You can expect an amazing surprise guest, incredible giveaways, and 90 minutes of the best business entertainment podcast in Australia.

Secure your tickets here.

Yesterday we announced that we will be hosting our first (proper) live recording of the podcast in front of an audience on Thursday 10th September from 4.00 until 5.30 at The Commons in Cremorne, Melbourne.

Tickets are already 50% sold out!

Do not miss your chance to attend what will be an amazing event with guests, giveaways and guns (Adir’s biceps, that is).

Secure your ticket here before it is too late!

For our listeners based elsewhere who can’t make it to the show - we will be hosting events in other states in the coming months. Make sure you’re on this email list for further updates.

We’ve launched our most commonly requested feature - buy your tickets to a live recording of The Contrarians here. Details below:

• Thursday, September 10th from 4.00 to 5.30

• Hosted at The Commons, Cremorne in Melbourne

• Tickets are an absolute steal at $49 (rumour has it Adir wanted to charge 100x that…)

Buy your tickets now! Expecting this to sell out quickly…

The Contrarians catchup

• Adir went to DEF CON in Las Vegas, the world’s largest hacker conference. His verdict: “Once you call it InfoSec and start thinking about it bigger than ‘how is Mythos going to hack my software’, it’s a very fascinating area. Directors in Australia are deeply underprepared for this. It’s scary what ASIC has said relative to the level of sophistication.” A social engineering demo in real time showed a caller extract enough information from an unknowing company employee to theoretically run a ransomware attack, in a 20-minute phone call.

• Adir also went to San Francisco for the first time since COVID. Figma is the most prolific advertiser in the city, with 40 Figma ads for every one Canva ad. And every single billboard on Highway 101 has either “AI” or “API” on it. “If you’re in tech, you need to go to San Fran because number one, it will be invigorating. Number two, you see the future.”

• Adir rode in a Waymo in San Francisco after previously riding in a Zoox in Las Vegas. His verdict: “A Waymo kind of sucks after you’ve been in a Zoox. It’s much better than an Uber with a driver. But Zoox is a step up.”

• LinkedIn is throttling organic reach. Adir audited his top ten feed posts: six were “commented on by a connection” rather than posted directly by a connection. Zero of the top ten were an actual post from someone he follows. Adam: “LinkedIn’s always been one of the few bastions of organic reach. And having two out of ten paid is a pretty big change from LinkedIn.”

$13B, 100 employees, $600M ARR, and probably losing money

Swedish AI app builder Lovable is raising at a US$13B valuation. It has approximately 100 employees and around $600M in annualised recurring revenue. Its market cap per employee is roughly A$200M, compared to NVIDIA’s A$192M per employee and Coles’ A$270K. The business builds websites and apps via AI prompts, having swept past incumbent Wix.

Adir: “Lovable is a platform that basically lets you make websites. There was Wix, the Israeli business, that dominated this space. And then AI came along and said, “oh, workflow, that’s what we’re all about”. We’re just gonna go and build a native workflow simplification for websites. It’s even simpler than Wix.”

Adir: “Imagine a business that makes $400M of trailing twelve months revenue. They only have 100 employees. Those employees, what are they going to cost on average in cash? $300K a year? So almost nothing. And yet I doubt they’re profitable with $400M because of token costs. The gross profit on businesses built on top of someone else’s models are generally not amazing.”

Adir: “In the casino economy that we live in now, surely the Lovable way to grow is just: if they employ another hundred people, they’re just going to increase another $6B in market cap. Isn’t that the way the maths works? Can you reverse-engineer it?”

It’s not just software, and directors are not ready

Adir attended DEF CON and came away with a dramatically expanded view of information security risk. The conference featured villages dedicated to lock picking, physical security bypass, and social engineering. A live demo showed a caller extract full system architecture and authentication details from an unwitting corporate employee over a 20-minute phone call.

Adir: “Someone’s going to a soundproof booth. A thousand people are listening outside. They get a 1-800 number of a big company and they phone it up. Their job is: see how much information you can extract about all of the software systems and security systems that this company is using, and what the authentication process is. And over the course of a twenty minute phone call, this person basically handed over everything that you would need to be able to hack your way into this company, just through a social engineering interaction.”

Adir: “I told you, like it’s really terribly scarily easy. And no one’s thinking about, do I have a high frequency or low frequency RFID scanner at my door? That is not software.

Adir: “Directors should be able to think about information security in a strategic way. Like, what are the risks for us and why, and what are the different ways that people might get in at a high level? How can we ask the right questions to our CEO and our tech team, and maybe our people and culture team as well? None of it is going to make you bulletproof. If there’s a lock and you can access it, you can open it without a key or someone can. That’s just the reality of things.”

John Stensholt on TechBros, the Atlassian story

John Stensholt, journalist and co-author (with Perry Williams) of TechBros, the book chronicling the rise, fall, and falling out of Mike Cannon-Brooks and Scott Farquhar, joined the pod. The book debuted in the top 10 on Amazon Australia across all books within days of release. Key revelations from the conversation:

On why Mike beat Scott:

Adam: “Mike was the product guy, Scott was the tech guy. Generally the product guys tend to have longer longevity because you can replace the engineering talent. It’s pretty hard to replace that sort of product vision. Felt like Mike was probably the right one if there was going to be just one of them.”

John: “He’s more outgoing. He’s better at doing those investor calls and dealing with investors. He’s probably a bit more gregarious in that way. He thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room as well, and he probably is.”

On Scott’s personality and the power struggle:

John: “I’m not sure whether he was, for the want of a better phrase, Machiavellian enough. We really, really tried very hard to find people that liked Mike a lot. And it was hard to find people that liked them both equally. I don’t think that detracts from Mike’s acumen as a business leader and a business builder. But the crusading aspect he undertook in the climate and renewable energy space probably turned some people off. And he was on LinkedIn and Twitter a lot talking about that where Scott wasn’t.”

Adir: “I often look at business and think we’ve moved past this age of monarchy and aristocracy and it’s been replaced by corporations. The people that are at Atlassian that are the consigliere of Mike are never gonna get a job that is as good as this job ever again in their lives. So Mike abdicating simultaneously as Scott abdicated would have seemed inconceivable to the powerful people whose whole careers depended on Mike staying.”

John: “Absolutely, yeah. I think there’s no doubt that the board was encouraged to make sure that Mike stayed. And there was a lot of internal discourse about that. You know, we need him here, he’s the best leader that we have. Once Scott left, the message went around, we could all fly business class again.”

On what the book reveals about the internal culture:

Adir: “I feel like I might be the last defender of Mike that’s left. But I’ve had only positive interactions, limited but only positive. I kind of think it’s special in a way that a guy that is fundamentally a tech nerd can become this successful and this wealthy just by building a tech business. I find that endearing.”

Five other stories worth following:

1. Investors who put nearly $1.2 million into Selena Gomez’s mental health startup Wondermind are suing the company and founders, alleging they misrepresented infrastructure, leadership and partnerships for more than three years to secure funding.

2. AI startup Mirage spent about $50,000 on a 24-hour AI-generated newscast using Reuters stories, avatars and graphics. It drew 50,000 viewers on X, but high-profile errors highlighted lingering trust problems around automated news journalism.

3. As Adir foreshadowed, Las Vegas buffets have fallen from around 35 to just seven as casinos favour restaurants and food halls. Survivors increasingly operate as loss leaders, using cheap or extravagant all-you-can-eat spreads to keep gamblers onsite.

4. Reddit says improving video is a priority as TikTok, Reels and Shorts dominate attention. Its push toward algorithmic feeds reflects an ambition to reach far more users, even if that dilutes Reddit’s quirky culture.

5. Solo travel is booming, with Google searches hitting record highs and travellers valuing freedom, spontaneity and meeting new people. Younger people lead the trend, while demand is rising among older women and even couples.

Listen in this week for another special episode of the pod, as Adam joins three of Australia’s best VCs for a conversation covering everything:

• Rick Baker, CEO and Co-Founder of BlackBird

• Craig Blair, Chair of Investments and Co-Founder of Airtree

• Ian Gardiner, Investment Partner at Jelix Ventures and Co-Founder of Innovation Bay

All recorded live at the latest Innovation Bay conference on the Gold Coast.

Listen below, or wherever you get your pods!

The Contrarians catchup

• Adir is recording from Las Vegas where it’s 42 degrees Celsius. His headline stat: 15 of the 25 biggest hotels in the world are on the Vegas strip, and there are 150,000 hotel rooms on the strip alone. The $15 all-you-can-eat buffet has essentially disappeared, with prices up 400-500% in 25 years. He paid $16 USD for a 500ml bottle of water, not including the $10 delivery fee.

• Ben Carroll has kept Victoria’s WFH laws intact, with only cosmetic concessions. Adam: “This is a job-killing, hope-killing law that absolutely penalizes employees and penalises young Victorians.” Adir’s read on the politics: “My only conclusion is that he decided the politics of getting rid of this is bad for him to get reelected. And think about what that says, because when Ben Carroll says we’re not changing this, he’s saying you, the shoppy, you are gonna watch as other people get to work from home.”

• Victoria’s IBAC inquiry found members of the Andrews government engaged in serious misconduct in their dealings with union boss Peter Marshall. Adam paid tribute to the late Jane Garrett: “Very few people in the Labor Party ever stood up to the autocratic Andrews. Jane Garrett is one person who can hold her head up high for doing that. She lost her job, her livelihood, and eventually her life to cancer following the horrendous treatment by Andrews and his cronies.”

• Atlassian announced a blowout quarter, with 31% growth and $220M in profit, sending shares up almost 30% in overnight trading. The catch: forecast growth next year is just 13%. Adam: “They’ve basically done exactly what you told them to do two years ago. And the share market seems to love it.” Adir: “I wasn’t sure that Mike Cannon-Brooks, as a guy that doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and quintupled down on mega growth and no profits, was going to be able to flip this. But I think maybe he’s done it.”

Adir is finally a convert to autonomous vehicles

Adir rode in a Zoox, the fully autonomous vehicle built from the ground up without a steering wheel, pedals, or driver’s cabin, in Las Vegas. It seats four passengers facing each other in a curved pod, controlled entirely via app and touchpads. Zoox was founded by an Australian, Tim Kentley-Klay, backed by Blackbird, and later acquired by Amazon.

Adir: “I can honestly say to you, I just experienced the future. There is no doubt about that. I felt 100% safe. It did feel like a human driving it.”

Adir: “As fast as they can build these things, they should be rolling them out in every city. And yes, I am sold on autonomous cars. If these were rolled out everywhere and you could get one within five minutes of ordering one, there is no possibility that I would own a car. Zero possibility.”

Adam: “Think of the unlock for parents, single parents, parents who are working. How many hours can you save not taking kids to school, not taking kids to activities? It’s just an unbelievable time unlock.”

Jetstar charges for overhead bins

Jetstar announced it will give priority boarding only to customers with one underseat carry-on bag. If you want a second bag or normal-sized carry-on in the overhead locker, you pay a priority fee ranging from $25 to $52. The mainstream media and consumer advocates reacted with horror.

Adam: “You’ve got all these people who haven’t paid a cent more for them. These huge bags take 15 minutes longer to board a plane because everybody wants to shove their bag up the top. And these are the people who complain the loudest and are the biggest free riders who have the most to lose, because they’re the ones costing other people. What Jetstar is really smartly doing is saying you can have a bag, but you’re going to have to pay for the cost of your externality.”

Adam: “I congratulate Steph Tully and Jetstar for this. This is a brave call, but it is absolutely the right call for Jetstar travelers.”

Adir: “Let’s think of all the things that we could strip out in order to let the poorest person who could possibly fly be able to get on our plane. There are people that do not have luggage that goes in the overhead. This is not an unlimited buffet, it’s a la carte.”

The golden window for Canva is closed

Canva told investors that growth will drop to 20% in FY27, down from 49% in 2023, 45% in 2024, and 38% in FY26. The company blamed high AI inference costs for slowing its free tier rollout, meaning the top of funnel that converts free users to paid has essentially stalled. Co-founder Mel Perkins said they “decided to slow the rollout while we rebuilt the architecture.” Co-founder Cliff Obrecht said “we were too ambitious in our assumptions.”

Adam: “This is basically like telling someone you’ve got a terminal illness. This is horrific news. Not only for Canva, but also its employees who are seeing multi-million dollar paydays evaporate before their very eyes. It’s also catastrophic for a swathe of the Australian VC industry which is really dependent on Canva’s $60B valuation.”

Adir: “Canva exists because they made it easier to do nice things and beautiful things than the previous technology, which was basically Photoshop. And if you’re a workflow enhancement business, that’s what their whole business effectively was, then there is no simpler workflow than prompts in an AI. And as we’ve seen with Claude Design, it’s amazingly good.”

Adir: “Canva has to fight against these frontier models with unlimited money whilst effectively paying the AI costs to fight that war. That is a horrible place to be. They should have sold. They should be selling. I haven’t changed my view.”

Adam: “Their gold-plated razors are a non-starter and I’m competing against people giving away other gold-plated razors like OpenAI for free. They should have seen this a year ago and sold when they could.”

Adir: “Not only is their razor now costing as if it’s made of solid gold, not only is ChatGPT giving out solid gold razors as well, not only are like ten other companies giving out solid gold razors for free. But all of these other companies, the AI companies, it turns out their things are not razors at all. They’re a magic wand that can do a hundred and fifty million other things as well.”

On valuation:

Adir: “I think it might be one of the most expensive misses of a golden window. You know, it’s even cheaper to have been a good idea. And their ability to pay this money diminishes every day.”

Adam: “This could have been a $50B exit for Australia. It’s just such a tragic missed opportunity.”

H3: Five other stories worth following:

1. Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel spent heavily in Q2, cutting cash from $397B to $365.5B through Alphabet investment and share buybacks. Operating earnings rose 16%, offsetting weaker insurance performance across the conglomerate.

2. Portland startup HitchPiggy wants to turn spare car seats into a rideshare network, letting drivers post existing trips, choose passengers, and set contributions, while riders review vehicles, routes, timing, pickup points, and costs beforehand.

3. Environmental groups are challenging FCC approval of Reflect Orbital’s first space-mirror test, arguing regulators overlooked risks to wildlife, astronomy and eyesight. The 59-foot mirror would reflect sunlight across 3.1 miles of Earth after dark.

4. San Francisco startup Conduit pays participants $50–$55 for two-hour sessions wearing an electrode helmet while talking, reading and typing. The brain data will train a noninvasive neural headband designed to control AI using thoughts.

5. July was the hottest month recorded across the contiguous U.S., averaging 76.89°F, surpassing July 1936. NOAA said every state ranked in its warmest third, as heat domes and climate change intensified extreme temperatures nationwide.

Watch today’s special episode on YouTube as the guys cover the latest news:

• Canva’s growth rate has roughly halved in three years, and Adam and Adir make the case that Australia’s most valuable private company is worth nowhere near its US$42 billion mark.

• Adir: “Anthropic is a superhuman business, and Canva has come down to just being a very fast human business.”

• Adir thinks Canva’s only move now is to sell to OpenAI, in cash, immediately. Adam thinks OpenAI would be mad to buy it!

• Meanwhile Figma is growing at 46% and accelerating while Canva decelerates. Adam explains why two design companies are heading in opposite directions.

• eBay staff sent a journalist couple a funeral wreath, a bloody pig mask and live insects, then tried to fit a GPS tracker to their car. Last week it settled for US$55.7 million.

• The CEO whose pay packet started it all was never charged and left with US$55 million. Adir wants a US$1 billion corporate fine; Adam wants a perp walk. Alas, neither happened.

Like and subscribe on YouTube, or listen now on Spotify:

And a reminder to follow us on Instagram for great weekly clips of the show!

Until yesterday, Canva was the last hero standing from Australia’s VC boom of the 2010s.

Culture Amp, funded by Blackbird and guided by Atlassian founders Mike Cannon-Brooks and Scott Farquar, has removed its popular CEO and co-founder and still hasn’t worked out a way to make any money. Safety Culture somehow got a US$2.5b valuation despite losing yet another $49m last year for its checklist app, while its c-suite resembles a swingers party.

Atlassian (which was bootstrapped in 2003 and pre-dated the boom) and which arguably funded everything else has seen its share price drop 80% and inspired John Stensholt and Perry Williams to write a soon-to-be-released blockbuster tell-all book.

Canva stood aside as a beacon of VC returns, guided by one of the best product builders in Australia (Mel Perkins) and a super sharp operator (Cliff Obrecht). Obrecht even claimed the business had been profitable for nine years (albeit with a questionable definition of profitability).

As the SaaSpocalypse raged and enterprise rival Figma lost almost 80% of its market value, Canva maintained its US$42b valuation (making it easily Australia’s most valuable unicorn). Canva is notionally worth 50% more than the far larger (and faster growing) Atlassian.

Alas, it appears not only have the wheels come off the Canva bandwagon, but the wagon has veered off the road, fallen off a cliff and burst into flames.

This week the AFR published a series of articles, initially reporting that Canva’s growth had dropped to 30%. A devastating follow-up brought even worse news. Emma Rappaport and Paul Smith writing in AFR’s Tech section dropped a bombshell, declaring Canva’s growth in FY26 was not 30%, but only 25%. Even worse, the business is now forecasting a miserly 20% growth for the coming financial year.

The freight train has become a rusty kids’ tricycle.

Canva blamed AI for the horrendous result, with Perkins noting that “rather than broadly rolling out a product before the underlying economics were ready, we decided to slow the rollout while we rebuilt the architecture, reduced unit costs and strengthened the business model.”

Obrecht claimed “we anticipated we’d be able to bring those costs down quicker than we were able to, and so ultimately we were a bit too ambitious in our assumptions, which meant we couldn’t roll out a competitive free AI product as quickly as we’d hoped.”

These high inference costs would have significantly impacted Canva’s profitability, (the business reported net profit of $26m for the 2025 financial year) but arguably, should have had a less material impact short term on revenue growth (reducing the ‘top of funnel’ free subs).

The business reported that active users had dropped from 265 million to only 208 million which backs up the importance of Canva’s ‘free’ top of the funnel plans.

And while Canva investors and management might claim this is a temporary AI related hiccup as the business reduces model costs, the longer-term revenue trend suggests otherwise.

In 2023, Canva grew at 49%, in 2024 it grew at 45% (these numbers are based on Canva’s recent ASIC filings). Growth was understood to have been 38% last year and is now forecast to fall to only 20% in FY2027.

This is not a one-off AI-induced token-maxxing blip, but rather five years of increasingly weaker growth from the one-time VC darling.

To be sure, a good deal of Canva’s predicament is bad luck. The business until recently had almost no real competitors in the consumer graphic design space (the only semblance of a foe was Adobe, which was focused on enterprise). Canva is now facing competition in its consumer market from not only AI products like Claude Design but also Microsoft’s imitator Designer software, which it can bundle for free into its Office Suite.

Canva maintains its US$42b valuation despite the terrible growth numbers; this is based on a small recent secondary round of share sales (with Robinhood Ventures acquiring US$25m of Canva shares).

But this figure appears significantly overstated given current market valuations of software businesses (let alone software businesses with rapidly diminishing growth).

While Canva hasn’t released its full FY26 (or even FY25) financials (they should be lodged shortly if the company wants to avoid another ASIC fine), based on US$922m revenue for the June quarter, we can estimate Canva’s FY26 revenue was around US$3.7b.

Figma has seen its share price slump by 78% despite reporting very strong growth numbers. Revenue grew by 46% year-over-year (up from 40% the prior quarter) while net revenue retention hit a record 139%. (Figma isn’t profitable on a GAAP basis, but it sounds like neither is Canva currently).

Figma’s market cap is US$14b on around $US1.4b annual revenue, so a 10x sales multiple. But Figma is growing far quicker than Canva (46% vs 20-25%) and should command a far higher multiple.

At US$42b, Canva is currently trading on a historical sales multiple of 11x.

If Canva’s revenue multiple was 5x (similar to Meta, which is growing at 28%, so faster than Canva) it would have a valuation of around US$19b, a massive 55% drop on its most recent valuation.

But even that is likely overvaluing the business given the rapidly slowing growth rate and significant business model risks with the rise of AI driven products like Claude Design.

Airtable is arguably a better comp - it was also growing at 20% and faced significant AI headwinds. This week it announced it was being sold to Bending Spoons for a 2.7x EV/ARR multiple (which would equate to a US$10b valuation for Canva).

Canva’s diminishing free user funnel (it has more than 220 million active users monthly but only 31 million actually paying users) casts real doubt over the company’s ability to grow significant profitability. Those 190 million free loaders had a negligible cost in the pre-AI environment. In an AI world, that top-of-funnel has a significantly higher cost. Even with Canva reducing token costs by 90% using its own models, that’s still a lot more than free users used to cost (which was almost nothing).

That massive funnel of potential paying users just got a lot more expensive. And reducing the benefits they get just means they are more likely to turn to free design products from OpenAI, Anthropic or Microsoft. In this sense, Canva feels far more vulnerable than the enterprise level Figma, which is far more differentiated and not wallowing in free consumer plans.

Adir, my pod co-host, says that owners need to ensure they never miss their golden window – where the market values your business irrationally. Miss that window and the market is likely to overcorrect on the downside.

Canva had the most golden of golden windows in 2021 and 2025, where they could have potentially sold one of the best ever Australian businesses for more than US$30b. Based on the company’s most recent data, that window appears to have slammed shut.

None of this is to say Canva itself is a bad business – it could conceivably pivot to profitably, but like Atlassian has discovered, that comes with a steep valuation discount. If Canva is growing at 10% annually and generating net profit of $200 million, that’s probably a US$6 billion business – a far cry from US$42 billion.

You can watch the full episode on YouTube above, or on the spotify link below.

The Contrarians catchup

• Ben Carroll is Victoria’s new Premier after Jacinta Allan was rolled by her own faction. Adam on what Carroll needs to do: “Getting rid of the SRL, which is just the most obvious thing ever, given it’s just an absolute disaster. $100B money-burn donation to the CFMEU that gets funnelled back into Labor.” Adir’s advice: “Don’t go down with this ship. Like this was not really your mess that was created.”

• Adir’s theory of the “Logo CEO”: one of the greatest negative signals for a new CEO is how quickly they decide to change the logo. “I cannot remember one CEO that joined an organisation where, in a non-media business, changing the logo was one of the first things they did and it went well.” Will (who changed the logo as soon as he joined The Contrarians) sat nervously in the room… listen to the full episode to hear his response!

• The RBA’s card surcharge ban is now producing visible consequences. Adir received a letter from Virgin Money: “Some things are changing. Basically everything good is getting worse and everything bad is getting worse. Your fee’s going up, the points are going down, there’s no insurance.” He called it: “The return of the bank fee era.” Adam: “Well done to the RBA for putting bank fees back on everybody. It’s just crazy.”

• Adam booked a pre-arranged British Airways flight from London, only for BA to cancel the entire route. They then changed an internal Canadian ski flight by three hours with no notification. “Airlines are a complete law unto themselves. They don’t care about a customer at all.” Adir: “Can you imagine how everyone else feels? Because you’ve got these relationships with airlines where you give them tens of millions of dollars or more, and this is how you feel.”

• Qantas, meanwhile, has become the most on-time airline in the world. Adam: “I’ve had great experiences in the last 18 months with Qantas. They’ve really become a really good airline again.”

Alan Joyce: “Everything I do, I do for you”

Alan Joyce appeared in a new interview, filmed in his apartment, and the backlash has been fierce. He claimed “I’m not here to defend capitalism” when pressed on his $110M payout, and sat in front of a grand piano in what looked like a luxury apartment. Adir’s verdict: if a crisis advisor had been there, none of it would have happened.

Adir: “He did say this, when he was questioned about the $110M that he pocketed, he said, I’m not here to defend capitalism, but that’s how capitalism works. And I feel like you should be here to defend capitalism. Like why are you pretending? If a guy who is running one of the biggest companies in Australia is not prepared to stand up and say we’re in a time where there’s a lot of arguments about socialism, that’s bad.”

Adir: “A guy that took $110M off the table and was getting a lot of hate. Would not have done an interview sitting in a gazillion dollar apartment with a grand piano. Like, that is not, what the hell is he doing the interview there for? It is such bad judgment. He should have gone to a Maccas or something.”

Adam: “I think the tragedy of Joyce is he could have retired in 2019, a hero of Australian commerce. People loved him. He would have had a choice of boards in Australia.”

Adam: “The ghost flights, for me, was the absolute worst. They were charging for flights, they’d cancel, they wouldn’t tell the customer. And why it was so bad is the customer would have to pay double to rebook. That to me was the absolute worst. Completely inexcusable.”

Adir: “Staying too long. I think it’s so few and far between: CEOs, leaders in general, presidents, etc. who are able to call that shot and not stay on too long. And Alan Joyce is a classic example of someone who sat on way too long.”

The hidden $2B electrification winner

OSW is a private Australian business that imports batteries and solar products, selling primarily through a network of 19,000 installers. In 2023 the business made $560M in revenue with a gross profit of $29M (5% margin) and lost $5.5M at the net line. They raised $8.5M. By 2025 revenue has reportedly reached $2B with $83M in EBITDA. The AFR reported the founders may be looking for a strategic investor.

Adir: “So they went and raised $8.5M. So that feels like a bit of a shitty business. But we fast forward to what the Financial Review has just reported: revenue $2B. They claim an EBITDA of $83M. I found it very interesting.”

Adam: “Whenever you’ve got government subsidy, who benefits? It’s the vendors. Same as the first home buyer thing. It’s the same dynamic.”

Adir: “You’ve got tailwinds of electrification and tailwinds of government subsidies. Government subsidies generally invite lots of competitors.”

Adir: “If I was the owner of this business, I would be going to a business valuer and saying, get me a valuation of $1B on this business so that my CGT event when I sell it in two years’ time under this government is not going to kill me.”

Adam: “I think you’d be a fool to buy that business for $600M. If I’m an owner of this business, I’m probably not crystallizing a tax event and selling. I’m just gonna hope it’s gonna last for more than four years, essentially. It’s very different being a buyer and a seller here.”

The pandemic fraud becomes undeniable

Anthony Fauci was compelled to appear before Rand Paul’s congressional committee after Joe Biden gave him a preemptive pardon covering 2019 to 2024. He invoked the fifth amendment (his right to silence) more than 100 times. Separately, his 1,000-page diary, left on government servers, was released. It revealed he tracked his own media performance obsessively. The word “press” appeared 641 times, “award” 80 times, “hero” 49 times, while “peer review,” “meta-analysis,” “risk benefit,” “learning loss,” and “mental health” were not mentioned at all. Most damningly, Fauci publicly claimed COVID had a 2% case fatality rate. His private diary said 0.2%.

Adir: “I’m very hesitant to say this, but I think we have been proven to be absolutely 100% correct for the deep cynicism we had about everything to do with this pandemic lockdown and the information it was based on.”

Adir: “What I was most scared about during that period was how easy it is to make human beings scared. And then to do whatever you want to them. Be careful of scared people and what politicians do to them to take away their own liberties.”

Adir: “These lockdowns are based not on science but on politics. I don’t think anything has more conclusively come out now than how right that view was. Like you got a little insight into it when you had the curfews in Melbourne and eventually Daniel Andrews said, no, I just made it up.”

Adir: “Epidemiologists who are meant to be dispassionate scientists, they were seduced with the allure of fame and they basically sold out themselves and their profession. And it was very unpopular to say that.”

Adam: “There were actual scientists, Jay Bhattacharya, great epidemiologists who were silenced and criticised and humiliated. And they were right all along.”

Adir: “One of the things both of us were saying was that these lockdowns were going to cause very long-term damage. Now we can see the health and mental health damage they’ve caused. It’s irrefutable now. Go and talk to any paediatrician about what’s happened as a consequence of the pandemic. They’ll tell you about the lockdowns. Like it’s terrible.”

The AI bubble’s most spectacular blow-up

Leopold Aschenbrenner, author of the viral 165-page AI manifesto “Situational Awareness,” saw his $45B fund of the same name partially liquidated after a 67% drawdown in July. The fund used 3-4x leverage on AI stocks. Despite the carnage, the fund is still up 80% for the year, having previously been up 270%. Citadel’s Ken Griffin stepped in to buy the liquidated positions. Aschenbrenner reportedly retains a stake in Anthropic believed to be worth US$5B.

Adir: “Directionally, he’s largely right about where the world’s going. But he’s not trying to make long-term bets on the future. He’s running ultra-leveraged short-term bets on a bubble. When they’re leveraged that high, they’re gonna be short-term. Because the minute it unwinds, you’re dead.”

Adam: “It feels like when you lose that much leverage, you’re gonna explode because the market never goes straight up. You can be right on the long-term. But when you lever so much, you only need like, we saw SK Hynix, which is a big investment of his, like those chip manufacturers had 45-50% pullbacks in July. And when you leverage 4X, you just can’t cover that.”

Adir: “In the dot-com boom, smart people bought stuff and people said, yeah, they know what they’re doing. It must be good. And then everything goes and jumps 25%, right? We’re back to the same ridiculous boom bubble we had two weeks ago.”

Adir: “Smart rich people that have made their money investing, the one human emotion they definitely have is greed. And so that is not the greatest emotion to be rational.”

Five other stories worth following:

1. The US bought Japanese yen for the first time in a decade, supporting efforts to lift the currency from 40-year lows. The intervention weakened the dollar and signalled American backing for Japan’s monetary action.

2. Spider-Man: Brand New Day earned $355M in the US alone, the second-biggest opening ever. Combined with The Odyssey, also starring Tom Holland and Zendaya, the films delivered a record $430M collective box-office weekend in history.

3. Google removed its new Earth image-generation feature after one day amid deepfake and disinformation concerns. Although outputs were watermarked and private, researchers showed it could easily fabricate realistic scenes involving conflict, disasters, and borders.

4. SpaceX briefly fell below its IPO price before its first earnings report as a public company. Investors now await results, an expiring lock-up releasing 900 million shares, and a rocket crashing into the moon.

5. AI startup LemonLime faced backlash after offering instant interviews to attendees who tattooed its logo. Seven people participated, prompting the founder to apologise publicly and promise the company would pay for tattoo removal costs.

H3: The Contrarians catchup

• Adam and Adir are back in person for the first time in five weeks. Joel got a dramatic haircut. The pod broke the news.

• Ed Husic went rogue at the Labour Party conference, targeting Albanese and Richard Miles. Adir: “He is prepared to spend his political career in purgatory for as long as Albanese is the Prime Minister. And his views are abhorrent. Like, anyone that says to me there’s genocide in Gaza, I just say what do you mean by genocide? No one can ever answer that question.”

• Victoria’s unemployment rate rose to 5.1% while the national rate held steady at 4.4% with participation surging by 76,000. Adam: “This is clearly the Dan Andrews and Jacinta Allan governments. This is what happens when you run worker-friendly policy. I’m not hiring in Victoria, I’m gonna hire in New South Wales if this WFH policy comes in because it’s just a better place to employ people.”

• The AFR ran a headline on Jacinta Allan’s government: “Allan’s latest policy alienates despairing business community.” The subheading: “A senior government source said Premier Jacinta Allan and her advisors have concluded that conflict with business wins them electoral support.” Adir: “Can you imagine something more cynical than a politician seeking to win votes by destroying the economy of her own state?”

• The richest entertainers of 1998 quiz: Jerry Seinfeld was number one ($267M), Larry David number two ($242M), Spielberg three, Oprah four, James Cameron five. Mike nailed Jerry Seinfeld and Michael Crichton (number eight). Harrison Ford was number nine. The Spice Girls were number 49 at $49M. Tiger Woods came in at 44.

H3: Jacinta Allan: the end is near

Jacinta Allan’s leadership is collapsing, with polling suggesting Labor could lose up to 35 seats at the Victorian election. Victoria is the crime capital of Australia. The paper’s Monday edition reported her downfall was expected within 24 hours of recording. Ben Carroll is the likely successor.

Adir: “My advice to Ben Carroll, who there’s some chance he’s listening to the podcast, is don’t go down with this ship. Like this was not really your mess that was created. It’s hard to see how the Labor Party ends up in power after the Victorian election, hopefully.”

Adam: “Dan Andrews is able to sell the longest lockdowns in Australia. He was able to sell locking up people in their housing commission like a jail for a week. And he got re-elected on a landslide in 2022. That was extraordinary. And Jacinta Allan’s just an average politician. She couldn’t do what he did.”

Adam: “Someone as smart as Thodey who’s been around the traps, who’s worked at Telstra, who should know better, has just fallen for it now. It’s just actually incredible that we haven’t learned our lesson.”

Adir: “The only reason Victoria is not insolvent is because lenders are still prepared to give Victoria money. Victoria has no ability to raise enough tax to repay it. Victoria is very close to insolvent. We exist at the grace of our bankers. Absolutely. That’s Victoria right now, without a doubt.”

H3: The chip that could detonate NVIDIA’s moat

A company called Etched, founded by a team of Thiel fellows, Harvard and MIT maths olympians, ex-Nvidia architects, and the original iPhone supply chain leads, raised $300M last week at a rumoured $3B valuation coming out of stealth. Their product: a chip where transformer architecture is physically encoded into the silicon, making it potentially 200 times faster than an NVIDIA GPU for text-based AI inference, but capable of doing nothing else.

Adir: “What they are building is pretty crazy. They’ve basically said it’s possible to encode the transformer logic onto the chip itself. What it means is all this chip can do is transformer-based calculations, which is mostly text-based stuff. This thing can maybe be 200 times faster than an NVIDIA chip.”

Adir: “Five years time is so unknowable. There’s so many, like the problem, two years time is unknowable. It’s very hard to pick what’s gonna happen. And I think this little glimpse into Etched, whether they’re the winners or not, it just shows how the assumptions that people are making about this industry are changing every week.”

On the broader AI bubble and hidden earnings inflation:

Adam: “In the first quarter just three companies, Google, NVIDIA and Amazon, saw massive gains in their other income category from their private investments in companies like SpaceX and Anthropic. The total of $69B in other income was ten percent of the S&P’s overall net income for the quarter. So we’ve got double the reason why these earnings are just a fraud.”

Adir: “The capital stack in this boom is much more concentrated than it was in the dot-com boom. It’s basically three or four hyperscalers and then some Saudis and a few others, and a few American banks lending debt. And every time someone comes to the market and says we need to raise $100B from AI, there are not many places that you can get there from.”

Adir: “You can’t short AI because you’re gonna go broke waiting. It’s unknowable when this thing is gonna crash, and there are so many vested interests determined to keep this up. And they’re rich and a whole lot of them are the most valuable companies in the world.”

H3: Waymo dumps Uber

The Financial Times reported Waymo is looking to exit its deal with Uber, having already split from the network in Phoenix. Waymo has told Uber it will stop using its app in January 2028. Waymo is now valued at $126B, having 4X’d from its 2020 first raise of around $30B. Uber, meanwhile, is down 34% since September and is only double its 2017 valuation of $68B under Dara Khosrowshahi.

Adir: “I think Uber can still succeed as a ride hailing app for autonomous vehicles, even if they don’t have Waymo. And my guess is if they succeed excluding Waymo, Waymo will actually give them the ability to hail Waymos as well.”

Adam: “I suspect in five years’ time we’re all taking these self-driving cars everywhere. Or certainly in ten years time. The market becomes just so much nicer. The same thing happened with Uber in San Francisco, where people who weren’t taking rideshare something who didn’t take taxis preferred an Uber. I think we get the same situation with self-driving.”

Adir: “It’s very hard to know what this market looks like in five years’ time. Not just because we’re dumb, because there’s too many nodes that you have to multiply at the moment to work out what the likely outcome is going to be.”

H3: Revolut gets an Australian banking licence

APRA granted Revolut, Europe’s most valuable startup, an authorised deposit-taking institution licence in Australia. Revolut is valued at US$115B and has 75 million global customers. Its CEO Nikolay Storonsky holds a 29% stake worth US$33B, making him Britain’s fifth richest person. Revenue was up 46% and profit up 57% to $1.7B. The key surprise: most of its profitability comes not from lending but from subscriptions, ranging from $6 to $100 a month.

Adir: “People used to cry about $2 a month bank fees, and Revolut has said I can get $100 a month and people are going to be happy to pay it. It’s unbelievable.”

Adir: “So we’re entering an era where bank fees are coming back because Revolut’s called them subscriptions, and every other bank has been forced now to charge bank fees by these unnecessary RBA changes. It’s the return of the bank fee era.”

Adam: “The RBA change has given us these three benefits: fewer points, high interest rates, and bank fees.”

Adir: “It doesn’t matter what exists in the world. Ultimately there are just some ways to make money and one of them is retail banking. They’ve just figured out it’s good to charge bank fees and I don’t know why all these idiot other banks didn’t charge bank fees and just call them subscription fees.”

H3: It just keeps getting worse at KPMG

KPMG sacked recently demoted COO Eileen Hoggart from the firm’s partnership after finding she had stored printed copies of confidential Lendlease board documents in her locker, shared them with colleagues bidding on the audit contract, and then repeatedly lied about it. The board had overruled its own legal and HR executives to allow Hoggart to remain as a senior audit partner for two months after being named in parliament. The scandal has now claimed the scalps of the CEO, chairman, and multiple senior audit partners.

Adir: “Most people that do terrible things to other people get away with it. I’ve had personal experience on the receiving end of this. Mostly you can get away with doing terrible stuff. And I just think their view of this was no one is ever going to catch us stealing this stuff. That is pervasive in the corporate world.”

Adam: “I think you can tar every auditor with this brush. This seems to be even within the same firm, these people at the top who you’d expect to be whiter than white were the worst actors of them all.”

Adir: “Every now and again you hook one of these big fish and it looks terrible. But what you don’t realise is there’s tons of this stuff going on below the surface that you’d never even know about. That’s the truth of it.”

H3: The 5% deposit scheme is a timebomb for young buyers

With auction clearance rates cratering and one agent reporting six auctions with not a single registered bidder over the weekend, Adam and Adir spent time dissecting the mechanics of the government’s 5% deposit scheme and what happens to young buyers if property prices fall.

Adam: “The worst area in terms of the people who are most exposed, the most amount of debt, is these first home buyers. These idiots who believed the government, come with us, come roll up to the first 5% empire. They’ve written their own death road.”

Adir: “This country has just massively increased its risk exposure to rising unemployment. The biggest point is that fifteen percent of the country’s economy is linked to property transactions and it’s throttled property transactions. But if unemployment rises and people can’t service their loans and banks say we need to get our money back, we’re gonna flog your property, there’s no buyers.”

Adir: “Can you imagine a better way to get someone to vote against the government than we’ve sold your home out from under you and by the way you still owe $50K to the bank. That is instantly voting against you.”

Adam: “Jim has basically cost them half their revenue. All they’ve got is a bit of gambling and payroll taxes. Imagine how bad Victoria’s going to be in three years’ time with no properties transacting.”

Adir: “Jim Chalmers said his PhD on Paul Keating and he’s managed to create a housing system where every part of the market’s fallen except the one that he was trying to get to move down.”

H3: Five other stories worth following:

1. More than 50 technology companies, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, Hugging Face and OpenAI, are urging Washington to avoid early restrictions on open-weight AI models, arguing they lower costs, expand access and strengthen American innovation globally.

2. A CBS News/YouGov poll found four in 10 Americans are eating less produce amid a Cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce, while confidence in the FDA response varies by political affiliation and staffing cuts.

3. OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Health for US users, allowing medical records and health apps to be connected for guidance. OpenAI says its models can outperform clinicians in reasoning, while stressing they should support professionals.

4. Colorado startup Lunar Outpost plans to send NVIDIA AI chips on future Moon missions, enabling rovers to navigate autonomously, communicate faster, create real-time maps, stream high-resolution video and potentially support NASA’s permanent lunar base.

5. Oxford spinout Moa Technology is developing herbicides that target weeds through biological mechanisms, responding to widespread resistance. After identifying more than 80 targets, it raised $30M to advance compounds and enhance existing herbicides.

H3: The Contrarians catchup

• Adam is recording from a private game reserve in South Africa. He witnessed a rare lion attack on a water buffalo, followed by a thundering herd of 30 buffaloes arriving to rescue their mate. The guide said lions succeed only 20% of the time on buffalo.

• England vs Argentina at the World Cup was a case study in not holding a lead. Thomas Tuchel switched to a defensive game at 1-0 up and paid the price. Adam: “Instead of trying to continue to play and potentially getting 2-0 up, they pulled all their attacking players off. And basically from that point, Argentina were always going to get back into it.”

• Adam tested his LuxPlus+ subscription churn data against benchmarks from the streaming industry. Netflix real churn is around 25-30%, Peacock at the other extreme is around 70%. LuxPlus+ churn has dropped to the “high 30s,” which Adam called “surprisingly low given we’re not a high frequency purchase like Amazon or Uber.”

• The pod debated the difference between a social democrat and a democratic socialist, in the context of Jim Chalmers’ budget and New York mayoral candidate Mamdani. Adir: “A social democrat, they are a Democrat, but their flavor of Democrat is socialist. What that means is that they fundamentally believe that society should be capitalist. They just want to apply a whole lot of socialist elements to it. A democratic socialist is a socialist, and their version of socialism is democratic. They want to get to socialism.” His verdict on Chalmers: “He’s not trying to dismantle capitalism. What he’s trying to do is stop wealth compounding for people, which is very bad for capitalism and I think might break the system.”

• Adam’s quiz segment featured his kids testing the pod on collective animal nouns from the safari. Key results: a group of giraffes is a journey, crows are a murder (Mike got it), warthogs are a sounder, and zebras are a dazzle or a harem.

H3: Xero CEO sells every share she has

Xero CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy sold her entire holding of 30,000 shares, citing tax obligations, one month after selling more than $4M worth of stock for the same reason. In five weeks she sold $6.2M of shares. Chairman David Thodey is simultaneously trying to rebase her pay package to bring it closer to Silicon Valley benchmarks. Xero shares are down 61% in the past year, back to 2019 levels.

Adam: “What’s most sickening about all this is they’ve called Singh Cassidy some sort of incredible Silicon Valley CEO. This was a really well-run business. They had some incredible Australian leaders. They put this blow-in from Silicon Valley and said, oh we’ve got to pay her Silicon Valley amounts because she’s this incredible leader. There’s no real evidence that she ever has been an incredible leader. They’ve brought in this North American so-called superstar who’s proven to be the exact opposite.”

Adir: “I cannot think of one positive thing to say about this situation. The time to make a call on the strategy is now. We think it sucks, it was a mistake. If that’s your view, make the call and then decide whether to keep or fire the CEO based on that outcome. If the answer is we think the strategy is still good, then keep swimming. Don’t sell your shares. Don’t ask for more. Like, do that.”

Adir: “It feels like the board is asking the market to untether CEO compensation from a strategy they believe in. Those two things cannot be untethered.”

Adir: “One way or the other she’s not going to be in this seat in two years.” Adam: “I’d be shocked.”

Adam: “This business actually makes money. They just didn’t need to be stuffed around with. Just keep making more money and grow incrementally is what they should have done.”

Adir: “The best thing that can happen to them, probably not for shareholders today, is the Atlassian slide, let’s call it. Enough value is lost that the most intelligent thing to do with the business becomes run it as a really great profit machine with some growth. And I think Xero needs to go on the same journey so that they can actually do what’s best for the long term of this business, and that is throwing off big amounts of cash.”

H3: ARN vs SEG: the mouse eyes the elephant

Sports Entertainment Group (SEG), owner of radio station SEN, has reportedly bought 2% of ARN Media and is running the rule over the company. ARN owns 58 radio stations and the iHeart digital platform and was valued at $1.5B a decade ago. Its share price has collapsed to 25 cents, valuing it at just $76M. ARN is still fighting an $82M lawsuit from Jackie O. SEG, meanwhile, has rebounded from 18c in 2023 to 36c, is guiding EBITDA of $16-18M, and on a net profit basis is actually more profitable than ARN.

Adir: “I always wondered whether the attacks on Hutchy a few years ago were based on reality or wishful thinking by media rivals. I think what Hutchy has managed to do is figure out a way to run a very profitable small niche media business. And it’s another example of a founder outperforming hired executives.”

Adam: “Radio is never going to get valuations of mainstream media again. Everything is niche media. There’s kind of no mainstream media business except the main social media players now.”

Adam: “Hutchy is an old school media proprietor who understands his clients and wants his clients to succeed. I find that other radio stations just care about how do we maximise, how do we get the most out of our clients, rather than how do we get our clients a great result.”

On Jackie O’s lawsuit:

Adir: “I would rather be ARN than Jackie O today. I think there’s a lot of question marks over what that contract is. Kyle did not make her life easier, both on air, obviously, but also by settling in the way that he did. A judge is probably gonna be reluctant to bankrupt a company full of employees to enforce her contract.”

Adir: “She thought that she had $100M coming down the pipe over the next 10 years, and she has to emotionally let go of that before she can settle. Sometimes people do things to you that you can’t do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on.”

H3: A $2B medical company doing $6M in revenue

4DMedical, a lung imaging software company that came out of university research dating back to 2005, is currently valued at $2B on the ASX, down from $3B, and is trading at 250-400 times its $6M annual revenue. Adir applied his medical background to do a deep technical critique of its core product, CTVQ, which claims to replace traditional nuclear VQ scans using standard CT imaging.

Adir: “No one’s ever heard of this company that I spoke to in the emergency or respiratory field. And the VQ scanning that’s non-urgent, from what I’ve heard, it’s actually on the decline, not the increase. In a real emergency situation when this is real life and death, sudden death pulmonary embolus, I’m going to take whatever the gold standard is that lets me visualise if there’s a pulmonary embolus, not tells me that there’s a very high probability that there’s a pulmonary embolus, which I think is what this is going to come out as.”

Adir: “This is trading on, depending on what you use, 250 to 400 times revenue on $6M revenue, not the $250M revenue that Pro Medicus is on. And Pro Medicus is like a 20-year-old proven business. I’m very skeptical that in the next five years this business is going to be able to generate the kind of revenue and growth that’s going to justify this kind of valuation.”

Adir: “If part of your portfolio is binary investments that are VC, venture capital-like in character, then sure, you can invest in this. But you should be aware that you’re going to have the hell taxed out of you under the new tax system for any company that generates this kind of return, because the higher the return, the higher the tax rate.”

Adam: “This is a casino, this is a full casino now. It’s not a joke. And it makes a mockery of the entire market when stuff like this gets valued ridiculous amounts like $2B. I think best case this 4D business drops 90%. That’s probably my best case. More likely drops like 99%.”

Adir: “This is like betting on a roulette wheel, picking one number. And if it lands on that number, instead of getting 35 times your money, you get two to one. That’s what this bet is like to me.”

H3: Five other stories worth following:

1. FIFA is set to announce record $15B World Cup revenue, far above its $11B forecast, boosted by dynamic ticket pricing and secondary-market fees, as final tickets reached a median price of $10,835.

2. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey grossed $264.1M worldwide in its opening weekend, including $124.5M in the US alone, recouping its $250M budget and strongly validating Universal’s decision to grant the acclaimed director near-total creative autonomy.

3. Beijing startup Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3, which reportedly beat leading Anthropic and OpenAI models in independent tests while costing 40% less, sharply intensifying questions about US valuations, infrastructure spending, and global technological leadership.

4. London startup Popsa uses hundreds of AI models to organise existing photo libraries, remove duplicates, write captions, and surface forgotten memories, targeting the estimated 70% of thousands of annual photos that people never revisit.

5. Protein demand is driving startups to create powders from microbes, air, water, and renewable energy. Companies including Air Protein and Solar Foods promise amino acids using less land and water, though scalability remains uncertain.

H3: The Contrarians catchup

• Adam is still in rural UK, recording from a farm with alpacas wandering in the background. London restaurants are packed, but everything is expensive. “A hundred bucks a head before drinks, and this is not fine dining by any stretch.”

• Adam took an EasyJet flight from Luton and, against all expectations, had a good experience. His hack: book row one. “If you’re in row one, there’s two baggage containers just for row one. You have no stress.” Adir’s response: “When you pay more money, they give you better stuff. I can give you a little recap on how capitalism works.”

• Adam booked a pre-reserved Uber at 4:30am in rural UK for a 50% premium, specifically for the guaranteed pickup guarantee. The driver hid his car, waited for the cancellation window to expire, collected the full premium fare, and drove past Adam waving him down. Adam then had to book another Uber at double the original price. “This guy purposely hid the car, waited for the time to expire, got paid the full fare, which is this massive premium fare, and just went off and did another job.”

• Twinkies are having a terrible time. Since 2022, desserts are down almost 25%. Adir: “Nobody wants to eat these snacks anymore because they’re all taking these injections for GLP. And then there’s a second thing going on, which you might call MAHA. Make America Healthy Again.” Meanwhile, the one food category that has surged 104% in a year: products with protein added. “No one’s even gonna know what protein you put in it. And then on the front, just write 15g of protein.”

• Adir’s verdict on corporate speak after reading the Smucker CFO’s response to the Twinkies writedown: “We did have some internal execution issues that we’ve really right-sized and worked through over the last fiscal year. That is a sentence that is devoid of any content.” On the CFO’s follow-up that “snacking is still important”: “Well it’s certainly important to you because if it stops, you’re gonna go broke. But I’m not sure what it means.”

H3: Telstra outage; due process is dead

Telstra suffered a major national outage that knocked out data, calls, and Melbourne train services for two days. Communications Minister Anika Wells publicly “held their feet to the fire” before any investigation had concluded. Telstra CEO Vicki Brady, on holiday overseas, flew home within 12 hours and managed the crisis. The Telstra share price didn’t fall until Wells spoke.

Adam: “Vicki Brady has been outstanding here. She found out at 4:30am. She jumped on the next plane, within 12 hours was back in Australia. If you look at Scott Galloway’s rules for crisis management, it’s get the top person involved, apologise profusely and overcorrect. I think Telstra did literally everything they could.”

Adir: “The Telstra share price hadn’t fallen at all until Annika Wells came out and said we’re gonna hold your feet to the fire. The idea of governments trying to inflict pain unfairly or prematurely on private enterprise in order to jack up their own ratings, it’s terrible.”

Adir: “Due process, which seems to have been swept aside in the last five to ten years. There is no indication so far that Telstra did anything terrible or Vicky Brady did anything terrible to cause this. And I think the idea of having due process and investigating it properly and giving people the benefit of the doubt before executing them, it would be nice if we went back to these liberal democratic values.”

Adam: “Some random router in Vicky Brady’s job isn’t checked ten million routers in data centers around the world. That’s absolutely not her role. Why would anybody want to lead these businesses? The rush to pile on every time something bad happens and politicians need to get their name in the headlines, I think was terrible.”

H3: The Greens, the NDIS, and a $95M-a-day gambling number

To secure Green votes for the CGT legislation, the government agreed to delay NDIS reform by two months. Separately, the Australia Institute claimed the lack of anti-gambling legislation is costing Australians $95M a day in losses. Adam and Adir both pushed back, but from different directions.

Adam: “What the Greens demanded was ensuring the NDIS can still remain a cesspool of waste, fraud, and corruption. It just delays it, means the fraud continues, means the fraudsters in Western Sydney can rip off taxpayers and run these criminal enterprises.”

Adir: “I’ve got big issues with gambling companies targeting problem gamblers and sending them broke. But I think to target an entire industry that people are using as entertainment with ‘Australians are having $95M a day in gambling losses stolen off them’, I think it’s an unfair way to characterize the industry. Sometimes the winning or losing money aspect of it is actually secondary to the primary enjoyment that people are getting from actually engaging in the activity.”

Adam: “Pokies by far the worst. That’s the one that kills families. It leads to bankruptcy, it’s so insidious, and they’re programmed to steal money from you. Pokies 100% should be banned. That’s what the Greens really should be focusing on.”

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H3: Firmus and IREN: the AI bubble is reaching its epoch

Firmus quietly launched a non-deal roadshow seeking to raise $500M at a $15.5B valuation ahead of its delayed IPO. UniSuper CIO John Pearce publicly said the roadshow was not well received in Australia. Meanwhile, IREN’s two founders were granted another $1B in restricted stock, on top of their existing $1B stake, just for remaining with the company for six years. Adam and Adir argue both stories are signs of a bubble reaching its peak.

Adir: “When I look at Firmus and I look at the economics, it feels to me like there’s this house of cards being built with a really good core, that’s NVIDIA. And then on top of that house of cards, they start building these other houses of cards all over the world. And Firmus hasn’t got any good core. They’re just a house of cards balanced on the house of cards bit of NVIDIA. And when the house of cards collapses, they all collapse down.”

Adam: “I reckon the peak AI bubble is what happened last week. The two IREN founders already have a billion dollars worth of IREN stock. They were granted another billion dollars of IREN stock. All you gotta do is hang around for six years. This is pretty outrageous. To give yourself a billion dollars for simply hanging around, when you’ve got a billion dollars, their excuse was we’re designed to attract, retain, and motivate high-calibre leaders. Well, I’m pretty sure you’re going to retain guys who have a billion dollar stake in the business without having another billion dollars.”

Adir: “The IREN Founders should be looking at ways to liquidate their existing stock, not getting more stock, would be my suggestion to them.”

Adam: “The smart money is now starting to get out. Sailors selling Bitcoin. All this bubble is reaching its epoch and it’s a matter of time now. We always get it too early every time, but it’s starting to feel like we’re starting to get pretty close to the end.”

Adir: “There are still plenty of people that today could go and buy something in the AI world and will still have the time to 10x their money before the crash. I’m not sure what it is you should buy. But that window is closing.”

H3: TEG/Ticketek: the disaster unfolds

TEG, the company founded by Kerry Packer in 1979 to sell World Series Cricket tickets, once grown into Australia’s dominant ticketing business under CEO Jeff Jones, is now hemorrhaging money after being run into the ground in just 13 months by former Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci. It lost $160M in 2025, $100M the year before. The company lost the Venues NSW contract and the Rod Laver Arena deal to AEG, and is now in talks with owner Silverlake to raise hundreds of millions in fresh capital.

Adam: “Banducci never spoke to the Stadiums people and ultimately lost the contracts. What Brad did do was hire a bunch of expensive former Woolworths staff. TEG is at its core a sales business and something former CEO Jeff Jones was the master of these relationships. Banducci is just a consultant, had no idea how to do this.”

Adam: “Even worse, TEG’s now in talks with Silverlake to raise hundreds of millions in fresh capital, which basically implies this business is bankrupt or close to being bankrupt. Private equity firms don’t like putting money back in six years after buying a business. That means they’re only doing it because they think the business is dead otherwise.”

Adir: “I’ve always found ticketing to be a bizarre business. This idea that says if you go to a stadium as an entertainment act, you don’t get to choose who sells the ticket to your entertainment because the stadium has made a deal with some other party. You’re not even buying the rights from the entertainer. The entertainer’s going to come into the thing you bought the rights from.”

Adam: “You really gotta be vertical. That’s why Live Nation is vertical. Live Nation basically said Ticketmaster is just this small cog in this big wheel. We’re gonna own the acts, gonna own the stadiums. The reason Ticketmaster and Live Nation have been successful is they can basically rip off the customers. Whereas Ticketek isn’t vertical enough to do that, which is why they’re struggling more.”

H3: Five other stories worth following:

1. Apple sued OpenAI, alleging a coordinated effort to steal trade secrets through former employees, including hardware chief Tang Tan himself. Apple seeks damages and immediate destruction of proprietary material, while OpenAI firmly denies wrongdoing.

2. A Khosla family-led group will buy the Seattle Seahawks for a reported $9.6B, an NFL record. Neeru Khosla is expected to control the franchise after approval, with sale proceeds ultimately destined for charity.

3. The World Cup reaches its semifinals, with France facing Spain and England playing Argentina before Sunday’s final. Meanwhile, baseball fans get the Home Run Derby and All-Star Game, followed by golf’s British Open tournament.

4. Japan is centralising its long-fragmented intelligence system as Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi expands major defence capabilities, reverses arms-export restrictions and responds to mounting espionage and coordinated disinformation threats directly linked to Russia and China.

5. Australia has become the third-largest importer of Chinese batteries as home installations surge alongside renewable energy growth. Falling prices, unreliable coal power and weak interstate connectivity are accelerating adoption and reshaping national electricity markets.

The Federal Government claimed that its controversial recent budget would tackle intergenerational inequity. Few would disagree that wealth inequality is a massive problem. Most people under the age of 35 struggle to purchase a home and if they do, are burdened with a crippling mortgage debt.

While the Government may have been well-intentioned, the budget completely failed in its claimed goals. A survey by millennial podcast, What the Flux, found that only 4% of respondents expect to be personally better off as a result of the budget, while 60% of millennials said older people were the big winners.

Young people aren’t fools. They know when they’re being played. And played they were.

Virtually all the tax benefits older Australians enjoy remain intact. Superannuation, a stealth transfer of $50b from young to old was untouched. The primary residence, regardless of its value, is never taxed. Older people can continue to negatively gear their investment properties. Young Aussie tradies trying their luck on crypto or someone quitting their corporate job to have a crack at a startup? That will be up to 47% tax, thanks.

The kicker? A complete unwillingness to rein in spending (especially on public servants and healthcare) means that the gross debt, according to the IPA, has already hit $1.6 trillion – that is a debt bomb being passed on from wealthy older people to younger people who have to pay the massive interest bill or have their standard of living further eroded by inflation. Even with all these great new taxes, the budget deficit is still forecast to be around $30b this year.

If the Labor Government wanted to bridge the intergenerational gap they’d be running a balanced budget as well as properly fixing the tax system, not fiddling with a few irrelevant cases like CGT which disproportionately impact younger people (due to grandfathering of existing assets).

So what could be done to fix the inequity? There needs to be serious (and some unpopular) changes.

Let’s go.

Income Tax – Australia is one of the highest income taxing countries in the world, our top tax rate of 47% kicks in at $190,000. In 1983, the top tax rate (of 60%) applied at $35,000 – but back then the median house price was $60,000. So the top tax rate was 58% of the median capital city house price.

The current median house price is $1m, if we kept the top tax level consistent in real terms, the top tax rate wouldn’t kick in until $580,000.

But there’s a better way to solve this. This is reducing the top tax bracket for income tax to 30%. Make no mistake, this is a massive policy shift to take the burden away from middle class income earners and it would cost up to $30b annually in forgone tax revenue. However, the real number would almost certainly be less because companies and individuals would now be aligned and there would be no need to use tax structures and trusts to split and divert income.

CGT - Reducing capital gains tax to 20% on business sales (which is roughly average by international standards) would notionally cost around $2b (this is compared to the 30-47% rate being applied from next year). However, the lower rate would also increase the willingness of investors to sell business assets rather than hoard them, so the actual net budget cost is likely far less. The higher, indexed CGT rate on properties would remain.

Reducing CGT on businesses would increase investment and employment, likely leading to higher income tax receipts. There’s a reason why almost every country in the world taxes capital at a far lower rate than income – it encourages investment in productive assets that grow the economy and employment. Otherwise, that capital will simply create jobs in other countries that don’t punitively punish investment.

These two major structural tax changes will cost up to $32b annually (albeit less in reality). But we also want to start repaying our massive debts, so we really need to find $70b in savings. Sounds like a lot.

How can we do it?

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Superannuation – The greatest rort of them all. Paul Keating introduced superannuation to purportedly ease the burden of the aged pension. It has been a total failure.

Back in 1992, around 77% of retired people drew a pension, now 67% of older Australians receive the pension. This is not a big change. As a result the pension savings are only around $10b annually.

(The Labor Party however benefits from the side effect of booming industry super funds pumping money back into its coffers, but I digress.)

While superannuation saves $10b annually, the cost of forgone tax revenue from superannuation is more than $50b. Economically speaking, superannuation has been a massive disaster, saving rich people money while diverting billions of dollars into index hugging fund managers and super funds.

Super contributions are currently taxed at only 15% when paid by employers or individuals. If we increased that rate to 25% (still below the new 30% income tax level) this would lead to around $15b in savings, less higher amounts needed for the Low Income Super Tax Offset, so let’s say $12b.

If we then increased the tax rate for earnings within super from 15% to 25% (still below income tax level) this would save another $7b. It makes absolutely no sense that wealthier retirees pay a far lower tax rate than 30 year olds who can’t afford to buy a house. The notion that older people should pay less tax simply because they are old, even though they’re also rich, is completely baffling.

These equitable changes save $19b annually while still allowing superannuation to remain slightly concessionary to the (highly reduced) income tax rate.

GST – The Howard Government introduced the GST in 2000 at a rate of 10% but excluded fresh food and education. This was a political folly which still inflicts significant economic pain. A small increase to the GST to 12.5% and finally applying 5% GST on fresh food and education would raise around $20b. This change would mostly be funded by wealthier people who spend more, while the lower income tax rates benefit all Australians. This would also bring Australia more into line with most western countries which run higher VATs and lower income tax levels.

SRL – The absurd train line in Victoria that no one wants is being funded to the tune of $3.8b by the Federal Government this year (and this cash furnace will continue to increase). The SRL, like the rest of the disgraced Victorian Government’s Big Build, is a money laundering scheme for the CFMEU. Easiest. Saving. Ever.

Primary Residence – The primary residence is, strangely, never taxed. Even if you paid $10m for a Point Piper mansion and sold it a decade later for $75m you’d pay nothing (and this does actually happen). This is the greatest uber rich tax break ever. If you imposed a tax of say 5% on homes selling for more than $2m and 10% on homes above $5m you’d raise around $12b in revenue annually. Less than 10% of houses would be taxed under this policy.

This relatively low impost would help fund the reduction in CGT (it’s completely nonsensical that productive assets which employ people are taxed at 47% but unproductive mansions are taxed at 0%).

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Public Service – The public service costs Australia $250b a year – a large chunk of this cost is essential workers, but not all of it. There’s also a bunch of less critical workers. There is roughly 7% churn each year across the public service – let’s say we didn’t replace (non essential) any workers for two years that would reduce the public service by around 10% and save around $12.5b annually.

Note, we’re not firing anyone but instead, just not replacing people who choose to retire or move to the private sector.

NDIS – The $42b NDIS is one of the biggest areas of taxpayer expenditure, ranging from helping genuinely disabled people to being a cesspit of fraud, waste and corruption. It’s basically impossible to fix and needs to be torn down so we can direct funds to those who really need it. Conservatively $10b in savings, but likely far more.

Fixing the Pension Means Test – Another great rort of the tax system is ignoring the value of a home when determining pension eligibility. You can live in a $20m house and qualify for the pension (and cream from hardworking taxpayers $45,000 annually). Around 15% of people receiving the pension fall within the wealthiest 20% of Australians – if we capped the residence exclusion to homes worth less than $750,000, we’d save upwards of $2b.

Offshore Resources – The Federal Government, courtesy of some highly effective lobbying, levies the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT) based on profits generated by natural gas producers. The States require mining companies to pay royalties based on revenue (or volume) for their schemes. As a result, the States (mostly WA and Queensland) collect around $20b annually and the Federal Government only $2b from (mostly US owned) offshore gas producers.

If the Federal Government taxed based on revenue it would (very roughly) raise around $5b annually (albeit this amount fluctuates significantly based on gas prices). While PRRT advocates have argued for years that the high upfront capital costs mean that a revenue based tax isn’t workable, that didn’t seem to stop the US from charging a revenue-based tax for offshore gas producers.

First Home Owner Grants – Technically these are paid for by the States, but given the States are mostly funded by the Feds this is fair game. Let’s remove these horrific policies which bid up the cost of housing and act as a payment to home sellers (rather than home buyers) and save another $2b.

AUKUS – A bilateral disgrace, Australia spends upwards of $6b annually (and this massively increases over the next decade) buying nuclear-powered Virginia-class and SSN-AUKUS submarines from the US. We could instead purchase Japanese Taigei-class submarines (equipped with lithium-ion batteries). While not as optimal as nuclear subs (which can stay submerged indefinitely), they are fit for purpose and would be delivered far quicker, saving at least $5b annually.

That’s $72b in savings/higher revenue and $32b in reduced taxes for a net improvement of $40b annually. The current budget deficit is $28.5b based on recent data, so these changes would likely lead to strong surplus of at least $12b.

My numbers are rough but directionally correct with a decent margin of safety. It’s clear that we could massively reduce income tax and capital gains tax on business sales by removing the ingrained rorts and wasteful spending which have become rusted to the core of the Australian economy.

Reducing income and capital gains taxes also abrogates the need to create exotic tax structures, while imposing a small tax on primary residences and slightly increasing the CGT allows for a far broader tax base.

How would this impact house prices? Well the primary residence tax would slightly dampen values, but this would likely be counteracted by the reduction in CGT.

Overnight, the Australian economy, which coincidentally is one of the worst performing globally despite the commodity boom, would be revitalised. We’d go from one of the most unfair tax systems to one which shifts the burden to the richest Australians. Instead of massively taxing regular wages, we’d tax wealth and consumption.

We’d no longer punish young people’s sweat and aspiration, but instead, reduce the tax offsets handed to people who can most afford it.

The Federal Government tried to be Robin Hood but ended up the Sheriff of Nottingham. This is how we can really improve it.

H3: The Contrarians catchup

• Adam is in London visiting Luxury Escapes’ 11-person UK team. His verdict: “London is incredible. The restaurants are full, London’s in its own bubble. The rest of the UK is a bit of a basket case, but London is incredible.” Dinner at Bubala, a favourite Israeli vegetarian restaurant, cost upwards of $100 a head before drinks. Apartment costs, strangely, have barely moved in a decade.

• Victoria’s crime wave has not abated. A friend of the pod relayed a home invasion by three teenagers who found car keys inside the house, used a wheel lock to break in, stole the car, and drove through the fence. The car was found. No one was charged. Adam: “You just got this abomination in Victoria. Crime is still rampant. You’ve got a Labor government that simply doesn’t care about people. It feels like ‘Back to the Future 2’ when Biff was running the place.”

• A What the Flux community survey of over 1,000 respondents found only 4% believe they’ll be better off as a result of the budget. 42% said scrapping the CGT discount was their biggest worry. 57% said the changes will force them to change their investment strategy. Adam: “Young people hate this budget. This is a budget that fraudulently claimed it was for young people. Jim Chalmers went and said, we’re gonna fix this intergenerational inequity. These guys have somehow made it worse.”

• A London School of Economics study of 400M job postings found entry-level hiring has fallen more than 14% since 2019. Adam: “Older people want to work from home. Younger people hate working from home because it just destroys their careers. Less than a quarter of Gen Z want a fully remote workplace.”

• Canva has quietly started preferencing Sydney-based applicants who work from the office, according to Rampart. Adam: “The Atlassian universe. The kings of work from home. Now saying, hold on, this isn’t working for us. Canva’s founders sniff the breeze and they clearly realise that the balance of power has shifted away from employees into businesses.”

H3: Sydney’s housing crisis: battlers banished for billionaires

Two recent Sydney developments illustrate what Adam and Adir argue is the perverse consequence of the budget’s tax settings. In North Bondi, 45 apartments are being demolished to make way for 16 luxury residences. In Bondi, 16 units on Campbell Parade were converted into seven luxury apartments called “The Mayfair,” with the top floor listed at $22-24M. Both qualify for primary residence tax exemptions.

Adir: “If I was writing the headline for The Daily Telegraph, I would say 45 battler tenants evicted to make way for sixteen rich owners who get the best tax treatment in Australia.”

Adam: “My headline would be battlers banished for billionaires.”

Adam: “This feels like the exact opposite of what the government’s been trying to achieve. Primary residence, full zero tax exemption all the time. Whatever these go up to, you’re not paying a cent of tax. This is a massive distortion on the free market. Everything should probably be taxed the same if you want things to be treated as free market.”

Adir: “The overarching issue that headlines everything else in this country is the increasing disparity between wealthy people and other people and the disappearance of the traditional middle class in Western liberal democracies. And I think this is just a piece of that disaster that’s going on.”

H3: CGT debate is about systems, not values

Adir delivered what he called his definitive framing of why the capital gains tax argument has been lost in a fog of class warfare, and why that framing is wrong.

Adir: “The idea of capital gains tax is in no way a value judgment on who should pay less tax. The problem with this capital gains tax argument is it’s been turned into an argument of morals and values when really it’s an argument of systems. If you don’t play by the rules of the system, the system is not going to work. And one rule is if you don’t give people good treatment for profits they make for investing capital, then they take that capital and they invest it elsewhere. And if that happens, capitalism is going to stop working for all of us.”

Adir: “Socialism is a great idea. We all want things to be fairer for people. But every time you try it in a country, it’s the worst possible system you can imagine. And so we want to live in capitalism because it sucks, but it is the best way for the largest number of people to live the best possible life.”

Adam: “I think we generally prefer whoever’s closer to the centre.”

Adir: “That is a perfect summary of how we feel. I kind of hate you a bit for saying that. I wish I would have said that.”

H3: The AI chip depreciation timebomb

Adam and Adir dug into what they see as the most underappreciated risk in the AI investment cycle: hyperscalers are depreciating their AI chips over five years, but the technology is moving so fast that chips become obsolete far sooner. When that mismatch is forced onto income statements, profitable businesses can turn loss-making overnight.

Adir: “I buy $5,000 worth of AI chips. I put them on my balance sheet, not my income statement. I say these chips are going to last for five years, so every year I take $1,000 of that $5,000 as an expense. I make $2,000 in sales. I record $1,000 of expenses. I make $1,000 of profit. But at year two, I realize these chips are only going to last one more year, not four more years. The remaining $4,000 has to become an expense. I’ve gone from $2,000 revenue, $1,000 expense, $1,000 profit, to $2,000 revenue, $4,000 expense, minus $2,000 profit. Suddenly I turn into a loss-making business simply because I miscalculated or deliberately misrepresented the amount of time that these chips were going to be useful for.”

Adam: “Either we have this massive expense coming up, or companies are going to start pulling back on spending. That starts hitting NVIDIA. Either way, this bubble pops one way or the other. There’s probably no great outcome here.”

Adam: “The Shiller CAPE Index has got this almost perfect record of predicting bubbles and crashes. The highest it ever was was 1999. The second highest point is right now. So either AI really is game changing and we’re all wrong, or what’s going to happen is what happened every time: too much debt, it’s pushed up asset prices too much, and there’s a massive overcorrection.”

Adir: “You can make a ton of money at the end of a bubble cycle. This is the ultimate greed versus fear moment for markets. You know that you might get caught any day, or it might be two years out and you’ll miss two years of incredible gains. You’ve got businesses like Sandisk that have gone up seventeen times in the last year. No one wants to miss that.”

H3: What happens when the founder leaves

PEP Private Equity bought Manshake, a protein drink business built by NRL star Adam McDougall and his wife, scaled it up, bought the manufacturing facilities, and then reportedly sold it back to the founder for next to nothing. The business had struggled after McDougall departed.

Adam: “If you’re gonna transition from founder to manager, you need to have competitive advantages in the business. You can’t just have product market fit. A founder can work with product market fit and continue to hustle and eke out profitability. But if you chuck a manager in there, they’ll probably stuff it up. If you’ve got great competitive advantage, if you’ve got great brand, you’ve got scale, and you just need to keep doing what you’re doing and extract more value, then you can chuck a really smart manager in. But if you haven’t got competitive advantage and an outside owner comes in and gets rid of the founder, almost certainly the business dies.”

Adir: “The brand was inextricably linked to the founder. And once that founder goes, the brand goes. You can’t maintain that without him. And so good night, turn off the lights on your way out. There is always a danger in buying a business whose brand is so inextricably connected to the founder, especially when it has no other powers.”

Adir: “PEP actually came out and said, irrespective of that outcome, we’ll still generate PEP-like returns from this fund because of our other wins. Which might be true, but it’s the closest you ever will hear a private equity business saying we messed up.”

H3: It keeps getting worse at CTM

Corporate Travel Management missed yet another deadline to refile its financial statements, now targeting August, more than a year late. The company announced a further $10-15M revenue restatement affecting its ANZ region, after flatly claiming for months the problem was confined to the UK. It also announced $400M in goodwill write-downs across Europe, ANZ and North America. The amount owed to the British government has grown from $80M to potentially $150M, against free cash of around $60M.

Adam: “This is fraud on fraud. I don’t know how ASIC hasn’t charged anyone here. What are they doing? The auditors have actually given them their rule book. What are they waiting for?”

Adam: “CTM claimed point blank it was just the UK. Now Australia, these liars. So $10-15M in ANZ. Remember they said this is just UK. Australia is fine.”

Adir: “The single biggest risk they face is getting the auditors to sign off on this in this environment. What auditor is going to want to take that risk? They would have to feel very, very confident that standing up in front of a parliamentary inquiry and on the front page of the Financial Review, their actions were watertight.”

Adam: “As businesses roll off, Flight Centre and their other competitors are feasting on them. It’s a slow burn, you’re not gonna lose all your revenue straight away. But this was a business that before this wasn’t profitable. After this, it’s gonna be less profitable. To pay the three hundred million dollars now they need banks to give them money and they need to trade out of it. I don’t think they’re gonna be able to trade out of it.”

H3: Five other stories worth following:

1. Andreessen Horowitz-backed Ornn is building a market where companies can trade and hedge GPU access like commodities, aiming to create financial infrastructure for soaring global AI compute and data-centre spending through 2031.

2. AI-driven demand is sending memory-chip profits and prices soaring, with DRAM and NAND benchmarks up roughly 660% over a year, raising device costs and potentially reviving pressure to ease Chinese chip restrictions.

3. Nigel Farage faces intensified scrutiny over political finances after reports a convicted fraudster funded expenses and an investigation into a £5 million crypto-billionaire donation, though Farage and Reform UK deny wrongdoing.

4. SpaceX will join the Nasdaq 100 less than a month after going public, giving passive funds exposure to the company while exposing investors to volatility after Nasdaq changed rules to fast-track inclusion.

5. Australia may force data centres to deliver direct local financial benefits as public concern grows over AI infrastructure, while Labor also backs worker protections against AI being used to intensify or fragment work.

H3: The Contrarians catchup

• Will Hayward gave a one-month business update for The Contrarians. The pod is growing fast, live events are in planning, and advertising revenue has been “surprisingly strong” from the start. His three asks: subscribe on all platforms, follow on YouTube and Instagram, and reach out if you want to advertise. Adam’s pitch to potential partners: “If you want to hit The Contrarians audience, you’re getting the decision makers, the founders, the CEOs, the CMOs, the CFOs. It’s the most premium audience in the country.”

• Adam described Luxury Escapes’ journey from a sprawling multi-brand e-commerce business to a pure-play travel company. At peak complexity they ran Luxury Escapes, Scoopon, Kudo, Deals.com, a fashion business called Brands Exclusive, and a homewares business competing with Temple & Webster. The rule learned the hard way: every time you merge customer bases, “you lose 50% of the audience literally overnight.”

• Adir on what to say to founders being threatened by a competitor: “If you hear someone on the other side of your deal telling you they’re going to crush you if you don’t sell, you should ask for more. That is a good sign for you.” The Luxury Escapes team heard exactly this from a rival five or six years ago. “This business has just continued to sort of fade away.”

• Adir on Socceroos coach Tony Popovic choosing a different lineup in game two of the FIFA World Cup: “He was up against a team where clearly he felt if he played the game that he played in the first match, they would be able to adapt to it. Everybody judged him based on the output metric. Nobody talked about the input metric.”

• Claude Design is, according to Adir, revolutionary. He used it to rebuild the entire front end of his brand equity analytics tool from a single screenshot and five lines of prompts. “It basically crafted 80% of what I thought I wanted without me even realising that’s precisely how I wanted it to look.” Listen for his verdict on Canva versus Claude Design.

Karl Stefanovic: the genius business move hidden inside a scandal

Karl Stefanovic parted ways with Nine Network after publishing and then retracting an interview with UK firebrand Tommy Robinson. The video was immediately uploaded to Pauline Hanson’s YouTube account and received 167,000 views. Stefanovic’s contract was already in its final year. Adam and Adir argued the whole episode was a win for almost everyone involved.

Adam: “He’s got a podcast business probably worth $20-30M today. Could be worth $100M. This is a genius business move by him. Whether it was intended or not, he’s played it brilliantly. I think Nine have probably gotten away with it pretty well as well. This is to me a great win-win.”

Adir: “This is literally $10-20M of free publicity he’s had. You can’t buy this kind of publicity. Money can buy you talking about your own stuff. It can’t buy other people talking about your own stuff because they think it’s good for them to talk about it.”

Adam: “I think Karl is really smartly picked up on that rightward trend. You can see the One Nation support is off the charts now. It’s the number one most popular party in the country. And Karl’s just, I think it’s just a really savvy guy who’s picked this up and he’s created the number one podcast in Australia in the space of four months.”

Labor is in a secret coalition with the Greens

The CGT legislation passed the Senate last week, pushed through by Labor and the Greens. In the same sitting, the government’s industrial relations bill, the one economic policy area where Adam and Adir gave Labor some credit, was pushed back. The broader political landscape has shifted dramatically in Adam’s view.

Adam: “You’ve got effectively the Greens calling the shots, the far-left, the ultra-far-left Greens, the socialists, potentially communist Greens, calling the shots in a coalition government with Labor.”

Adir: “I think if you would have asked me this six months ago I would have said you can’t compare. Like I might disagree with this government, but there’s still a trustworthy government. I think this government is totally untrustworthy today, and you can’t believe a word that they say.”

Adir: “I want to bring Tony Burke onto the podcast just to ask him one question, which is, will you commit on this podcast to not claiming negative gearing on your six investment properties, given you’ve stopped young people with no properties from ever being able to use it? Because if you believe it’s right to wipe out negative gearing, then walk the talk.”

Adam: “The core of the policy was right, but they executed it so badly that you can’t possibly give them a positive mark for it. They should have removed it for everyone, but they should have given people warning and maybe given a phase-in period of three or four years. And it should have been for everybody, not grandfathering older rich people.”

The CGT carve-outs: fake exemptions to a lie of a policy

Adam did a deep technical breakdown of the two “carve-outs” the government announced alongside the CGT changes. The first raises the small business CGT concession threshold from $2M to $10M turnover but applies a 30% minimum tax rate that was never disclosed. The second, the so-called innovative company carve-out, is more complex and, in Adam’s view, almost entirely unusable.

On the small business carve-out:

Adam: “The 30% minimum tax rate still applies for all this now. So previously you used to be able to stack these two discounts. Now you can index it, but you have this minimum 30% tax rate. This so-called $10M thing really isn’t that generous. The 30% minimum is 30% secret, 30% that they neglect to tell people about.”

Adam: “People that start their own businesses, they have sweat equity by virtue of the work they do and no cost base. That’s the group with no cost base. Self-started, motivated job creators, the backbone of Australian society. If you want your hair cut, if you want your toilet fixed, you need someone like this. So that’s who the 30% minimum tax really smashes.”

On the innovative company carve-out, which requires a company to be under $50M turnover, under 10 years old, unlisted, qualify for the ESIC framework, and employees must hold shares for at least five years:

Adam: “We were a $50M revenue business within two years of our business. We were a valueless business then, with virtually no profit and nobody was valuing us much. So we had really risk-taking early stage employees who would absolutely not qualify. And we’re just one out of thousands and thousands of companies.”

Adam: “If you’re an employee and it’s going to be fully acquired, there is no way the acquirer is going to let you as an employee hold those shares for another two years. Your shares are going to be compulsorily acquired as part of a drag provision, which means the buyer can force me to sell and the buyer will be forcing me to relinquish the tax benefit.”

Adam: “The company that fits into the intersection of all these criteria is a company with all this amazing potential up front, but sold in less than 10 years with a revenue of under $50M. We could call that company a failure. That is the company whose founders get the discount.”

Adir: “I believe this is a Labor government, do they realise how much power they’ve just given the company? If I have an employee and they’re at year four of their holding, do you know how much power I’ve got in firing them? They not only lose their job, but they miss out on the tax benefit.”

Adam: “Nobody has done more to increase the benefit of the wealthy versus the not wealthy than this Labor left government and their latest budget. Unintentionally, but that’s what’s happened.”

Does Canva sell now or be killed by a giant?

Adir’s hands-on experience with Claude Design has significantly sharpened his bear case on Canva.

Adir: “My increasing view is that I was right about this and it’s going to be very hard for Canva to compete. They’ve gone from being the giant killer to being at risk of being killed by a giant. I think it’s sell time. Like that’s my honest view. It’s time to go and find someone.”

Adir: “Canva should not IPO. Canva should basically go to their bankers and say, we want to be bought by Anthropic or OpenAI. It can be an all-stock deal, but the stock has to be non-escrowed and we sell it into their IPO as much as we can.”

Adir: “It’s very hard to build a generational company today with this level of tech change. If you want to build a generational company, build leather handbags, maybe you can build a generational company. But it’s very hard in tech.”

H3: Five other stories worth following:

1. Chinese AI models are narrowing the gap with leading US rivals, raising concerns that American restrictions may backfire by pushing businesses toward cheaper Chinese tools while limiting access to domestic models for trusted users.

2. OpenAI and Anthropic are pushing back against government limits after restricted model releases, while Austria is pitching the EU as a safer home for Anthropic, promising legal certainty, market access, capital, and values.

3. Michael overtook Oppenheimer as the highest-grossing biopic ever, Supergirl underwhelmed despite Krypto’s presence, and Toy Story 5 held the top box office spot, suggesting audiences still have appetite for familiar franchises.

4. Former Apple designer Julian Hoenig launched Amble, a minimalist street-legal electric buggy startup focused on short trips, with 2027 delivery slots already reserved by hospitality customers ordering roughly 40 vehicles worth $1m.

5. Former Starlink engineers launched Eclipse Space to help governments and companies build their own satellite constellations, using a fabless model that designs spacecraft while outsourcing manufacturing to make infrastructure cheaper and faster.

According to the Herald Sun, the only thing that anyone is talking about is the news that Karl Stefanovic has been ejected from Nine following his interview with controversial right wing commentator and campaigner Tommy Robinson.

The consensus view appears to be the following.

Stefanovic has been on a slow rightward trajectory. He has increasingly focused on immigration. He has apologised for his role in encouraging people to get vaccinated. And he interviewed Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer, before he got round to Robinson. The media in general perceives these as, at best, a slide into senility. At worst, genuine conviction from Karl that Pauline/Clive/Tommy might be worth listening to.

There also seems to be some agreement that this is all some misstep from Stefanovic - he got over his skis, has lost his way, and is now out of a job. If he wants to be “Joe Bogan”, as he has joked, he can’t do so if he excludes half the population.

The Rogan comparison is easy, not least because Karl has made it himself. Rogan is considered by many as the American everyman (despite his fortune). He has at points hosted the biggest podcast in the world and his clips generate millions of views. Karl is building his own Rogan style show which seems similar in format.

But even if the pun works, it is the wrong one. A far better comparison is Tucker Carlson.

Carlson was famously fired from Fox News following the Dominion settlement, where Fox was forced to pay US$787.5M to settle the claim that they defamed the company (something I became fairly familiar with). It isn’t totally clear why he was fired. In pre-trial discovery, various internal messages showed disdain for the President, Fox’s audience and perhaps most importantly, Fox’s management.

Things have turned out fairly well for Carlson since then.

At Fox, Carlson was reportedly earning somewhere between US$15M and US$20M a year, and walked away from a contract with around US$25M still owing. Within months he had launched the Tucker Carlson Network, a US$9-a-month subscription service, raising roughly US$15M from investors at the end of 2023. By June 2025, Axios reported that he and his business partner had bought those investors out entirely: the network had turned profitable faster than anyone expected, and the backers got their money back with a return.

The audience appears real too, at least on the metrics available. The Tucker Carlson Show was Apple’s most popular new podcast of 2024, and for a week that July it knocked Joe Rogan off the top of Spotify’s US chart. His YouTube channel runs at around 1.7 million subscribers and some 30 million views a month. None of this is Fox-sized — he was pulling 3.3 million viewers a night on cable, the biggest audience in American news — but he now owns the whole thing rather than renting an audience from Rupert.

Exactly how much he is making is impossible to verify; the “$30M a year” figures floating around are guesses. But it is almost certainly a wildly profitable enterprise. The cost base of an operation like this is tiny — Megyn Kelly, who built a similar empire after being pushed out of NBC, reportedly does it with six staff — so even a modest subscriber base throws off more profit than a fat network salary ever did.

The secret is taking advantage of three trends at once.

The first is that you can now reach a massive audience without any of the infrastructure. No studio, no satellite trucks, no network. Carlson’s operation is reportedly staffed largely by the people who used to work for him at Fox, publishing straight to YouTube, Spotify and X. Megyn Kelly’s six-person team now out-rates the YouTube channels of NBC News, CBS News and the BBC.

The second is that the old mastheads and networks are in structural decline, shedding the audiences — and the trust — that once made them the only game in town. This year’s Digital News Report once again showed how much the general public distrust mainstream media (but increasingly trust personality based media). Few in the big end of town ever seem prepared to confront this, other than somehow blaming Facebook and Google.

The third is that there is an enormous audience of people who don’t share the hyper-progressive social politics of most newsrooms, and who feel that nothing in the mainstream is serving them. That is the audience Carlson, Kelly, and Glenn Beck before them, have monetised. The simple fact is, many watch videos like the Karl/Tommy interview and find themselves nodding along.

Could a similarly large and profitable future await Karl?

There are reasons to think not.

To state the obvious, Australia is a far smaller country. This business model relies in part on scale; with far fewer people, and (probably) little chance to become an international star, Stefanovic might just never reach the scale required to build something worth the effort.

But what about the point on hyper progressivism? Ask most people in the media, and in my experience they tend to argue that our media is too right wing. The same people think One Nation and the Liberals are unimaginably evil parties, and Labour is not much better. If you worry about any number of social issues, immigration, or what happened during COVID, you are definitionally evil.

But the general public? With One Nation now polling at 29 per cent, it is hard not to think we’re seeing a radical recalibration of politics in Australia as well.

Might we see something similar coming in media? And might Karl be the media star to capitalise on all this?

Watch this space.

You can watch the full episode on YouTube below, listen wherever you get your podcasts, or read on for a summary.

The subject this month: ASX-listed shoe empire Accent Group (AX1), and the hostile takeover bid circling it.

• Sell now or wait three years? Scott brought a real founder dilemma to the table — a business owner who could keep growing but is tempted to cash out. Adir’s answer was emphatic: don’t sell the whole thing, do a secondary. “Try and do a secondary sale of a meaningful amount of non-controlling equity… Take that money off the table, put it in your pocket. And then that will dramatically increase your risk appetite to drive the next seventy percent of your equity hard. That’s what I did. I do it with almost every founder I’m involved with… because I always want them to take more risk.”

• Search funds are coming for your dad’s air-con business. The guys nerded out on the US “search fund” model — MBAs raising money to buy an old, boring, profitable business and run it. Adir, channelling the archetype: “I’m a smart person. I’ve done an MBA… I can’t be bothered working my way up in a company and I don’t want to found something new. So just give me cash and bet that I’ll figure out how to run it.” The serious point underneath it: a wall of 70-to-75-year-old founders is about to need an exit, “and the alternative… is shutting it down. That’s plan B. Kill the goodwill.”

• The newspaper game. Adir described an experiment where investors are shown old finance front pages and asked to trade on them — and almost everyone does terribly. The AIs do better, “but it tends to overbet on stuff and then blows itself up. Claude did the best, actually, of all the AIs.”

Accent is a third-party retailer trying very hard to become something better

You may not know Accent Group, but you know its brands: The Athlete’s Foot, Hype DC, Platypus, the soon-to-be-shuttered Glue Store — plus the exclusive Australian distribution of Skechers, Hoka, Vans, Doc Martens and Saucony. Revenue has compounded impressively: $440 million in 2016, $800 million by 2020, $1.46 billion last year. The share price, meanwhile, has been a yo-yo — 65c in 2011, $1.80 in 2016, 68c when COVID hit, a four-bagging peak of $2.94 in 2021 (a $1.5 billion company), and back to 55c last month.

Adir’s framing of that disconnect was the line of the night:

Adir: “If all you got to see in this business over the last fifteen years is their revenue and earnings numbers, I think you would never guess that the share price had been this volatile.”

The strategic story is a slow march away from plain wholesale-and-retail toward owning more of the margin — buying Stylerunner out of trouble and growing it, locking up exclusive brand licences. But Adir was clear-eyed about what it still is today:

Adir: “Predominantly they’re still a third-party retailer selling some of their exclusive brands in Australia. They’ve got a little wholesale business and a little vertically integrated business… it’s not Mecca, but of all the third-party retail businesses, this is definitely one of the better ones.”

Functional beats fashion — and that’s the whole thesis

The most useful idea in the episode came out of Scott’s weekend. Sent to a mall on a shoelace mission, he wandered into The Athlete’s Foot and found it heaving while the fashion stores around it sat empty.

Scott: “Everyone’s in there getting their feet measured, trying to get the right boots… there’s a functional technology here for measuring your foot and getting the best possible shoe. That kind of foot traffic thing matters a lot in this retail world.”

Adir had the data point to back it: roughly 83% of Athlete’s Foot shoppers use the in-store measurement tech. That’s the distinction the whole business turns on — functional versus fashion. The functional end (running, fitting, performance) is sticky and repeatable. The fashion end is a knife-edge:

Scott: “The fashion ones are hard to ride, because you’re either riding a trend and doing really well, or you’re on the other side of it and you’re having to write off your stores and shut them down.”

Where it gets genuinely interesting is the cornered resource — Accent’s exclusive Australian rights to the brand of the moment, Hoka. Adam laid out the flywheel: scale and store count earn you the exclusive licence, and the licence is a toll booth.

Adir: “They’ve got a cornered resource for Hoka in Australia. If you want to stock Hoka, one way or another you’re going to be paying them — you’re going to wholesale buy off them, or you’re a customer that retail buys off them.”

The margin collapse nobody can quite explain

Now the bad news, and the reason the stock got smashed. First-half profit fell from $47 million to $28 million, and gross margin collapsed from roughly 57% to 47%. Management offered three reasons — a high-discount environment, forced inventory clearances, and the AUD/USD. None of them landed.

Adam: “High discount environment means your brand’s weak or you haven’t got any pricing… the US dollar wasn’t even super strong last half, so I’m not sure how that’s an excuse. I feel like they’re just chucking darts at the dartboard.”

Adir translated the “discounting” excuse into what it actually means about the economy:

Adir: “You saw the store was full but all these other stores were not very full — that’s called consumer confidence. That’s: we have to run discounts to get people to buy. That is what’s going on in Australia right now.”

On the “we bought the wrong stock” defence, both were unwilling to crucify a CEO with this track record over one bad buying cycle:

Adir: “Every business that has inventory goes through a period of having to clear out the wrong stuff. If I kept seeing it, I’d say maybe this guy’s lost it” — but not on one half.

The honest conclusion: “There’s been a dramatic drop in gross margin and it’s not well explained in the documentation.” That’s the share price.

A cheap stock — if you trust the numbers

So is it a bargain? The market cap fell about $400 million on the downgrade, putting it on roughly six to seven times earnings. Adam’s read: “A business that’s shown over ten years it can deliver growth — that’s a crazy low multiple.” Scott’s defence of the sector was a neat one for 2026:

Scott: “Unlike some of the other things, it doesn’t have that AI risk attached to it. That’s why I love retail. And that’s why I love GLP” — the weight-loss drugs that should, in theory, put more people in running shoes.

Adir rebuilt the maths from the ground up and landed somewhere more sober. Accent guided to $79–84 million of EBIT for FY26, but the EBIT is eaten by interest and then tax:

Adir: “After interest, that eighty could be fifty-five. Then they pay some tax, maybe they get to thirty-five. And they’re valued at four hundred mil. I think this is more like eleven times net profit” — cheap on EBIT, less heroic on the bottom line.

Daniel Agostinelli and the cloud he didn’t make

A word on the CEO. Daniel Agostinelli is a Brett Blundy protégé and Sanity co-founder, the kind of high-quality operator Adir says he looks for — “this is a special guy.” He’s also under an ASIC insider-trading cloud over a share sale made shortly before an announcement. His defence: the chairman signed off on it. The chairman then left three days later. Adam thought the blame was misallocated:

Adam: “The chairman should have said, no, you can’t sell, Daniel. He stupidly goes, of course, do what you want. And now Daniel’s being blamed for it… the fault really should lie on the chairman here.”

Adir was more cautious — and turned it into a governance lesson:

Adir: “There’s a moment in life where something looks less likely and then it looks more likely… that’s why board minutes are so important. And people neglect board minutes so badly.”

Mike Ashley’s takeover chess

Frasers Group — the UK retail giant run by billionaire Mike Ashley, owner of Sports Direct — has lobbed a hostile, zero-premium bid at 65c. But the bid is the endgame of a decade-long campaign. Frasers has wanted into Australia for years (it had earlier dabbled with MySale and bought Sneakerboy out of administration). The Accent operation unfolded as follows:

Buy the founder out at the top. In July 2024, with Accent above $2, Brett Blundy sold his entire ~$165 million block to Frasers. Adam: “I remember seeing Brett sell and thinking, oh, this can’t be good.” Adir on Blundy’s timing: “He’s good, isn’t he? Doesn’t get much wrong” — he sold at the absolute peak.

Put your own man on the board. Frasers nominated an “independent” director — who happened to have run Sports Direct for Ashley for 35 years.

Adir: “You’re Mike Ashley and you’re saying, I’ve locked up 15% of the company, but how the hell am I going to know what’s going on? So I appoint someone on the board who ran a chunk of my Sports Direct business and that I really trust. I think that will really nail the information flow for me.”

Then sign the JV that does the heavy lifting for you. Accent took on the capital-hungry Sports Direct rollout — which Adam argued is exactly what a patient predator wants:

Adam: “You just go spend a couple hundred million on this, and then — boom — I’m going to take you out when you’re a bit weaker.”

The genius, both agreed, is that Ashley cannot lose. If the Sports Direct partnership soars, his stake re-rates. If it stalls, he buys the lot cheaply. Either way Accent grows more dependent on him.

Adir: “This guy has manoeuvred himself into a great situation.”

So what does it take to win it? The stock is already trading above the 65c offer, and Ashley’s blocking stake means he’s the only buyer in town. The guys think it gets done — but not at 65c.

Adir: “If you offer an investor who five seconds ago was sitting at 55c a buck — and by the way, your dividends are being cut anyway — I think you get this away at a dollar. I’m just not sure Mike actually wants to pay a dollar.”

Adam: “You can’t make six billion US dollars unless you’re a pretty good operator. And Mike clearly is.”

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Nothing highlights the rushed, chaotic nature of this federal budget more than the last-minute reversal of legislation that would have financially ruined grieving widows. The legislative process has been so sloppy that a Labor-Left government committed to a goal of social justice keeps fumbling the ball in ways that disproportionately affect women.

Detail is boring and politics is shrill, but it’s worth understanding what the government almost did.

In the budget, certain negative gearing and CGT benefits will be retained by existing asset owners, a so-called “Grandfathering” clause. The government has decided that an asset jointly owned by spouses would have its grandfathered tax benefits stripped when one owner dies or if the couple divorces.

Beyond the political absurdity of this measure, how did no one in government realise that policy targeting grieving, older widows is deeply unfair, economically unnecessary, ideologically nasty, and exceptionally callous? Whilst the legislation would have applied equally, women would have had it much worse because in the developed world, women outlive men.

According to census data from 2021, there are roughly one million widowed Australians, and widows outnumber widowers by four to one. For someone with even a passing interest in demographics, it is quickly obvious that such policy would impact women four times as often as men. Yet, a frantic Treasurer was about to ensure that newly widowed women with jointly owned investments would have had their financial security instantly and severely worsened.

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This disaster was also slated to apply in divorce, and again it would have excessively hurt women. In a domestic partnership, the highest-value investments are often real estate and when heterosexual relationships end, these more frequently divide in favour of the ex-wife. The instant removal of a negative gearing tax benefit may well mean the loan on that woman’s rental property could no longer be serviced. Jim Chalmers was an inch away from creating policy likely to push a widow or divorcee into the forced sale of her assets.

Whilst the government either missed these disasters or didn’t care, thankfully several astute journalists as well as some crossbenchers made a fuss. And as is not standard practice, by morning the Prime Minister had reversed course. Changing one’s mind when the facts change is admirable, particularly in a politician. But it would have been far more admirable to consult properly and honestly on such dramatic legislation, and avoid this national mess.

There is one specific area in which women still face the potential risk of a more adverse outcome than their male counterparts.

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To go back a step, for several weeks pundits have highlighted that changes to capital gains tax (CGT) and negative gearing would prevent younger Australians from accessing wealth creation opportunities that enriched their older compatriots. To compound this inequality, wealthy Australians will retain their benefits. These and other proposed changes created a political backlash sufficiently large for the government to acquiesce to some so-called carve-outs.

Even with these carve-outs, the wealthy and entrepreneurial have been dealt a harsh blow. But ironically, one of the carve-outs has exacerbated a gender inequality problem.

The government now plans to offer preferential CGT treatment to businesses that fit an “innovation” definition. Whilst the details have not been released, there is precedent in a 2016 concession that established the early stage innovation company (ESIC). It would be logical for the government to utilise this existing classification mechanism for “innovation”. This concession explicitly concerns startups that receive external funding, and the hurdles are skewed towards addressing that case.

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Unfortunately, there is a long and consistent body of evidence demonstrating that women are materially underrepresented as the founders of externally funded technology startups. Whilst the industry has been trying to increase the representation of female founders amongst this funded ecosystem, there are genuine structural obstacles. The challenges are real and ingrained, and they will not be overcome quickly.

Thus, if the “innovation” carve-out for preferential tax treatment is biased towards the funded sub-sector in which women are historically underrepresented, it will financially disadvantage women. And often younger women starting their first business.

This outcome is not a fait accompli, but the risk is real and demands a blank-page assessment. There is danger in rushed, lazy, or sloppy categorisation, and to date this process has been light on precision.

With each passing day, the unintended consequences of this budget appear worse. No doubt, there are more landmines waiting to be discovered, or created as the detail is produced. It is yet another example of what happens when governments rush dramatic, life-altering legislation without proper engagement.

One can only hope this government finds the courage to pause these changes until a proper and transparent consultation has been undertaken. If Albanese does finally take the high road, it is likely a new Treasurer will join him on the journey.

That’s the thing about bubbles, they creep up on you. Bubbles turn usually sensible, risk-averse people into brazen speculators. This is because bubbles are always based on a strand of truth, a thread of sensibility. It’s only in hindsight, after the bubble has popped, that the absurdity becomes obvious.

Every era has a company or thing that best embodies the bubble. During the tulip bubble it was the Semper Augustus bulb (which at one point sold for the price of a grand Amsterdam mansion); the Roaring 20s had RCA, the entertainment business that later created NBC and whose share price would subsequently drop 98%.

The 1960s had the Nifty Fifty and Polaroid which had a near 100 price earnings multiple (before crashing 90%). The Japanese Stock Bubble of the 1980s, which saw its market peak in 1989 before collapsing, took until 2024 to regain its losses (meanwhile the Japanese property market never fully recovered). The star back then was NTT Docomo, which traded on a PE multiple of more than 350 and was worth more than IBM, AT&T, Exxon, General Electric, and General Motors combined (Docomo was eventually delisted in 2020 after being absorbed by its parent, NTT).

While many point to Webvan and Pets.com during the dot-com era, they were largely irrelevant – Cisco was the epoch. It was briefly the world’s most valuable company after its share price surged by over 3,800% in five years. Shortly before the dot-com bubble burst in late March 2000, Cisco snatched the crown from Microsoft, worth more than US$500 billion with a PE multiple of 230. Its share price would soon drop by 80%. It took 25 years to recover those nominal share price losses.

All these bubble epoch companies had genuine reasons for their rise; virtually all survived the crash for decades to come, albeit with far lower market values. RCA was purchased in 1985 by a then-dominant General Electric (itself a key figure in the dot-com bubble based on the now widely discredited Jack Welch’s fraudulent use of GE Capital).

What is the AI era’s poster child for the bubble?

It’s not Nvidia or Apple or Alphabet (hugely profitable businesses albeit all mutually inflated by off balance sheet capex).

No, it’s SpaceX (and when the inevitable Tesla merger happens, Elon Inc).

SpaceX has it all – a genius founder and CEO (now the world’s first and only trillionaire), a plausible bubble story (mining space) and a transformational product (Starlink).

Real bubbles need smart people to join in, not just brazen speculators. The NFT craze wasn’t a real bubble, only a handful of crazed speculators, pop stars and late-to-the-party idiots got involved. The smart money stayed well clear.

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SpaceX is different. Australia’s smartest debt fund manager, Chris Joye, claimed SpaceX’s “equity story was all about the almost unquantifiable optionality and upside associated with the world’s most capable, and important, manufacturing business.” Marc Andreeson, founder of Netscape and one of the most influential VCs in the Valley wrote a fawning profile outlining the upside of SpaceX’s moon shots (while assiduously avoiding any real financial metrics).

Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, invested $1.4 billion in the IPO. More than 20 of Wall Street’s most respected banks worked on the float, which was led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Even Joye fell into the classic bubble trap, misplacing product genius with positive cash flows: “SpaceX inverted the economics. It used vertical integration, a never-before-seen launch cadence, and reusable rocketry to turn a failed industry into a planetary utility. Starlink now connects households, airlines, ships, emergency services and armies. In Ukraine, access to Starlink materially changed the battlefield.”

To be clear, I’m no Elon hater – I drive a Tesla (my favourite ever car) and love Starlink. We once recorded a podcast from midair using Starlink with the full episode uploaded by the time I landed. The SpaceX rocket business has a clear lead over all-comers which will persist for decades.

The problem? Having a great product and visionary genius doesn’t justify a price to sales multiple of 100 (or a forward P/S multiple of 90). Bearing in mind we shouldn’t even be using the insidious revenue multiple, we just have no choice here because SpaceX not only doesn’t make any money, it won’t make any real money (post capex) for a long time.

The intrinsic value of SpaceX is so far removed from its current valuation (around $2.1 trillion depending on the day) that it’s difficult to take any of this too seriously. But let’s do a quick sum of the parts given that SpaceX is really two (or possibly three) separate businesses.

First the easy one – xAI. Elon’s bastardised social media business turned frontier model turned data centre operator.

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xAI is a cash furnace. Last year it saw US$1.2b in EBITDA losses before its capex of US$12b. Even with the recent deals to rent GPUs to Anthropic and Google, this is a business that is worth essentially nothing and competing against Anthropic and OpenAI (and a host of other models). The Cursor deal (which got significantly cheaper than the US$60b sticker price with SpaceX’s share price gain) is interesting, but the LLM space is becoming commoditised and margins are likely to be starched away through furious competition between frontier labs and lightweight models. (Note, the cash burn of xAI will drop materially following the Anthropic and Google deals but then it becomes more of a GPU rental business than a deep tech decacorn).

Then there’s the good business – Starlink. Starlink has a virtual monopoly on satellite internet globally (Amazon’s Leo is miles behind). It benefits from being able to hitch a ride on SpaceX’s launch capability for essentially a wholesale price.

There are around 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit out of 15,400 total satellites – Starlink is literally two thirds of all low orbit satellites. That’s a big lead that could take a decade or more to catch. When Starship ramps up the cost per kilogram will drop 90% and that benefit will continue to be mostly capured by Starlink.

But even virtual monpolies have an intrinsic value. For that we need to look at how much real profit (after capex) the business generates, how fast its profit is growing and how big is its addressable market.

According to SpaceX’s S1 Starlink makes around US$8 billion a year in EBITDA. But this isn’t a media or software business with no incremental capital costs – satellites aren’t cheap, even the little ones. The business spent US$4b on capital expenditures – so a better proxy for profit is US$4 billion.

The strange thing is, despite Starlink being such an incredible product, it’s not actually growing that fast, it rose around 86 percent last year. This is very good, but it’s not 100x sales good.

Meanwhile, the average revenue per user for Starlink is dropping – from US$99 per month in 2023 to US$81 per month in 2025. This reflects the shift from high cost users like private jets and super yachts to cheaper consumer satellites. That means to keep up its growth rate, Starlink needs to find lots more customers because incremental customers are less lucrative than earlier ones. This also shows that it lacks real monopoly pricing power – while Starlink is faster than broadband, it’s not that much faster, and in the consumer market isn’t able to command much of a pricing premium.

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Then there’s the addressable market. SpaceX bulls note that every broadband user on earth is a potential Starlink customer. But even if you take the ultimate steel man case and take the ten largest telcos on earth (AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, Comcast, China Mobile, NTT, Vodafone etc) their annual profits combined are around US$110b.

It’s inconceivable that Starlink could take even half of that market given the incumbents’ rusted-on customer bases, massive infrastructure and often, diversified businesses. But even if Starlink took every single customer from every major telco on earth, the business would be worth around US$1.4 trillion – a significant discount on SpaceX’s current value.

That leaves the SpaceX rocket business, which notionally makes some EBITDA (US$1.1b in 2024 and US$653m in 2025) but which spends US$3b on capex annually. There’s no doubt SpaceX is best in class, but despite Elon’s Mars fever dreams, remains trapped in a relatively contained market. This year more than 75% of SpaceX’s payloads are shipping Starlink satellites into orbit (this is up from 64% in 2023).

The 25% of SpaceX flights that weren’t dedicated Starlink missions were shared among commercial telecom satellites, U.S. space force spy satellites and NASA astronaut/cargo runs to the ISS.

This means SpaceX can’t really be considered a separate operating business; it’s really part of Starlink, so it’s hard to give it much value.

So we have two very cool, but mostly valueless, businesses (in xAI and SpaceX) and one fantastic business (Starlink). The problem is Starlink is only a US$4b profit business (and that’s being generous) growing at 86% annually with shrinking ARPU. Even allowing for a significant Elon premium, this is maybe a US$300b business – if you just saw the financials and nothing else, you’d be closer to US$150b (or even less). That’s around 90% below the current market price. (None of this is investment advice and I don’t have a position in SpaceX stock.)

So how did this SpaceX bubble become so frothy? Partly there’s the Elon magic – Tesla has been similarly overvalued for almost a decade. But there were other reasons.

Most notably, the float raised only US$75b – this is tiny when compared to SpaceX’s total market value. So a small number of shares is acting as a false proxy. Then there was the controversial decision by the NASDAQ to alter its index rules to fast-track SpaceX into its flagship Nasdaq-100 index. This meant that SpaceX will join the index in just 15 days (rather than 3 months), forcing index funds and ETFs to buy the stock.

When you mix the Elon magic with a fast growing and much loved product and sprinkle on some financial alchemy, you get a business that is not only one of the most valuable ever, but could also drop 90%.

If you’re thinking this all feels like 1999 all over again, you’d be right.

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The Contrarians catchup

• Adir’s Howard Stern/David Letterman clip got four likes on LinkedIn. His more combative posts about the budget went viral but attracted personal abuse. “I find that if someone I have had an interaction with writes personally mean stuff to me on LinkedIn, I find that quite hurtful. But like even random people that I don’t know, anonymity is worse, clearly.”

• The episode kicked off with a quiz: the world’s top startup ecosystems by value. The answer: 1. Silicon Valley, 2. New York, 3. London, 4. Tel Aviv, 5. Austin. Sydney is 26, Melbourne is 30. Adir’s take on Tel Aviv: “There’s been a war in Tel Aviv, incredible. Like all of these founders, literally they’re going to the army. But foreigners are scared to invest VC money in the country and yet it’s recent number four with no population.”

• Adir used Claude to compare his electricity bill against competing providers after the government comparison tool gave him completely wrong results: “I uploaded screenshots of prices from different providers into Claude and my bill and I said can you just work this out? I double-checked the end result.” He also discovered he was taking longer and more frequent showers than anyone else.

• The ASX has returned just 32% since 2006, compounding at 1.4% per year over 20 years before dividends and inflation cancel each other out. Adam: “The ASX has been just a quagmire for two decades. What a disastrous state of affairs.”

• Adam wrote a 2,000-word piece on Luke Sayers for The Contrarians newsletter and says it was the best reaction he’s had to anything he’s ever written: “It went into the real background of pre-Dick Pic Day. Luke was a controversial character at PWC. He was fined for having alleged relationships with staff. There’s a lot of stuff that hasn’t really been reported much.”

Albanese accidentally admits he doesn’t believe in capitalism

The government announced a partial retreat from its most controversial CGT changes, creating a 50% discount for innovative businesses meeting strict criteria, and lifting the small business concession threshold from $2M to $10M in turnover. But a $10M lifetime cap applies, and the new rules are near-impossibly complex to qualify for.

Adir: “I sincerely apologise for calling you a shill because they wouldn’t say backdown. But I don’t think this is a backdown. This is basically, you know, like I call this, you know the Simpsons episode where Homer and Chief Wiggum are in a hole and they say, how are we gonna get out? And Chief Wiggum yells no, dig up stupid. Like this feels like that moment to me.”

Adir: “It’s like you’re trying to do a puzzle, but people have poured in pieces from eight different puzzles. And now make the picture. It doesn’t fit together. You can’t make this picture.”

Adam: “What Albanese and Chalmers don’t seem to get is the fact that the CGT reforms will change the cost of capital and push investors towards higher yielding, more mature companies to pay big dividends. They have no understanding of that concept whatsoever.”

On Albanese’s claim that the aspiration of a small business owner is the same as for every worker:

Adam: “There in one barely comprehensible sentence is a treatise where he is saying I do not believe in the principles of capitalism, because in capitalism, capital and labour do not get treated the same, for better or for worse. And Albanese has just, I do not believe in the fundamental cornerstone of capitalism.”

Adir: “A politician who is paid from the public purse is as aspirational as someone that opens a hairdressing business and doesn’t pay themselves for four years. We are the same aspirational. Now, you might be the same ambitious, but he’s not as aspirational. And we should not compare the taxpayer-funded salary that a politician gets with the hairdresser and the sweat equity they’ve built up and the risks they’ve taken. And if you do compare those things then frankly you no longer believe in capitalism.”

Adam: “He is not lying about his core ideology. His core ideology is I do not believe in capitalism. And there are not really democracies that have managed to exist anywhere around the world in history for extended periods of time that have not been based on capitalist economies. This is a slippery slope to democratic disaster if we start eroding capitalism.”

On who is actually paying for it all:

Adir: “The biggest travesty is we’re all fighting about CGT, and Chalmers’ comment was basically, how many young people even are affected by CGT? And that triggered a thought in my mind, which is we shouldn’t be arguing whether 10 or 20% are affected by CGT. We should be saying, how come 70% of young people are not affected by CGT? And the answer is, because if you earn $45,000 to $135,000, you’re paying an extra 30% in income tax. If you’re earning $100,000, the average wage in Australia, it’s usurious levels of tax. And somehow the entire tax debate has been completely deviated towards CGT.”

KPMG is worse than PWC, and barely reported

A Senate inquiry revealed that KPMG had systematically shared confidential client board papers, including those of 70-year client Lendlease, to win new audit work. The firm’s former CEO Andrew Yates, who publicly condemned PWC’s behaviour in 2023 while this conduct was ongoing inside his own firm, has been ousted. He was paid $3M in salary last year and is receiving a $1.7M termination payment. A former KPMG partner who is now chairman of Westpac’s audit committee stayed at chairman Martin Shepherd’s house while KPMG was pitching for Westpac’s $32M audit. A separate KPMG partner left the firm and within months joined the Macquarie board, chairing its audit committee. KPMG subsequently won Macquarie’s $75M audit.

Adam: “Not only did he basically try to steal clients from PwC, he also lied about the whole process in front of Parliament. This guy said this is why the PwC issue is so disturbing. Based on the findings of the Tax Practitioners Board, the conduct of PwC was clearly unethical and unacceptable. Yates even emphasised that KPMG did not use legal personal privilege improperly. He then went and claimed it.”

Adam: “They’ve got this law firm to investigate. They’re using this internal investigation to avoid giving it to a real investigator. The whistleblower is being exposed internally throughout the organisation. He got fired. They certainly dismissed the claims. And ASIC has conceded that they have inadequate powers to protect the whistleblower because something about these types of partnerships don’t exactly fall under ASIC. This whistleblower who has now said I wouldn’t do this again. This country can’t even protect the whistleblowers that are doing the right thing.”

Adir: “One of the things that I’ll generally say to players is exactly what I feel like should be said to this board and this CEO. You should never do anything that you would be embarrassed about on the front page of the Financial Review. All of this would not have been hard to understand was going to look terrible on the front page of the Financial Review. They just didn’t think it was going to. And they came to stop it getting there. But welcome to the reality.”

Adam: “This is horrifying. How many column inches were devoted to PWC? This is so much worse. It’s not just the crime, not just the stealing the documents and using it for your own money-making schemes, but to effectively victimise this poor whistleblower. And God knows the mental state of this heroic whistleblower who tried and tried and tried.”

Ferrari’s EV problem

Ferrari’s new electric car, the Luce (meaning “light” in Italian), has drawn criticism for its looks, which don’t carry the instantly recognisable Ferrari silhouette. Yet Ferrari’s brand machinery has ensured that loyal clients feel they need to buy it to maintain good standing and preserve their access to limited edition supercars. The Ferrari F-80 sells for US$3.9M and trades for $5M on secondary markets. The FXXK (this isn’t us avoiding saying “fuck”, that’s its name), a track-only car, sells for $3M and $4M on the collector market.

Adir: “Even if you don’t see the badge, you know it’s a Ferrari. You couldn’t say that about this car. I think that’s the difference.”

Adam: “This is better than brand forgiveness. Forgiveness would usually mean, don’t worry that we made a mistake, when we make the next thing we’ll be fine. This is, we made a mistake, but our brand is so strong and our customers are so desperate to be a part of it that they will buy this thing that no one maybe wants in the same way, just to show us that they’re there for us in hard times as well as good times. This is absolutely remarkable.”

Adir: “They’ve got this unique characteristic, or I don’t want to say unique because that would mean only one has it, but very, very uncommon brand characteristic, which is people will buy things from us that they don’t even really want in order to have standing to buy the stuff that they do want because it’s so unattainable and inaccessible. That is like a very, very tough game to play that almost no one pulls off.”

Adore Beauty: the IRE Index claims another victim

Adore Beauty, which IPO’d at a $600M valuation, rejected a $1.20 per share ($130M) acquisition approach roughly a year ago. The shares now trade at 30c, implying a market cap of around $25M. Insiders including founders and private equity backer Quadrant sold down a combined $250M across the IPO and thereafter, giving an IR (Insider Relative Exit) Index ratio of approximately 10, making it a strong contender for number one on the all-time leaderboard.

Adir: “The problem they’ve got is the problem that we foresaw they were going to have. You’re selling third-party retail stuff against an enormous, very well-run competitor in Mecca, who also has exclusive brands that bring people in. You can’t compete with them.”

Adir: “And when they opened stores, which I generally favour, you know, I hate third-party retail, but they’re opening stores three doors away from Mecca. That is not a road to victory.”

Adam: “If David Jones stays solvent, that will be a dramatic achievement in my view. Like that has big problems. But if you’re Myer, how would you not launch a takeover bid for Adore Beauty now? For $20M, very cheap. There is a brand that has a loyal customer base that will respond to offers from Adore Beauty, and there’s a real brand there.”

Five other stories worth following:

1. US and Iranian negotiators met in Switzerland overnight after talks turned tense, while Trump threatened harder strikes unless Tehran reined in Hezbollah. Qatar and Pakistan reported encouraging progress, with negotiations continuing through the week.

2. Keir Starmer said he will resign as UK prime minister, promising an orderly transition after Labour lost confidence amid an Epstein-linked ambassador scandal and Andy Burnham’s rise. A successor is expected by September recess.

3. Serena Williams will return to Wimbledon singles next week after accepting a wild card, nearly four years after stepping away at the 2022 US Open. She will also play doubles with sister Venus.

4. Nipsea researchers in Singapore developed an ultra-black paint absorbing 99.9% of visible light, creating optical illusions and potential luxury vehicle uses. It recalls Vantablack, used by BMW concepts, satellites and submarines.

5. Snap unveiled Specs, chunky AR glasses costing about $2,200, after a decade in development. Shares fell over 5%, though Evan Spiegel compared the device’s all-in-one computing power to a premium computer.

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The Contrarians catchup

• The Socceroos beat Turkey 2-0 at the World Cup, in what Adir called a genuinely shocking result. “It was pretty obvious from the way they set up the structure that they were gonna try to play this game, which is we’re just gonna defend the hell out of it and try and kick a ball forward and counterattack. It’s a perfect counter positioning, right? And it worked.”

• Adir spent a full Sunday touring Melbourne’s furniture strips to take the temperature of consumer spending. His read: north of the Yarra, young people were busy in cafes and fashion stores. South of the Yarra, almost every furniture store was dead except Coco Republic, which had been heavily discounted since being bought by private equity. “I think we might be at the low point right now for consumer durable goods discretionary spend. Although there is a pretty high chance we go into a recession after this budget.”

• Adam’s Melbourne Airport taxi machine experience: three machines, none working. His verdict on the incompetent roll-out: “The best laid plans, we’re gonna stop this roading, we’re gonna put these machines in, and they couldn’t even get the machines to work. One didn’t attach to the credit card reading machine. And the other one just didn’t even get that far.”

• Adir took an Uber driven by a man who spent 25 minutes delivering a dissertation on why Hezbollah is not a terrorist organisation. Adir now books his Uber under a different name: “If I use my name, how many times I’ve been lectured about Palestine. I’m not interested in that. It’s so terrifying.”

• A Fair Work Commissioner previously employed by the CFMEU and TCFU ruled that Uber could not remove a driver from its platform despite multiple safety complaints including photographic evidence of him driving at 119km/h in a 100 zone. Adam: “We’re not looking after our 17-year-old girls, we’re looking after these rapists.”

The R&D tax rort: Atlassian’s $150M windfall

Hidden inside the federal budget was a change to the R&D tax incentive, lifting the maximum annual claim from around $100M to $150M. Only two Australian companies claim anywhere near that level: Atlassian and Fortescue.

Adir: “The previous chair of the Tech Council was Robyn Denholm. The current chair is Scott Farquhar. Robyn Denholm went to be the government innovation advisor and wrote the R&D tax incentive recommendation, which said lift it to $150M, of which one of the two companies that benefits is Atlassian, of which Scott Farquhar is a co-founder. So there are links everywhere here. It smells fishy and I don’t think that’s a good look.”

Adir: “You’ve got a situation where they’ve also raised the threshold on which you can make an R&D claim to $250K. And so all of these small startups in their first one or two years of starting, they now lose access. What makes me angry is that these small startups that should be supported, they’ve just lost the ability to claim.”

Adam: “Robyn’s quote was, ‘in Silicon Valley, nobody’s sitting around a table going, oh I wonder what the government’s going to do to help us get this startup off the ground’. She’s never worked in a startup in her life. She started at Tesla when it was a trillion-dollar business. Who is she to be telling startup founders what they can and can’t be doing? She’s a billionaire. How dare she lecture founders with no money in the bank who are living off ramen?”

Adir: “When she says I’ve never heard a founder think about tax before starting a startup, I would say listen harder. The reason you’ve never met a founder that cares about tax is you’ve never tried to charge them 47% before. Go charge them 47%. And you just did. And now they’re all talking about it.”

The budget hits young cheerleaders, not Scott Farquhar

Adam told the story of two founders in their mid-twenties who built a cheerleading club from scratch, filling a warehouse in Port Melbourne with 1,000 kids. The business makes millions in revenue. If they sell in a few years for $10M, they will pay 47% CGT on their gains.

Adam: “This is the sweat equity. This is a young 25-year-old who’s about to build a significant business, doing a great thing for the economy, about to be absolutely smashed from the politics of envy and incompetence. It’s not the Scott Farquhars and Mike Cannon-Brookses. We’re fine. We get grandfathered.”

Adam: “They trusted Labor not to lie to us on economic policy. They’ve lied, they’ve killed the trust of this 5% of aspirational voters that call it Howard’s Battlers. And we’ve seen that’s why Albanese is now less popular than Pauline Hanson.”

Adir: “The higher the return of an asset, the higher the tax rate on that asset. It’s one of the singularly dumbest ideas you could possibly have if you fundamentally believe in capitalism. And that’s what this system does.”

The New Zealand Finance Minister, Nicola Willis, responded to the Australian budget changes with: “Australians looking to start or grow a business have an epic opportunity. And that opportunity is to do it in New Zealand.”

Adir: “She’s right. It’s sad to say, but she’s right.”

Xero chairman falls in love with the CEO

Xero chairman David Thodey has begun privately meeting institutional shareholders to try to rebase CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy’s pay package. Xero shares are down 62% this year. The acquisition of loss-making Midland Milo was signed off by the board and the CEO together.

Adam: “Singh Cassidy has the unique honour of being both the highest paid and possibly the worst-performing CEO in Australia. The worst chairman is the chairman that falls in love with the CEO. Richard Goyder with Alan Joyce was probably the classic. And this is David Thodey’s falling for the same trap. He’s fallen in love with his CEO while the CEO has completely underperformed.”

Adir: “If you start and you say I’ve got this great strategy, we’re going to drive the share price up with my incredible decision making and execution, and then as CEO the share price goes into reverse dramatically, you need to own it. You can’t turn around and say, well, there’s no incentive for me anymore to keep doing it. Either you believe it or you don’t. If you believe it, stick with it because you’re gonna make lots of money in the future when it rockets back up. If you don’t believe in it, quit. But this idea that says I had this strategy, investors don’t like it, it’s run the share price into the ground, and now I don’t feel motivated anymore, I can’t support that.”

Adam: “I think both CEO and chairman have to go. I called this with DroneShield and this is the same. Chairman, CEO gone. They have to go.”

Elon becomes the world’s first trillionaire

SpaceX completed what it says is the world’s largest ever IPO last week, raising US$75B. Shares were priced at $135, traded up to $173, and settled back to $161, a 19% pop. Only 5% of equity was sold. Famous short seller Jim Chanos called it a “hopes and dreams IPO.”

Adam: “The IPO was perfectly priced. You want a bit of good sort of goodwill publicity. And obviously only selling 5% of the equity, so you can afford a bit of dilution. This is a perfectly priced IPO.”

Adir: “It’s hard for me to communicate how much this feels like the dot-com boom. It’s almost identical. The reason I say that bit of background is it’s easier to mistake this as being unlike the dot-com boom because the businesses are making revenue. But what is the same is that the valuation and the economics of the businesses are completely disconnected.”

Adam: “It never made any sense that a couple of dudes from Australia, where one ran a lingerie business and one was just a finance guy, how these guys could be better at tech than real genius technologists out of Silicon Valley.”

Adir: “I think very smart people are now saying very dumb things, drinking the Kool-Aid. I remember that from the dot-com boom and I was young and I remember thinking, hang on, am I really dumb? And so if you’re skeptical and cynical about what’s going on, do not second-guess yourself based on smart people agreeing with those valuation. And if you’re not cynical and you think you’re right, don’t draw any succour from smart people agreeing with you. I saw almost every smart person being wrong in the dot-com.”

Special guest: Tim Wilson, Shadow Treasurer

Tim Wilson, the member for Goldstein and the Liberal Party’s Shadow Treasurer, joined the pod. Wilson famously lost his seat to Teal candidate Zoe Daniel in 2022 and then became the only person to win a seat back from a Teal at the 2025 election. He is a heartbeat and an election away from the treasurership.

On winning back his seat:

Tim: “If you ask me on 23 May 2022, I thought I was done. If you asked me in the year leading up, I was absolutely convinced I was going to win. But as it got closer and closer to election day I felt it slipping. And then on election day when the numbers were coming in and my opponent was celebrating her victory, we were looking at the numbers and saying, this doesn’t look right. We can see a path to victory. I wouldn’t be calling it this early. And so basically from election night onwards, I absolutely believed I was going to win.”

On One Nation:

Tim: “If you’re earning $60K, $120K combined household income and you’re trying to pay thousands and thousands of dollars a month in mortgage and it just keeps going up and up and up, you get shitty. There’s no point pretending otherwise. People are feeling the pinch much harder. They’re going to the supermarket, they’re getting less in their red basket and they’re saying something has to change. But at the moment they’re just looking for a sense of almost exasperation for an alternative. And she’s come along and said I’m a bright, in one sense, a bright new shiny thing.”

Tim: “I don’t believe in being One Nation lite and I don’t believe in being Labor lite. I believe in being big Liberal, which means we’re pro-enterprise, pro-family, pro-community, and pro small business getting ahead.”

On the budget and young Australians:

Tim: “There was a study by the e61 Institute that looked at which companies were most likely to be productive and they were those in the first five years. Which ones were most disproportionately likely to employ people? Companies in their first two years. And the ones that were most likely to be productive were also those that had employee share ownership schemes because you get interest in alignment. I want interests in alignment to grow the future of the economy. And instead they’re being targeted.”

Tim: “Labour has divided the country, particularly through this budget. They literally led up to the budget trying to encourage families to have fights around the kitchen table. They’ve pitted people who’ve invested and saved against young Australians on a false promise that it’s going to achieve greater home ownership. We’ve got to be the solution which unites the country, talks about a way forward and gets people to put their energy towards growth and opportunity again.”

On housing:

Tim: “We’ve said that we’re not going to allow migration to continue to overshoot while we haven’t got the volume of housing stock. You can’t if you keep overshooting migration, which is what we’ve been doing, while not building new housing stock, you only get one impact.”

On what he wants for young Australians:

Tim: “I don’t want to run your life. How you live your life is up to you and I respect that. And I also don’t want it in return. I want whatever generation of Australians you’re in to be in a position to get ahead and to be able to work hard and that hard work actually pays off. And then I’m interested in how you design a tax system that empowers you.”

Five other stories worth following:

1. G7 gathered in Évian-les-Bains as Macron sought to ease tensions, boosted by Trump’s Iran deal news but strained by US positions on climate, NATO and Greenland, plus a Versailles dinner to keep him engaged.

2. After Amazon’s Andy Jassy reportedly warned Fable could be jailbroken, the White House allegedly ordered Anthropic to pull models offline, then imposed export controls. Anthropic says no universal jailbreak exists as talks continue.

3. Trump marked his 80th birthday with UFC Freedom 250 on the White House South Lawn, joining Dana White cage-side before 4,300 invitees, including Mark Zuckerberg, David Ellison and Joe Rogan, despite storm threats.

4. The Knicks ended a 53-year title drought while generating huge economic upside for New York, from packed bars and merchandise sales to $90M home games, million-dollar finals ads and late-night TV ratings boosts.

5. New Dawn Bio raised $2.4M to grow cultured wood 10,000 times faster than forestry, using tree stem cells and bioreactors to create shaped timber that could reduce waste, deforestation and carbon emissions.