250 years old. Rocket ship IPOs. New York is winning again. Trillionaires. American soccer looks good. European minds are visiting, comprehending.
How can you be pessimistic about the USA?
Oh yes, I remember that Bond film where the villain decarbonized the auto industry, brought fast internet to everyone on the planet, and helped paralyzed people interact with the world again.
Learn to confidencemaxxx and watch reality bend your way. Winners act like winners. This is your sign to start believing in yourself. This is your sign to start becoming delusionally confident in yourself and the fact that it will all work out.
most ppl’s refusal to risk humiliation is their original downfall.
genius is indistinguishable from delusion / being a moron until the outcome arrives.
the funniest part is that when it all works, everyone retrofits the narrative to make it look inevitable.
& when it fails, they call it what they were always going to call it. stupid.
the line between idiocy & insight is fine as hell.
Founder of lululemon on what he'd tell every 25 year old:
"I'd tell them that every person in the world is an individual with a different genetic makeup and a different upbringing and the way that you're thinking is so radically different than every other person in the world and incomparable that if you have an idea and you want to move forward with it, don't worry so much about the competition because nobody will be able to replicate you and the way you think about it."
Good math, but not all quite there:
First, SpaceX pays fairly average, but for more than a decade they have offered regular (~bi-annual) liquidity to employees. To live comfortably (especially to have a family) in LA County, most employees would have sold a little bit here and there, if not a lot (e.g., if they were the sole earner in a household).
Second, critically, because there is no double trigger (in order to facilitate the liquidity), most people default to "sell-to-cover" — i.e., ~40-50% of their holdings are immediately sold to cover the taxes on vest. Remember these vests are W-2 events. In order to not do this, the employee would need to come up with significant cash (because the taxes are paid against the price at vest, not the price at grant) — especially later on.
However, two things make SpaceX particularly awesome IMO:
1. They gave employees the option to choose stock or options along the way. Someone who took options and paid the taxes with cash would have done very well.
2. They gave stock to everyone. There are a bunch of highly skilled workers that we on X never think of, like Tube Benders, Orbital Tube Welders, Cleanroom Technicians, etc. that are going to make significant fortunes.
Maybe it's overly quixotic, but this last point is underrated part of @elonmusk attacking physical problems, not just software ones, with 100x thinking: a bunch of people in the types of jobs America needs and romanticizes (for good reason) will be rewarded with the kind of wealth that really would not be possible at any other company they would have chosen.
An incredibly positive story that, if you can't see it in that light, you should look inward.
@pmarca Because of Airbnb, I talk with city officials and housing experts all the time. Whatever the online discourse says, this book has meaningfully influenced a lot of people who actually have the power to build
A young Harvard medical school graduate spent nearly three years stuck in his parents' house, having panic attacks and hallucinations. One evening at twilight, walking into a dressing room, he was hit by what he later called "a horrible fear of my own existence." His name was William James. The diary entry he wrote on April 30, 1870 became the foundation of modern psychology.
The line was this: "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." He was 28. He'd given up. So he made one decision: stop waiting to feel okay before doing things. He would do them first, and let the feelings catch up whenever they could.
He spent the next twenty years turning that one diary line into a science. His 1890 textbook landed on a simple split: the things you do are under your direct control, but the things you feel are not. You can decide to swing your legs out of bed and walk to the kitchen. The mood that hits you while you're walking, you can't dial. So you work the part you can work. The feeling side shows up on its own clock, when it's ready and not before.
Brain scanners caught up about a century later. There's a network in your head that switches on the moment you stop paying attention to anything specific. It's the voice that drags you back to something dumb you said in 2014. In depressed brains, this network is overactive. It runs in loops. It will not let go of the negative track about you. The second you start doing something that actually needs your attention, the loop quiets and a different network takes over. Action is the off switch.
In 2016, The Lancet published a trial called COBRA. Researchers took 440 adults with depression and split them in half. One group got CBT, the gold-standard talking therapy where you work on your thinking patterns. The other group got something simpler, basically James's idea written into a treatment plan: pick small activities each week, schedule them, do them, see what happens to your mood. A year later, both groups had improved by the same amount. The simpler version also cost about 20% less to deliver, because junior workers can run it. Five days of training is enough.
In 2024, a research team pulled 218 studies together, covering 14,170 depressed people. Walking and jogging produced a real drop in depression scores. Yoga, same drop. Weights, same drop. The authors' verdict: exercise belongs alongside therapy and medication as one of the main treatments for depression.
So that's the answer William James worked out from his own three years in hell in 1870, and that 14,000+ people in clinical trials have confirmed since. Action. Walk somewhere. Pick something heavy up and put it down. Show up at yoga. Schedule one small task and finish it. Any of these works, and they work for the same reason. You move, and the feeling follows.
The Economist has a long read on Enhanced Games with interesting details on the business and athlete doping prep:
▫️Up to $25m in prizes for 50 athletes (swimming, weightlifting, track)
▫️Spent $8m on modular arena for ease of transport ($6m just for pool)
▫️Las Vegas event will host 2,500 spectators
▫️$250k to first place and up to $1m bonuses for new world records
▫️The Killers will play the Super Bowl-style ceremonies
▫️Livestream on YouTube and hosted by Bryan Johnson
The media spectacle is adversiting for the real business of selling DTC drugs and supplements for “sleep, energy…and healthy age-ing”.
Pills, powders, creams and injectable including: testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), human growth hormones (HGH), GLP-1 meds and various peptides.
To prepare for the event his weekend, 40 Enhanced athletes moved to Abu Dhabi in February and spent 3 months training with special medical oversight and doping regimens.
UAE has world-class medical facilities and flexible regulatory system.
Athletes have access to physios, private chefs and 5-star rooming (as well as same pools and tracks they’d compete on).
Each athlete had specific protocols that is tweaked after daily testing per, The Economist:
“There would be a menu of enhancement drugs on offer rather than a set prescription…allowing each protocol to be tailored to the specific demands of the athlete’s sport. Testosterone and anabolic steroids would be made available to build muscle; human-growth hormone to repair tissue; erythropoietin to boost red-blood-cell production; meldonium to enhance endurance (whether it actually does this is disputed); and modafinil and Adderall to sharpen focus and reduce fatigue. Dosages would start low but would be gradually increased to levels that…would exceed those used in standard medical care, while staying within what he considered safe limits. (These levels would also typically be lower than those seen in some users of high-street gyms.)”
Enhanced Games was founded by Australian entrepreneur Aron D’Souza with investments from Peter Thiel, Christian Angermayer and Donald Trump Jr.
In early May, Enhanced Games went public via a de-SPAC merger at $1.2B valuation. Per its filing, it lost $4.7m in 2024 and $26.7m in 2025.
Aron has since left the organization but told Joe Rogan he made the bet based on two stats:
▫️44% of Olympians admit to using banned or performance-enhancing drugs according to research commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)
▫️American Olympian only earns $30,000 a year (and none of it comes from IOC; it’s either sponsorship or national athletic funds)
The Enhanced Game pitch is that it’s more fair to the athletes than the IOC (very unsurprisingly, IOC hates this idea) and that spectators want to see full human potential (even with drugs and specialized equipment like full-body swim suits).
Notably, James “The Missile” Magnussen will try to break the 50-meter freestyle swim record of 20.88 seconds.
Hafthor “The Mountain” Bjornsson will try to deadlift over 1,124 lbs.
***
Full read here: https://t.co/XIKwS1RZyD
Rogan pod: https://t.co/g8sV6vKSQN
The point is simple
We keep hearing about this 10-1000x in productivity – yet all developments seem completely lateral.
I have repeatedly asked for ONE single example of this inhumane exaltation above human quality.
A single uber-high quality product from this 100x productivity that would've taken a dedicated autistic coder 10+ years in their basement to make, but made in around 1 year with AI assistance.
Show us.
Stand up and show the class.
Entire comment section is a vague "you know nothing jon snow" rebuttal - not a single example.
There are zero. zilch.
There is nothing.
AI is not even close to the level you think it is.
Silicon valley marketing.
The beautiful thing is you don't even need to be exceptional at all of these. Just being above-average on 2-3 dimensions compounds like crazy:
• Work harder than average (easy)
• Work smarter than average (study the game)
• Persist longer than average (most people quit shockingly early)
• Get feedback and iterate (most people just... don't)
Naval is right, and the math proves it in a way most people aren’t processing.
GPT-4 launched at $60 per million output tokens. Today, equivalent capability costs under $1. That’s a 98% price collapse in two years. Demand didn’t fall. It exploded. OpenAI went from $1B to $12B+ in ARR while slashing prices every quarter.
This is Jevons Paradox at civilizational scale. When coal got cheaper in the 1800s, England didn’t use less coal. They burned 10x more. Intelligence is following the same curve, except the adoption rate is compressing a century of energy economics into 36 months.
The part nobody’s thinking through: every previous commodity with “unlimited demand” eventually restructured the labor market around it. Electricity didn’t create unlimited demand for electricians. It eliminated most of the jobs that electricity replaced and created entirely new ones that didn’t exist before.
The 280x cost reduction Stanford measured between 2022 and 2024 means a task that cost $1,000 in AI compute now costs $3.57. At that price, companies don’t just automate what humans were doing. They start doing things that were never economically viable at human-labor pricing. Analysis that would have required a $200K analyst for a year now runs for $50 in an afternoon.
Unlimited demand for intelligence at near-zero marginal cost means intelligence stops being the scarce input. Taste, judgment, and the ability to ask the right question become the bottleneck. The returns flow to people who can direct intelligence, not people who provide it.
That’s the real trade: the value of raw intelligence is cratering while the value of knowing what to do with intelligence has never been higher. And that gap is only getting wider.
Overconfidence will get you further in life than your skills. The illusion of superiority makes you take bold steps, not constant self criticism. You seem like you know what you’re doing. All the knowledge you hoard in your cave means nothing when the world cares about output.
SpaceX has acquired xAI
Elon's letter: "The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth."
For context, the entire U.S. currently generates 1.3 TW.
"My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.
Factories on the Moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space. By using an electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing, it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power.
The capabilities we unlock by making space-based data centers a reality will fund and enable self-growing bases on the Moon, an entire civilization on Mars and ultimately expansion to the Universe.
Thank you for everything you have done and will do for the light cone of consciousness."
— @ElonMusk letter: https://t.co/ysuGCUGRuX