Elon Musk drags Sam Altman and OpenAI into an Oakland courtroom over a $134 billion charity. Berkshire Hathaway holds its first annual meeting in 55 years without Warren Buffett at the helm. Spirit Airlines liquidates overnight, taking 17,000 jobs with it. Co-hosts Michael Nichols and Jason Thompson break down the strategy, finance, and management questions buried inside this week's biggest business stories.

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In the headlines, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta committed up to $700 billion of AI infrastructure capex for 2026, with all four CEOs telling Q1 calls they are still supply constrained. Microsoft alone is sitting on an $80 billion Azure backlog it cannot fill for lack of power. Gary Marcus calls the spending out of control. We compare hyperscaler economics to the dot com bubble and ask which foundation labs survive a price war.

Then the model wars. Moonshot's Kimi K2.6 ties GPT 5.5 on coding at 80% lower token cost. xAI shipped Grok 4.3 as a budget reasoning model. Is the frontier decoupling from the bulk market? Anthropic moved Claude security to public beta with CrowdStrike, Microsoft Security, Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne, Trend AI, and Wiz embedding Opus 4.7 into their platforms. Does this kill the AI native cybersecurity startup category before it gets funded?

We cover AI slop in peer reviewed research, where submission volume jumped 42% after ChatGPT. China blocked Meta's acquisition of Manus, signaling that AI capability flight is now a national concern. Trader Joe's faces a class action over caffeine content in its private label coffees.

In the firehose, David Silver closed a $1.1 billion seed for a new superintelligence lab, AWS launched managed agents in partnership with OpenAI, Japanese airports started a humanoid robot pilot, Jane Street paid $4.9 billion in employee comp, and a new LLM called Talkie was trained only on text published before 1931. Outside the courtroom, Musk called most cryptocurrencies scams and triggered a selloff.Then the three main topics. First, the OpenAI lawsuit. Musk claims Altman and Greg Brockman stole his charity by pivoting to for profit, but emails show Musk pushed the same structure when he expected to control it. xAI is now a direct competitor, and Musk admitted under oath that Grok has been distilling OpenAI outputs. Is this principled or $134 billion of founder's remorse?

Second, Berkshire Hathaway. The first annual meeting since 1970 without Buffett. Greg Abel walked into doubled profits, a record cash pile, and a stock trailing the S&P by more than 30 points since Buffett's retirement announcement. Abel told shareholders Berkshire would not do AI for the sake of AI. Can he carry the prior when so many holders believe Berkshire equals Buffett?

Third, Spirit Airlines. Liquidation began this morning, 17,000 jobs gone, and a $500 million Trump bailout died from creditor opposition. The Iran war doubled jet fuel prices and the ultra low cost carrier model could not survive it. This is Spirit's third bankruptcy since late 2024. Frontier and Avelo are forming a coalition to absorb the routes.

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro

0:48 Headlines: Big Tech's $700B AI Capex Bet

6:21 Frontier vs Budget LLMs, Kimi K2 and Grok 4.3

11:43 Claude Security Goes Public Beta

17:46 AI Slop and the Peer Review Crisis

24:16 China Blocks the Meta Manus AI Deal

30:59 Trader Joe's Caffeine Class Action

35:00 Firehose

52:00 Topic 1, Elon Musk vs OpenAI in Court

1:06:18 Topic 2, Berkshire Hathaway Without Warren Buffett

1:17:23 Topic 3, Spirit Airlines Liquidation

Papa Elon just slapped a $60 billion price tag on AI coding startup Cursor, and the structure of the deal is even wilder than the number. Is this a real acquisition or the cleverest IPO pump of the year? In Episode 8, Michael and Jason break down the SpaceX and Cursor deal, then sit down with their very first guest, strategy expert Scott Newton, to talk about what modern corporate strategy actually looks like in the age of AI.

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Connect with Scott Netwon https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottbnewton/

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https://open.spotify.com/artist/4092jgp59goD4nZIL2mQw5

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Scott Newton is a managing partner at Thinking Dimensions, a global strategy consulting firm, and has spent over 20 years advising boards, CEOs, and private equity on strategy and growth. He mentors founders at Techstars, leads the MBA consulting program at CIMBA, and holds board seats at Strategy Tools and Sirius. We dig into AI adoption inside the enterprise, why most corporates are stuck in pilot hell, the Kodak versus Fujifilm story, why European automakers are getting eaten alive by BYD and the Chinese EV wave, and what the board of directors needs to look like for a digital first company.

Before the interview, we run through the headlines: Google is investing $10 billion in Anthropic with another $30 billion to follow at a $380 billion valuation, AI journalism and the Wire by Atticus, DeepSeek V4 dropping at less than 15 percent of OpenAI compute cost, Siemens humanoid robots running an eight hour shift in the factory, and new MIT and Penn studies suggesting AI chatbots may be eroding cognitive ability. Then we ride through a Drinking from the Firehose rapid fire round covering Tim Cook stepping down at Apple, Intel earnings, Meta cutting 10 percent of headcount, Microsoft offering voluntary buyouts, GPT 5.5, Codex, Volkswagen AI agents in China, Microsoft's $18 billion Australia deal, and Anthropic and Amazon expanding their compute partnership.If you care about AI strategy, corporate governance, venture capital, business model disruption, or just want to understand where the money is actually moving in tech, this one is for you.Connect with us:Subscribe to Show Your Priors for weekly conversations on business, strategy, and the ideas shaping the world.

Clips Channel | https://youtube.com/@sypclips Spotify | https://open.spotify.com/show/7qz3G3XoOaSPpg2elfKmH3Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/showyourpriors/Threads | https://www.threads.com/@showyourpriorsTikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@showyourpriorsX - Michael Nichols | https://x.com/m_g_nicholsX | https://x.com/showyourpriorsSubstack | https://showyourpriors.substack.com/Reddit | https://www.reddit.com/r/ShowYourPriorsPodcastLinkedIn - Michael Nichols | https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-guy-nicholsLinkedIn - Jason Thompson | https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-thompson-607b0b54

00:00 Intro

00:28 Headlines: Google's $10B Bet on Anthropic

04:26 The Wire by Atticus and the Future of AI Journalism

09:15 DeepSeek V4: Open Source at 1 Percent of the Cost

14:55 Siemens Humanoid Robots Hit the Factory Floor

19:33 Are AI Chatbots Rotting Our Brains?

24:57 Drinking from the Firehose: Rapid Fire Headlines

33:30 Topic 1: Did SpaceX Really Buy Cursor for $60 Billion?

44:26 Topic 2: Scott Newton on Modern Strategy and AI

53:00 Kodak vs Fujifilm and the Trap of a Great Business Model

60:30 Why European Automakers Are Losing to BYD

66:00 Pilot Hell: Why Corporate AI Adoption Stalls

77:49 Education, Critical Thinking, and the End of Rote Learning

88:32 Fun Closer: TQM and the Chairman's Circle of Excellence

91:00 The Trait Every Leader Will Need

93:21 Closing Thoughts

Keywords:

AI, artificial intelligence, Elon Musk, SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Tim Cook, Meta, Intel, Anthropic, Cursor, Cursor AI, DeepSeek, GPT 5, Codex, Claude, Copilot, business strategy, corporate strategy, AI strategy, AI adoption, AI investment

Episode 7 of Show Your Priors takes on three heavyweights at the intersection of business, strategy, finance, and technology. The Stanford 2026 AI Index Report, the surprise return of SPACs with Chamath Palihapitiya, and what Joseph Stalin's five year plan can teach corporate leaders about the targets sitting on their desk right now.

We open with the headlines. Allbirds ditches its shoe business to become an AI compute company, and the stock rips 880 percent in a single day, while Michael Burry quietly loads up on beaten down SaaS names like Adobe, Veeva, and Autodesk. We talk vertical AI, thin wrappers, the next greater fool theory, and why the dot com bubble playbook is alive and well in the current AI hype cycle.

From there we cover the US Air Force's new War Matrix AI wargaming tool, a federal judge ruling that your ChatGPT history is closer to a postcard than a privileged legal conversation, a Fortune report on how much of software engineering and customer support AI can already do, and Elon Musk's latest universal basic income pitch. If AI drives massive layoffs, who exactly is buying the next iPhone?

The main topic is the 2026 Stanford AI Index Report. We dig into whether China is closing the gap on US AI supremacy, where private AI investment actually sits, why foreign AI researchers are not arriving at the rate they used to, the entry level squeeze hitting junior software engineers and customer support reps, global sentiment on AI as friend or enemy, generative AI adoption curves that outpace the internet, AI in medicine and digital twins, and where the data centers really are.

Then SPACs. Chamath just raised another 300 million dollars to do it all over again. We break down what a special purpose acquisition company actually is, why the structure rewards sponsors before retail investors, what Virgin Galactic's chart reveals about the entire model, and why the 2026 version looks a lot like the 2021 version with better PR. Social proof, survivorship bias, caveat emptor, and why index funds keep winning the boring way.

We close with Joseph Stalin and the Soviet five year plan. Why did top down targets lead to purges instead of productivity? And why does your annual corporate budget cycle rhyme with that same mechanism? Stretch targets, deterministic management, no excuses cultures, airbrushed CEOs, and the real reason big corporations struggle to innovate even when they have every dollar available to spend. If you have ever survived budget season, this one lands.

Show Your Priors is a weekly business, strategy, finance, marketing, management, and AI podcast hosted by Michael Nichols and Jason Thompson. A prior is the belief you bring before the argument starts. Every week we show you ours.

New episodes every week. Like, subscribe, and share with a friend who still argues for stretch targets.

00:00 Intro00:43 Headlines: Allbirds AI Pivot and Michael Burry Loads Up on SaaS05:13 War Matrix and AI in National Defense07:52 Federal Judge Rules ChatGPT Chats Are Not Privileged10:47 Fortune Report: How Much of Your Job Can AI Actually Do12:33 Elon Musk, UBI, and the AI Layoff Paradox18:59 Main Topic: Stanford 2026 AI Index Report41:10 SPACs Are Back: Chamath and the Special Purpose Playbook56:52 Joseph Stalin, the Five Year Plan, and Corporate Targets