Bezos' Prometheus Raises $12B, America Inc. Moves to Texas, Trucking Rebounds | Diet TBPN

Bezos is getting very serious about the AI game. $12 billion raised for Prometheus. It's just been 6 months since he emerged from stealth with $6.2 billion in funding. The industrial AI startup, as they're calling it, raised another $12 billion in Series B. It's just 1,000 times bigger than a normal Series A and a Series B. Used to go from $6 million Series A, $12 million Series B. Now it's $6 billion Series A, $12 billion Series B. Serious dollars, but AI is expensive. The valuation, $41 billion. Back in November, there was very little disclosed about Prometheus. We wrote about it a little. There was some speculation on the time.

$41?

$41 billion. Bigger than— what's a $40 billion company?

And this is a business that is buying existing companies?

That's the thing.

We don't really know.

We don't really know, but it's a lot of money. Could be buying companies and trying to transform them.

Well, being able to raise that much capital to buy businesses with that little dilution is a pretty remarkable feat that pretty much only Jeff Bezos could pull off.

Yeah. So the Wall Street Journal has some more details and mostly it just gives you, takes you a little bit more inside the mind of Jeff Bezos and where he's thinking, like how he's thinking about the shape of the AI impact The headline is very clear. Bezos bats down AI job loss fears while launching new venture. New startup Prometheus seeks to build an artificial general engineer. AGE is the new buzzword. You thought we were at, we thought we were running out of them. We got AI, AGI, ASI, RSI, AIFDE, personal superintelligence, meta superintelligence, TBD, continual learning.

Standard Intelligence.

Yep.

Irregular Intelligence.

Not Standard, Ineffable Intelligence.

The Irregular Intelligence, the Irregular Super Intelligence Company.

Of the Dogpatch.

The Dogpatch.

Something like that. But artificial general engineer is the new phrase, the new term, and he wants it to be able to design and manufacture complex physical products. So Jeff Bezos expects artificial intelligence to create a labor shortage in the economy. Interesting. There's some correlation between liquid net worth and your projection—

And your optimism.

—of employment rate. Yeah. So he expects a labor shortage, rejecting fears that fast-evolving technology will put humans out of work as he launches a new venture aimed at making engineers more productive. The billionaire founder of Amazon.com— and don't forget Blue Origin— is co-leading a new AI business called Prometheus, which plans to build an artificial general engineer that can design and manufacture complex physical products such as a jet engine. He said in an interview that the company's goal is to, quote, empower engineers and make innovation easier and faster so smaller teams can do much bigger things on much shorter time cycles. That'd be good. It takes forever to build a jet engine. It takes forever to build a plane. We've talked to multiple founders that have been trying to build new plane designs for decades and haven't really been able to scale them up, although they've made incredible gains and traction and demos. Actually getting new planes on the runway safely approved has been far too long. If AI speeds it up by 10%, that's like years. It's crazy. The Amazon and Blue Origin co-founder joins a group of longtime technology leaders that have jumped into the AI fray. You got Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong, Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev, also Brian Chesky over at Airbnb. These folks are all building new companies around the AI boom, among others. Prometheus, which said it is valued at about $41 billion, has raised $12 billion from investors, including Bezos, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock. Went straight to the big banks. Yeah, like the invest— VCs are just like, yeah, well, yeah.

I mean, there's another world where doing 6 on $40 billion is just like your IPO. Totally.

Yeah, that is IPO numbers. That's, yeah, that's a crazy amount of money. Yeah, you gotta go to the banks for this. They've hired 150 people across San Francisco, London, and Zurich. Interesting. Despite Silicon Valley's enthusiasm for AI's promise, the broader population has become very wary, fearing widespread job losses. Some of the pessimism about AI among young people is the opposite of reality, Bezos said. And we've been seeing this in the jobs numbers, like the job, The economy is running hot. Inflation is high, but also unemployment is very low, lower than expected. We're adding a lot of jobs. AI will mean fewer workers are needed in jobs that exist today, but it will also create far more opportunities and increase productivity, he said. That's a very white-pilling statement. Bezos argued that if AI makes it cheaper, faster, and easier to invent things, employment will ultimately rise because even though you're shrinking the number of people needed by 10x, the technology will create more than 10x as many opportunities. And you certainly saw that with Amazon. The number of, you know, store workers in physical retail stores probably shrunk, but the number of entrepreneurs building products, selling them on Amazon, in and around the Amazon ecosystem, not just in the warehouse, but in the broader Amazon ecosystem, probably increased. And we certainly saw that in the broad job numbers in the United States. Like, the labor market has grown unequivocally since 1999. We've added jobs all over the place. As people have shifted around. There's going to be two-earner income households where one earner drops out of the labor pool because there's going to be so much productivity, he said. That's an interesting take. He's saying that there's going to be so much more productivity that some, some people will choose not to work. And of course, that won't necessarily show up in the unemployment rate because the unemployment rate only measures people that are actively looking for jobs. So you could have a world where the workforce is shrinking in terms of the number of people that have typical jobs. Is declining, but the unemployment rate is also very low because you have more single-earner households, one person working, making more than enough money to support the whole family. Sort of an older-school mindset, harkens back to, you know, the maybe apocryphal stories about the mid-20th century, but certainly an optimistic view nonetheless.

Yeah, it's notable, uh, NEET levels have been rising since 2021. That's not employed in education or training, not in employment. So that trend started well before the current AI paradigm. Yeah, but wouldn't be surprised if it continues, hopefully for the reasons that Bezos is talking about. I think there's going to be a lot of focus on his summer plans, John. Yeah, I think there's going to be more scrutiny than ever. You know, this is a guy that can hardly jet around the Mediterranean on a big boat without being photographed every single day. Sure. And this was prior to these back-to-back, you know, multibillion-dollar rounds. And so going into the summer, I think people are going to be paying extra attention, right? Is he doing back-to-back days at the beach club or is he keeping it to a 4-hour window on Saturday, locking back in? By Saturday night, getting a good night's sleep, spending his Sunday preparing for the coming week, right?

He does have a co-CEO. Maybe they've split it up. Most people would think co-CEO is like they're both involved in every decision. Maybe it's more of like he takes the winter and fall quarters, and the other co-CEO takes the summer and spring. Like, if you divide it up that way, no one's ever tried that with a co-CEO. Just like, you run the company for 6 months, then I run the company for 6 months. And you're completely off on vacation, maybe? Yeah, yeah.

The alternative is, you know, Bezos would say like Friday from 7 PM until 2 AM on Saturday, I'm not going to be super available, super online. And then also from 2 AM till around 11 AM, I'll be fully, fully offline. OK. Then there's about a 1-hour window on Saturday where you can take like a lunch break or whatever you need to do. But then from 1:00 PM until 2:00 AM Sunday, I'm gonna be offline again. But back, you know—

Maybe if you're co-CEOs, you should just do, I'm CEO of TBPN on the odd hours and you're on the even hours. And so if there's a big decision—

Is that the secret to nonstop productivity?

Interlace them, yeah. So, oh, it's 3:00 AM, call Jordy. Oh, it's 4:00 AM, call John. Co-CEOs working out. They held talks to raise a $100 billion fund. Which is a lot of money. We'll talk about SpaceX in a bit, but SpaceX is looking for $70 billion and it's a huge business with so much attention. This is an entirely new thing and they want to put $100 billion to work. But of course, Bezos has plenty of money to backstop it, anchor it, do whatever he needs, and he has massive connections. So the Wall Street Journal reported this and they said the goal was with that fund to acquire manufacturing businesses and deploy AI across their operations. And remember, we did that whole list of like, what could they actually buy for $100 billion? What would be a good buy? And there were some very interesting, like you could buy like Goodyear, for example, and work on tire manufacturing. And I think I was wrong in all my predictions, but it was an interesting exercise to just take a little tour of the American manufacturing industry.

But my read on it is some combination of like a foundation model that allows you to generate full product, full, full products, basically, like product specs, designs, et cetera, to high fidelity. And then something like a SendCutSend-style infrastructure where you can just make that product on the fly and get it delivered. And that is the moment we're in right now where on your computer you can make at least an image of anything you want in the entire world, but then there hasn't been that much of a speed-up on the other side, right? And so closing the loop there is gonna be Very, very cool.

This company Prometheus is bigger than AIG, the insurance company, bigger than Chipotle, bigger than CBRE, the real estate company.

Are you on companiesmarketcap.com, John?

I'm not, I'm on ChatGPT. Bigger than Baidu? Wow. That is, that is crazy.

John, do you think that they're going to be punished for their hubris and chained for eternity with a—

The nominal determinism of Prometheus is sort of crazy, right? Yeah.

But chained up for eternity, eagle comes, eats his liver every day.

Isn't Prometheus like the third time an AI company has done this? Because there was the Prometheus data center at Meta and then there was a company called Icarus too. Icarus, yeah, I got in trouble for that one 'cause I was talking to a New Yorker reporter about that and sort of overstepped a little bit 'cause I was like, they have a great team, I'm rooting for them, but not Prometheus.

So I think we need another company named Hercules, right? Because Hercules saves Prometheus Prometheus. He frees him from the chains. Okay. But then Hercules—

Is there a company called Hercules? That's a good company name. I like that one.

Yeah, that's for you in the chat.

I don't know. But yeah, so if raised, it would be the latest in a series of investors buying established companies and using AI to improve productivity and margins. We've seen a couple of these funds roll out, the AI roll-ups, AI modernization, private equity firms. Obviously, private equity firms themselves are doing this. But no one's come in with $100 billion. You're in a completely completely different tier from all the other companies that are doing this. AI's advances have paved the way for, quote, a multitude of golden ages, not just one, happening simultaneously, Bezos said. He said this is the best time to start a company. I love the optimism.

That is crazy. You can buy strategy, MicroStrategy, and Prometheus are roughly the same value, the same, as well as Coinbase.

MicroStrategy is in sort of a rough spot, right? Isn't Bitcoin down? No, it's a good—

it's— I mean, it's an interesting— it's an interesting bet, right? What do you want to— what do you want to buy? What do you want to own at $41 billion? Yeah. MicroStrategy's at $42 technically. Yeah.

You could buy Reddit. That's $33 billion. Anyway, the next story we got to talk about is gamers are rising up. Gamers are rising up. You heard that the government was trying to put gyms in airports. Well, the gamers had something to say. They're pushing back. Airport lounges. Are catering to gamers. The airport lounges where video games are more important than drinks. Travelers can kill time, play everything from Mario Kart to Minecraft before their flight. We got to do this. Get a little rust going next time we're flying.

Before we dive into this, has, has TSA gotten like better, more consistent?

I have a hot take on this. I think TSA might be goated.

I think they're pretty dialed. I think it's good. Out of the last maybe 30 flights. I have not waited more than 30 minutes in a security line. And that makes— commercial is obviously still—

torture. Torture. It's sort of a Promethean punishment.

Humiliation ritual. But that being said, being able to plan on a 30-minute security line makes commercial travel Pretty— Yeah.

I mean, it was the butt of every comedian's joke because it's so universal. Everyone's been through TSA. It's very slow. Take your shoes off. There's a million little places for comedy gold that's highly relatable.

Don't have to take your shoes off. Yeah, you don't. Don't have to even take your laptop out.

No, it's getting back. And there's like, I mean, I guess it's getting more surveillance-y because they take a photo of you like 17 times on the way through. You can refuse that though. You can? Yeah.

You can just say no? Nick does that. You can just say no.

You can say no, but then don't get my bags off.

Yeah, you can just say no. They don't. They used to about, I will say, about 2 years ago, they would tell you more frequently, like, it's optional. It's optional. Now they're just like, photo now. And you can read the text, and it says you can opt out.

OK, can you opt out of the whole thing? Is it all just like a high-agency test? You can just be like, actually, I just want to go around. I don't even want to go through the metal detector. And they're like, yeah, right this way, sir. No one's ever thought to break out of the Matrix, but you reached the final level. You reached based reality. Good job, continue.

No, but truly being able to plan on, it's gonna take me like 30 minutes to get through. You can like comfortably show up 45 minutes before your flight. It's very efficient. Yeah, reliable.

And make it every time.

Every time, every time. Which means that you're pushing it even more to the limit. Oh yeah. Oftentimes I will be getting through security and John will text and be like, just got my car, I'll be there, I'll be parking in 45 minutes. And I'm like, I thought I was cutting it a little bit close. But mandate of heaven, you always make it.

I always make it. And if you're not missing flights at least like 10% of the time, you're actually— you're not cutting it close enough. No. You have to be taking some level of risk, or else you're just wasting time.

No. Yes. No, because oftentimes—

Hey, you went to an investor, and you were like, your goal is to never invest in a company that goes down. Oh, you're a VC. But if you get a single zero in your portfolio, you can never invest ever again. Would you do that? No way. No way.

No way. I'm not engaging. No way.

So you're going to have some zeros in your portfolio. You're going to miss some flights. But on average, your DPI is going to be quite good, which is—

No, but the expected profit— Yeah, yeah. Comparing that—

This is where the argument goes. I can just have as much fun as the— at the airport, so I don't mind showing up 5 hours early.

No, no, but okay, if you miss your flight and then the next flight is like 3 hours, then like— Yes. It doesn't, it doesn't math out because like if you just get your flight 10 minutes or like a little bit earlier, then it'll like match. I think it makes sense.

So basically like, like let's say I fly once a week and I save an hour with my strategy. That's 50 hours a year and I only miss one flight. You're not saving an hour. I saved 3 hours.

And you're not, you're not like saving the time. I am. You were probably, you were probably at your, just like having another coffee at the hotel and or having a conversation that you could just have.

No, I was literally, before I go to the airport, I am literally locked in at the clock factory. Okay. I'm locked into the clock factory. I'm being the most productive I've ever been. And making clocks. I'm making clocks, clock by clock. And you think that that time's useless.

Well, okay, now you can be gaming at the airport.

Yeah, so I should get there. I should get— if I want to prestige on COD, I should get there maybe like 72 hours early.

Yeah, John, you're just like, yeah, I gotta get up at 2 AM this morning. Like, I got like a— I got a super early flight. They're like, oh, what time is your flight? Like 11 AM. 11 AM. Like, yeah.

Oh, is this a coincidence? GTA 6 dropped and you're going to the airport 10 hours early? Well, now you can because airport lounges are starting to cater to gamers. Gamers are the most important constituency. We're going to have a gamer president one day. The first thing that David Lee and Cassie Yang noticed when they popped into the new lounge in Terminal 1 at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Friday wasn't a robot bartender, which they have apparently. I believe Ben will be traveling through Minneapolis-St. Paul. We should give him a little gaming challenge, see if he can— See if he can get to prestige on COD before he hits his flight. It was something only parents in this digital device era could appreciate— unfettered access to their phones. Their kids, 8 and 12, were busy playing Mario Kart and Crash Bandicoot at the lounge's video game stations to commandeer their phones for some pre-flight screen time. The Portal Lounge is, by design, not your grandfather's airport lounge. Yes, there is a small buffet and bartenders, robot and real. That pour that lounge libation staple, an Old Fashioned. The focus is on entertainment. They're gaming. It's the latest concept from a husband and wife team on a mission to amp up airport downtime. Emma and Jordan Walbridge, with backgrounds in hotels and medical device sales respectively, opened their first airport video game lounge at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport in 2018 called Gameway. There are now 11 of them at airports across the country. And 2 more due to open this year. Portal in Minneapolis is the latest iteration of concept with a few more bells and whistles. They zeroed in on video games after regularly visiting lounges on business trips and finding them too staid. "I always felt like I was in a library," Emma says, with some guests slushing others and throwing— shushing others and throwing sides.

This picture makes me feel like I'm a television screen.

Oh, because they're looking at you like you're— With the control. You're the game. Yeah. Interesting.

I think this is going to be more successful than, like, the whole airport gyms movement. I think so. Like, every once in a while somebody will post online, why don't airports have gyms? There's been a few moments where it would have been nice to have a gym. But imagine a world where even just 5% of your flight had just gotten off of an hour on the treadmill. Yeah. And was getting pretty sweaty. Pretty brutal.

Pretty heavy. Pretty brutal. Some heavy breathing going on. I don't know, but it's also trucking season. The 4-year US trucking slump is officially over, says the Wall Street Journal. It's over at last. Truckers who held on through almost 4 years of slumping freight rates finally have something to celebrate. It feels like a breath of air for an industry that maybe felt like they were running out of air. Trucking executives are calling it an end to one of the longest freight downturns in carriers' memory. They say rates have risen to more sustainable levels after a period period of low earnings coupled with Trump administration crackdowns on immigrant drivers pushed many carriers out of the market. The Logistics Managers Index, a monthly survey of supply chain managers, showed transportation prices increased in May at the fastest rate for any metric in the report's 10-year history. So if you scroll down, yeah, that chart is crazy. Um, so good news for the truckers. Of course, this is going to push up, you know, prices and inflation potentially, but, uh, it is good to have a healthy trucking industry, a healthy dry van spot rate, which I'm sure you've been following intently. Dry van spot rates for the week of June were up 5,200 basis points. Let's go. 52% year over year, excluding fuel surcharges, according to a report. So the fuel prices get passed through, but the economy is doing well. And so prices for dry van spot rates are increasing. Uh, as he said, is, uh, stronger freight market over the last few months. The nationwide company is increasing its fleet of more than 10,500 trucks and expanding its pool of about 11,000 drivers.

What is driving this?

This has been a supply-driven freight recovery as opposed to a demand-driven freight recovery. Turnaround comes after 4 years in which carriers have been squeezed by a combination of too many trucks on the road and not enough loads. Drivers rushed into the industry during the pandemic. So there was a boom in online ordering, shipping, all the different things that happened during COVID Consumer demand drove freight rates to record highs. Rates plummeted in 2022, forcing hundreds of thousands of smaller carriers out of business. Many truckers held on even as costs for drivers, equipment, and insurance rose. The exodus accelerated over the past year, and trucking specialists say the industry has finally found an equilibrium where the supply of trucks is low enough to lift rates, which will of course bring more trucks into the market and rates will adjust, of course. But higher fuel prices due to the war have pushed up trucking companies' expenses, but operators are largely passing along those costs to their customers. Uh, we have some breaking news.

What's breaking news? Uh, Ty Morse says on Saturday we finished construction of set number 2. Set number 2. Uh, so Ty had built a set. Yes, for his interview with Elon Musk. Yes. It sounds like they built it in a place that they weren't— they were only able to occupy for like a week.

7 days. So they shifted. 1-hour notice. And that was on June 6th. This is gripping. This was a trending story on X. He says, for the past 3 months, I've been asking myself the simple question, what would Elon do? Elon would build the rocket and put it on the launch stand before he got approval. He would ask, what's the biggest bottleneck to achieving my mission? And then go about sub— systematically undoing the bottlenecks until he and his team had made the impossible happen. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. And so he has built yet another set that I think can last a full month, and hopefully he lands the interview. He's incredibly pumped up for this, and the meta-story of him building this set has done better than most podcasts. There's more views on—

John, I want to read the summary of the book about the story of Time Wars getting Elon on his podcast.

Like 7,500 people, 2 million people watched the video about the set. And so you do have this dynamic where the meta story is more interesting or it's by default more interesting because the interview hasn't actually happened. But there are plenty of Elon interviews at this point, like he does a lot of interviews, uh, that don't go super viral. Like he did this interview with Jamie Dimon, and I think that's fully recorded. I think you can just search it and watch it, but, uh, I don't know that that's something that like everyone in tech saw and everyone in tech talked about. But this is a story people are talking about, the Meta story, and people love to see bold moves. People love to see Tennessee building and all these crazy things and risk-taking and all of that is on display. And so, Ty Morse is getting a lot of attention. So, good luck to him. Godspeed, Ty. Texas is America's new center of gravity, says The Economist. Exxon's reincorporation— they were in Texas, they left Texas, they went back to Texas— is one more feather in the state's cowboy hat, says The Economist. This is a hilarious, hilarious song lyric. Just when I thought I got him to fall in love with Tennessee, I should should have known better than to take them back to Abilene, Abilene, Texas. They were singing about data centers in Ella Langley's Chosen Texas, a song that has ranked near the top of America's music charts throughout 2026. Some of those listens may be coming from policymakers elsewhere in the country. Much like Miss Langley, they are losing to Texas. On May 27th, ExxonMobil shareholders approved a plan to cut the oil giant's ties with New Jersey and reincorporate in Texas, where it has long had its its headquarters. It's not alone. According to CBRE, a property firm, at least 184 companies shifted their headquarters to Austin, Dallas, or Houston between 2020 and 2025, among them Tesla, a car company, and Caterpillar, a maker of construction equipment. Texas is steadily establishing itself as America's— America Inc.'s new center of gravity. No state receives more business investment or is adding more people to its population. From 2020 to 2025, it created roughly a fifth of all net new jobs in the country. Wow. In early 20— in the early 2020s, Texas was luring remote workers fleeing high taxes, exorbitant house prices, and bad policies in America's coastal metropolises while benefiting from the Biden administration subsidies for green energy and chipmaking facilities. Now the state's dominance in energy has made it a major beneficiary of the data center boom. Meanwhile, its technology and finance ecosystems have been deepening. This summer, it will ring its first standalone burst, the Texas Stock Exchange, joining outposts of the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ already operating in the state. Donald Trump has called the New York Stock Exchange's new branch an unbelievably bad thing for his hometown of New York, even if his social media venture was the first business to list on it. So that's a very funny thing, but he was obviously giving that in the context of like New York is defined by its exchanges, and in the context of just New York, the city, losing out to Texas, or New York State losing out to Texas in any way is bad for that state, I suppose. The state's appeal is to yuppies, to yuppies is growing with every stream of a country song. I've been listening to a lot of country songs. Joe Weisenthal plays in Country a country band. band, blues band.

People ask dream guest. Yeah. And I tell them dream performance. Oh yeah. Joe Wiesenthal acoustic set.

Ooh. Unplugged? Unplugged. Tiny desk. A tiny desk.

Tiny desk. What if we set him up with a slat wall set?

We gotta get Roger from Conde Nast. He can jam. Get a couple.

Yeah, but a little slat wall set. Yeah.

And he can just play. An SM7B podcast microphone on the guitar. That might be the trick. Might be the trick. To understand its ascendancy, start in Houston, heart of the Texan energy industry. Its oil and gas barons have been raking in profits as a result of the Iran War. But over the past years, the state has also become a hub for green energy. This year, it's expected to build 2/5 of all utility-scale solar in America, a technology for which its wide-open flatlands are ideal. Interesting. Anyway, leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpi.com and we will see you tomorrow for the SpaceX IPO. We're going to just be hanging out. We're hanging out. No guests.

We're going to have the stock price on the big board.

Be fun. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Throwing flashbang.