Mark Minevich

I sit in the rooms where AI policy gets made. Sovereign govts, global boards, top funds. I share what I see here. Startup investor w/exits. Fortune · Forbes

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

I’ve spent years advising Fortune 500 boards, sovereign wealth funds, and Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing AI startups.
Here are 7 things I’d tell every CEO about AI that most advisors won’t say out loud

[Brigitte Gabriel @ACTBrigitte]

🚨BREAKING: Secretary Rubio just brokered a historic framework peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, right here in Washington, D.C.

The deal is simple: Iran is out. Hezbollah is out. The Lebanese military moves in.

Israel begins withdrawing from southern Lebanon. Lebanon takes back control of its own soil. And for the first time in decades, a real path to peace is on the table.

America made this happen.
🇺🇸🇮🇱🇱🇧

[Open Source Intel @Osint613]

Ted Cruz: "We are seeing a cancer on the right. It is rising antisemitism ... here's the scary thing: I've seen more antisemitism on the right over the last 18 months than any time in my life. And it's spreading like a cancer. Tucker Carlson is the most dangerous demagogue in America."

[Shaun Maguire @shaunmmaguire]

It is time to wake up.

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

Today, an immigrant became the first trillionaire in human history.

Before you have an opinion about the number, sit with the part nobody posts about.

In 2008.Three Falcon 1 rockets, three failures. Elon Musk had poured nearly $100M of his own money into SpaceX, Tesla was bleeding out in the middle of the financial crisis, and both companies were weeks from dead. He had cash for exactly one more launch. If it failed, SpaceX was finished.

September 28, 2008 , the fourth Falcon 1 reached orbit. SpaceX went public this morning, opened above a $2 trillion valuation, and made him the first person in history worth more than a trillion dollars.

Look at the arc, not the number. Born in Pretoria. Left for Canada at 17. Landed in America with ambition and not much else. Millionaire at 27. Billionaire at 41. Trillionaire at 54. PayPal reinvented money. Tesla forced an entire industry to electrify. SpaceX made reusable rockets real and put the majority of the world’s active satellites in orbit. xAI is racing at the frontier. And in 2008, weeks from losing all of it, he kept going.

I’m not Elon, by any stretch of the imagination. But I know what that edge feels like.

I came to this country as a kid from Ukraine with nothing. I’ve had launches that exploded too , deals that died, doors that closed, people who told me to be realistic and stop. Some of the hardest moments came when people simply went quiet and stopped picking up.

The milestone is controversial, and the trade offs of his choices are real and worth debating. But the engine underneath is the oldest American story there is: an outsider who out-worked, out- built, and out-lasted everyone who bet against him. The American Dream didn’t die. It got rewritten today and the bar for the next generation just moved.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. Most people quit one launch before the one that works. The difference isn’t talent or timing. It’s that you keep going when it’s hard, when you can’t see the end of the tunnel, when everything in front of you looks bleak. That’s the exact moment that decides everything.

The breakthrough almost never shows up before the dark part. It shows up right after it.

I learned that from my father.

He survived WW2 . Lost his mother early when he was a teen. He came to America with almost nothing but his family and a refusal to break. He had every reason in the world to quit, and he never did. When life barked at him and it barked his whole life, he had one line:

The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

I lost him this past December. I carry that line into every dark stretch now. It was his. Now it’s mine. Tonight, it’s yours.

The caravan moves on.

Keep going.

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

Do you remember when you joined X? I do! #MyXAnniversary

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

Today, an immigrant became the first trillionaire in human history.

Before you have an opinion about the number, sit with the part nobody posts about.

In 2008.Three Falcon 1 rockets, three failures. Elon Musk had poured nearly $100M of his own money into SpaceX, Tesla was bleeding out in the middle of the financial crisis, and both companies were weeks from dead. He had cash for exactly one more launch. If it failed, SpaceX was finished.

September 28, 2008 , the fourth Falcon 1 reached orbit. SpaceX went public this morning, opened above a $2 trillion valuation, and made him the first person in history worth more than a trillion dollars.

Look at the arc, not the number. Born in Pretoria. Left for Canada at 17. Landed in America with ambition and not much else. Millionaire at 27. Billionaire at 41. Trillionaire at 54. PayPal reinvented money. Tesla forced an entire industry to electrify. SpaceX made reusable rockets real and put the majority of the world’s active satellites in orbit. xAI is racing at the frontier. And in 2008, weeks from losing all of it, he kept going.

I’m not Elon, by any stretch of the imagination. But I know what that edge feels like.

I came to this country as a kid from Ukraine with nothing. I’ve had launches that exploded too , deals that died, doors that closed, people who told me to be realistic and stop. Some of the hardest moments came when people simply went quiet and stopped picking up.

The milestone is controversial, and the trade offs of his choices are real and worth debating. But the engine underneath is the oldest American story there is: an outsider who out-worked, out- built, and out-lasted everyone who bet against him. The American Dream didn’t die. It got rewritten today and the bar for the next generation just moved.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. Most people quit one launch before the one that works. The difference isn’t talent or timing. It’s that you keep going when it’s hard, when you can’t see the end of the tunnel, when everything in front of you looks bleak. That’s the exact moment that decides everything.

The breakthrough almost never shows up before the dark part. It shows up right after it.

I learned that from my father.

He survived WW2 . Lost his mother early when he was a teen. He came to America with almost nothing but his family and a refusal to break. He had every reason in the world to quit, and he never did. When life barked at him and it barked his whole life, he had one line:

The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

I lost him this past December. I carry that line into every dark stretch now. It was his. Now it’s mine. Tonight, it’s yours.

The caravan moves on.

Keep going.

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

Grief strips the noise out.
So here’s the economy, no spin:
K-shaped. AI-accelerated. Stressed.
CPI 3.8%. Energy +17.9% on Hormuz. Debt $39T, interest near $1T/yr. The Fed is trapped , cut feeds inflation, hold chokes growth.
The rich are partying. The middle class is paying for groceries. Two economies, one tape.
$4T of IPOs loading with SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic. Greatest liquidity event of the decade, or the top. Both, in sequence.
And tens of thousands of tech layoffs IN an AI boom. Not despite it. Because of it.
The skill that built the last decade isn’t the one that survives the next.
Stop timing froth. Build for resilience. Volatility is the weather, not the apocalypse.

World doesn’t stop for froth. Or fear. Or grief.
It moves. So do we.

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

America invented nothing? Wrong.

We didn’t invent the spark but we built the fire.

Britain lit the match. Germany built the car. CERN coughed up the web.

Then America scaled ALL of it. Mass production. Electrification. Aviation. The transistor. The internet. The PC. The iPhone. The entire AI stack.

The receipts:
→ $806B R&D more than China + Japan COMBINED
→ 425 STEM Nobels (UK ~145. Germany 116. Not close.)
→ Our universities = the planet’s #1 talent factory

Now the part nobody wants to say:

Foreign students take HALF of our advanced STEM degrees. In CS? Temp visa holders grabbed 58% of 2024 PhDs. Americans got 37%.

We train the world’s talent then hand it our jobs.

Enough is Enough

The bar on who stays is rising this week. Good. About time.

So apply it everywhere:

O-1 with extraordinary ability uncapped. Nobel minds. Breakthrough founders. Irreplaceable genius. Bring them all day.

Everyone else? Americans. First. Period.

Train Americans. Hire Americans. Import only the rarest of the rare.

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

In 1980 my family came to America the legal way. Front door. No shortcut, didn’t ask for one.

So spare me the meltdown over the new USCIS memo.

It repeals no law. Kills no green card category. It enforces what Section 245 has said since 1974: adjusting status from inside the U.S. is discretionary grace and not a right.

Tech is screaming “brain drain.” So let’s name what’s actually draining.

Over 80% of Big Tech’s recent H-1B filings were for AI roles. That’s not a talent strategy. It’s a conveyor belt: import mid-level labor, park it on a temp visa, adjust on the inside, repeat. Arbitrage with a mission statement.

The actual geniuses were never at risk. EB-1, O-1, NIW are all wide open. The brilliance that makes you approvable on merit makes you deserving on discretion. The system still rolls out the red carpet for the exceptional. It just stopped comping the bulk order.

So the only question that matters for every CEO crying brain drain:

Were you fighting for irreplaceable talent or cheap, renewable optionality you could underpay?

Because this policy only threatens one of those. And you know which.

We didn’t need a backdoor in 1980. Tech doesn’t need one now.

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

Xi Jinping with population collapsing for a 4th straight year, fertility at 1.0, property sector in its 5th year of bust, youth unemployment near 20%, FDI fleeing, “run” culture emptying out his best educated used a state visit to call AMERICA the declining power.
Invoked “Thucydides Trap” to the President’s face. The academic euphemism for: accept your decline, or this ends in war.
Then dictated terms on Taiwan. Called independence and peace “fire and water.” Drew his red line on his soil, at our expense.
Let’s be clear:

The Chinese Communist Party does not write American foreign policy. Not on Taiwan. Not on the Pacific. Not on semiconductors. Not on alliances. Not on anything.
A leader whose own house is on fire does not get to lecture the United States on decline.
We compete hard. We defend allies. We keep the capital, the compute, and the capability on our side of the line.

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

@chalavyishmael Totally sick

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

@SebastienLaye @DavidSacks @mkratsios47 Agree

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

Silicon Valley flew to Washington yesterday . Not to lobby. To listen. I was in the same room with Jamie Dimon, Palantir’s Shyam Sankar, Anduril’s Trae Stephens, David Sacks, and members of Congress. Dimon said “there’s no divine right to success” and called for industrial policy. Sankar called Iran the first AI war. Stephens warned that Congress has “abdicated their posts” while Silicon Valley plays philosopher king. The bipartisan consensus was razor sharp: nuclear, defense tech, AI, manufacturing. All of it. Now.

The old playbook is dead. Laissez-faire is dead. SaaS-everything is dead. Blind globalization didn’t just fail… it armed our adversaries. For thirty years Silicon Valley told America the future was software and the factory didn’t matter. China listened. They took the factories, the tooling, the workers, and the know-how. Three decades of offshoring America’s industrial soul just got its eulogy in a room.

Look, China’s manufacturing output is 1.6x ours. Their shipbuilding capacity is 232x ours. Trae said it plainest: “Factories are the weapon. Without factories, you have no weapons.” The era of “move fast and break things” is over. The era of move fast and build things just started.

The country that builds the factories wins the war. Not the country with the best app. 🇺🇸​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Great job @HillValleyForum @jacobhelberg

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

@sriramk Great job @sriramk

[Holger Müller #EnterpriseAcceleration @holgermu]

And we are off @constellationr #AIForum with @mikeni, David Bray, @MMinevich and @rwang0 - it will be interesting.

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

What a nightmare getting out of Austin airport to San Francisco yesterday @united
Over 10 1/2 hours of delays and broken planes

This is all very painful and United should thrive to do better

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

@rwang0 @AnupamGovil @sxsw It was great to meet and lots of fun

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

🇺🇸 Let me be blunt about Iran.

Anything less than TOTAL American victory is an American defeat.

What victory looks like:

→ President Trump walks into Tehran. Welcomed by new leadership.
→ The flag changes. The Islamic Republic is over.
→ Trade deals with the US to be signed and sealed.
→ The China-Iran axis? Shrunk to irrelevance.

Iran has the world’s 2nd largest gas reserves and 4th largest oil reserves.
American companies should be FIRST in line and not locked out while Beijing fills the vacuum.

Half-measures are a gift to China.
Ambiguity is a gift to Russia.
Victory must real, visible, undeniable is the only option.

Whatever it takes !

[Mark Minevich @MMinevich]

@GrahamAllen What is going on here