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SG Scott Galloway Scott Galloway Professor of marketing at NYU Stern and author of bestselling books including The Four and The Algebra of Wealth.

“I would argue that data centers are the new empty vessel for income inequality, and that it's the worst managed brand in America. And they decided to literally pick the opposite of Michael Jordan, who was the best spokesperson in history. They picked Kevin O'Leary, who couldn't have been a worse spokesperson.”

Prof G Markets · Money & Markets · November 2026

“I would argue that data centers are the new empty vessel for income inequality, and that it's the worst managed brand in America. And they decided to literally pick the opposite of Michael Jordan, who was the best spokesperson in history. They picked Kevin O'Leary, who couldn't have been a worse spokesperson.” — Scott Galloway, Prof G Markets

Context

After noting that data centers are being rebranded as "compute campuses", Galloway argues voters are using data centers as an outlet for anger about wealth concentration, and takes a jab at the industry's choice of public face.

Transcript

Prof G Markets Around 38:41 into the episode
Scott Galloway

There you go. And so in an attempt to get around this, OpenAI is now rebranding data centers as compute campuses. That's my

Ed Elson

walking around with backpacks, scootering from class to class at their compute campuses.

Scott Galloway

Consumers figure it out pretty quickly. I don't think the rebranding is going to save them. But this, the data center thing, I would argue that data centers are the new empty vessel for income inequality and that it's the worst managed brand in America. And they decided to literally pick the opposite of Michael Jordan, who was the best spokesperson in history. They picked Kevin O'Leary, who couldn't have been a worse spokesperson. And people are upset about income inequality. People are upset by what they perceive is a correlation between the Epstein class and the tech brothers. Empty vessel, how they can vote on it is they vote on data centers and data centers have become and I and again, and I, our comments will fill up, Scott. You live next to a data center. The state with the most data centers is Virginia, and they like them. And so I was shocked. I mean, basically, what I thought was going to happen was that red states are going to benefit economically because they were going to say, all right, your market for supply for data centers for approval has shrunk, which means I can extract…

Ed Elson

That's it. I think that's the most important thing for the markets coming out of this election was that the people were asked how they feel about data centers, and it was basically just a giant, flat, resounding no. Only one of those measures got passed. Their Best failed. You had four moratoriums…

Scott Galloway

Then Their is governors more than Congress, right? It's that a lot of these governors ran against a very kind of anti-AI positioning. And now that they've been elected, they've got to, you know, at least dance to the music, if you will, or stay somewhat true. Chip and memory stocks. So the notes…

Ed Elson

that's the other thing. Who cares? You're fine. The stock market's up 8.5%. I mean, it's crisis on Wall Street as we go from 9% year-to-date returns to 8.5%. Like, I'm okay with that. That's fine.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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