WE

Decoding the singularity

[Cenk Uygur @cenkuygur]

I’ve been banned from the UK. I tried to get on a flight to London to attend SXSW London and give a speech at Oxford. I’ve been banned for criticizing Israel. Are we free anymore? This is oppression of Western citizens by our own governments on behalf of a different country!

[Bull Theory @BullTheoryio]

🚨Michael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbers.

Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake.

He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing.

Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor.

Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale.

Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models.

But here is what Burry is flagging.

Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory.

They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies.

Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle.

Now here is where American retirees enter the picture.

Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit.

Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene.

Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans.

When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center.

The numbers inside Athene are most alarming.

Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight.

Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets.

Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth.

The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times.

Burry's says:
Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing.

- Nvidia books the revenue.
- Apollo collects the fees.
- xAI gets the computing power.
- And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

There is no world in which this is okay.  

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito did not recuse himself from cases involving Trump’s Treasury Department while his own son was secretly working there as a political appointee and attorney. 

His son's employment was hidden so thoroughly that his name appears nowhere on the Treasury Department website, he has no public resume, and his bar listings are outdated. 

If Alito had recused himself, the secret would have come out. He didn’t recuse himself. 

This is a clear conflict of interest, and the American people deserved to know about it. 

The federal recusal standard is clear: a justice must step aside in any case where there is a reasonable basis to question whether he or she can be impartial. A justice ruling on cases involving the department where his son works fails that test. The Treasury Department sits at the center of some of the biggest legal fights of this administration, and challenges to Trump’s $1.776 billion January 6 slush fund could be headed to the Court next. 

The Supreme Court is the only court in America with no binding code of conduct. That is completely unacceptable, and it has to change NOW. 

Congress controls the Power of the Purse, and therefore the Court’s funding. If the Court will not adopt a binding code of conduct with real recusal review on their own, I support withholding their funding until they do. 
 https://t.co/FV2Tkpz7Dk

[sarah @sahouraxo]

BREAKING:

Israel is dropping white phosphorus bombs on civilian areas in the village of Arnoun, Nabatieh, South Lebanon.

These are internationally banned munitions — and Israel is unleashing them against civilians.

[Not Jerome Powell @alifarhat79]

Taxpayers realizing they will pay $300 billion to reconstruct Iran after paying $70 billion to destroy it

[Nature Vid @naturevid2]

This video was deleted from Facebook yesterday.

You know what to do ‼️

[Ro Khanna @RoKhanna]

The DOJ is literally investigating a sexual assault survivor, E Jean Carroll, instead of a single perpetrator in the Epstein files.

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Psaki: “…I have to start tonight with a story that in any other administration, would be grounds for opening an impeachment inquiry, because today ProPublica reported that the White House intervened to get a $620 million deal for a company tied to President Trump’s adult son @DonaldJTrumpJr…the deal in question involved a startup focused on rare earth magnet production called Vulcan Elements and last Summer, Don Jr’s venture capital firm took an undisclosed stake in that company, and wouldn’t you know…three months later, the Pentagon announced that it was giving Vulcan Elements a $620 million loan.”🙄🤦‍♀️

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core.

The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old.

It had fewer than 50 employees.

And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it.

Here is the part the administration tried to bury.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast.

One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.

Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion.

A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son.

This is public money. Your money.

Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for.

And there is more coming.

A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review.

This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer.

https://t.co/4kB1cZNmlE

[FactPost @factpostnews]

As attorney general, Ken Paxton sued schools that didn't display the Ten Commandments inside their classrooms.

Some of the Commandments include:

—"Thou shalt not commit adultery" (Paxton allegedly had multiple extramarital affairs)
—"Thou shalt not steal" (Paxton was indicted for felony securities fraud and impeached for misusing public resources)
—"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor" (Paxton was impeached for making false statements in official records)

[Financial Times @FT]

Trump’s Board of Peace fund is empty https://t.co/r3U8sEB8oF

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

Your wife says you cheated on her.

Your staff say you took bribes.

Your party impeached you.

[WE @R8iderWill]

@EthanKreagerFF What percentage rostered #1 QB, WR?

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

President Trump was convicted of fraud, and has pardoned over 70 people convicted of fraud.

[Governor Newsom Press Office @GovPressOffice]

Donald Trump’s DOJ got caught DELETING a press release about a cop-beater who is accused of buying a child for sex.

Are you angry yet?

[Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) @adamscochran]

The one that we sent money to and that raised billions?

Where did it go?

Where did the $400M of Venezuelan oil money sitting a Qatari bank go?

When will the GOP wake the fuck up to the fact the President is fleecing the country and using it like his personal piggy bank!

[Team Talarico @TeamTalaricoHQ]

This is Ken Paxton's mugshot.

He was indicted on 3 felony counts for investment fraud.

He was reported to the FBI by his own staff for bribery.

He was impeached by his own party for corruption.

Now he’s the Republican nominee for US Senate in Texas.

Together we will stop him.

[Rep. Shontel Brown @RepShontelBrown]

When Howard Lutnick found out he had to testify in front of the Oversight Committee, he gave $5 MILLION to a House Republican PAC.

Shortly after donating, James Comer announced his testimony would never be seen by the public. This is blatant corruption. He should be fired.

https://t.co/6CQdpD8Mzc

[Senator Dick Durbin @SenatorDurbin]

Just one week after tobacco giant Reynolds donated $5 million to MAGA Inc. and dined with Trump at his golf club, President Trump directed FDA to authorize the sale of flavored vapes.

This corruption is poisoning our kids and unleashing a new wave of addiction on America.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

Similar to when Israeli cyber official Tom Alexandrovich -- after meeting with NSA and other US agents -- was arrested in Las Vegas for trying to arrange hook-ups with underage girls.

He was then bizarrely released with no restrictions, waltzed back to Israel, never returned.