Before I was a jeweler, I was the Vice President of A&R at Priority Records. In 1996 we signed Jay-Z to a deal and I didn’t believe in him, I was too west coast 😆
In 2016 @1996Biggs asked me to host the 20 year anniversary of Reasonable Doubt. I can’t believe 30 years is here🤯
10 Wild Facts About Tilman Fertitta (the Guy Who Just Bought Caesars)
1. His great-great uncles ran organized crime in Galveston. Sam "The Velvet Glove" Maceo and Rosario "The Iron Glove" Maceo were Sicilian barbers turned Gulf Coast mob bosses who controlled gambling, prostitution, and drugs across Texas. His grandfather ran the operation alongside them. Their illegal casino, the Balinese Room, hosted Frank Sinatra, the Marx Brothers, and some of the biggest names in American entertainment.
2. The Texas Rangers raided the casino 64 times without a single bust. It sat at the end of a 600-foot pier. When Rangers rushed the door, a buzzer sounded, gambling equipment disappeared into hidden wall pockets, and the house band played "The Eyes of Texas" to slow them down.
3. The Maceos invested in the Desert Inn — the largest casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip when it opened in 1950. By the early fifties, the dealers and pit bosses who worked for the Maceos had mostly migrated to Las Vegas, taking the operation with them.
4. The Rangers finally got them on May 30, 1957 — by sending undercover detectives inside first. The Balinese Room was shut down for good. Tilman's great-uncle Anthony left for Las Vegas.
Tilman Fertitta was born 26 days later.
5. His third cousins are the Fertitta brothers — Frank and Lorenzo. They bought the UFC for $2 million and sold it for $4 billion. They also own Station Casinos.
6. By age 21, he had won a free Cadillac selling Shaklee vitamins door to door.
7. In 1993, Tilman tried to buy the Houston Rockets for $81 million. He lost — outbid by $4 million. In 2017, he came back and paid $2.2 billion for the same team. That was roughly 71% of his net worth at the time.
8. Because he owns an NBA team, his own casinos are banned from taking bets on Rockets games. He spent $2.2 billion to own a team and now can't take action on it anywhere he operates. After the Caesars deal, that restriction applies to a much larger list of casinos.
9. He is the current U.S. Ambassador to Italy.
10. He just signed a $17.6 billion deal to acquire Caesars Entertainment — the parent company of Caesars Palace, Harrah's, the Flamingo, and 49 other casinos. It is the largest casino acquisition in American history.
I genuinely don't understand why everyone isn't using this yet
Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI, posted a simple idea that hit 16 million views: stop using AI to write code, use it to build a second brain.
You point Claude Code at a folder, drop in any source, an article, a transcript, a PDF, and Claude reads it, links it, and files it into a living wiki of everything you know. It compounds like interest, the more you feed it, the smarter it gets.
Here's the whole thing:
> Install Obsidian, create a vault, open it in Claude Code
> Paste Karpathy's wiki idea file and tell Claude to build it
> Claude makes three folders: raw for sources, wiki for its pages, a CLAUDE.md that runs it
> Drop any source into raw and say "ingest this"
> Ask questions across everything, forever
Five minutes to set up, and you never start from a blank chat again.
Full step-by-step guide with Claude and Obsidian, link below.
Bookmark this
LeBron is the Emmitt Smith of the NBA - Great player, all-time longevity stats. On paper, he should be the greatest running back of all time. On paper.
But in reality, if you watched him and Barry Sanders, no one in their right mind is picking Emmitt over Barry. The way Barry moved, we have yet to see anyone else move like him 30 years later just like we have yet to see anyone move like Jordan.
The end of Silvio Manfred Dante
What's scary at the end is how quickly the family disintegrated. Throughout the series they are constantly introducing cousins and uncles and you feel like it's a huge criminal enterprise. But in the end you realize they really were this weird pygmy thing from Jersey that only Tony was able to barely hold together.
🎥: The Sopranos
An angry Silvio.
As soon as Silvio brought up how much money he was losing Ralphie understood and told her to leave. Goes to show how much of douche bags most of the characters in the Sopranos were.
🎥: The Sopranos
J.R. Smith says retirement has made him realize how much money he’s wasted:
“Half the sh*t I bought in the last 10 years, I barely use. I pretty much wear the same golf outfits every day. Even the watches… I don't go anywhere to wear them. I think, why did I spend all this money on stuff that I don't really use? But not only that, I don't really care about. I had 7 cars at one point, in Cleveland. I’m like, ‘Why did I have 7 cars?’”
(via The Richard Show, h/t @cptdankkk)
JUST IN: New study suggests political ideology is the strongest predictor of Messi/Ronaldo preference — with progressives leaning Messi & conservatives leaning Ronaldo.
One of the most heartbreaking moments in The Sopranos.
After years of treating Christopher like a son, Tony makes a choice that changes everything.
🎬📺 The Sopranos
The scene is intense, shocking, and uncomfortable, revealing the darker side of Tony's personality. It reminds viewers that beneath his charm and leadership lies a man driven by anger, pride,
The moment Walter said "Say my name," it was clear this was never just about providing for his family.
Reality check: Sometimes ambition quietly turns into ego, and ego is never satisfied.
🎥 Breaking Bad 🔥 Credit to: AMC
At what point does confidence become arrogance? 👇
ESPN reporting Floyd Mayweather hit with two new felony charges.
Theft and intent to defraud, for allegedly passing a bad $200k check to buy a ⌚️
Meanwhile:
defendant in separate civil cases in at least 4 states
$7.2 million IRS tax lien
$22k lien from a Vegas gated community