barz3n

Money, markets, and the decisions behind them

[barz3n @barz3n]

@0x_Squirrel He sold him for about a week and a half of usher pay. He bought him back for a year and a half of it.

[barz3n @barz3n]

@0xZenad He was worth sending to a clinic. He just wasn’t worth telling first.

[barz3n @barz3n]

In 2004, after three championships in four years, Shaquille O’Neal left the Los Angeles Lakers for Miami because he refused to go from $30 million a year to $20 million.

Years later he explained how it actually happened.

“I learned in Orlando that business overtakes everything. Doesn’t matter how you feel, doesn’t matter how they feel.”

The team’s position, in his words:

“Pay Shaq 30 million while he’s going into his late 30s? Let’s bring it down.”

His position:

“We just won three out of four. I’m just getting started. I’ve at least got one or two more championships in me. My money’s not going down. You can’t bring me from 30 to 20.”

Then the line that has nothing to do with basketball.

“Not with five kids.”

The Lakers answered that they would entertain trading him.

“I took offense to that. So I said, well, I want to go to Miami. And that’s how that all started.”

He says he has no problem with the business of it.

“I understand business. I have no problem with that.”

His problem is with how it was done.

“Approach me business-wise. If you insult me, now I’m going to take offense to that.”

The same thing happened to him again in Miami. They sent him to get an MRI. Then they phoned.

“Don’t just send me to the doctor’s office to get an MRI and then I get a call saying I’ve been traded. If you’re going to be a businessman, let’s do business. Shake my hand and tell me to my face.”

The man who said feelings do not matter left two teams over being handled instead of being told.

He won a championship in Miami two years later.

Would you have taken the twenty?

[barz3n @barz3n]

@softarox Fair. But the ring came in Miami, and he only got there by saying no.

[barz3n @barz3n]

@softarox $415M owed against $130M in assets. He was $285 million underwater at the moment he said “way up there.”

[barz3n @barz3n]

@agent_isho @GenLayer The interesting part isn’t that validators run different models. It’s what happens when they disagree. That disagreement is the actual product.

[barz3n @barz3n]

@AleiahLock everyone looks at him

[barz3n @barz3n]

@AleiahLock sad

[barz3n @barz3n]

@1onetouch1 The uncomfortable version of this: if your team’s AI usage looks like faster copying and pasting, nothing has been adopted. The old workflow just runs quicker.

[barz3n @barz3n]

@0x_CryptoFuture 🥲

[barz3n @barz3n]

Shaquille O’Neal spent his first million dollars in one day. He had not played a second in the NBA.

Two days later the bank called. He was $80,000 in the hole.

It was 1992. He was 20. The money was an endorsement deal signed before the draft, before he had played a single NBA game.

He thought a million meant a million.

“You forget about FICA and sales tax. So I thought I was getting one million dollars straight up.”

What landed was about $600,000.

He went out and bought a black Mercedes for $150,000. He wrote a cheque. He did not negotiate.

“Guy could have told me $200,000, I would have bought it.”

He drove it home. His father looked at it.

“That’s nice. Where’s mine?”

They went back and bought the identical one.

“That’s 300,000 right there.”

Then his mother said she did not want one that big. She wanted a smaller one.

“That’s 500,000 right there.”

Then the suits for the draft. The jewellery. The earrings. The Alpine pull-out deck so he could take it into the club. The alarm that called his pager.

A couple of days later the phone rang. It was the manager of his bank, a friend of the family.

He asked Shaq if he knew how to read a bank statement.

“I was $80,000 in the hole.”

Then the man touched his hand.

“Son, I watched you play here in high school. You’re a smart young man. I don’t want you to be like all these other athletes.”

So Shaq started interviewing financial advisers.

One of them told him to hand over the $40 million rookie contract. He would turn it into $200 million by the time Shaq was 23.

“I don’t like this guy.”

The one he picked talked about savings bonds and setting up a corporation for his family so the spending could be written off.

His name was Lester Knispel. He has run the money ever since.

Years later Shaq was in a Rolls-Royce dealership with Mike Tyson.

Tyson bought three. Shaq had not planned to buy any.

“I wasn’t gonna let him outdo me. So I bought two.”

$600,000 gone.

Then Lester called. “Hey, gotta stop this.”

There was one Lester could not save him from.

Howard Schultz offered him Starbucks franchises in Black neighbourhoods.

“I looked him in his face and said: black people don’t drink coffee, sir. I don’t think it’s gonna work.”

“You should have seen his face.”

Magic Johnson took that deal instead.

In the same interview he is told he now earns more from endorsements and television than he ever did playing. He does not argue.

He was $80,000 overdrawn before his first NBA game. Nothing changed except who held the chequebook.

Would you hand yours over?

The video below is Shaq telling it himself.

[barz3n @barz3n]

@0x_Squirrel Spread over two and a half years, that is roughly $67,000 a day. Every day.

[barz3n @barz3n]

@evgenia_vibes Taxes and his agent took $400,000. His father’s Mercedes took another $150,000, and nobody made him buy that one.

[barz3n @barz3n]

@1babyteee yeaaah

[barz3n @barz3n]

@whaleyxbt u need to read this

[barz3n @barz3n]

@kiruwaaaaaa so interesting

[barz3n @barz3n]

@fort1kkk The 4 PM ET check on the next day is doing more work here than the tokenomics. Most people are pricing the first hour.

[barz3n @barz3n]

@noclipepe book

[barz3n @barz3n]

@Skylar_ good concept

[barz3n @barz3n]

@Egichzz yeah

[barz3n @barz3n]

Bill Gates says AI is the greatest threat to equity that humans have ever invented.

He also says it is the most powerful tool for advancing it.

Both halves are in the same sentence.

“AI is both the most powerful tool for advancing equity and the greatest threat to equity that humans have ever invented.”

The video below is 42 seconds. He does not slow down once.

“AI’s ability to replace and exceed human cognition will usher in one of the most turbulent eras in history.”

Not replace. Replace and exceed.

Then he listed what that looks like.

“Many jobs will disappear. White collar jobs first, with blue collar ones to follow.”

The office before the factory floor.

“AI could empower criminals to create bombs, bioweapons and computer viruses.”

“AI could stunt our kids’ development and replace human relationships.”

Four seconds after the word bioweapons:

“At the same time, the positive things about AI will be amazing.”

Elsewhere he said what is missing.

“There’s no plan to ease the entry into the AI era, and not even a plan to have a plan.”

In 2017 Gates proposed one. He said robots that take a person’s job should be taxed.

Nine years later, by his own description, there is not even a plan to have a plan.

He is describing the industry he spent his life building.

He says there is still time to act.

Who exactly is supposed to make the plan?