Hamza Alqortobi

#FOMO

[st1ne @SolSt1ne]

A former chess prodigy co-founded Palantir at 22, cashed almost nothing for years, and turned that into an empire - 8VC, Addepar, Anduril, a whole university.

- Peter Thiel's protege who became a company-building machine

56-min unfiltered on defense tech, AI, and where the next $100B companies come from

bookmark - this rewires how you think about building anything

[Hamza Alqortobi @HamzaAlqortobi]

#Algeria #China #Maghreb

[Hamza Alqortobi @HamzaAlqortobi]

When Revolutions Grow Old: Is Algeria Waiting for Its Deng Xiaoping? https://t.co/01dQ6YJlDB

[Hamza Alqortobi @HamzaAlqortobi]

A neutral, non-ideological look at what Algeria might learn from Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatism.

[Сarm1ne @carm1nee]

Paul Tudor Jones: "you will never see as many great women investors or traders as men, period. end of story"

this is him explaining why he believes motherhood and trading are incompatible, why he immediately pulls money from any manager going through divorce, and why he thinks peak trading ability expires at 29

"as soon as that baby's lips touched that girl's bosom, forget it. every single investment idea, every desire to understand what's going to make this go up or down is going to be overwhelmed by the most beautiful experience which a man will never share"

"as soon as my manager is going through divorce, redeem immediately. you can automatically subtract 10-20% from any manager going through divorce"

"by the time I was 21 I had a PhD in probabilistic theory. I played poker, backgammon, bridge, monopoly. that's all I did as a child. I got my 10,000 reps"

bookmark & watch the full 7 minutes ↓

[inhuman resources @inhumandept_vp]

A candidate had a two-year gap on his resume.

I asked him about it.

He said he'd taken time off to care for a terminally ill parent.

I smiled and told him that shows incredible empathy, resilience, and dedication. I assured him those are exactly the soft skills we value in our leadership track.

He looked visibly relieved and thanked me for being so understanding.

I nodded and concluded the interview on a warm note.

Then I opened our applicant tracking system and selected "Reject" from the dropdown.

People who've dealt with real life-and-death stakes rarely panic over a missed deliverable.

We can't have that in the company.

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

SpaceX has developed a prototype for a handset-like device designed to reshape how humans interact with artificial intelligence: WSJ

The prototype features a sleek design that is slimmer than an iPhone; it was shown to some investors and other stakeholders ahead of the company’s IPO

The prototype was designed to run on a proprietary operating system and integrate AI technology from SpaceX’s xAI. The device would use a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset

[ₕₐₘₚₜₒₙ @hamptonism]

This is by far one of the most important things I’ve watched in 2026.

[محمد بن عبدالرحمن @MBA_AlThani_]

Live from Lucerne, work continues with @VP & @jaredkushner.

[Roger K. Horn @rogerkhorn]

Francis Fukuyama recently shared a compelling piece titled “The Myth of Authoritarian Efficiency” by political scientists Jørgen Møller and Svend-Erik Skaaning (Aarhus University / V-Dem project).
The article dismantles the popular notion that authoritarian regimes—particularly China—are simply better at “getting things done.” Drawing on historical data and comparative evidence, the authors argue that democracies consistently outperform autocracies over the long term across critical domains:
• Military effectiveness: Democracies have won more than 80% of wars since 1815. Greater legitimacy enables citizens to make greater sacrifices, and democratic alliances prove more durable.
• Economic performance: While autocracies can drive catch-up growth to middle-income levels, they struggle to transition to innovation-driven, knowledge economies that require rule of law, intellectual property protection, and open debate. High-quality democracies show a modest but robust long-run growth advantage.
• Avoiding catastrophe: Autocracies periodically produce large-scale man-made disasters (Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Soviet collectivization). Institutional checks and public scrutiny in democracies make comparable failures rare.
• Crisis management & environment: Transparency, independent science, and accountability lead to better outcomes on pandemics, climate policy, and environmental indicators. China’s zero-COVID flip-flop and overstated economic statistics illustrate the risks of centralized, unaccountable decision-making.
The authors acknowledge democracies can be slow and messy, but emphasize that self-correction mechanisms ultimately make them more resilient and effective than systems that concentrate power without feedback loops.
Francis Fukuyama, author of the landmark book The End of History and the Last Man, continues to spark important conversations about the enduring strengths of liberal democracy in an era of renewed authoritarian confidence.
Full article (highly recommended):
https://t.co/rdLYptPLnY
What’s your take—do you see evidence of this “myth” playing out in emerging markets or great-power competition today?
#Democracy #Geopolitics #China #EmergingMarkets #InternationalRelations #PoliticalEconomy

[Hamza Alqortobi @HamzaAlqortobi]

How Google Translate Exposed Russia's Secret Army https://t.co/BSnu3H0Fz1 via @thechristofiles

[Gilles Babinet @babgi]

La maison Blanche réfléchirait a un scénario qui consisterait à faire en sorte que l'état fédéral des USA détienne jusqu'à 50% du capital des IA frontières pour éviter une déformation de la distribution de la valeur entre travail et capital.
Etrangement, cela découle de travaux d'économistes sur les "GPT" -ici entendues comme Général Purpose Technologies - postulant qu'une technologie d'usage général (comme l'électricité ou les telecom) de type réseau, doit être soumise a une forte régulation, voir nationalisée.
https://t.co/tIp9lEVAJu

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Walter Isaacson reveals how Elon Musk fired 85% of Twitter's employees in three rounds and why

"He brought in the engineers and figured the amount of people doing Tesla full self-driving and autopilot software was about one-tenth of what was doing software for Twitter. He said this can't be the case"

"He fired 85% in three different rounds. First was firing people because they had a team from Tesla's autopilot team grading the code written in the past year. Then he fired people who didn't seem totally all in or loyal. Then another round of layoffs"

"At each step, almost everybody says that's enough, it's going to destroy things. They were partly right. There was degradation of the service, but not as much as half the services I use"

"He has an algorithm. Question every requirement, then delete delete delete. And the corollary, if you don't end up adding back 20% of what you deleted, you didn't delete enough in the first round"

"You asked me if he overdid it. He probably overdid it by 20%, which is his formula"

[Mikhail Khodorkovsky @khodorkovsky_en]

This week the FSB arrested Ilya Traber, a St. Petersburg businessman from the same world Putin came from. Before Putin ran the largest country on earth, he carried his boss's suitcase in that city.

🧵Here is the origin story. [1/15]

[Danny (Dennis) Citrinowicz ,داني سيترينوفيتش @citrinowicz]

The growing rapprochement between the UAE and Iran undermines a key assumption that has shaped much of the Israeli debate over the past year, namely, that Gulf states would move closer to Israel, expand the Abraham Accords, or even support a more confrontational regional posture toward Tehran in the wake of the war.

In reality, many Gulf states are deeply frustrated with Israel. From their perspective, they were drawn into a regional crisis that imposed significant economic and security costs on them. Since the strikes on Qatar, many in the Gulf increasingly view Israel not as a source of stability, but as a potential driver of regional escalation.

As a result, there is little prospect of major new normalization steps with Israel absent dramatic progress on the Palestinian issue. Gulf leaders understand that the Iranian regime is not going anywhere, and they see no strategic benefit in trying to isolate Tehran or push it into a corner.

This does not mean that Gulf states have become naïve about Iran. They remain deeply aware of the challenges and threats posed by Tehran. However, their preferred strategy is de-escalation and coexistence rather than confrontation. From their perspective, maintaining channels of communication with Iran is a necessity, not a choice.

#IranWar‌

[Jeffrey Currie 🆔++ @CommodMkt]

The New Joule Order is here, an era in which energy security has become a dominant force shaping investment, geopolitical alliances and commodity prices.

It marks a shift from a world where energy policy was driven by efficiency and cost to one where it is driven by security and resilience. 

The thesis rested on a simple observation: the world had underpriced physical energy security for a decade, and the repricing would be non-linear.

The Strait of Hormuz crisis is the first major test of this new era. 

My latest piece in the @FT explores the New Joule Order in depth and is available to read below.

[Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭 @ThierryBorgeat]

Citadel Securities just put institutional weight behind what the AI bulls won't say out loud.

In a new macro note titled "Tokenomics," Citadel makes the argument plainly: even the most powerful technology on earth still has to pass through the boring discipline of cost curves, capacity limits, and marginal returns.

The evidence is piling up:
– Amazon removed its token usage leaderboard
– Microsoft cancelled Claude Code subscriptions
– Multiple companies reporting unexpectedly massive token bills

Their conclusion is the part that matters.

Adoption is no longer about what AI can do in principle. It's becoming about the price and scarcity of the inputs needed to run it at scale. Compute. Power. Cooling. Memory bandwidth. Inference budgets. All real, all binding constraints.

And here's the kicker from the chart.

The Silicon Data LLM Token Expenditure Index, a benchmark for how much the market is actually spending on AI tokens, has started rolling over. Citadel reads it as a shift toward cheaper models. Companies substituting away from expensive frontier AI toward "good enough" alternatives.

That's economics 101 doing what it always does. When the price of something rises, people use less of it, or find a cheaper version.

Citadel sees a bifurcation forming. Frontier AI concentrated among a few firms with the balance sheets to absorb the cost. Everyone else quietly downgrading to simpler, cheaper models.

This is the part of every technology revolution the early narrative ignores.

The technology being real was never the question.

The question was always whether the economics could carry the valuations.

When one of the most sophisticated trading firms on earth starts writing about AI in the language of cost curves and rationing instead of limitless demand, the conversation has quietly changed.

The hype was about what AI could do.

The reckoning is about what it costs.

[Darius Rochebin @DariusRochebin]

Sur les formules de politesse, lire l'extraordinaire gradation de V.Hugo. (Variante altière de Richelieu : "Je suis votre serviteur très humble" - employé à l'oral pour signifier: "l'entretien est terminé"...

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

It's not a coincidence Jamie Dimon, Elon, Jensen, and Barry Diller all share the same management philosophy: getting the truth from the source

Dara on what he learned from Barry Diller in his 20+ years working with him:

"I was an analyst at Allen & Company working on the LBO model for Paramount.

Barry didn't want to talk to the MD or the VP or the associate.

He'd say, 'Who built the model? I'm going to talk to that guy.'

He wanted to hear straight from the source.

It's the filtering that gets the edge out of the situation, and it's often the edge that gives you an edge. It's not the average."

@GavinSBaker in our conversation from 2024 explained how Elon, Jensen, and Jamie work:

"Wherever in the company the problem is, that is who Jensen and Elon go to work with — the subject matter expert, whether they're 23 or 50, there's no hierarchy.

When JPMorgan was buying Bear Stearns, the best modeler in the company was 24 years old.

They set up a desk for him side-by-side with Jamie. Jamie would say, "Change that, change this."

He didn't ask for that guy's boss. He said, 'This guy is the best, I want to work with him.'"

[Nader Itayim | ‌‌نادر ایتیّم @ncitayim]

🇸🇦 Saudi energy minister: If you don't know what is to come, it's absolutely fine to admit that.

"In the midst of definitely the biggest energy security crisis that the world has ever seen, I haven’t uttered a single word. And I intend to maintain that record, because I believe being silent is a type of talking.

"For me, to be silent is an admission, a humble admission of the fact that I don’t know what will happen. Not tomorrow, or even in half an hour’s time. So if you don’t know what will happen, you might as well be humble enough to say I don’t know it, and I’d rather preserve my self-respect, and the respect that people may have for me.

"And this is the very core of the situation today. There are so many moving parts. There are so many unknowns… If you don't know it, be silent. Being silent is a form of talking."