Lucius

breaking it down before it breaks out

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

@Beaver_0x Taste, checks its own frames" is the part I want to see. A model reviewing its own output is the real unlock. Please do a breakdown, I'll be following for it.

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

Jeff Bezos divorced his wife after 25 years of marriage. She walked away with $36B in Amazon stock.

But she gave him the voting rights to every share she received. Bezos kept 75% of their Amazon holdings, and his ex-wife helped make sure he wouldn't lose control of the company.

They had built Amazon together from the beginning.

Jeff and MacKenzie met while working at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in New York.

They married in 1993.

A year later, they drove across the country to Seattle. MacKenzie drove while Jeff worked on the business plan for what would become Amazon.

She was there in the early days, handling accounting and helping negotiate contracts.

25 years later, their marriage was ending.

Their combined fortune was estimated at more than $130B, almost entirely tied to Amazon shares.

Then private messages between Jeff and another woman became public.

Bezos accused the National Enquirer's publisher of threatening to release intimate photos of him.

The divorce was already public. Now his private life had become a national story.

And investors were watching something else.

Who would control Amazon?

Together, Jeff and MacKenzie owned roughly 16% of the company, which was valued at nearly $900B.

Under the settlement announced in April 2019, the shares were divided 75% to Jeff and 25% to MacKenzie.

That left her with about 4% of Amazon.

Worth $36B.

Enough to make her one of the richest women in the world.

But the ownership agreement had another condition.

Jeff retained voting control over MacKenzie's shares.

She also gave up her interests in The Washington Post and Blue Origin.

When the divorce was finalized in July, her Amazon stake was worth approximately $38B.

She had helped build the business, spent 25 years married to its founder, and left with one of the largest divorce settlements in history.

But Bezos still controlled the votes attached to the entire 16% stake they once owned together.

She kept $36B in stock.

He kept the voting power.

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

@gosh_sol_eth Moving bricks is the easy part. Moving them for 18 months while your investors scream at you is the real test.

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

@Beaver_0x Wow, I didn't know my Claude could do that.

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

Ivanka Trump was about 10 when her father pointed at a homeless man outside Trump Tower and told her the man had $8 billion more than he did.

In the video below, she tells the story herself, in Born Rich, the 2003 film made by an heir to Johnson & Johnson.

"I remember my father pointing to him and saying, 'You know, that guy has $8 billion more than me,' because he was in such extreme debt at that point."

He wasn't joking. At the start of 1990, Donald Trump owed more than 70 banks about $4 billion. $800 million of it he had guaranteed personally.

The banks didn't take everything. They put him on an allowance. $450,000 a month for personal spending, less in the years after.

There's an old saying on Wall Street. Owe the bank $100, and it's your problem. Owe the bank $4 billion, and it's the bank's problem.

The man on the sidewalk owed nobody anything. On paper, he really was richer.

The richest-looking man on Fifth Avenue was worth less than the one sitting outside his own front door.

Was he broke, or was he just too big for the banks to let him fall?

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

@Beaver_0x Claude will soon replace all traders; great post.

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

This is Elon Musk in 2003, after selling his first company Zip2 for $307M.

He told a Stanford lecture hall exactly how he built it and PayPal with almost no money.

7 rules he ran both companies on:

1) Product is the only real marketing

[Beaver @Beaver_0x]

whoever built this realized we’ve been using our smartest AI for the dumbest possible jobs

your $25-$250/mo frontier model is researching, writing code, planning…

and then you’re paying the same brain to decide YES / NO.

Jev flips that.

it’s a tiny decision model that sits in front of the expensive stuff and handles the boring forks:

-> which agent goes next?
-> is this worth researching?
-> reply or ignore?
-> publish, wait or escalate?
-> BUY / SELL / HOLD?
-> click this or keep looking?

then I saw the numbers people are reporting and the whole architecture started making a lot more sense.

~2,000 papers classified for around $0.05
~800 emails sorted for around $0.028

browser-agent loops demonstrated around 6 seconds for ~$0.0029

and at the quoted pricing, roughly 20,000 ~2K-token decisions comes out around $0.62.

that’s not because Jev became smarter than Claude.

it’s because nobody asked it to be Claude.

the setup is stupidly simple:

-> big LLM gets the hard thinking, research and writing
-> Jev gets the thousands of tiny decisions between those steps
-> code actually clicks, saves, sends and executes

and suddenly you start noticing these little decisions everywhere.

> your inbox.
> X feed.
> support queue.
> meetings.
> leads.
> video clips.
> browser agents.
> even paper-trading loops.

that’s the part I think most agent builders are missing.

the expensive model doesn’t need to touch every step just because it’s capable of touching every step.

> let Claude think.
> let Jev decide what deserves Claude.
> let code do the actual work.

I broke down 12 places you can wire this into an agent today + the exact router setup in the article below

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

@Beaver_0x Few people provide such information for free thank you.

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

Jamie Johnson, an heir to Johnson & Johnson, made a film about the rich kids he grew up with. One of them went to court to stop it from airing.

In the video below, you hear one of those kids in his own words, and Jamie's answer when he was called a traitor.

At midnight on his 21st birthday, Jamie inherited more money than most people could earn in a lifetime. He hadn't done anything to earn it, and that bothered him. So he asked ten friends from the same world to talk about money on camera.

Luke Weil, heir to a gaming fortune, said yes. He opened by saying he really didn't want to do this and disliked both people behind the camera immensely. Then he described boarding school. If a kid from some town in Connecticut annoyed him, he could say, "I'm from New York. I can buy your family. Piss off." He called it petty, weak and underhanded. He also said it was so easy.

Luke later took legal action to stop the film from airing in America. He lost. It came out as Born Rich.

Asked if that made him a traitor, Jamie said, "I guess in that sense I was."

They all agreed to sit in front of his camera. Did that give Jamie the right to show the world what they said?

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

@Beaver_0x I didn't understand anything when I watched the video, but the text is written very clearly thanks.

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

Fred Trump Jr. died in a hospital room alone. His father was worth hundreds of millions. His brother was at the movies. Nobody from the family that built an empire bothered to show up for the one of them who was actually dying

He was the firstborn, the heir, meant to inherit it all. He didn't want it. He wanted to fly, and he became an airline pilot, happier than the Trump name ever made him. His father called the dream "a chauffeur in the sky." His brother Donald told him to his face he was wasting his life. So they pulled him back into the business he hated, and it took him apart. The drinking started. The cockpit was gone. The heir to a fortune ended up on his father's maintenance crew, fixing the old man's buildings for a wage

Here is where it becomes pure money. When Fred Sr. died, the will was engineered the way the wealthy always do it. The valuable buildings were placed into entities the loyal children controlled, and Fred Jr.'s kids were handed a frozen, lowballed stake and told that was the number. This is the oldest move in inherited wealth: the person holding the asset also writes its price, and a private company has no public market to argue with. They nearly signed

Then they did the one thing that saved them. They refused the family's figure and paid for an independent appraisal, the same move that protects you in any buyout, any divorce, any inheritance. The buildings the family swore were worth $30 million came back closer to $1 billion. That gap wasn't an accident. It was the discount you get handed when you trust the person who profits from your ignorance

So remember the rule, because it will cost you one day too. Whoever controls an asset controls its stated price, and that price is built to favor them, your employer with your equity, your partner in a split, your own blood over a will. Never accept a valuation from the side that wins if you believe it. Fred Jr. trusted the people who loved him and died with nothing. His children trusted a number they checked themselves and walked out with a fortune. Same family. Same buildings. One learned to verify. The other believed them all the way to the grave

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

A dead MIT professor accidentally destroyed the $20 billion executive coaching industry with one hour of lecture, and ten million people have already watched him do it.

He filmed it once in January 2018 and died eighteen months later.

Executive coaches charge fifteen thousand dollars a session to teach a third of what he covered in that one hour for free.

His name was Patrick Winston. He ran the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997 and wrote the AI textbook every computer science major in the world read for thirty years.

Every January for four decades, he gave a lecture called "How to Speak."

His entire framework fits on a napkin.

Do not read. Be in the image. Keep images simple. Eliminate clutter. Start with an empathetic connection. End with a punch line the audience can repeat over dinner. Never open with a joke. Never end with "thank you."

That last rule alone has probably cost the executive coaching industry a hundred million dollars.

"Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas. In that order."

That is the actual opening line of the lecture. Winston believed it strongly enough to spend fifty years teaching computer scientists how to talk.

Founders spend $80,000 on an MBA and then hire a communications coach to teach them the same material Winston filmed once for free. Engineers write brilliant code and lose promotions to teammates who watched this lecture on the train.

The lecture is free on MIT OpenCourseWare. The textbook is free on his page.

Winston died in 2019. Almost none of the ten million viewers have actually implemented the four rules on the napkin.

The napkin is free. The willingness to actually use it in your next meeting is the entire edge

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

In 1973, the richest man in the world, J. Paul Getty, refused to pay a $17 million ransom for his kidnapped 16-year-old grandson. Getty had the money. He simply refused to pay.

Eight days after John Paul Getty III disappeared in Rome, his mother went in front of the cameras and asked the kidnappers to contact the family again. You can see that conversation in the video below.

She said the family was ready to negotiate. When a reporter interpreted that as ready to pay, she immediately corrected him: “No, I didn't say the family is ready to pay. I said the family is ready to negotiate.”

There was a reason she chose those words so carefully. Getty had already made his position clear. He had 14 other grandchildren, and argued that if he paid for one, he could soon have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.

For months, he refused to give in. Then the kidnappers cut off the boy’s ear and mailed it to an Italian newspaper along with a lock of his hair. The ransom was eventually negotiated down and Getty finally agreed to contribute toward his grandson’s release. Five months after he was kidnapped, John Paul Getty III was freed.

Watching his mother’s interview now makes that one word hit differently. The family was ready to negotiate. The man with the money wasn’t ready to pay.

Was Getty protecting the rest of his family, or was he simply a greedy old man who refused to part with his money?

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

@Beaver_0x nice that you lock in Sharpe 15 before shipping it save this

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

Warren Buffett disowned his granddaughter in 2006, writing that he had never accepted her as his grandchild, legally or emotionally.

Buffett has largely avoided publicly discussing what happened between them. In the video below, Nicole Buffett tells her side of the story.

Nicole had grown up as part of the Buffett family after Warren’s son Peter adopted her. She visited Warren in Omaha, called him Grandpa, and Warren’s wife Susan even referred to Nicole as one of her “adored grandchildren.”

But being the granddaughter of one of the richest men in the world never meant living like one.

Warren paid for her education, but Nicole didn’t have access to his fortune. She worked with children at Family Human Services in San Francisco and built her own life while carrying one of the most famous surnames in American business.

Then their relationship fell apart after Nicole appeared in The One Percent, a documentary about wealth inequality.

She later received a letter from Buffett telling her that he had not emotionally or legally adopted her as a grandchild, and that the rest of his family had not adopted her as a niece or cousin either.

One detail made the letter even more painful.

Buffett signed it simply “Warren.”

Nicole still had a card from only a year earlier signed “Grandpa.”

One of the richest men in the world had spent years as her grandfather. Then a letter told her he no longer considered himself one.

Do you think Buffett had the right to draw that line, or did he take it too far?

Save the video to finish Nicole’s story later, and follow for more heartbreaking stories from behind the lives of the world’s most famous billionaires.

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

@Beaver_0x jev is really taking AI to the next level.

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

this is insane. i genuinely don't understand why ambitious people aren't shown this lecture before their careers start consuming their entire lives.

clayton christensen spent his career studying why successful companies collapse. in his final class, he asked students to apply the theory to themselves: if you keep allocating your time the same way, what life are you actually building?

he had already seen the answer in his own harvard mba class. everyone looked successful at the fifth reunion; by the 10th, 15th, 20th, and 25th, many were unhappy, divorced, and living far from their children.

work shows you the score immediately. close a sale, ship a product, finish a presentation, earn a promotion, get paid.

an hour with your child may produce nothing you can measure today; it may take 20 years to understand what that hour built. so the next free hour goes back to work, one rational decision at a time.

this is how people build lives they never planned: through hundreds of right decisions that lead in the wrong direction, day after day.

money, titles, and headcount are easy to count. christensen believed a life should be measured by the people who became better because you were there.

he died in 2020.

one question remains: if someone saw only where your time, energy, and attention went this year, what would they think actually mattered to you?

the full 19-minute lecture is in the video below.

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

https://t.co/7l7Jef99QZ

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

@Beaver_0x This really helps a lot in the work.

[Lucius @0x_Luc1us]

Mark Zuckerberg’s daughter told him she wanted to be like Taylor Swift.

His answer: “You can’t. That’s not available to you.”

He had taken August to a Swift concert. Afterwards, she told him she wanted to be like the singer when she grew up. Most parents would probably smile and encourage the dream. Zuckerberg gave her that answer instead.

In the interview below, he tells the story himself. And his daughter’s response is the part worth hearing.

August thought about it, then decided she wanted to grow up into someone other people would want to be like. Someone called August Chan Zuckerberg.

Her father’s reaction: “Hell yeah.”

Coming from Zuckerberg, that exchange is easy to admire and just as easy to question. There is ambition in wanting to become someone others look up to. There is also a lot of pressure in turning a child’s excitement after a concert into a conversation about becoming exceptional.

She went to see her favorite singer. She came home talking about making her own name.

Would you have answered your daughter the same way?