Gossip episode alert. The OpenAI/Anthropic rivalry is boiling over.

We sip on the most piping hot tea around OpenAI and Anthropic's ad spots at the Super Bowl and the growing animosity between the two giants.

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Keen-eared listeners may remember when Elon bought his own company X (formerly Twitter) with his OpenAI spite company xAI.

Well, he's done it again, folks. This time SpaceX has bought xAI, meaning that SpaceX now owns xAI and X as part of the largest private company on Earth.

We discuss.

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You asked, we answered. We're doing a much-requested episode on "Australian" fintech Airwallex, which has gotten a lot of untoward attention of late — anti-money laundering audits, accusations by American VCs of being a financial backdoor to China. But there's a bigger story here: the proliferation of payments companies doing a big land grab from traditional financial institutions, and quickly learning that regulation and bank policy exists for a reason.

We take a crash course of Airwallex, its current controversies, and where it fits into the bigger payments story.

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As somewhat of a follow up to our Claude Code/Coworker episode last week, today we regroup to evaluate what it could mean for YOUR favourite SaaS products. That's right, folks, AI is coming to take away your precious QuickBooks and you're going to watch and clap as it rips and tears it to pieces. We also touched (if briefly) on the Siri x Gemini announcement.

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New year, new studio, same red hot takes.

This episode covers the typhoon of AI-generated filth created by Grok, Elon Musk's AI venture, currently flooding X. We also touch on the general state of X as a platform.

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We're joined by friend of the pod and Rear Window columnist Mark Di Stefano for a loose chat covering a swathe of topics from capital-J Journalism, the tech oligopoly and AI in politics. This is our final dispatch from our Christmas recording.

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We're joined by Rowan "Joyride" Dix and Becky "Becky Lucas" Lucas for another round of our annual community shark tank, where we listen to our listeners pitch their startup ideas and decide whether we're going to invest.

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In the inaugural episode of this years holiday special, we rack up Ws as we dissect the predictions we made last silly season for 2025.

Go to https://www.downround.net/ to sign up for PREMIUM and get ad-free listening PLUS an extra episode every week. In this week's premium ep, we make our predictions for 2026, which will almost certainly come true (not financial advice).

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A highly requested topic in the Down Round Discord is mental health and mindfulness apps — from meditation platforms like Calm to therapist marketplaces like BetterHelp. That's the topic of today, discussing the boom during the ZIRP era, the peak during COVID, and how it all relates to other engagement platforms like Duolingo.

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Netflix wants to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount Skydance wants to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. Both for many billions of dollars. Why? We break down the $70 – 100 billion bids, the Ellison–Trump court politics, and why this could mark the final enclosure of the film industry by tech.

Also: James chronicles the history of film industry disruption, and Raph reveals his long-awaited top ten movies of 2025 list.

We also provide some follow-up on prediction markets after last weeks episode.

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This week we're going deep on the rise of prediction markets — the hybrid of futures trading, sports gambling, and economic theology that suddenly seems to have eaten the world. Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi are booming and an increasingly big part of both tech culture and also gambling culture.

We trace the whole arc: from Hayekian fantasies about prices revealing truth, to the far bigger truth: people just really, really like having a punt.

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