might own 50% of TVPN soon. You never know with this. >> You never know. It might you just never know. >> You're tempting fate here. >> But uh >> bad example. >> But yeah, the the the other thing is um you know we we have >> Yeah. AI 2027 talks about this. I think that's a it is it is right in line. He's clearly in the millu of that crew and uh we'll see. We'll see where all this goes, you know. I don't know. We'll see. Um it's uh a lot of people are sort of framing it as >> rather have universal basic tokens. >> Maybe that would be the dividend. I don't know. >> But it's interesting. So he's trying to ban data centers with the data center moratorum. Yes. >> Act. But then he also wants half >> Yeah. Those two things feel like like it feels like he's just kind of throwing stuff at the wall. >> Yeah. So de Dean Ball pointed out this sort of like uh you know misalignment here. He says uh I am so confused by the Bernie Sanders stance on AI. Is AI an existential risk that needs to be banned or a public good that should be redistributed? He wants to have it both ways which is the tell that his flirtation with AI safety is mostly for show. This is about capital. Interesting. At the same time, I I think that there is a world where if you if you do think AI is an existential risk, having a board seat, having control, having votes over that does enable, especially if you have a board seat over every AI lab, you could actually do the thing where you say, "We're all going to slow down simultaneously." That's a lot easier to implement if you have 50% control over everything. Uh Tyler, what do you >> Yeah, but you can just do like the AI FDA, right? You don't need like actual equity. But okay, this is my kind of contrarian take, but this seems like extremely bullish, right? Because Bernie, you don't think of him as being this kind of classically capitalist person, >> but these are going to be the biggest. >> He's saying that the stocks underrated. >> Yeah. >> These are going to be the biggest because if all the stocks were going to zero, >> so big that this is going to be like disruptive to the economy. Sure. >> Like this seems like he's extremely AGI pill. >> It seems like it. Yeah. >> Yeah. It's like this seems like he's he's basically saying like, okay, the data center stuff is like probably not going to work out. I'm not gonna be able to ban these things. Yeah. >> Uh Mark in the chat says, "Mr. Sanders is your crazy uncle that your mom and dad use as a baby center babysitter when there are no other options." >> H interesting. >> You think that Bernie has been getting his AI takes from Jason Oppen? >> I I I'm not going there yet. We'll get there. But uh first off uh I mean the big news today, Anthropic is uh confidentially filed for IPO. They should be out. SpaceX is going public. Google's public. Open AAI. There's rumors of of of an IPO. >> Yeah. And that's what that's what gets really crazy here, right? Because is is Google's a leading lab >> for sure. >> Does Bernie Bernie want? >> But then Yeah. But then is is Salesforce an AI company? >> Is Meta >> is Meta? Yeah, Meta. I mean Mark Mark would be we were talking about this earlier. Mark would quickly be like me trying to build personal super I'm not an AI company take half my company. >> I'm not an AI lab. >> I'm just doing some experiment. >> I got these GPUs to 99 that we're creating is just recommendations. >> It's going to take half of all birds. >> Oh no. Uh we talked about the dueling narrative. So, Enthropic is IPOing or or they have they have confidentially submitted a draft S1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission pending completion of SEC review. This gives us the option to pursue an initial public offering. Uh there's a race between uh SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic to get out, hoover up those public market dollars. Um meanwhile, it was so over for the all the SAS companies, but uh the SAS apocalypse might be cancelled. That's what we're seeing. A lot of companies are up. Some of them are up on anthropic holdings, but others are just up on continued traction in their >> Mark's got to be feeling good. He invested 50 million into Anthropic, I think, in 2023 or 2024. >> Cheeky 100x. >> Very cheeky. Very cheeky. He's feeling good. He's now going to deploy€2 billion euros into France. >> Love it. Our strong team, 1800 employees in France. >> Wow. uh more committed than ever to driving invent innovation and agentic growth across the country. And I love this new meta. I think this picture is this is the new >> this is the new vibriel meta. So anytime you do a business transaction, >> snap a selfie with your business partner. Post it. You don't need to make a video with a bunch of, you know, sort of uh videos throughout history of of, you know, hypersonic jets and rockets and things like that. Um, just take a selfie, post it, you're good to go. Much more efficient. >> Okay. So, >> and I'm dropping after this partnership. I just got to say I'm we're cancelling my personal beef with uh France. >> Oh, that's great. >> This is a fantastic progress. >> Benny off won you over >> and uh yeah, if if they have Ben off's full faith, they have my full faith. And uh already this €2 billion I think is significantly more than their uh their the previous investment that they announced that created the original beef. >> Yeah. Yeah. Beef squash. It's good to see. Good to see. Well, uh Ben off gave some more context on Salesforce's progress the fiscal year 27 Q1 results. Uh record revenue 11.13 billion up 13% year-over-year. This is a very mature company still growing very quickly. Very good news. Uh operating cash flow of 6.7 billion. Agent Force crossed 1 billion uh ARR or yeah ARR. Uh combined with data 360 and Informatica now at 3.4 billion in AI data ARR. >> We're not just talking about the here. >> We're not just talking about the agentic future. We're delivering it. The number one agentic CRM powering a shift to agentic enterprises at scale. The momentum is real. The future is unstoppable. Fire emoji. >> Uh anyway, let's go through uh what Brandon Gra uh summarized from Jensen Wong's uh Computex 2026 keynote. Uh Nvidia CEO made several announcements during his keynote speech at Computex, Taiwan's annual technology expo. I guess it's their CES, but more enterprise focused even. Uh he introduced the RTX Nvidia RTX Spark super chip an ARMbased chip for PCs designed to process AI workloads locally. He announced that the enterprise Vera Rubin CPU is now in full production. And he announced several foundation models, a world model, an openweight flagship AI model. Uh that seems like big news, openweight flagship AI model. We heard that he was investing billions of dollars in that, but I I think everyone's very interested to see where it benchmarks against the 55s, the what what is uh 48 now. Um and uh and the 35s from Google like the closed source models have been on the frontier and there's been the chart showing that the open- source models from China have been sort of decelerating or they're just uh they're they're growing more linearly than the uh than the American closed source models. So, is there a gap there? Where does Nvidia fit in with their openw weight model? That that's an interesting question. Um, and he also released a model specifically designed for humanoid robots. A lot of the attention from the keynote came is going to the RTX Spark, which is being viewed as Microsoft's attempt to create its own Apple Silicon moment, and Microsoft coordinated its announcements of its new Surface Laptop Ultra, which will be optimized for RTX Spark and will be released this fall. Uh, well, we can close with Will Manitis. He says, "I don't think any of you understand what is about to happen in the market. We are about to live through the craziest 5-year run in technoc capital history. God help us all. I pray that when the judgment comes, he can see all that we did to ensure efficient price discovery." He's bullish. >> He's looked extremely bullish recently, >> which I don't know if that's bullish or >> him being bullish. Bearish. If he's bearish, you should be bullish. Be bullish when other people are bearish. Be fearful when other people are greedy. Who knows? Do your own research, make your own decisions. Uh, Adam Faze also hired a sketch artist for a party. He said, "I'm so tired of how many experiences of my life have been now been taken over by phones and content." So, for my birthday party this year, I told my friends to leave their phones at home and had a sketch artist capture the night instead. I thought this is very, very cool. Wildly different. And like all of these can be printed or framed. I mean, I guess they're they're physical pieces of art, but they could also be uh replicated for the partygoers. Very very cool analog. Uh this is why vinyl records are at an all-time high. There's demand for both the content barbell slop and the artisal handcrafted sketch artists from Adam Faze. Very very cool. And we will see you >> tomorrow. Flashbang.