Sagar Rawal

[Sagar Rawal @Rd4Rawal]

संसारमा सबैभन्दा प्रिय भाषा भनेको नै प्रेमको भाषा हो

[GeniusThinking @GeniusGTX]

Larry Ellison: “When WhatsApp sold for $19B, a lot of us were shocked… until we thought about it”

Back in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg paid $19 billion for WhatsApp and its 450 million monthly users.

A few months after the deal closed, the Oracle founder explained what Silicon Valley had missed at first:

“A lot of us [in Silicon Valley] were shocked — until we thought about it and understood the value of having access to that many consumers,”

His point: think about what traditional businesses, cable companies for example, spend to win each customer.

“This is not the place to debate how much you can get through WhatsApp — $1 per year per customer is not going to do it — but I believe there will be opportunity to sell these same customers other things as they join your ecosystem.”

And he added:

“There was quite a battle between Facebook and Google over that property. It wasn’t that one guy did something really silly with a lot of money. Mark Zuckerberg won an auction over Google and paid a high price but got a very valuable asset in the 21st century.”

By 2025, WhatsApp had roughly 3.1 billion monthly users worldwide.

If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.

[dnap @dnapway]

Mark Zuckerberg says Alexandr Wang is the sharpest entrepreneur of his generation: "Alex is the guy. He's the fucking guy."

"Alex and I had spent a bunch of time talking over the years, and maybe once every few months or something we'd talk. And I was always just very impressed by how he thought about things strategically."

"I kind of had this view of like, all right, currently he's doing this very operational data business, but it always felt to me like he was the sharpest entrepreneur of his generation of the ones who I had a chance to meet."

"I think maybe when we got started, a lot of people were like, okay, like how is this going to work? It's like the social media guy is working with the data guy. Like, are we going to build a frontier lab here or what?"

"My really strong conviction is because I talked to all the leaders of all the labs, all the heads of research, all this stuff, and I was like, no, Alex is the guy. Like he's the fucking guy."

"We need this kind of strategic clarity that he has around the different ways that we want to approach this, the kind of extreme focus on talent density, on the clarity of communicating the different vision which we kind of fashioned together over this period."

"And a bunch of things that I think were kind of extreme but have basically worked, like having this very flat culture was something that you were kind of really obsessed with."

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

75% of the world’s food is generated from only 12 plants and 5 animal species.

[Sagar Rawal @Rd4Rawal]

Network cash in out

[Kay @Dwriteway]

Business is all about relationships.

Talk to people.

[Sagar Rawal @Rd4Rawal]

Sublime

[Robert Greene @RobertGreene]

A lot of people are asking me to explain the sublime, here is my attempt to do so in under 2 minutes.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Unfortunately, we are being blocked by certain oligarchs in order to maintain their monopolistic chokehold on the Indian people. You can guess who they are …

This is a crime against the people of India!

[Sagar Rawal @Rd4Rawal]

@HistoryDailyyy Past present future

[History Daily @HistoryDailyyy]

"I see only my objective - the obstacles must give way."

*-Napoleon Bonaparte

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

I love SI slopcore

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

A humanoid is a capital good on a scale that changes the constraint. It lengthens production and raises what labor and land can turn out, which is the abundance Elon is pointing at.

A person supplies about 2,000 hours a year. A robot on a 168 hour week supplies about 8,700. His floor of 1 billion within 10 years, priced in the low 10,000s, equals about 4 billion full time equivalents against a world labor force of 3.5 billion.
The 10 billion at 15 years is an order of magnitude past that.

Robots building robots still require saving, because energy, materials, and machines have to be bid into that line.
Expected abundance holds for ordinary wants which is what matters for people as consumers. Housing, food, care, and routine medicine get repriced toward energy and materials until a household’s budget stops being what limits them.

An owner running 100s or 1,000s of agents earns the return on that capital stock, which is also how universal high income shows up as purchasing power.

Money prices remain the way to allocate whatever is still scarce, that is energy, locations, raw materials. At least in the short term.

Energy is the binding input, and settling more than one planet adds land, minerals, and generation beyond a single world.

TLDR: (1) More energy. (2) Multiplanetary doesn’t hurt.

[Sam Altman @sama]

I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue.

[Robert Greene @RobertGreene]

Make a list of the people in your life who live with purpose. Prioritize spending more time with them.

[History Daily @HistoryDailyyy]

"Six hours' sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool."

*- Napoleon Bonaparte

[Navalism @NavalismHQ]

"Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve."

@naval

[Robert Greene @RobertGreene]

Work at what connects to you emotionally and ideas will come to you.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Congratulations, @jgebbia!

[Fortune MMXM @FortuneMMXM]

I remembered how I couldn’t sleep for two weeks, the first time I saw this

[Dhruv kumar @Dhruvkumar16797]

Full Course on How To Speak Clearly

[Joseph Tsar @joseph_tsar_]

How To Speak Articulately (Full Course)

[Isa @isssa0x]

The MIT professor Congress subpoenaed in 2014 for calling the American voter "stupid" also filmed the free 26-hour microeconomics course every Goldman Sachs analyst has to know before their $250,000 signing bonus interview.

Millions have watched. Almost no retail investor has finished it.

His name is Jonathan Gruber. He is the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT and one of the two economists Barack Obama's team called into the White House in early 2009 to model the cost curve of the Affordable Care Act.

The 75-minute clip in this video is one lecture from 14.01 Principles of Microeconomics, filmed at MIT and posted on OpenCourseWare for nothing.

MIT charges $85,000 a year to sit in that classroom. He posted the entire course for free.

Gruber covers the mathematical foundation of every decision under uncertainty in one semester.

Expected utility. The average happiness you should expect from a decision weighted by probability. Every insurance premium on earth is priced from this formula.

Risk aversion. The reason people pay ten dollars for a policy that covers a one-dollar loss with five percent probability. The reason almost every retail trader closes winners early and holds losers long.

Marginal rate of substitution. Every salary negotiation, every product bundle at Amazon, and every menu at a Michelin restaurant is priced on it.

Adverse selection. Why healthy people leave the insurance pool and sick people stay. Gruber used this exact equation to model the individual mandate of Obamacare.

Moral hazard. The reason people drive faster with seatbelts and gamble bigger with a bailout guarantee.

Every quant fund on Wall Street pays entry level analysts $250,000 to know this material.

Every consulting firm pays McKinsey partners $500,000 to teach it to Fortune 500 clients as a workshop.

The one MIT professor who ran the policy modeling for the largest healthcare law in American history gave away the whole framework on YouTube for nothing.

"The most surprising fact about human decision-making is how systematically we violate every model that predicts it."

That is a paraphrase Gruber returns to across the series.

The lectures are free on MIT OpenCourseWare. Gruber's textbook is under sixty dollars.

The math is free. The willingness to sit through 26 hours of microeconomics before signing a mortgage, buying an insurance policy, or opening a brokerage account is a much rarer commodity than the confidence to walk in without it.