China, AI Immigration, Rare Earths & Chips, Tariffs, Markets | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner

Summary

• The dot-com lesson for AI: Gerstner, prepping his HBS 25th-reunion talk, ran the split-adjusted math — Amazon is up ~440X from its 2000 high and ~1,800X from the low, and the Nasdaq is still up 5X from the bubble peak. “We overestimated what it was going to do in the short term… but dramatically underestimated the long term” — and AI’s short term is already running faster than the internet’s ever did.
• Data walls are going up in hyper speed: Reddit sued Anthropic despite a deal, Anthropic cut Windsurf off its models, and Salesforce changed its ToS so you can query but not train on your own CRM and Slack data. Gerstner predicts enterprise apps will have to declare themselves “open data or closed data” — and challengers will declare open and steal customers. With OpenAI hitting 400B annual searches 8 years faster than Google, the TripAdvisor-in-Google’s-underbelly dynamic is replaying in fast-forward.
• China’s success is Darwinian, not Soviet: Beijing seeds 500–1,000 competitors per strategic industry at the provincial level and lets markets whittle them down — producing $130/car solid-state lidar vs Waymo’s $5,000, and 500+ EV startups vs a US handful. Corollary for investors: China deprioritizes market cap — BYD’s 30% price cut may have been state-encouraged, but Gurley says he has no proof — so betting on Chinese Mag-7-style $3T winners may misread “the objective function of what a win is.”
• The visa 180 is a self-inflicted wound: Rubio’s move to revoke visas of Chinese students “in critical fields” reverses Trump’s All-In promise to staple green cards to diplomas, at a moment when ~40–50% of top US AI researchers are of Chinese origin. Gurley warns of “a McCarthy-like perspective that could be very dangerous to our long-term competitiveness”; Gerstner: build the championship team — “we should not care where in the world the basketball player comes from.”
• Gerstner’s trade proposal ahead of the Trump–Xi call: rare earths for the deprecated Blackwell 30 — no HBM, no CoWoS, degraded for training but keeps China’s researchers and developers in CUDA, avoids accelerating Huawei, generates billions for the US and Nvidia, and buys years to stand up domestic rare-earth supply. The tail risk of the ban: if AGI is existential and China is locked out, “we just have to go take Taiwan.”
• Market call: land the plane or give back 10–15%. Nasdaq +20% off the lows makes sense if blended tariffs settle ~10–15% and the reconciliation bill passes (failure = a $4T tax increase); core PCE supports two Fed cuts in the back half, and 10-year hand-wringing ignores that yields have sat in a 4–5% range for two years. “Don’t take yourself out of the game” — but the proof is in the pudding.
• Governance lightning round: Gurley’s Delaware warning is landing — high-profile and private companies are reconsidering incorporation after evidence of 66x lawyer fee multipliers — and the ISS/Glass Lewis proxy duopoly (97% share, >80% foreign-owned) is an open incubation target: “reach out to us. We could help fund it.”

Deep dive

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