Good morning. It’s Jeremy here, filling in for Andrew, who is now on paternity leave for a bit. So you’ll see a rotating cast of Fortune tech journalists writing this newsletter for a few weeks.
Fortune Brainstorm Tech wrapped yesterday. Here were a few highlights from the final day of the conference:
Meanwhile, the tech world is talking about Oracle’s massive market gains, which have boosted Oracle founder, chairman, and chief technology officer Larry Ellison’s net worth, allowing him to surpass Elon Musk to claim the title of world’s richest man. Helping to drive Oracle’s stock was the announcement of a massive $300 billion deal with OpenAI to supply the AI company with data center capacity. (Now we know why OpenAI is telling investors it’s going to burn through $115 billion in cash by 2029.) Of course, the only reason Oracle is in this position is down to Ellison’s courting of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which has allowed his company, previously a distinct back-of-the-pack cloud company, to secure a massive stockpile of top-of-the-line Nvidia GPUs. More on Ellison’s soaring fortunes below.
Buy-now, pay-later fintech Klarna’s IPO went off, with the company’s shares gaining 15% on opening day. (Whether that “opening day pop” is a good thing is a debate for another day. It seems like the finance profs have mostly lost the argument, with bankers convincing companies that the money lost from underpricing the shares is worth its weight in marketing and investor buzz from the opening day jump.)
The MAGA wing of the Republican Party views AI companies with at best skepticism and at worst, downright disdain, seeing them as woke bastions of left wing coastal elitism, exemplars of Silicon Valley’s inordinate, insidious, and arbitrary power, and, in their quest to build AGI and “superintelligence,” guilty of a kind of idolatry (essentially trying to build God in a machine). You can watch Carlson press Altman on these points throughout the podcast, while Altman tries, often awkwardly, to parry the premise of Carlson’s questions, or assure Carlson that there’s really not as much ideological distance between them as Carlson seems to assume. It’s all slightly cringey (especially Carlson’s over-the-top facial expressions). But, despite the cringe factor, it is probably worth watching, if only to get a deeper sense of the reasons MAGA distrusts Silicon Valley in general and AI in particular.
Ok, now here’s more tech news.
—Jeremy Kahn
