Sep 25, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ MrBeast Profit Illusion

Plus: Zuck’s Rivals Ring Bell, Giants Carve Germany

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

MrBeast sells the dream of endless growth, even as his balance sheet bleeds. The Winklevoss twins prove that in Silicon Valley, reputations can be rebuilt with enough patience and regulation. And OpenAI’s German play shows that empire-building now comes in the language of sovereignty.

INFLUENCERS

MrBeast’s Billion-View Empire Is Just a $110M Burn Pile

👀 What’s the move: Bloomberg reports Beast Industries lost more than $110M in 2024, its third straight year in the red. Videos cost $3–4M each while YouTube payouts barely cover a fraction, making the world’s biggest channel a money sink. The only thing keeping the lights on is Feastables, his chocolate brand, which drove half of last year’s $450M revenue.

💡 Why it’s not boring: MrBeast isn’t running a media company, he’s running a perpetual subsidy scheme. The videos aren’t profit centers but marketing spend, and the “attention arbitrage” only works if consumer goods scale faster than the production burn. Bloomberg’s numbers puncture the myth: strip out candy sales and the empire collapses under its own spectacle.

⛵ Key takeaway: MrBeast turned YouTube into Madison Avenue, but the ad budget is his own balance sheet.

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CRYPTO

The Twins Zuckerberg Erased Just Rang Nasdaq’s Bell

👀 What’s the move: The Winklevoss brothers went from Harvard stars to Silicon Valley punchlines after losing Facebook. With their settlement cash they bought into Bitcoin, endured years as “the guys who lost to Zuck,” and then doubled down where others refused, building Gemini as the first crypto exchange obsessed with compliance. A decade later, that discipline paid off with a Nasdaq debut that soared 60% on day one.

💡 Why it’s not boring: In an industry addicted to shortcuts, Gemini’s moat was regulation. While Mt. Gox lost billions and FTX imploded in fraud, Gemini won trust from regulators, institutions, and eventually Wall Street. Its advantage wasn’t being first, but being legitimate, the only trait that matters once crypto graduates into the financial mainstream.

⛵ Key takeaway: The Winklevosses proved in crypto the killer app wasn’t code, it was credibility.

MONOPOLY

SAP, OpenAI, Microsoft Carve Germany’s AI Fiefdom

👀 What’s the move: SAP, OpenAI, and Microsoft just inked a sovereign AI pact— OpenAI for Germany. Running on SAP’s Delos Cloud (backed by Microsoft Azure), it promises AI services that satisfy Germany’s strict sovereignty rules. Crucially, this is OpenAI’s first government partnership outside the US, and the first of its kind attempted by any AI giant globally.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t just enterprise service, it’s infrastructure geopolitics. SAP turns its sovereign cloud into a national moat, Microsoft cements Azure as the substrate, and OpenAI secures a government-sanctioned distribution channel. If Germany proves the model works, OpenAI won’t just be selling AI, it will have written the playbook for national AI adoption. That’s a repeatable template and the closest step yet to an AI empire with OpenAI at its core.

⛵ Key takeaway: This isn’t about one contract, it’s about exporting sovereignty as a service.

STARTUP SPOT

🧾 Feastables
“Creator-driven snack empire.”
MrBeast’s food brand selling chocolate, cookies, gummies with viral fan-powered retail growth.
→ Founded 2022 by Jimmy Donaldson + ex-RxBar CEO Jim Murray; hit $10M sales year one; now in Walmart & 7-Eleven, fuels half of Beast Industries’ $450M revenue (2024).

🪐 Telo
“Mini electric truck for cities.”
MT1 packs 5 seats + 5-ft bed into Mini-sized EV, optimized for urban utility.
→ Founded 2022 by Jason Marks, Forrest North, Yves Béhar; raised $20M Series A (Sep 2025) w/ Tesla co-founder Tarpenning + Marc Benioff; 12k preorders (~$600M).

🧠 Greptile
“AI code review with context.”
Understands full codebase to auto-review PRs, catch bugs, enforce standards.
→ YC W24; Series A $25M led by Benchmark; 1k+ teams incl. Brex, PostHog, Substack using it for faster, safer merges.

BAY AREA MEMOS

OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank are adding five new U.S. Stargate data centers, bringing capacity to nearly 7 gigawatts and moving ahead of schedule on their $500 billion goal.
Telo raised 20 million dollars to build the MT1, a compact electric pickup designed for cities with 350 miles of range.
Greptile raised $25M to expand its AI-powered code review platform, challenging rivals CodeRabbit and Graphite in the fast-growing code validation market.
Defense tech firm Auterion secures $130 million in a series B round to scale its AI-powered drone swarm software for governments.
Snowflake launched Snowflake for Startups to fund and support AI-focused early-stage companies with capital, cloud credits, and ecosystem access.

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