The story behind the cartoon
Mike Intrator co-founded Hudson Ridge Asset Management, a natural-gas-focused hedge fund, and ran it as chief executive. In 2016, he and the future CoreWeave founders bought a single GPU, put it on a pool table in lower Manhattan, and mined their first Ethereum block. The hobby had a data-center footprint in New Jersey within a year, and CoreWeave was founded in 2017.
The pool-table experiment survived the crypto boom and the crypto winter. In November 2021 CoreWeave raised $50 million from Magnetar to scale its specialized GPU cloud, years after most crypto miners had folded or pivoted. When AI demand exploded, the same GPU-buying habit turned out to be exactly the business the moment wanted.
In May 2024 CoreWeave raised $1.1 billion in Series C equity to expand the infrastructure serving AI workloads. On March 27, 2025, the company priced its initial public offering at $40 a share and joined Nasdaq as a purpose-built AI cloud company — a crypto-mining hobby, nine years on, listed as critical AI infrastructure.
The joke in Zimbo’s strip is that Intrator never actually left the pool table. Every panel escalates the scale — gas desk, one GPU, a warehouse, a $50 million check, a $1.1 billion sign — and the finale puts him back where he started, lining up a break shot with the racked balls replaced by GPUs. He never left the pool table. The table just got bigger.
THE GPU CARD SHARK
THE WALLS ARE MADE OF GLASS
THE BILLIONAIRE'S BARBECUE
THE ONE-DAY HOSTAGE CRISIS