Was tactfully honest that Chet has to better without tearing him down, took ownership that he himself needs to be better too, and built Chet up and let the whole world know he trusts Chet to learn from this and put in the work to come out better bc of this. Leadership.
new grads often ask me what they should be doing so they don't fall behind in the ai space. there's a lot, but its honestly super manageable. become intimate with model internals. proof based linear algebra. non-convex optimization. this is stuff you could've done in undergrad. it definitely takes some time and work, but its doable. have taste, have opinions. train a small model, then train a big one. vLLM internals, tensor parallelism. hand roll kernels. cluster orchestration. do you have opinions on synthetic data? why don't you? SFT, PPO, you should know this. learn Triton. everyone is reproducing papers now so you need to be doing more. do you know the semi supply chain? where are the bottlenecks? hardware, man, hardware. your little gpu rig erector set in your basement isnt gonna cut it. build a cluster, a big one. pretrain a 800B model. now postrain it. serve it to millions of people. you should be able to beat deepseek on some benchmarks now. its a lot to take in but it all snowballs. this what job security looks like from now on. do you want to work in tech or not
keep it to yourself longer than feels natural. the urge to tell people is the urge to get a little credit before you’ve done anything, and their reaction, good or bad, will move you off the thing. you don’t need their belief loaded on top of yours yet. yours is still fragile. guard it the way you’d guard a flame walking across a windy lot.
🚨Michael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbers.
Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake.
He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing.
Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor.
Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale.
Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models.
But here is what Burry is flagging.
Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory.
They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies.
Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle.
Now here is where American retirees enter the picture.
Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit.
Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene.
Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans.
When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center.
The numbers inside Athene are most alarming.
Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight.
Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets.
Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth.
The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times.
Burry's says:
Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing.
- Nvidia books the revenue.
- Apollo collects the fees.
- xAI gets the computing power.
- And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.
Presti better get off of Chet , that’s about to be the worst contract in the NBA . 7’1 & can’t guard bigs… 7’1 & can’t post up guards . & the dude got the heart of a roach .
Bitch I’m a star,
But I never shine.
Built the tallest wall,
Come and see behind.
Violent are the times,
When the smoke clears,
You is who I find.
Let’s runaway
I tweet for me boo 😭 Twitter for the OGs was basically a diary. We wasn’t sitting around chasing engagement . You just had a thought, tweeted it, and kept scrolling. If somebody saw it, cool. If they didn’t, oh well 😂 Twitter originally wasn’t even about likes like that. It was just people broadcasting their random ass thoughts into the universe.
There are two loops in every founder's head.
The autism loop: run your own model to the floor, ignore consensus, hold a thesis when everyone says you're wrong. That makes conviction.
The empathy loop: feel what the user feels, sense what the market wants before it has words. That makes traction.
Most people crank one and starve the other. Pure conviction builds something brilliant nobody wants. Pure empathy builds consensus mush.
PG put the whole job in four words: make something people want. The autism loop makes the something. The empathy loop knows it's wanted. The founder is the bridge.
Most great founders show up dominant in the first loop. That's why they're contrarian enough to try at all. The work is grafting on the second.
There is no place in the world that helps founders make the two loops work together to make great startups than Y Combinator. It is the most gratifying part of our work.