The World’s Fastest Growing Defense Company, OpenAI’s Code Red, Google Strikes Back | Diet TBPN

Why is no one talking about Armin Popperger? He's the CEO of Rheinmetall. And they've been on an absolute tear. We're of course going to get to code red. We're going to talk about OpenAI, but we talk about OpenAI every day, basically. And I thought it'd be interesting to meet the CEO behind the world's fastest growing defense company. It's on the COVID of the business section of the Wall Street Journal. When I think high growth defense companies, I usually think and, or you know, Saranic or there's so many other companies that are growing very fast in defense tech. Rheinmetall's been on an absolute tear. They're now basically the same size as Lockheed Martin in General Dynamics. You can see the gun that they make in that picture. They make big massive cannons. They make artillery shells. They've been very important to the Ukraine war. So in the last three years, they've been on an absolute tear. They've gone from roughly 5 billion in market cap three years ago to, to $80 billion in market cap. We gotta ring the gong. We gotta warm up the gong.

Bring the gong.

80 billion market cap. They've been on a tear. But there's been basically three key drivers to the growth, to the story. First, they had a head start. This company they actually started over a century ago, 1889. Can you believe that? They spend their first 25 years basically just stacking up ammo for the German Empire. They. This obviously comes to a head in 1914 when World War I breaks out. @ the time, the company was one of the largest arms manufacturers. Like they were pretty big. After 25 years of just stockpiling ammo, growing, growing, growing as a defense company, World War I breaks out. But then after the war, they got a pivot. They got a pivot because the Treaty of Versailles forces them to switch to non military products. They say, hey, make some cars, make some trains. They get fixated on trains and also.

Typewriters. Not the first, not the first.

Dudes to get fixated on.

Trains. Happens to the best of.

Them. But they have a good run, they stay in business. They keep making trains, locomotives particularly. You know, they're making big stuff. And then 20 years later, it's the mid-30s, it's 1935 around there. They're starting to get back into weapons and ammo production. They can't stay away. Uh oh, who are they rearming? The Wehrmacht and World War II, obviously it's massive for production. They're printing, they're making lots of weapons. But by the end of the war their facilities have basically been destroyed by air raids. They need to rebuild the company from scratch. So after the second war they get banned from making weapons again until.

1950. Keeps.

Happening. And so they have to go back to making typewriters. They keep getting relegated to typewriters, you guys, no more.

Guns. That's.

Enough. You have to make some typewriters. And so they get back into defense tech. In the 50s, 60s, the German Armed Forces gets re established in 1980, 1956 and by 1979, Rheinmetall is making 120 millimeter guns that go on Leopard tanks that you've probably seen in that image roughly. And so there's lots of M and A, lots of diversification. Over the next few decades they expand into automotive and electronics. And that kind of brings us to the second act of the story, which is the Ukraine war. Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Rheinmetall was around 5.5 billion market cap then. And three days later, Olaf Scholz, the Chancellor of Germany, gives what's known as the Zeitenwende speech, which is literally translates to turning point. So he says this is a turning point. Europe has been invaded. We now have a foreign army on European soil. Even though Ukraine's not part of NATO, it feels like, you know, Russia is expanding. If they keep, if they just keep going in the same direction, they're eventually gonna be in our hometown. So we gotta do something about it. And what does he propose? He doesn't just say he is a big deal. He says, no, we're actually going to invest $100 billion like off balance sheet from some fund into defense tech. We're going to spend more money. And then of course there's a whole bunch of other initiatives that happen. There's the Trump negotiations around how much Europe should pay as a portion of GDP on defense. But basically it's this major turning point where Europe goes from spending sustainment levels, okay, we're going to spend this much every year to we are going to double or triple or exponentially grow are spending and it's all going to be net new so you can go and fight for it. And that's what Ryan Matal does. So revenue's grown 50% since 2022. They're guiding for sales of $58 billion in an operating margin of more than 20% by 2030. So they have like almost a level numbers of everything. It feels very similar where there's a, there's a structural change in the way their business is going to work. Same thing as Eli Lilly, same story. There's a couple of these stocks where there is now sort of a me trend and they are in position to capture a ton of value as long as they can execute. The big question is what winds up happening. But the third leg of the stool, the third important piece in this story is the current CEO, the man no one is talking about until today, Armin Papperger. He's been called a white haired Goliath. I love that.

Cnn. Can we pull up a.

Picture? Just randomly threw that in, popping.

Through. There he.

Is. There's some other photos. And last year he was targeted in an assassination plot by the.

Russians.

What? So the CNN reported that Russia had made a series of plans to assassinate several defense industry executives all across Europe who were supporting Ukraine's war efforts. Earlier this year, Armin Papperger opened a new factory that will allow his company to produce more of an essential caliber of artillery shell than the entire US defense industry combined. Rheinmetall is now the world's fastest growing large def and a key player in Europe's quest to rearm. Rheinmetall's stock is up 15x since Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, giving it a market cap of 80 billion, roughly on par with US rivals. So let's head over to red alert.

Territory. Gavin Baker, responding to the reporting says October, 1.4 trillion in spending commitments. November, rough vibes in December. Code Red. Life comes at you fast. It certainly has felt. It certainly has felt f ever since that fateful.

Podcast. Yes, that was a crazy turning.

Point. Although there was plenty of conversation prior to that around what the trajectory of OpenAI would actually look.

Like. The Code Red leak from the information reported, it was clearly some sort of all hands that Sam Altman was holding a town hall with the rest of the OpenAI team and he's kind of just saying lock in. That's what he should have said. Never say Code Red. You gotta say lock in, brothers, lock in. Say we're taking that hill. We're storming their fortress. We will grind Google Gemini team into paste and we will crush our enemies. We will see them driven before hospitals learned this.

Lesson. Yes. You say Code.

Red.

Yes. That meant there was a fire in the hospital and that you would probably want to figure out a way to get.

Out. Yes. I think if you're a CEO who's under incredible scrutiny, like you're Sam Altman and you have beat reporters at this point, who are texting your employees every single day, hey, what's going on? What's on the ground? Give me a quote. What.

Happened? Yeah. So to give people context, a beat reporter might reach out to. They will actually adopt the strategy of just trying to wear someone down, where they will send hundreds of messages to individual people on the team. Just over and over and over, relentless. Like email, cell phone, Instagram, DM, LinkedIn. Just like constantly, constantly, constantly flooding, hoping that at some point this person just says, like.

Fine. Like the name beat reporter comes from them trying to beat you down. That's the whole.

Point. Is that.

True? That's where it comes from. No.

Way. Are you messing with.

Me? Yeah, I'm messing with.

You. Okay, okay.

Okay. I have no idea. But I like the idea of it. It's like they just try and beat down your.

Employees. It's like.

That. They try and beat you down. There is some praise for OpenAI on the timeline, which we should get to from none other than Blake Robbins. Blake says OpenAI is operating on a different level. Play that sound cue, Jordie. The amount they have shipped in the past few weeks and months is incredible. Feels like we are witnessing a generational run. This was on October.

6Th. This was on October 6th. Sora was, I think, number one in the charts at that.

Point.

Yes. It's now.

21. Yes. The scattershot nature raises questions about the company's discipline and ability to support these disparate initiatives. Is OpenAI a frontier research lab, social network operator, a commerce engine, a hardware company? Because it's hard to do all of.

That. Well, if you go back to the BG2 interview, or just the BG interview. Sam. Sam's answer to the question of how are you going to support the 1.4 trillion of commitments? Was, we're automating science. And we're making and we're making and we're making, like, consumer electronics. And the reason that that to me, that was kind of like a concerning answer because Google has been doing those things for.

Years. Yeah. But they've earned the right because.

They have 25 years funding it with massive cash.

Flow. Yeah. Hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue and. And so much cash. I have a plan. If Sam Altman really wants to set the record straight. Everyone's saying Code Red. Oh, Code Red. It's so bad. He needs to come out with a statement. We're going to Baja Blast Gemini out of the App Store. If he says, our plan is to Baja Blast Gemini and anthropic into the minor leagues of AI research. I think he just wins completely. Let's actually play this clip from Ashley Vance.

Here. Yeah, so to speak to Gemini Theory specifically, it's a pretty good model and I think one thing we do is try to build consensus. The benchmarks only tell you so much. And just looking purely at the benchmarks, we actually felt quite confident. We have models internally that perform at the level of Gemini 3 and we're pretty confident that we will release them soon and we can release successor models that are even better. But yeah, again, the benchmarks only tell you so much. I think everyone probes the models in their own way. There is this math problem I like to give the.

Models. This is.

Funny. I think so far none of them has quite cracked it. Even the thinking models just tell us. Yeah, I'll wait for.

That. Is this like a secret math.

Problem? Oh, no, no, no. Well, if I announce it here, maybe it gets trained on.

It. It's going to get so.

Saturated. To speak to Gemini Theory specifically, it's a pretty good model and I.

Think. Let's read what Prinz is saying here. So, new interview with Mark Chen from OpenAI. Ashley Vance, the interviewer has apparently been spending a lot of time at OpenAI, including sitting in on meetings. He seems to be writing a book and he seems to think that OpenAI has made some huge advance in pre training. Pre training seems like this area where it seems like you've figured something out, you're excited about it, you think this is going to be a major advance. Mark doesn't spill the beans though. He says we think there's a lot of room in pre training. A lot of people say scaling dead is dead. We don't think so at all. Big question about what that means. Is that scaling rl, is that scaling dollars in? Is it? Is it? Oh yeah. If you, if you, if you invest $100 trillion, you can give it one more IQ point. It's like, yeah, that would be an example of like scaling holding, but like no one's going to make that trade.

Off. Okay, so what Sam said in the internal Slack memo is he was directing more employees to focus on improving features of ChatGPT, such as personalizing the chatbot for more than 800 million people. And again, we've seen them launch more functionality around this. I think the theory is that this could be a very like, make the product really, really sticky. Whether or not that's true generally is still unclear. It's certainly people have, have been very loyal to 4.0. Other key priorities covered by the code red include ImageGen, the image generating AI that allows users to create a variety of.

Photos. Fundamentally, what LLMs are doing, what these chatbots are doing is they're basically instantiating full web pages. They should be able to instantiate anything that you could possibly land on, whether it's a video, an image, a blog post with images embedded. Like, it should be able to, to like not just understand everything and give you the answer, but it should be able to contextualize that answer in any format. Should they say, hey, we're just going to use Nano Banana, which is like a crazy thing, but you know, there is a world where they say like, hey, yeah, like we're not going to focus on that. OpenAI has, has a strong hold on the consumer market to the point where if they swapped out the underlying model, they would still accrue tons of the value because people don't really know what model is. Which, like, I think the average user doesn't do it. But first, Tyler.

Has. Yeah, I mean, I think that especially makes sense in the context of images and video because they're just so expensive. Yeah, like, I think a Nano Banana Pro image is like, I think it's like 10.

Cents. No.

Way. Or okay, that might be per like a thousand or.

Something. But it's still, it's.

Still. They're really expensive. Videos are even more expensive. Videos are like really, really.

Expensive. Oh, architects are cooked. AI is coming for you. Prepare accordingly. And you see this and it's like this AI generated image. And it looks like remarkable, like.

Looks like a floor.

Plan. It looks like a floor plan. It looks amazing. Like it looks like. Okay, yeah, that's like, all the lines are straight, but you zoom in and it's like one of the funniest layouts ever because you realize that it's just, it's just one massive room with like three or four. Okay, so first off, okay, so you come in through the two car garage, then there's a powder room. So the mud room. So, so first off, there's this mud room, mudroom and laundry with two bathtubs in it. Scroll up to the right. Okay, yeah, right there. So why do you have two bathtubs next to your coat.

Closet? In the mud.

Room. In the mud room. And then, and also, like you can't go normally you come out of garage, you go straight into the mudroom. But here you have to go into the main area, which is the gallery hall. And then you go from there into there. And so scroll to the left a Little bit. So we can see.

The. What is the.

Coat? So then you go to the bathroom, there's a powder room and then.

There'S the coat bath and two.

Toilets. Why is there two toilets next to each other? Remember we were touring that facility and it had two coats, two bathrooms right next to each other with no line next to.

It? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were in the machine in the crazy office that had the machine. One of the bathrooms just had. It was like meant to be a private bathroom and it just had two toilets there. We were like, why the two.

Toilets? Yeah, so it's like so you come in through your main foyer, then there's a master bathroom, then there's a coat bathroom with two more toilets and then there's a huge walk in closet which isn't even directly attached to anything else. So you have to like go through this corridor to get to the rest. And so this master suite has three toilets. But then it gets better dude, it gets better. So go over to the top right hand side because this is so. Look at bedroom number two. It's just like whoa, off the center. Then bedroom number three is there. Then there's a Jack and Jill bath. Then scroll down with nothing. Wait, three, three sinks, three sinks, no toilets. And then there's another bathroom and then there's a third, third bathroom with a toilet. This is with ZF5.

Sinks. You might not like it John, but this is, this is architecture at its.

Best. Is AI going to help with architectural design? Of course. Is nanobanana going to randomly one shot the perfect floor plan? No. Also.

No. This is why OpenAI is encode red. In the two weeks since Gemini launch, chatgpt unique daily active users a 7 day average are down 6%. He is sharing to be clear, web traffic.

Data. Ah these, these traffic sources are so rough. I just feel like people use apps anyway. The part of the code red of course is that OpenAI Sora app has fallen out of the top 20 most downloaded apps in the United States on both the App Store and Google Play. Things are, things are falling. I actually opened up Sora today. I looked at it and there was some cool stuff happening. This is a little bit of a hot take. Like it was not. There was still a lot of slop which I would define as like the, you know, it's a POV video of a bus driver with a bunch of cats on the bus and it's like cute and funny or like, you know, it's a chipmunk water skiing. Like that type of stuff is.

That why you were late for the gym.

Today?

No. Do you think they have to explain the funding gap at this point or can we all just agree that maybe everyone got a little too.

Excited? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I feel like everyone's sort of repriced everything already with the Oracle round tripping and just this idea that some of the equity investments, they are circular, but it's basically just like a discount on their purchases. And, you know, these things probably aren't as binding as we think. And so I feel like the OpenAI is going to blow up the economy narrative. I feel like that was really oversold. It should be fading in my opinion, but I don't.

Know. Apparently ChatGPT is also down right now. I just tested it. It's not down for me, but the chat says it's.

Down. Time to Baja blast those servers back online, brother. It's time to rock. We're going to have to Baja blast some some funding into this company because apparently there's a $270 billion funding hole. Squaring the total, it leaves OpenAI in a $2702-070000-00000 funding hole. The math doesn't work. Maybe OpenAI should release to the world. Here's how the math can work because I haven't seen anyone state how this can actually work. Even if you get there, OpenAI does fall $207 billion short of the money it needs to continue funding its commitments. Right? So it has. In 2030, OpenAI free cash flow will be about 287 billion. That's like insane. If you're in a situation where you have $287 billion of free cash flow, like you can't raise more debt on that. I feel like math tends to work out when you go from a non profit to a $300 billion cash flow a year in 10 years, everything just forms in front of you. Like, yes, you are building the bridge as you're driving, but like that tends to happen when you're on that much of a tear. We should read through Ben Thompson's latest piece because he's provided a lot more context on Google, Nvidia and OpenAI with a post called Google, Nvidia and.

OpenAI. Would you look at.

That. You have Luke bored on Tatooine, called to adventure by a mysterious message born by R2D2 that he initially refuses, refusing refusal of the call. This is the classic hero's journey. A mentor in Obi Wan Kenobi leads him to the threshold of leaving Tatooine and faces tests and carries the battle station plans to the rebels. While preparing for the road back to the Death Star, he trusts the Force in his final test and returns transformed. And when you zoom out to the original trilogy, it's simply an expanded version of this of the story. This time, however, the ordeal is in the entire second movie. The Empire Strikes Back the heroes of the AI story over the last three years have been two companies, OpenAI and Nvidia. The first startup is called, with the release of ChatGPT, to be the next great consumer tech company. The other was best known as a gaming chip company characterized by boom and bust cycles, driven by their visionary and endlessly optimistic founder, transformed into the most essential infrastructure provider for the AI revolution. Over the last few weeks, however, both have entered the cave. They're in the cave, the cave of disillusionment, and are facing their greatest ordeal. The Google empire is very much striking back. So Google strikes back. The first Google blow was Gemini 3, which scored better than OpenAI's State of the art model on a host of benchmarks, even if actual real world usage was a bit more uneven. Gemini 3's biggest advantage is its sheer size and the vast amount of compute that went into creating it. This is notable because OpenAI has had difficulty creating the next generation of models beyond the GPT4 level of size and complexity. What has carried the company is a genuine breakthrough in reasoning that produces better results in many cases, but at the cost of time and money. Ben Thompson creates Aggregation Theory. This idea of like it's so important to aggregate demand in the modern Internet world. It's potentially the only thing you can do. You can't really monopolize supply. It's very hard to monopolize supply. But monopolizing demand is something that happens and the strength of habits is significant. Like we're watching this stuff every single day so we can take the time to okay, yeah, we should test out this other model, we should daily drive this app. But for a lot of people, if they have a map that's installed and they've been using it for a year, they're never.

Changing. The thing that I've heard come up multiple times is people that when Gemini 3 launched, they switched to Gemini 3 on desktop, but they stayed using ChatGPT on.

Mobile. And I mean to be completely transparent, the Gemini mobile app is really, really struggling to stay connected. There's something in the when you fire off a prompt, it doesn't save it locally and then cache that and then send it off, inference it and then come. Unless you keep the app open like it will. It will just give you like a server disconnected error. Like I've gotten like dozens of these and that's going to be a real. I think it should be something they should be. They should be able to fix in like a weekend. This is, I think, a broader point. The the naive approach to moats focuses on the cost of switching. In fact, however, the more important correlation to the strength of a moat is the number of unique purchasers to users. Okay, so you can see where this is going with like Nvidia has five buyers and ChatGPT has a billion buyers. I argued that you could map large tech companies across two spectrums. The degree of supplier differentiation from Facebook where the supplier is completely commoditized, just your friend on Facebook, to Microsoft and Apple where the suppliers are somewhat more controlled. Yeah, there's the what a chart. The more unique buyers of your product you have, the the stronger your moat. Because it's hard to. Because you have to convince each one of them. He started this article recounting the hero's journey in part to make the easy leap to the Empire Strikes Back. However, there is a personal angle as well. The hero of this site has been aggregation theory and the belief that controlling demand trumps everything else. Google was my ultimate protagonist. Moreover, I do believe in the innovation and velocity that comes from a founder led company like Nvidia. And I do still worry about Google's bureaucracy and disruption potential, making the company less nimble and aggressive than OpenAI. More than anything though, I believe in the market power and defensibility of 800 million users. Which is why I think ChatGPT still has a meaningful moat. At the same time, I understand why the market is freaking out about Google. Their structural advantage, their their structural advantages in everything from monetization to data to infrastructure to R and D is so substantial that you understand why. OpenAI's founding was motivated by the fear of Google winning AI. It's very easy to imagine an outcome where Google's inputs simply matter more than anything else. One of my most important theories is being put to the ultimate test, which perhaps is why I'm so frustrated. OpenAI's avoidance of advertising. Google is now my antagonist. Google has already done this once. Search was the ultimate example of a company winning an open market with nothing more than a better product. Aggregators win new markets by being better. The open question now is whether one that has already reached scale can be dethroned by the overwhelming application of resources Especially when its inherent advantages are diminished by refusing to adopt an aggregator's optimal business model. I really wonder who's going to take the leap first. Who's going to jump and put ads in the app first? It feels like Google should do.

It. Yeah, nobody's gonna be like what Google is putting ads in a product. Yeah, it won't be that.

Surprising. Apple AI chief John Giandrea is leaving the company. Amar Subramania from Microsoft is joined to lead AI under Craig Federighi. Aman brings a wealth of experience to Apple. He's quoting here. Having most recently served as CVP of AI at Microsoft and previously spent 16 years at Google where he was head of engineering for Google Gemini. This is bearing the lead. He joined Microsoft AI four months ago. Wow, what a crazy.

Turnaround. LinkedIn says six months ago, but who's.

Counting? That's pretty.

Fast. This makes sense considering Apple is partnering with Gemini and not a lot of people are going to be in a better position to help integrate that into Siri than.

Amar. Strange hire for a number of reasons, but it's hard to argue that the Apple job is a bad one. Anything is an important improvement at this point. So the bar is as low as it comes. I'm personally just excited to actually test drive what Gemini, how it works in Siri, how seamless that is. Because if it really is, just raise, press the button, get Gemini and it's linked up properly and it doesn't have timeouts and it gets back to you pretty quickly. That's going to be a pretty powerful experience. That's definitely going to cut down on ChatGPT app usage for iPhone users, I would.

Imagine. Underrated.

Threat. I would think so. I don't even know that Apple will benefit massively from this. It's not like they're going to sell twice as many iPhones. They're already so.

Big. I don't think it's necessarily like especially bullish for Apple. It's an underrated threat for.

OpenAI. I would think.

So. There's a lot of queries that all hit chatgpt on mobile that are not even like super economic, but just a lot of my usage around, hey, just trying to learn about something or research a product, et.

Cetera.

Yeah. And if that's just like again, one tap and you're in there, I.

Think I'm going to be using that a lot. Unless they really botch it. And I don't know how they're going to botch.

It. But yeah, yeah, I mean I.

Think the because Anything's.

Possible. You know, Apple's like, hold my.

Beer. They're going to be like every, for privacy reasons, every time you press the button you have to E sign and it's like, why are we doing.

That? Alfred Lynn comes in on the board of DoorDash buys. 100.

Million DoorDash Lynn Sanity. He's not done stewarding DoorDash. He's continuing to steward the company with 100 million dollar.

Buy. Let's pull up this clip from Huberman Lab. Dr. Jeffrey tells Huberman that LED lighting in buildings is a public health crisis that could be on par with the use of asbestos. Many building contractors slash designers are coming to him worried they're going to be sued and asking how to start fixing the issues. So we're lighting because I am.

Very concerned about the amount of short wavelength light that people are exposed to nowadays, especially.

Kids. The group of us that are shuffling around, some of them are saying this is an issue on the same level as asbestos. This is a public health issue. And it's big. LEDs came in and people won the Nobel Prize for this very rightly at the time because they save a lot of energy. The LED has got a big blue spike in it, although we tend not to see that. And that is even true of warm LEDs. And there is no red the light found in LEDs when we use them. Certainly when we use them on the retina. Looking at mice, we can watch the mitochondria gently go downhill. They're far less responsive. They, their membrane potentials are coming down. The mitochondria are not breathing very well. Watch that in real time under LED lighting. Under LED lighting at the same energy levels that we would find in a domestic or commercial.

Environment. This is why I want to rig the studio with candlescent incandescent.

Light. Incandescent. We're going back to.

Candles. Candle.

Max. Let's do.

Candlelight. How about a.

Heart? This is the.

Way. If we put a hearth so we have lights above our heads that I'm sure are leds killing us slowly and softly. If we put like somewhat a bonfire right above us, that'd be the way. And then we just. When the wood kind of burns out, the show's over. We just go until the.

Heart. That would be good. I like that. Leave us five stars on Apple.

Podcast. Thank you for hanging.

Out.

Goodbye. Have a great evening.