Apple CEO Tim Cook steps down, big tech’s earnings, xAI and Cursor deal
In this episode of Get the Check, the pod breaks down a huge week in tech. There’s the historic CEO transition at Apple, a meltdown over Big Tech’s capex spend, and xAI’s new plan after Grok was adopted by zero companies we have heard of. Side note, does anyone know why all the big tech companies report on the same day??
After 15 years of running Apple, Tim Cook is stepping into an Executive Chairman role and giving John Ternus the reigns. The hosts start the segment with Tim Cook’s legacy, and there’s a lot to unpack. He took Apple from $350M to $4T, invented new categories (shoutout to the AirPod, which Anika insists she hates but has purchased 5 times and counting), and even built a $109B services business that now drives 41% of Apple’s profits. They also talk about his misses. The Vision Pro ate 25% of R&D spend for years and was barely even adopted in the heart of SF. Then there’s the elephant in the room, which was no real AI product, even though Siri plus Apple’s personal context set them up perfectly to create consumer AI or some type of assistant. The podcast really needs an assistant, so if John Ternus could work on that the pod is forever indebted. Ternus is a hardware engineer who has worked on every important Apple project since 2001. Maya discusses the real reason she thinks Cook picked him and where he may place important bets.
Next they get into hyperscaler earnings, and the numbers are genuinely hard to comprehend. Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon collectively announced $700B in data center spending for the year, which is roughly the GDP of most countries. Amazon’s free cash flow is down 97%, Meta is burning $370M a day on construction, and the new bottleneck is not GPUs anymore, it is energy. Half of the planned 2026 megawatts are already canceled. The pod also digs into the Sam Altman vs. Sarah Friar drama at OpenAI, which is projected to lose $14B this year as they try to IPO.
Finally, they get into xAI’s proposed deal with Cursor: either a $60B acquisition or a $10B payment for using Colossus, xAI’s data center that is sitting at 11% capacity considering Elon’s in the middle of a lawsuit with its otherwise top potential customer OpenAI. Anika’s hot take is that this isn’t just a model capabilities problem for Grok it’s also a brand problem - enterprises are not buying Grok after it thought it was Hitler. Priya points out that if this deal closes and Cursor gets locked into Composer only, which is there own model vs. their current approach, which allows users to select between all models then that is a huge opening for anyone else building coding tools.
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00:00 Our take on the JPM sexual harassment lawsuit
06:49 Did Tim Cook achieve GOAT status
09:10 Cook expanding into SaaS
12:00 RIP Intel
14:02 Where Tim Cook got cooked
14:05 Vision Pro fail
17:08 iPhone growth stalls
19:31 Apple un-intelligence
27:27 Why Ternus won’t be another Cook
29:35 What we think Apple will bet on next
30:40 Hyperscaler capex freakout
31:35 FCF explained
45:28 SpaceX Cursor deal
49:58 Coding tool consolidation
50:10 Maya rants about GitHub