🌍 Top 10 contributors to global real GDP growth (2026)
1.🇨🇳 China — 26.6%
2.🇮🇳 India — 17.0%
3.🇺🇸 United States — 9.9%
4.🇮🇩 Indonesia — 3.8%
5.🇹🇷 Türkiye — 2.2%
6.🇳🇬 Nigeria — 1.5%
7.🇧🇷 Brazil — 1.5%
8.🇻🇳 Vietnam — 1.6%
9.🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia — 1.7%
10.🇩🇪 Germany — 0.9%
📌 China + India alone = 43.6% of global growth
📌 Asia-Pacific accounts for ~50% of total growth
Source: IMF
i think if you're a young, ambitious person, the most important thing to do right now is realise that the old ways do not work. what you're watching right now is old, antiquated, bureaucratic, slow moving structures coming to a clash with a faster than ever moving reality
we are now in an age where skills are prioritised over anything, and the old path of education -> good job has been dead for quite a while. education was always a means to an end, a stamp of approval for abilities. but with degree inflation & AI, these things are quickly becoming worthless
you can just do things is now the signal for capability - the world will always prioritise people who take action. ultimately the people who recognise this are, as usual, the ones on the fringest who move fastes and aren't bogged down with unnecessary friction - startups, small companies, and capital managers.
Steve Jobs criticizing consultants in a 1992 lecture to an MIT Sloan MBA class
Worth a listen
"I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a chance to take responsibility for one's recommendations, and where one has to see one's recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissues for the mistakes, and pick oneself up off the ground and dust themselves off, one learns a fraction of what one can."
Anduril Founder @PalmerLuckey on China’s Critical Threat Against the U.S. Military:
“They’re building weapons that are sometimes better than ours, for a tenth of the price, and 100x the scale.”
“The real power of the Chinese military is their ability to manufacture… unfortunately, right now they are very much on the right side of the equation.”
“Anti-ship missiles are a huge concern… it’s very hard to defend against them. Even if you can defend against one, can you defend against 10? Can you defend against 100?”
“When our aircraft carriers cost billions of dollars, you can justify throwing a lot of missiles at it and it still makes sense, from China’s perspective.”
“I don’t think China’s gonna go for a Pearl Harbor. But what they probably could do is deny the U.S. Navy the ability to operate in any area that they make a priority… if [China] makes enough hypersonic anti-ship missiles.”
“What happens is, not the destruction of the U.S. Navy, but the neutering of the U.S. Navy. We realize we can’t actually use [our ships], so they sit somewhere else, watching Taiwan get invaded.”
“The United States has a lot of missiles that are excellent… but we don’t make enough of them.”
“This is the Anduril mission problem… how do we do these things cheaper, better, and faster?”
“This is why [Anduril] is investing in building missiles and missile systems. We need something like 100x more capacity than we currently have.”
Rebuild The Arsenal. 🇺🇸
This year, I wish you less — less information, less food, less entertainment, less communication, less stimulation. You already have too much of all that, and it stands in the way of your serenity, health, sleep, and creativity. Merry Christmas! ☦️
This is historic:
Alphabet, $GOOGL, has accounted for 19.4% of the S&P 500's YTD gain, the most among any stock.
This comes as the company has added +$1.3 trillion in market cap this year.
Nvidia, $NVDA, has had the 2nd-largest impact at +16.0%, or +$1.05 trillion.
This is followed by Broadcom, $AVGO, and Microsoft, $MSFT, which delivered +$520 billion and +$380 billion, respectively.
As a result, the top 10 stocks have accounted for 59.4% of the S&P 500's YTD gain.
In other words, the remaining 490 stocks have accounted for just 40.6% of the S&P 500's rally.
Big tech is all that matters.
The best investors are like great spearfishermen.
"You drop down with no equipment and hold your breath. You let little fish go by because you're not there to hunt little fish. You're waiting for the big fish. It's an exercise in waiting."
Martín learned this from 3G Capital. They waited five years for the right deal, and closed it in a week. Then waited another decade to do their biggest deal with Anheuser-Busch.
"Every four or five years, there’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity and you have to be ready and willing to move quickly to capture it."
I’m turning 41, but I don’t feel like celebrating.
Our generation is running out of time to save the free Internet built for us by our fathers.
What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is being turned into the ultimate tool of control.
Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU).
Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy.
A dark, dystopian world is approaching fast — while we’re asleep. Our generation risks going down in history as the last one that had freedoms — and allowed them to be taken away.
We’ve been fed a lie.
We’ve been made to believe that the greatest fight of our generation is to destroy everything our forefathers left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech.
By betraying the legacy of our ancestors, we’ve set ourselves on a path toward self-destruction — moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological.
So no, I’m not going to celebrate today. I’m running out of time. WE are running out of time.