David Scacco

Investor, Partner, 1st Google Ad Exec (2000-07), ex-Chicagoan. Now cofounder/managing partner @ Essentia Capital Partners

[David Scacco @DavidScacco]

As they say, this didn’t age well….

[۟ @vermilionpixie]

I respect Messi’s greatness, but I’m fully convinced he’s going goal‑less this World Cup and Argentina are getting grouped. He holds them back.

Bookmark this and come back when it happens.

[David Scacco @DavidScacco]

savage

[david friedberg @friedberg]

they’re not jobs if they’re not valued. they’re not valued if there aren’t customers out there willing to pay them for their great work. needing the government to “create” a job is tantamount to welfare and that level of welfare resolves these individuals to a dependency on the government and lack of economic mobility. and chains our people, collectively, to a more indentured future.

you may be well intentioned but you have, and always will, fail to see the destitute folly of government as a job creation engine.

i have tried to engage you on this topic, in good faith, with empiricism and reasoning, but you have only dodged my points and pivoted to some populist refrain about the importance of taxation and the evils of productivity-driven success.

i can only assume you’re dodging these truths because you and the rest of the politburo leadership have deemed the conversation unsafe speech and put your oligopoly at risk.

let’s leave it at that then.

perhaps if your ways get their day, we can all bask in the glories of the dark ages ahead.

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

Friendly Reminder:

If your income has not risen by at least 30% since Covid hit, you are now poorer.

And that is using the government’s own data.
The real number is likely 40% plus.

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

"The more homogenous our citizens can be made in these particulars [principles, opinions, values and manners], the greater will be our prospect of permanent union."

George Washington
1st President of the United States

[David Scacco @DavidScacco]

Wow. Just. Wow.

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that's been in the city since 1921.

They didn't lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they'd rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year.

Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move.

They lost them for two reasons.

The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they're bad at their jobs.

In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack.

Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn't even exist yet.

That fight dragged on for years.

The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn't reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois.

Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting.

So now it's all gone.

The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything.

Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize.

Pritzker: they're "an $8.5B valued business" that doesn't need propping up.

But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works.

Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team.

And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago.

Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes.

Pritzker after they left: "I wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team."

There it is. "Billionaire-owned."

That's how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you're saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line.

Meanwhile they're running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You're living in it.

Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that's $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances "the point of no return."

When you run things this badly, you sell what's left.

They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect.

Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check.

But a fixed property tax rate for a team that's been here 106 years? That's "propping up billionaires."

Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in.

Indiana didn't outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren't a disaster.

Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero. Ignore all the bad management but make sure to stick it to those evil, pesky billionaires.

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

They don’t teach that from 1920-1970, the US had severely restricted immigration…

In those 50 years we won WW2, became a global economic and military superpower, created a booming economy, a thriving middle class and a strong common culture. The America everyone talks about.

[David Scacco @DavidScacco]

@typesfast Why is the WiFi on US flights terrible?

[David Scacco @DavidScacco]

What’s makes this crazy water consumption even worse is that 75% of the almonds are exported. China is a top importer. So we’re essentially exporting our scarce California water to the rest of the world.

[Colin McCarthy @US_Stormwatch]

Insane stat of the day: California almonds use roughly 3–5.5 million acre-feet of water per year, depending on methodology.

That's ~4-7x more water than all data centers in North America used combined in 2025.

[David Scacco @DavidScacco]

@ihtesham2005 tennis seems more kind than wicked.

[David Scacco @DavidScacco]

Great to have watched these guys hard work come to fruition. Looking forward to seeing user adoption. Great job.

[David Scacco @DavidScacco]

I’m not exactly sure what opportunity @PeterDiamandis is referring to here but our new Essentia Storage-Backed Retail Fund is a great example.

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

There's a certain kind of person who runs TOWARD the fire instead of away from it. They see opportunity when others see chaos. That's what builds extraordinary things. 

Which direction are you running?

[Maria Davidson @MariaDavidson]

California's population grew 0.4% in the last decade.

The number of state employees grew 24.5%.

Total state spending grew 48%, inflation adjusted.

You have to ask - where did all the money go?

[David Scacco @DavidScacco]

troubling if true...

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

California is going bankrupt before our eyes.

[David Scacco @DavidScacco]

@jamesclift Build me a real estate investment firm targeting high net worth investors.

[James Clift @jamesclift]

Introducing Durable.

The first AI business builder that replaces your 9-5 income.

RT + comment “Durable” and we'll build your business for FREE.

[David Scacco @DavidScacco]

The idea of retiring with most of your wealth/savings sitting in the stock market is getting scarier. Will AI cause the market to completely revalue stocks? @ Essentia Capital Partners, we're focused on real estate that leverages data, AI and technology to outperform legacy operators and deliver strong income for investors from day-1.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

https://t.co/kJc3ewLW69

[David Scacco @DavidScacco]

@VigilantFox If you’re traveling a lot you’re going to have TSA-pre which doesn’t send you through the body scanners

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

The State of California has been run top to bottom by one party since 2011.

Here are their results:

1) highest state income tax
2) highest rate of poverty
3) highest rate of unemployment
4) highest rate of homelessness
5) highest energy costs

Hard to explain this away.

[Artificial Analysis @ArtificialAnlys]

Google is once again the leader in AI: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview leads the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, 4 points ahead of Claude Opus 4.6 while costing less than half as much to run

@GoogleDeepMind gave us pre-release access to Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview. It leads 6 of the 10 evaluations that make up the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index and improves significantly over Gemini 3 Pro Preview across capabilities, with the biggest gains in reasoning and knowledge, coding, and hallucination reduction.

Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview also remains relatively token efficient, using ~57M tokens to run the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (+1M from Gemini 3 Pro Preview), lower than other frontier models at max reasoning settings such as Opus 4.6 (max) and GPT-5.2 (xhigh). Combined with lower per-token pricing, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview is cost-efficient among frontier peers, costing less than half as much as Opus 4.6 (max) to run the full Intelligence Index, though still nearly 2x the leading open-weights model, GLM-5.

Key Takeaways:

➤ State-of-the-art intelligence at lower costs: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview is leading 6 of the 10 evaluations that make up the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at less than half the cost to run of frontier peers from @OpenAI and @AnthropicAI. It obtains the highest score in Terminal-Bench Hard (agentic coding), AA-Omniscience (knowledge & hallucination), Humanity’s Last Exam (reasoning & knowledge), GPQA-Diamond (scientific reasoning), SciCode (coding) and CritPt (research-level physics). The CritPt score is particularly notable, scoring 18% on unpublished, research-level physics reasoning problems, over 5 p.p. above the next best model

➤ Improved real-world agentic performance, but not leading: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview shows an improvement in GDPval-AA, our agentic evaluation focusing on real-world tasks, but is still not the leading model in this area. The model increases its ELO score over 100 points to 1316 (up from Gemini 3 Pro Preview), however still sits behind Claude Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, GPT-5.2 (xhigh), and GLM-5

➤ Leading coding abilities: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview leads the Artificial Analysis Coding Index, achieving the highest score in both Terminal-Bench Hard (54%) and SciCode (59%)

➤ Reduced hallucinations: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview shows a major improvement in tendency to guess incorrectly when it doesn’t know the answer, reducing its AA-Omniscience hallucination rate by 38 p.p. from Gemini 3 Pro Preview

➤ Maintained token and cost efficiency: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview improves without material increases in cost or token usage. It uses only ~2% more tokens to run the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index than Gemini 3 Pro Preview, and keeps the same pricing ($2/$12 per 1M input/output tokens for ≤200k context). Its cost to run the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index of $892 is less than half of frontier models such as Opus 4.6 (max) and GPT-5.2 (xhigh), though still ~2x the cost of leading open weights models such as GLM 5 ($547)

➤ Google takes top 3 spots in multi-modality: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview ranks #1 on MMMU-Pro, our multimodal understanding and reasoning benchmark, ahead of Gemini 3 Pro Preview and Gemini 3 Flash, reinforcing Google’s leadership in multimodal reasoning

➤ Other model details: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview retains the same 1 million token context window as its predecessor, and includes support for tool calling, structured outputs, and JSON mode

[David Scacco @DavidScacco]

Either Ai is going to eat software and all the jobs – or – there's a Ai bubble waiting to burst. Wall Street is acting like both are true.