Oil Market Turbulence, Sundar's New Comp Package, TBPN Weather Report | Diet TBPN
9 Mar 2026 · 31 min
In this March 9‑10, 2026 podcast episode, the hosts dissect a cascade of timely topics. They begin with the geopolitical shock of the Strait of Hormuz blockade, describing how at least ten vessels have spoofed their AIS transponders to appear Chinese and how roughly 1,000 ships worth $25 billion of cargo are stranded. They quantify the crude price spike— five standard deviations above the 50‑day moving average, a once‑in‑9,500‑year event—and trace historic supply‑shock magnitudes (Hormuz, Iranian Revolution, Yom Kippur, Iraq‑Kuwait, Iran‑Iraq, Ukraine‑Russia). They link the oil surge to market volatility (VIX inversion), inflationary pressure, and a potential Fed rate‑hike dilemma. The conversation then pivots to the AI ecosystem: how oil price shocks affect data‑center construction, power costs, and component supply chains. They argue the direct impact on US AI compute is minimal (0.6 % of electricity from petroleum) but note indirect effects via diesel‑powered construction equipment and plastics, plus macro‑economic drag on financing for new data‑center capacity. A side‑track covers Germany’s nuclear phase‑out and its unexpected effect on fossil‑fuel generation and electricity prices. The hosts then discuss Sundar Pichai’s new compensation package— up to $692 million over three years, with performance units, Waymo and Wing stock components— and reflect on the end of the “Mag 7” outperformance narrative. A brief, comedic weather segment with Ben predicts an unlikely rainstorm in Los Angeles, sparking a mock‑argument about fake news. Later, they examine George Hotz’s “Tiny Corp” AI‑hardware venture, outlining its capital structure, power costs, and revenue model, and conclude that while oil shocks won’t cripple AI growth, higher inflation could raise financing costs for massive data‑center builds. Finally, they touch on Four Loko’s potential sale, describing its historic high‑caffeine, high‑alcohol formulation and regulatory issues. Throughout, the tone oscillates between analytical, conversational, and satirical, with occasional humor and pop‑culture references.
Chapters
Of course, oil is— it's gushing all over the timeline, all over the Financial Times, all over the Wall Street Journal. Let's go through the timeline and see how people are processing the news of the Strait of Hormuz and the oil price spikes.
We— Fox News this morning. Yes. They were saying just basically their advice to the captains was to man up and just send it.
Yeah, send it. That seems crazy.
Effectively, I'll read the—
please stay safe.
I'll read the actual quote. A guy, Brian, said, if you want to diminish the Iranian threat, if you want to make sure this ends with complete capitulation, show some guts and go through that strait.
That seems very, very risky right now. Stay safe out there if you are on a shipping vessel. There are some crazy twists happening. So apparently ships in the Gulf are declaring themselves as Chinese vessels to dodge attack. At least 10 vessels have changed transponder messages in an apparent attempt to avoid becoming targets. Clutch of vessels trapped in the Gulf under enemy fire are adopting a tried and tested ruse to avoid attacks. They're changing flags, using transponders to declare themselves to be Chinese. There's always been a very odd tug of war between how ships identify themselves because often for tax reasons, they're bought in one country, operated by individuals from another company, but they fly a different flag to be able to go from one place to another. And it's all based on like the port systems. I don't fully understand it, but it is very interesting. At least 10 ships over the past week have altered their destination signal to read Chinese owner, all Chinese crew, or Chinese crew on board. About 1,000 ships are currently shut inside the Gulf and its immediate surroundings with a cumulative value of $25 billion.
And I don't know if you've seen some of the maps that show the strait where it looks like nothing is actually moving through.
Yeah.
I think in actuality, a number of the ships are actually turning off their transponders. Oh, so you can't see the movement. Yeah, because they're basically moving a little bit, going through the Strait and then turning back home.
I wrote about what oil— what oil prices mean for the AI buildout and data centers. It's just sort of interesting to dig into the deeper supply chain of artificial intelligence. But there are some posts that we should go through around the oil story. So crude oil is 5 standard deviations above its 50-day moving average. Statistically speaking, this occurs every 9,500 years. So the last time would have been about 6,000 years before Moses parted the Red Sea. Imagine what that did to shipping in the area. Fanciful.
Pull up this clip from Landman.
I haven't seen Landman. Have you watched it? Is it good? Let's, uh, you want oil to live above 60 but below 90.
And don't get me wrong, we're still printing money at 90, but gas gets up over $3.50 a gallon, it starts to pinch. It's $100. Every product in America has to readjust its price. $78 a barrel, that's about perfect. You know, it brings enough profit to keep exploring, but it don't sting as much at the pump. Unless of course you're in California. I mean, they tax the shit out of it out there. It could be $45 a barrel and it's still $4 a pump. I don't know how those son of a bitches do it out there.
It's movie day.
2020. TV PN again. A barrel of oil was worthless. This place became a ghost town. And nobody's immune. Kids have to quit college. Trucks get sold or repoed.
How old were you when you discovered that gas is really expensive in California? Not just because there's a lot of demand for it.
I mean, I discovered it when I was filling up in Montana and it was like $2 a gallon and it's like $5 a gallon here. That was pretty wild. The first major gas price shock that I noticed was Hurricane Katrina. In my life. I think it was in high school. Because I was too young—
I was talking about just the fact, realizing that it's so expensive because of the taxes that California puts on it.
Yeah, because it's nice to drive around here. Put the top down, the weather's good, so they're like, yeah, you're gonna pay. You're gonna pay more for the joys of driving an internal combustion engine car. Now, the price in California is aggressive. I don't know the structure of the prices. Is it percentage-based or fixed? Because that affects how much the price will move based on oil price shocks. Because if the price per barrel doubles, but the tax is flat, you don't feel it as much here as you do other places.
I'm pulling it up, but you can run through this.
The largest supply shock by a factor of 4, so the Hormuz blockade, which is current, 20 million barrels were lost in supply. The Iranian Revolution in 1978 was 5.6 million. The Yom Kippur War embargoes in '73 was 4.4. The Iraq-Kuwait War was 4.3 in 1990. The Iran-Iraq War in 1980 was 4.0. And then the Ukraine-Russia invasion in 2022, which is the last time that oil spiked over $100 a barrel, was 1 to 3. So an absolutely huge supply shock, and I'm sure it will have a lot of implications all over the economy. With triple-digit prices, here's what's going to happen now, says Policy Tensor. Markets will scream when they open tomorrow. VIX will surge to levels beyond what we saw in April. The sell-off will continue for some time as intermediaries shed risk. And the markets are red. They have been screaming today. The VIX futures curve already has inverted, bid up by dealers looking for insurance. This predicts a massive sell-off. The pressure on this captured White House now beings in earnest. That's oddly written. Anyone can tell them that if this persists for very long, it will destroy the Trump presidency and gut the GOP for a generation. The controlling factor here, as I have told you over and over again, is that the United States does not have the military means to reopen Hormuz. There's no military solution in sight. This means that not only does Iran have the strategic upper hand now, it means that Iran enjoys the unambiguous strategic advantage. All they need to do is keep the thing closed until he capitulates. I put my neck out far to call this in advance, and someone told him yesterday I was in the minority, perhaps even a minority of one. No longer. I was correct. Just calling a shot. The blob heads and scribes were incorrect in their assessment of the strategic situation, and now markets will price to reflect reality. We briefly touched on Scott Sumner's blog post on Substack at the end of Thursday's show, maybe Friday's show. We didn't get a chance to read it. I actually read through it earlier today. And it's pretty interesting. It basically makes the case, you know, it has a very controversial kind of freak out. And the thought is that like he's doom posting, maybe it's about AI, maybe it's about this particular conflict. He is more just reflecting on this dynamic between when the market freaks out, it acts as a moderating effect to policy. And so, he gives a number of examples around like tariffs.
Or more specifically, the admin.
Yeah, yeah. Like the tariffs caused this massive circuit breaker, 5% sell-off in the market. And then that was internalized and very quickly adjusted. And there were a whole bunch of different carve-outs to sort of like create soft landings. And so, he's actually— what he's getting at is that after the fact, a lot of people say, look, you didn't need to freak out because the taco happened. Trump always chickens out. The actual proposed policy effect didn't go into effect. And his point is that, well, it's precisely because people freaked out that it didn't go into effect. So freaking out is good in Scott Sumner's mind, at least. Anyway, I love this.
Yeah, we have a solution.
We have a solution. If you're feeling the pain at the pump, Pivot and get a horse. At oil at $110, the urban horse is the only option. Pulling up to the gas station on a horse is truly elite. I do want to know what's the TCO on a horse with the food and the stables versus, you know, just keeping a— what is that, a Ford Taurus in your— I don't know, that's something else. Yeah, in your garage. The horse really mogs at the gas station in particular, right? 'cause it's just making everyone feel so stupid. Yeah, we got to go back. One horsepower is all you need. Nick Carter says, seeing a lot of non-process trusting panic-ens on the TL. And then he followed up by saying, that's what I thought because the oil prices spiked up and then they fell down and we did not get $120 a barrel oil. We got exactly $100, which was still—
It's not like it's way, way, way too early to celebrate or anything.
Yeah, exactly. Unreal numbers about Germany's nuclear power generation. So if you scroll down, look at this curve. This is truly the, the, the bell curve meme or something like that. JP Morgan estimates that had Germany not phased out nuclear power, the country would have generated 50% less electricity from fossil fuels and 84% less electricity from natural gas in 2024. Electricity prices in Germany would have been around 25% lower, and the country would have imported half as much electricity. And just complete rise and fall of nuclear power generation in Germany. One of the craziest graphs. You don't see graphs like that very often in new technologies. Typically, you see S-curves or you see exponentials. No one considers the models get better and then they get dumber. That's certainly the funniest outcome. Goldman Sachs sent a note to investors saying if oil prices increase by $10 and remain elevated for 3 months, US year-over-year headline CPI inflation would likely rise from 2.4% in January to 3% in May. Those are small numbers, but we're looking at an oil price increase of maybe $30, $40 over the baseline, potentially higher. We don't know where oil is going to land. And so you have this weird tug of war right now with the Fed, where if oil prices go up, inflation goes up, the Fed has a mandate to curb inflation. That means higher interest rates at a time when the labor market is shedding jobs. You would expect a Fed rate cut, or a lot of people are optimistic about a rate cut. Trump certainly wants rate cuts. But if inflation is climbing, there's really no solution other than keeping rates higher or even raising them further. So a real jam in terms of federal monetary policy, Fed monetary policy. Here's Art Cashin at the opening bell. This is a historical video. When was this? This was a long time ago. Let's play this clip.
This may be it. First, let me start out. Morituri te, salutamus esse. And you know, that's the gladiator salute. We who are about to die salute you. So it's going to be a tough morning. This may be it.
We are about to die.
Salute you.
Insane, insane aura for CNBC really doesn't get enough credit for being so innovative in terms of broadcasting and entertainment. Really, some of the greatest clips.
I love one of the top comments. This is an old clip.
Yeah, obviously.
Obviously, brother.
480p, it's probably from the '90s. So Zero Hedge says, with oil at $111, total panic. And Memetic Sisyphus shares a clip that says, half of this site for the last week has sounded like this.
Producers are telling me there is breaking news. The Asian financial markets have just opened to a huge sell-off, and we're going to switch to that story right now. Good, I'm glad I'm here. Your thoughts, Tracy Jordan, on how this is going to impact Wall Street? Larry, I'm not an expert, but I do have a strong opinion.
New York as we know it will no longer exist tomorrow.
Producers are telling me there is Is that from 30 Rock?
That's so good. That's funny. Oil came way, came way in from its overnight highs, says Joe Weisenthal.
The quote post is Chris Paul hits a huge 3 to cut down the lead to 42.
Absolutely, absolutely brutal. My essay this morning was titled Why Is No One Talking About Oil? Of course, everyone is talking about oil. Oil discourse gushed onto the timeline this weekend. Crude prices spiked to nearly $120 a barrel as a broadening war in Iran threatens both transportation routes and production. The geopolitical and economic analyses are flowing. But what does this mean for AGI timelines? And a lot of people in the AI world are sort of tuning all of this out because they see recursive self-improvement, AGI, ASI, the buildout as more important. And I just wanted to sort of reality check the AI supply chain. To understand how does oil actually affect data center construction, AI production, token pricing? Like, is there any effect? My conclusion was that it's very moderate, but there are some interesting effects in the financial markets that are probably the bigger takeaway. But it's still interesting to hear about like, yes, oil actually is used in the production of AI, at least a little bit. Power has been at the forefront of the AI pushback. Like everyone's worried about these local energy prices, these electricity prices increasing near the data centers. But pain at the pump might become a bigger story as gasoline prices spike. And that has been pain at the pump. Oh, it's been the most tangible sign of inflation and moves so quickly. You know, one, one jitter in the economy.
It's a huge component. You know, people on the coast, people in tech don't have a good sense for this, right? If gas— gas for a lot of people, gas could quadruple and it wouldn't— they wouldn't really notice it.
No, no.
But if you actually look into the average American, how gasoline fits into their budget, it's a meaningful component of their monthly budget. So they feel it super intensely.
And variable.
Yeah. Cost.
There are so many different ways where a lot of Americans go on driving vacations. That obviously is directly impacted by gas prices. And then also just psychologically, there's something about filling up at the gas tank where you see the number ticking up and you're doing that on an every-week basis or so, that it's just so visceral. It's this thing that you have to stop and then go experience and watch the money flow out of your account in real time. It's very visual. It's very interactive.
Yeah, I remember I must have been probably 18 at this point where I would just go and I would— for a long time, I just put— I'd prepaid for a certain amount of gas.
Yeah, I got $20.
I got $20.
Let's see how much I can get.
And I felt like really, like I felt like the king of the castle.
Exactly.
I just put my card down and let it run up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How far it would go. But in AI circles, the discussion's been much more focused on RSI now is the new acronym that everyone's focusing on, not AGI. AGI's here. We know artificial general intelligence. We passed the Turing test, but can they recursively self-improve? Are they RSI? Are we in RSI now? Is it coming? Is this going to be a fast takeoff? Is this going to be a slow takeoff? Well, something's taken off. Dylan Patel said being in SF is like being in Wuhan right before the pandemic. Something is happening. It's going to hit everywhere, but so few people know it. So he's sort of echoing that something big is happening.
The irony is that George Hotz hitting the timeline to raise money makes me more bullish on acceleration. Yeah, right. Because if not, he's obviously not historically been a huge fan of venture capital.
Well, he's not raising from traditional VCs, he said. So he said, this is from Tiny Corp. If Tiny Corp was raising $20 million at $200 million valuation, who'd be interested? Business model is basically this: buy an $11.5 million building with 5 megawatts of power, link in our Discord, wait for AMD to launch the RDNA 5 96GB cards mid-2027. Preorder 3,000 cards. Hopefully we can negotiate for $2,500 each. Build 500 $20,000 tiny boxes with 6 of the cards in, in each box. Run all the Chinese LLMs. Make $600,000 per month revenue selling tokens on OpenRouter. Market depth is there. This is 1% of OpenRouter. Improvements to Tiny Grad yield revenue improvements. Due to how power is priced in Oregon, it's only like $50,000 for the electric bill before the 4 megawatts, before they price for peak, not usage. We get like 3c kilowatt-hour power, 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. We can also make $100,000 per month leasing co-location space to Comma. Building and cards paid off in 3 years max, investment made back. Low risk of being undercut since we're using consumer GPUs and running the cheapest colo you can believe. If someone chill wants in, I'd do it. I'm not gonna fake hype. I'm not gonna hype fake tech, but demand for tokens is gonna skyrocket. Look at the open Claw install numbers. With crazy good optimizations, we could potentially get 3x more from the machines, and we have electricity for 3x more machines, $5.4 revenue per month, then continue to scale from there, custom chips, et cetera. He's starting a NeoCloud, or he's starting a— yeah, he's going to be serving tokens. There is an immense amount of desire for this binary moment. This is the singular. This is AGI. This is ASI. The RSI is here. This thing is happening right now, and there's before and after, and everything has changed. And he just doesn't see it that way, I think. I think he sees it much more like the internet, the mobile phone, like other technologies that have been rolled out, electricity. Yes, there is like a before and after, but you can only really define the period by maybe a decade and you need a few decades to understand that moment. It's very hard to go back and, you know, there is like the iPhone moment and there is like, you know, the first launch of, I don't know, AOL. Like, I don't even know. I don't even know what the iPhone moment of the internet was just because it was sort of a slow rollout. It's clear that the AI industry continues to grow and continues to need more and more power and compute, as we've seen from George Hotz's new project. That means large data center campuses. But if they're not in random office buildings that George is picking up on the cheap, they're probably going to be built with construction equipment. So what does this mean? They don't just drop from the heavens. They require building, which requires oil. But how much oil? And is oil a serious— is a serious oil shock enough to impact the AI buildout in a meaningful way? Spoiler alert. Basically, no. Live GPU clusters in the United States do not use much oil directly. Only 0.6% of US electricity in 2024 came from petroleum. We're much, much more dependent on natural gas, something like 42% of US electricity is natural gas. And so America ramped up natural gas production significantly over the past two decades. A lot of that was in reaction to the wars in the Middle East. Hey, we need to be We need to be less dependent on foreign oil. We need to be energy independent. And so you have the fracking boom, the natural gas boom, and that's where a lot of our fossil fuels come from today, I believe. Data centers only consume a single-digit percent of US electricity. So you're looking at 0.6% of a few percent is like the actual impact. So the short-term impact of high oil prices should be very limited on AI. When you're talking about building new capacity, building new data centers, oil is a little bit more involved. So diesel powers trucks, trains, boats, barges, generators, pumps, compressors, excavators, and tons more construction equipment. Petroleum is also broadly used for plastics, polyurethane, and solvents that all work their way into the data center supply chain. The biggest problem is delaying already tight schedules because of narrowly available components going out of stock. The price of oil goes up, there's one marginal factory that can't produce one ingredient that goes into the rack and that slows things down. You have to wait a week while you find another supplier. That stuff can add up to just a little bit of a delay. This happened during COVID and the AI industry was already experiencing something similar with transformers. And so you don't want products getting stuck in transit or going outta stock. But the bigger problem and the one that people should be talking about, and I think you were debating with Dan Primack at Axios about this, is macroeconomic. So higher prices, higher oil prices lead to higher inflation. If the Fed has to raise rates to control inflation, capital formation for megaprojects gets a lot harder. So JLL has this estimate. The next 100 gigawatts of data center capacity could require about $870 billion of new debt financing. And so using this rough number, every extra 50 basis points of borrowing cost on $870 billion is $4.35 billion in annual interest expense.
Question right now is the hundreds of billions of dollars of sovereign AI projects in the Middle East, right? I think a lot of those people are going to be like, do we want to send, you know, billions of dollars of GPUs over there?
And then also the money coming here is another thing where you might want to spend it elsewhere. Have you been noticing that it's been hotter in Los Angeles?
I have.
Downtown Los Angeles is forecasted to approach 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday and Friday.
Which is why—
not good.
We're gonna do the weather. We have a new segment for you today. We're doing the weather on TVPN. We have our very own Ben.
We have Ben.
Hello guys, how are you?
We're doing great. Tell us about the weather.
What's happening?
Well, I want to start off by saying, as you can see, the weather today for the low of today is gonna be 75 degrees Fahrenheit up there, high of 100 degrees Fahrenheit down there. But there's something I actually wanted to point out that I saw, and I thought that was quite interesting. As you can see up here, there's a localized low pressure area up there and a localized high pressure area right down there, if you can see that.
Right, does that mean rain?
The issue with that's not normally an issue and not a cause for concern, and it's not very common for this time of the year. However, today, later in the afternoon, these two areas are going to collide and they're going to hit each other.
No, really?
And what that's going to cause is barometric pressure inversion. Okay, it might sound a little bit scary, but I guarantee there's no cause for concern. All that means is that hot air rushing in from the west is going to collide with that cold air rushing in from the east, and it's going to cause a bunch of turbulence in the sky, moving all the airwaves around and oscillations in the sky. However, I want to add one more point. A byproduct of this effect is that all that humidity that dropped after that hot air moved to the bottom is going to raise up because the water cycle, you know, evaporation stuff. It's going to raise up into the sky, into those clouds, going to cause big clouds in the sky, and eventually all that water is going to fall down onto the ground. We're going to have big rain later in the afternoon.
It's actually going to rain in LA.
Yeah, it might sound crazy, but I just want it for all you guys at home. I definitely try to step outside with a jacket today, maybe a hoodie, just in case. Don't try to be a big shot.
I'm fact-checking you right now, and the weather app says it's going to be sunny all week. Is this just complete fake news?
My team— those are the numbers my team gave me.
This is complete fake news. No, no, no, this is the fakest news I've ever heard.
All that—
literally the transatlantic current.
John, John, I'm— I don't trust your app. I trust the weather.
Apple says it's not gonna rain the entire month. There's zero chance of rain.
Did you look at the transatlantic current?
No, the transatlantic precipitation— zero inches today, that's pretty good. Just tomorrow, zero inches on Wednesday.
John, you're really gonna— you're really gonna trust it? You're really going to trust an application? Yeah, it was probably vibe coded yesterday over Ben, who's doing the weather.
How did he get here? What happened here?
Yeah. No, if you look right there, you can see a localized high pressure area. That's a low.
I think this is an overeager weatherman who's just looking for drama in the most boring weather market in America, which is Los Angeles.
I think, I think this is the most important story. Look at the world.
This is ridiculous.
You guys can look at the jet streams. They're coming in from the west.
I don't want to hear any more mumbo jumbo about jet streams.
Get out of here.
You're done.
Great work.
Thank you.
This is the future of the weather. You have a weatherman.
Yes.
Gets into a live altercation with one of the other hosts. And you talk about the wealth of Sundar Pichai. Pichai.
Sundar.
New pay deal worth up to $692 million.
Is this like 10 times what Tim Cook's making? No, it must be over time, right?
I mean, Cook's making around $70 million a year combined.
So if he works for 10 years, he makes what Sundar makes in 3? We've been advocating for this, so this is good. Yeah, no, no, we're in support.
Yeah, Google has increased Sundar's potential pay to $692 million over the next 3 years.
You know that Tim Cook dropped this in the Apple board members group chat as soon as it hit. He was just like, dude, this is a cool article. You should read this.
Drops it in. Just drops it.
Yeah, exactly.
The bulk of his package comes in performance units with a target value of $126 million split evenly into two tranches and could pay out as much as twice the target, a quarter billion, if it outperforms significantly or nothing if it lags behind.
Got to beat the S&P 100.
Pichai will receive Waymo stock with a target— stock in Waymo with a target value of $130 million and $45 million in Wing Aviation. That's their their drone delivery platform. Again, both can pay out up to 200% of the target.
If he delivers and the company does well, he should be richly rewarded. Stick a fork in it! Turn out the lights! Hasta la vista! Say it any way you'd like, the simple truth is the Mag7 trade is over. Finito! I love Barron's writing.
Dead.
The collective stock market outperformance of those 7 tech icons— Alphabet, Amazon.com, Apple, Meta Platforms, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Tesla— is now a thing of the past. The group may still do okay, and some of the individual stocks may even kill it, but the slam dunk, set it and forget it, run circles around the market era of the Mag 7 is gone with the wind. The actual argument was the growth-to-value narrative, the loss of cash flow as they increasingly invest in capex, the financials will look very different. There'll be margin compression, that type of thing. It's not an unreasonable take, but it is, it's just funny the way it's written. Sundar Pichai took over as CEO in August of 2015. He's going on 11 years in the seat. Google's market cap has increased almost sevenfold from half a trillion to $3.6 trillion, briefly topping $4 trillion in January. This surge has made the Indian-born, 53-year-old former McKinsey consultant a billionaire. He joined in 2004 and made his name developing the Chrome browser and leading the Android division. He had been criticized for being too slow to adopt AI at the search giant, allowing OpenAI to release the first hit product, ChatGPT, in late 2022, but has since bounced back, releasing cutting-edge AI models and integrating the technology into its dominant search engine. Yes, he's done very, very well on that front. Pichai has also navigated a duo of antitrust cases brought against Google's search and app store businesses, avoiding the worst-case scenario of forced breakup. A third lawsuit is pending against the advertising network. Pichai last got a stock award in December of 2022 worth $218 million, which was structured in the same way. His earnings are topped up by his personal security costs, which rose to $8.3 million in 2024. Earlier in the week, he sold 32,000 500 Class C shares at an average price of $303, worth roughly $10 million. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates that he has sold about $650 million in stock since becoming CEO. They still own, along with his wife, he owns 1.67 million shares of Google worth half a billion at the latest stock price. And Google's founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page still control the company through their ownership of supervoting Class B stock, which gives them 56% of decision-making power. Interesting. I think you got to give Miami—
Paper hands. Oh, he sold $650 million of stock.
No, no, no. He sold that, but he's— oh, and he only owns half a billion. So, yeah, he sold more.
Hopefully he put it all in—
Paper hands, but he's getting topped up. And he's diamond-handling the new— he's diamond-handling.
I know. I'm just saying, I'm just saying, looking at the stock chart since 2015 when he became CEO, it would have done pretty well just to not do anything and trust his own process. Hey, owner of Four Loko is exploring a sale of the storied alcohol brand, sources say. The parent company of Four Loko, the canned alcoholic beverage that became a college campus sensation in the late 2000s before being reformulated under regulatory pressure. Is exploring. I cannot believe they nerfed Four Loko. You can just imagine the trajectory of the United States if it hadn't been nerfed. And then straight downward. Really?
Yes. It was so bad. It was so— the people were having like heart attacks. Yes, it was terrible. So really, Four Loko was a 24-ounce can, so twice the size of a normal alcoholic.
Trey, the birthday boy, says it was amazing.
Amazing. Okay. The original formulation was twice as big as a normal can of Bud Light or Miller Lite or Coors Light, your normal beer, something that you would grab. And then instead of it being 3.2% alcohol or 4.5% alcohol, it was like 10% alcohol. It was the strength of like wine almost. And so a single Four Loko was like 4 or 5 beers in one can. And then they also added like 200 milligrams of caffeine. You would become incredibly intoxicated and inebriated, but then also incredibly stimulated from all the caffeine. And that spelled doom for many people. People would be very high-functioning, but completely inebriated and discombobulated. And so they would get into all sorts of trouble.
The discombobulator.
It was the discombobulator. It was also wildly illegal from an FDA perspective. You can't mix alcohol and caffeine in a single product. That's just a rule.
They're looking to, uh, and potentially will capture somewhere around $400 million on the sale, the brand value.
So people— it's hilarious that they're working with JPMorgan on this. That's wild.
Here's what the CMO had to say. For over a decade, our sales have been the leading— have been leading the flavored malted beverage market by embracing bold innovation, unconventional marketing, and a risk-taking attitude that delivers results year after year. I think that's a good place to call it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Goodbye.
Cheers.
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