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Start free trial →The Pomp Podcast · October 2026
Discussing Microsoft offering buyouts to a large share of its staff, he argues the real story is what the move implies about AI productivity and the coming political fight over labor versus capital.
…you'd have all those events going on. So I'm getting more positive because I'm looking through this and thinking the holiday season is about to take over. I'm not worried about a bubble. So I'm believing that over the next six months, even if it's mud, you're getting good entry points right here.
…a ton of these that we could go through. And you sit there and you say, what are people worried about? The fundamentals are telling you this is one of the greatest, you know, kind of economic booms for a capitalist society, probably in human history. And people are literally talking about bubbles.
…what do employees making 400,000 have to pay in taxes? 50%, 50 plus, depending on where they live. What does Microsoft pay on corporate taxes? There's an arbitrage here that's becoming a bigger story to the government because if Microsoft doesn't have to pay the same amount, you're losing receipts from this if people don't get jobs or if they end up taking less of a job, whatever the case is. I think this is becoming a labor versus capital story that is much, much bigger than people realize because we're just entering the productivity boom. That's the other message that Microsoft is saying is they believe they can do this buyout at five to six or six to seven times the last one. What is that saying about their expectations about what AI is going to enable their business to be like in the future?
Listen, I can talk about this from a personal perspective because we just went through this with our own public company. We have done two things, a massive cost-cutting exercise, compute costs down substantially. Compute costs literally, I've talked about publicly, $550,000 in March of 2026 per…
Yep.
Down now, 50%, give or take. My hope is, hope that we're actually going to be able to get completely off the frontier models, run everything on our own software and models and hardware. If we do that, 97% cost savings on a token for token processing. Massive cost savings. Going to all of our key…