Zuckerberg's unprecedented spree of buying AI talent at massive pay packages is possible because unlike sports there is no free-agency limit in business, and because as a founder-controlled company Meta can make bets that public-market-accountable companies like Google or Apple cannot.

39:08conviction that he's willing to take a big bet. I think he's very willing to look at cost as a percentage of his market cap and to view risk as spending against a percentage of his market cap. Not everyone's capable of doing that. I think it may be the right math actually. >> Um in terms of you know how how big a bet he wants to make. Um but yeah, it's

39:30an what he has done here in the past three weeks is is an experiment that's never been tried before. But there's unlimited free agency in business unlike sports. And he just went and bought the, you know, 27 Yankees, you know, of AI. >> Yeah. I mean, and and I think your point is a great one. And listen, we're shareholders in Meta. We're shareholders in Open AI. I wouldn't be a shareholder

39:54in in in Meta if I didn't think, you know, in fact, I remember back in 22 when um you know, when we took our big position there and people said to me, "Oh, what are you what are you doing? this is a founder controlled company. He's never going to become more efficient. He's never going to do these things. I said the whole reason I want to be all in on this company is it's

40:12founder controlled. I think it is a massive advantage that he has today, right? And he's talking about risking 1% of his company, right? In order to reboot around AI, that seems to me to be a very very rational economic decision. And there's no and this is just a talent war. He's got to, you know, Llama 4 was not where it needed to be to compete heads up, but he has one advantage none

40:38of those other companies have. He has the world's biggest printing press shooting out billion dollar bills, right? He's not relying on the beneficence of venture capitalists. The guy has a business model that is generating the cash to fund all this. And so, he's leveraging that cash as a source of competitive advantage, which seems to me to make a lot of sense. I think it's going to make it very

41:01difficult and I'm, you know, that's why I was asking about the downstream implications, Bill. If you're a company that's trying to compete against that, I don't think many venture companies can compete against that on a on a durable long-term basis. >> Certainly not the real startups. >> Yeah. Yeah. I was having a discussion with a real AI startup uh founder this weekend and, you know, he was asking