Episode 209: Meme Hero Frank Greeff Joins Pod, OpenAI vs Anthropic, Clare O'Neil's Budget Slip, Sexyland get Hot, CTM Crumbles and is SpaceX the Most Overvalued IPO Ever?
Adam and Adir sit down with Frank Greeff, the man who led the LinkedIn campaign against the government's disastrous budget, and copped a clap from Albo and the Nine papers for his trouble.
The Contrarians catchup
Adam and Adir debated the OpenAI comeback narrative after Codex launched as a competitive developer tool. Adam: “I’m far more bullish on OpenAI now than I was a few months ago. Could it be a $500B business? Like if Anthropic’s making $500M now and the way it’s scaling, Anthropic could be making $20B a year pretty soon.” Adir: “I wrote them off. I’ve written them off.”
Adir discovered that Coles resets Curtis Stone loyalty credits between promotions, wiping his 30 leftover fry-pan credits when glassware launched. “Don’t you think that is a bad customer loyalty move? How could they not retain the credits and give you some feeling that you’re invested in portfolio?”
The guys dissected Sexyland, a private retailer with 17 stores doing $36M in revenue and $4.5M EBITDA. Adam: “Usually great margins with adult stuff.” Adir: “It’s much less profitable than I expected.”
Richard Goyder is stepping down from Woodside. Adam: “This should have happened a couple of years ago. But no one goes forever.”
Lime bikes network effects debate, continued from last episode. Adir brought in outside confirmation from his friend Tel Aviv: “Way more people using Lime means the person that uses it and lives a bit further north, they go and leave it further north. And then when I want to get the bike further north, I can. That is a network effect.”
The budget: the housing minister undercuts her own government
Housing Minister Clare O’Neil gave an interview in which she appeared to directly contradict the government’s stated rationale for the CGT and negative gearing changes. The guys argued she inadvertently dismantled the entire policy in a single sitting.
Adir: “She said the tax system should not create and drive investment decisions for people. At one point I thought it is possible that these Labour politicians periodically visit planet Earth, at least for a coffee. But that demonstrates that she hasn’t been here for a very long time. Because tax treatment is a huge driver of capital, of profitability.”
Adir: “Her argument is basically that, contrary to Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers’ pitch that this is designed to make the asset class of housing less attractive to investors, her pitch is no, no, no, no. It’s not. This tax will not make any asset class more or less attractive than any other asset class. It’s a complete undermining of the whole argument. And the journalist did not ask her a single question about this.”
Adir: “You’ve got a situation now where not only can they not explain the tax, but you’ve got a senior minister, a minister for housing, undermining the housing fundamentals that are stated as being the core idea of the policy.”
Adir: “Treasury Secretary Jenny Wilkinson came out and said there is no clear evidence that these tax changes will be detrimental to capital investment and capital flows in Australia. That is not a lie, but that is a political statement. The truthful statement is this: there is no clear evidence either way. However, there is strong evidence that these type of tax changes reduce the amount of intellectual property and patents registered by countries and significantly reduce venture capital investment. That’s the honest answer.”
Adam: “She should be a non-politicised neutral. Disgraceful. I think she should be fired, but she’s doing the bidding of the people who should be firing her.”
Special guest: Frank Greeff on the ALBO meme and the SMH hatchet job
Frank Greeff co-founded Realbase with his brothers, growing it from a four million dollar services business to a $180M exit. He created the viral “ALBO co-founder” meme after the budget and was then targeted by a Sydney Morning Herald piece that implied he had not shared equity with his team.
On first hearing the budget:
Frank: “We had been having this incremental momentum in the right direction. The VC markets in Australia had been growing. More and more young people that I’d been meeting were keen to get into the world of founding businesses.”
On the meme going viral:
Frank: “I started getting messages about like how this is ricocheting in the politicians’ world. Getting reached out to by so many media establishments. Hearing from politicians going, oh my gosh, this thing is going crazy in the four walls of Canberra. And that was like a little bit weird and wonderful. But let’s be honest, a lot of media is trying to cling on, trying to hold on to their once glory days. And so something that’s going off on social media, they’ll certainly jump onto and grab.”
On the SMH article:
Frank: “I received maybe on Wednesday last week a list of questions from the journo and immediately I was like, okay, there is a hit piece coming for me. Because the questions were all related specifically to me and the context of the business. It felt very different to the rest of the questions that any other journalists had sent me that week. Those were all like, what’s your view on this thing? These were all about me.”
Frank: “We started the business when we were 20 years old. I was a chef. My brothers had never had jobs or bosses and we had no idea what it was like. People have asked, how come you didn’t have a sophisticated ESOP? It’s like, we didn’t even know what an ESOP was. So when we gave out shares, it would just be straight equity and you just transfer shares to that person. The key is, okay, you learn a bunch of lessons and then you go, what do I take from those lessons to apply to the next? And that’s why the critical piece for me was in our new business, I know about an ESOP. Ten out of eleven people have ESOP and all the right structures.”
Adam: “A quarter of Frank’s staff had equity, which is a very high ratio. More would have been offered. Probably half would have been offered and a quarter took. That’s up there with anyone in Australia. So the whole framing that Frank and his brothers were villains for not giving equity is just a complete stuff up.”
Adir: “I really encourage you not to be dissuaded by this and to keep speaking. Because I think your voice is measured and it’s smart and it comes from a place of personal experience. It is every citizen’s right to be able to speak freely about things that the government is doing. And you were not even abusive or insulting.”
Anthropic: the fastest growing business in history
Anthropic raised $65B at a valuation of $965B, led by Altimeter Capital and joined by Dragoneer, Sequoia, D1, Bailey Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, and Fidelity. Revenue is reportedly doubling to $10.9B in Q2, having gone from $100M ARR in late 2023, to $1B a year later, to $4B six months after that, to roughly $10B now.
Adam: “10x, 10x, 8x. That is just unbelievable. In the first quarter this year, Anthropic spent 71 cents on computing power for every dollar. It’s down to 56 cents. That’s some real scale. That’s obviously why they’ve turned profitable. I’ve never seen a business grow like this.”
Adir: “I don’t think a business ever has grown like this. That’s why. Yeah, this is the first time ever. The question is, what would make it worth a trillion dollars? If a business was growing at 30% and making $20-30B in NPAT, you could probably say, that feels like a trillion dollar valuation.”
Adam: “If you want an LLM exposure, it’s gotta be Anthropic, which is why all these smart funds are doing it. They can’t afford to miss out because it could 2-3x. Anthropic’s now more valuable than OpenAI. Anthropic was like a tenth the valuation of OpenAI a year ago. It is now more. I’ve never seen a business grow like this.”
Adir: “A trillion dollar valuation is not ridiculous for this business in the way it is for Elon’s businesses. You can see how this could be worth that. There’s not many of these to get into, maybe at the moment there are two. And if you want to get into one of them, you pay the price.”
SpaceX IPO: $80B raise, $2T valuation, and mostly hot air
SpaceX lodged its prospectus with the SEC to raise $80B in June, eclipsing Saudi Aramco’s $26B as the largest IPO in history. Revenue was $19B in 2025, up 33%, but the company lost $4.94B, kept alive by $26B in financing. Starlink, responsible for $11B of the $19B in revenue, is the only profitable segment. XAI consumed $5.6B in capex.
Adam: “SpaceX is essentially an internet service provider that also explores space. The company’s extraordinary ambitions are fuelled by a much more ordinary product. The only way they can keep going is by doing this IPO. Clearly out of cash.”
Adam: “Starlink’s a great business. Two to three hundred billion dollar business? Because there’s so much TAM. Every plane will have it, every boat will have it. Anyone in rural areas. Caught three, four hundred billion combined with SpaceX. But xAI is burning seven, eight, nine billion dollars a year.”
Adam: “The kernel of truth here is Elon is a generationally incredible entrepreneur. He’s responsible for bringing electric cars into the mainstream. He’s responsible for Starlink. SpaceX is unbelievable. That doesn’t mean his companies should be worth 3.5 trillion. That’s where the brilliance of Musk has completely detached from any kind of financial reality.”
Adir: “The era we’re living in is kings have been replaced by corporate tyrants. All of the capturing of countries, unless you’re Vladimir Putin, that inclination in human beings hasn’t disappeared, it’s just been replaced by corporate activity. And you’ve got large percentages of the population in Western countries that see no linear way to make any amount of money that lets them buy a house, but they see Elon, and these are like their own kind of savior. Someone who can bring self-financial salvation to people who otherwise couldn’t get there.”
Adam: “We’ve got an Elon premium of 600% here. This is at best a $500B business being valued at $3.6T.”
CTM: the car has driven off the bridge
Corporate Travel Management entered safe harbour, with directors refusing to sign a declaration that the company is solvent. Lenders including HSBC, CommBank, and Westpac are being asked for access to an additional $35M, without which CTM cannot pay the UK government’s $178M. The AFR obtained a confidential presentation to lenders described by attendees as “deeply uncomfortable.”
Adam: “Apparently the stumbling block is that lenders are demanding directors sign a declaration that the company is solvent, which the board is unwilling to do. Which kind of says it all really. The board’s unwilling to stand by the solvency of this business.”
Adir: “We’re watching a huge car accident in slow motion. All we’re seeing now is bits of the car flying in every direction as we watch the crash. What we don’t know is whether it’s a fatal crash or not.”
Adam: “My view is the car’s driven off the bridge and landed a hundred meters below in the river and you think, oh, this guy could still be alive. Pretty sure the guy’s dead.”
Five other stories worth following:
Typical CEO pay rose 5.9% to $17.7M in 2025, with median workers needing 200 years to match one year of CEO earnings. Welltower’s Shankh Mitra topped the list at $821.1M annually, an enormous gap.
Pop Mart’s website traffic has fallen since the holidays, suggesting the Labubu craze may be cooling, though some shoppers may have shifted in-store. Retailers say adult-focused blind-box toys remain influential across the category overall.
Chinese startup LinkerBot shipped 10,000 robot hands in 2025, meeting 80% of global demand. Its dexterous hands start at $600, but founder Zhou Yong expects prices to hit $200 within five years.
Berkshire Hathaway will buy Taylor Morrison Home for $6.8B in cash, adding site-built housing alongside Clayton Homes. Incoming CEO Greg Abel says the deal could expand homeownership and eventually combine operations.
The Trump administration may require USMCA-covered vehicles to contain 50% US-made components to access lower tariffs. Tesla appears best placed to qualify, with its cars already averaging 84% US content.