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Ricardo

@Ric_RTP

Apple can't even fix Siri but they're making more money from AI than companies spending 30x more. They pulled in $900 million from AI apps last year. On track to cross $1 BILLION in 2026. Not by building AI models or spending hundreds of billions on data centers... But simply by charging everyone else a 30% tax for the privilege of reaching iPhone users. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI. Every major AI company on the planet pays Apple a cut every time someone subscribes to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Grok through the App Store. 75% of that $900 million came from ChatGPT alone. Meanwhile, here's what Apple's competitors spent on AI last year: Amazon: $100+ billion Microsoft: $80 billion Google: $75 billion Meta: $65 billion Combined: almost $400 billion. Apple's AI spend? $12.7 billion. A fraction. And Apple is STILL making a billion dollars from AI while spending 30x less than the competition. Morgan Stanley projects Amazon's free cash flow will go NEGATIVE this year. Potentially by $28 billion. Barclays says Meta's free cash flow could drop 90%. These companies are hemorrhaging cash trying to build the future of AI. Apple just sits there collecting rent. Think about the absurdity of this situation: Sam Altman raised $110 billion for OpenAI. Spent years and billions building ChatGPT. Got 900 million weekly users. Built the most popular AI product in history. And Apple takes 30% of every subscription that flows through the iPhone. Altman does the work. Apple gets the cut. Google spent $75 billion on AI infrastructure and is STILL paying Apple $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on iPhones. Now Apple is collecting ANOTHER revenue stream from Google's Gemini app subscriptions on top of that. Google pays Apple coming and going. The strategy is so simple it's almost offensive. Every other tech company is in an arms race. Burning cash. Building data centers. Training frontier models. Fighting over who has the best AI. Apple's strategy: Let them fight. Whoever wins still needs the iPhone to reach consumers. And whoever reaches consumers through the iPhone pays us 30%. Apple is the toll road for AI. And here's the thing that makes it even more brutal: Siri is STILL terrible. Apple's own AI assistant is years behind ChatGPT and Claude. They're literally partnering with Google's Gemini to replace the brains behind Siri because they couldn't build it themselves. Apple LOST the AI technology race. But it doesn't matter. Because they won the distribution race decades ago. 2.4 billion active iOS devices worldwide. The App Store processes every major AI subscription. And Apple takes a cut of all of it. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives estimates Apple's AI layer alone could be worth $1.5 trillion over the coming years. Adding $75 to $100 per share just from being the middleman. No data centers. No training runs. No frontier models. No billion-dollar compute bills. Just 2.4 billion devices and a 30% tax on everyone who wants to reach them. This is the most underrated business model in the entire AI industry. Everyone's debating who builds the best AI. Apple's already decided it doesn't matter. Because whoever wins still pays them. Do y'all think Apple is making the right move by not participating in the AI race?

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