Ahmed Mohammed

AI agents · market watch · tools

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

Jeff Bezos failed twice at the business that now sells more than half of everything bought on Amazon. Amazon Auctions: nobody came. zShops: nobody came. The third try, he said, worked right away.

In a talk with his brother, he said Amazon is a great place to fail, because it has so much practice.

Auctions launched in March 1999. He said nobody came. Maybe their mother was the only buyer. He bought a coffee cup himself.

Each failure took about a year and a half, he said.

Next came zShops in September 1999. Same idea at fixed prices. Same result.

Then the team put outside sellers on the same product page as Amazon’s own inventory. They called it Marketplace. It launched in November 2000.

By 2018, independent sellers made up 58% of physical sales on Amazon. Their sales grew from $0.1 billion to $160 billion. Amazon’s own grew from $1.6 billion to $117 billion. He wrote that third-party sellers were “kicking our first party butt.”

He later wrote that Amazon took two big swings and missed, then stayed “stubborn on the vision.” That letter counted over 70,000 sellers with more than $100,000 in yearly sales.

My read: he did not drop the idea. He changed where it lived, from a separate auction site to the page customers already used.

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

Scott Bessent spent 20 years trading against governments alongside Soros and Druckenmiller. Now he's Trump's U.S. Treasury Secretary.

He helped generate $10 BILLION in profits for Soros:

$1B betting against the British pound in a single day

Then tipped Soros off about Japan: "A once-in-a-lifetime market move is coming."

The result? Another $1.2B in profits.

Stan Druckenmiller personally mentored him.

George Soros backed him with $2B when he launched his own fund.

Bessent went on to launch a hedge fund that raised $4.5B in just 6 months.

The man who helped bring Britain and Japan to their knees in the markets now oversees the finances of the United States.

Let that sink in.

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

@elonmusk @jgebbia A few moments later

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

Warren Buffett called himself an idiot for not buying Amazon. He never bought it himself. One of his deputies did, and by March 2026 Berkshire had sold every share.

Yahoo Finance published his interview with Andy Serwer on May 1, 2019. Asked about Amazon, Buffett said he always admired Jeff Bezos but did not realize books could become this.

He said he does not worry about what he misses outside his circle of competence, maybe 5% to 10% of companies. His worst mistakes, he said, are inside it. “You haven’t seen them.”

The next day he told CNBC he had been “an idiot for not buying.” One of his money managers had bought some. He credited those deputies for Berkshire’s Apple purchases too. The filing showed about 536,000 shares, roughly $930 million.

By the third quarter of 2025, after a 20-for-1 split, the stake was 10 million shares, about $2.1 billion.

In Buffett’s last quarter as CEO, Berkshire sold 77% of it. In the first quarter of 2026, under Greg Abel, it sold the rest. That same quarter, it more than tripled its Alphabet stake.

Buffett never moved his circle. He let someone else work outside it.

In his 1996 letter he wrote that the size of the circle matters little. Knowing its edge is what counts.

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

@elonmusk 10GW by end of 2027 and he’s already saying maybe more a server designed for space is the part i keep re-reading lol

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

@elonmusk big claim greatest demo of all time is a high bar, but if anyone knows how to make a product launch go viral, it’s him 😅

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

@elonmusk impressive on paper. every voice model i’ve tried looks great in a table and then struggles the moment there’s background noise. curious if 3.0 actually fixes that

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

@alfa123gg That one detail says everything about how he thinks

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

Elon Musk literally explained how Zip2 got internet for $100 a month. It is not a startup grant. It is not a special deal. It is a hole drilled through the floor into the ISP downstairs.

At Stanford in 2003, he told students why a first business should be cheap to start.

It was 1995. He had put his Stanford physics program on hold, planning to come back in a couple of quarters if it failed. He had huge student debt and no money.

He could not afford both a place to live and an office. So he rented the office and slept on a futon there. He showered at the YMCA. The whole company was six people: Musk, his brother, a friend of his mother’s and three salespeople.

The internet came from a tiny ISP one floor below.

That connection cost about $100 a month. Revenue was small, but it was larger than the expenses.

In 1999, Compaq bought Zip2 for more than $300 million in cash. Musk called it “a currency I highly recommend.”

PayPal was the same lesson at scale. He ran it for its first two years. By the end of year two it had a million customers, with no sales force, no marketing head and no ad budget.

At its height, PayPal had about 30 engineers.

At the end, he said space is a tough first company because it needs a lot of capital. Start with something that needs little.

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

@elonmusk another country added, another place off the “no good internet” list. love to see it

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

@johnternus been waiting for Apple to do a proper home display. curious about the price and what it can do beyond the clock and photos 👀

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

@AnthropicAI asia is clearly a big focus for them now. exciting to watch 👀

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

@alfa123gg enjoy the video 🤝

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

Warren Buffett literally explained how to tell if your life was a success. It is not your net worth. It is not the schools named after you. It is whether the people you hope love you actually do.

Nebraska, September 30, 2005. Buffett and Bill Gates took questions from 92 business students. Nobody showed them the questions in advance.

A student put their combined wealth at $91 billion. Bloomberg’s index now has it near $264 billion: Buffett at $147 billion, Gates at $117 billion.

Another student asked how they define success.

Buffett’s answer had no dollar figure in it.

His father taught him that your inner scorecard matters more than the outer one. He had never known anyone his age, surrounded by people who love them, who felt like anything other than a success.

The opposite, he said, is people enormously wealthy, with schools named after them and dinners in their honor, whom nobody actually thinks much of. He believes they know it. He would not name names.

His word for their lives: “hollow.”

Gates answered with family. His goal outside work was raising kids well. So far, he said, he had not caused them any damage.

Buffett’s kids went to public school in Omaha. He said they did not even know what he did.

He told the students that 99% of what he has would go to philanthropy. Forbes counts more than $72 billion given so far.

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

@elonmusk @Bots Ngl a bot with its own email is kinda cool and kinda scary at the same time. Hope the drafts need me to hit send first 😅

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

@younweb3 Thanks, you too! Grateful for the chance to learn something new every day

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

Elon Musk literally explained why SpaceX and Tesla almost died in 2008. It is not bad engineering. It is not one unlucky launch. It is three failed rockets, a global recession and a financing round that closed on Christmas Eve.

At Stanford in 2015, he said that when he started both companies, he thought success was maybe 10% likely.

By 2008, the odds were on the scoreboard. SpaceX was zero for three on launches.

Raising money for a startup carmaker was brutal while GM and Chrysler were heading toward bankruptcy.

The fourth SpaceX launch worked on September 28, 2008. It was the last one the company had money for.

Then the Tesla round closed at 6 p.m. on December 24, 2008. Last hour of the last day it was possible. Payroll would have bounced two days later.

Asked about “fail fast,” Musk said there are far more ways to fail than to succeed. A rocket has a thousand ways to break and one way to work.

Rockets give you no retry. You cannot recall one or patch it. It is “nine minutes to orbit or it’s over.”

He called the lack of stigma around failure one of the great things about Silicon Valley.

At 10% odds, the winner is not the smartest founder. It is the one who can survive being zero for three.

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

@alexandr_wang The “usage reset” button with that fluffy mascot is peak product marketing. Turning a bug into a good mood is a skill

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

@cb_doge @spacexai 380MW is a serious first export

Changwon to US soil without a domestic reference plant is a bold move

[Ahmed Mohammed @AKadry99]

@Av1dlive What was the first thing that finally clicked for you while studying it?