Moonshots EP 193: Elon’s $1T Package, Apple’s $600B for Trump and How Small Startups Win

Summary

WTF episode with Peter Diamandis, Dave Blundin, Alex Wissner-Gross, plus guest founders Brian Elliot and Sid Pardes from Blitzy. Opens with Elon’s $1T Tesla pay package (20% of value created if Tesla reaches $8T market cap) and a Trump dinner where Tim Cook committed $600B to the US economy, Zuckerberg matched it on the spot, and Altman announced OpenAI expects to be the most capital-intensive company in history ($119B additional investment through 2029). Alex notes the $5-7T AI capex numbers that were laughed at 18 months ago are now entirely plausible. The panel debates post-scarcity economics — Alex frames the key question as “what remains scarce when energy and intelligence cost zero?” drawing Star Trek parallels (interstellar travel as the new scarcity). Dave highlights Merkor (Link Ventures portfolio company) reaching $10B valuation and $500M revenue run rate in just 2 years from a $30M seed, with 18-year-old founders, as evidence the founder age is dropping dramatically (from mid-30s a decade ago to 20-23 now). The second half features Blitzy, an enterprise-grade autonomous software development platform that ingests 100M+ lines of code and performs large-scale transformations (COBOL-to-Java migrations, multi-week autonomous coding runs). Founded when Brian and Sid vibe-coded a bakery’s $400K mobile app overnight during Harvard Business School. Their thesis: increase code quality at any cost because the other side of a pull request is human labor that is exponentially more expensive. They frame trillion-dollar AI investments as “free R&D” that makes their product better rather than competition that threatens them.

Key Segments

• [00:02-06:00] Elon’s $1T pay package; post-scarcity economics; what remains scarce when energy/intelligence hit zero
• [06:00-11:00] Trump dinner: Cook $600B, Zuck matches, Altman $119B; capex predictions that seemed insane 18 months ago now plausible
• [11:00-16:00] Merkor: $30M seed to $10B valuation in 2 years, $500M revenue; founder age dropping to 18-23
• [16:00-30:00] Blitzy deep dive: enterprise AI coding, COBOL/PL1 migrations, 100M+ LOC ingestion, multi-week autonomous runs; founding story

Notable Claims

• Elon’s Tesla pay: $1T if Tesla reaches $8T market cap (20% comp ratio, vs typical 5%)
• Trump dinner yielded $1.2T in US economy commitments from Cook + Zuckerberg alone
• OpenAI internally planning $119B additional investment through 2029
• Merkor: $30M seed to $10B valuation and $500M ARR in 2 years — unprecedented speed
• Average founding age of VC-backed unicorns has dropped from mid-30s to 20-23
• Blitzy: 12-hour to multi-week autonomous coding runs on enterprise codebases; built a bakery app overnight that was quoted at $400K