Arven

business | tech | power

[Arven @arvenxbt]

WARREN BUFFETT SAYS HE WON THE MOST IMPORTANT LOTTERY OF HIS LIFE BEFORE HE EVER EARNED A DOLLAR

Not the stock picks. Not Berkshire. Just being born in the US in 1930, as a man, odds he's put as high as 80 to 1 against.

He calls it the ovarian lottery. Everything he built afterward, in his own telling, was playing a hand he never had to earn in the first place.

He's talked about it for decades, going back to a 1997 shareholder meeting where he laid out the thought experiment straight: imagine you get to design the rules of society 24 hours before you're born, but you don't know if you'll come out rich or poor, healthy or not, born in the US or somewhere with none of the same odds stacked in your favor.

He's said it plainly about his own family too. Two sisters, just as sharp, just as driven as he was. They didn't get the same shot, and he knew it even as a kid watching it happen.

The talent was real. So was the head start nobody chose.

[Arven @arvenxbt]

https://t.co/zPjDhj4AVE

[Arven @arvenxbt]

@BonBona9z probably would’ve been a very different story

[Arven @arvenxbt]

HE TOOK HIS WEDDING GIFT MONEY TO A BROKER, GOT BORED WITHIN A MONTH, AND ENDED UP BUILDING A $100 BILLION MONEY MACHINE

Jim Simons was 21, freshly married, with a few thousand dollars in wedding cash. He walked it into Merrill Lynch and bought two stocks. Stocks bored him fast.

He asked his broker for something with more action. The answer: soybeans.

He bought soybean futures. Price went up, then down, panic set in, he sold both, bought one back. Started driving from Berkeley to San Francisco at 8 AM just to watch the market move, a math PhD student losing sleep over soybean prices.

Then he made what might be the most disciplined decision of his life. He told himself: either finish the thesis or trade soybeans, not both. He closed the position for a small profit and didn't trade again for years.

That same man went on to build Renaissance Technologies, the fund that turned out to be right on barely 50.75% of its trades and still generated over $100 billion in profit, arguably the greatest money-making machine finance has ever seen.

Underneath every decision he made sit five equations older than any bank on the planet: compound growth, present value, geometric mean, the Rule of 72, real return. All of them fit on a napkin.

When a fund advertises a 20% average return, that's usually the arithmetic mean talking. Ask for the geometric mean instead and watch the number quietly shrink. Nobody's hiding it, they're just betting you won't ask.

Simons never beat the math. He just never argued with it. The napkin is free. The discipline is what actually built the fortune.

[Lumen @lumenxbt]

https://t.co/dib7ii1unv

[Arven @arvenxbt]

@Pixel_Neuron exactly. the math was the edge.

[Arven @arvenxbt]

@0xKenny1st exactly. knowing when to stop matters.

[Arven @arvenxbt]

@Pixel_Neuron exactly lol, new tools, same human brain

[Arven @arvenxbt]

jane street pays top talent hundreds of thousands to master one skill:

persuasion.

30 years ago, tony robbins broke down the same skill in a 21-minute session.

no fancy funnel.
no scripts.
no ai.

just understanding what actually makes people say yes.
the interesting part?

the psychology hasn't changed.

the tools did.

[Arven @arvenxbt]

https://t.co/zPjDhj4AVE

[Arven @arvenxbt]

@0xVexonic exactly. new tools change the game, but people still respond to the same triggers.

[Arven @arvenxbt]

@0xKenny1st yeah, the tools change fast, but the principles really don’t.

[Arven @arvenxbt]

@diablomediablo a pencil is such a simple way to explain something this complex

[Arven @arvenxbt]

@0xVexonic 1% sounds small until you see what it costs over 30 years

[Arven @arvenxbt]

@0xzynex the exit timing is the crazy part here

[Arven @arvenxbt]

@isssa0x the part about repetition is easy to overlook until you start sizing bigger

[Arven @arvenxbt]

@Pixel_Neuron complexity really is an underrated risk

[Arven @arvenxbt]

@0xKenny1st yeah, timing changes everything

[Arven @arvenxbt]

A random number changed Robert Shiller’s life.

In 1969, he was a grad student drinking beer with friends while waiting for the Vietnam draft lottery. His birthday came up, and he got number 362 out of 366.

He didn’t go to Vietnam.

40 years later, economists found something strange: the men who got low lottery numbers ended up earning less money for the rest of their lives.

Shiller got 362.

Now watch his final lecture at Yale.

He starts with a professor who left academia to give $30 loans to women in Bangladesh. That man eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Then Shiller explains why most people think about finance the wrong way.

Finance isn’t just about making money. It’s about preventing species from going extinct, protecting people from losing their careers, and giving people access to capital when they need it most.

The Nature Conservancy has a $5.6B endowment managed by portfolio managers. That money has helped buy huge amounts of land around the world to protect it.

Someone is literally managing an investment portfolio for gorillas.

And then Shiller quotes Ecclesiastes:

“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. Time and chance happeneth to them all.”

It’s written in Latin above his desk at home.

This lecture is worth watching.

Because after hearing it, random events might start looking less like bad luck and more like something you can work with.

[Superior @andreysuperior]

https://t.co/6fbpq78hsH

[Arven @arvenxbt]

@limalemonnn Munger was really onto something. this stuff still holds up

[Arven @arvenxbt]

9 million people watched an MIT physicist explain quantum mechanics.

almost nobody connected it to their money.

Allan Adams starts with one idea:

superposition.

a quantum system can exist in multiple possible states until it’s measured.

sounds abstract.

until you realize the same physics could eventually break the math protecting your bank accounts, messages and crypto.

RSA works because multiplying two huge primes is easy.

finding those primes again is supposed to be practically impossible.

quantum computers change that equation.

the scary part?

you can learn the idea for free in one MIT lecture.

and the financial system is already preparing for what happens next.

the most important part of quantum computing might not be what it can calculate.

it’s what it can make breakable.

[Arven @arvenxbt]

https://t.co/zPjDhj4AVE

[Arven @arvenxbt]

Elon Musk says GrokBot could become the #1 tool for building agentic systems within 6–12 months.

and he expects 100% of code to be written by LLMs within a year.

70%+ of engineers at SpaceXAI are already using it to build self-learning agents.

40 minutes of elon + the engineers explaining what AI engineering looks like next.

probably worth watching.

[Kenny1st @0xKenny1st]

https://t.co/K53fEDYCD2

[Arven @arvenxbt]

An engineer who worked on this before joining SpaceXAI just said something wild about GrokBot:

"It's the most powerful agentic tool we've built so far — but 99% of people are using it wrong."

He walks through how their engineering team runs 10+ GrokBot agents each, coordinated by a single Chief of Staff agent that manages the rest.

Full workshop below — how to build a GTM team with GrokBot agents from scratch. More useful than most $500 courses on agent systems.

Watch it, then ship your own autonomous team.

[Kenny1st @0xKenny1st]

https://t.co/K53fEDYCD2