Ellen Levy

[Ellen Levy @EllenLevy]

@shak @Neko Congratulations!!!

[Ellen Levy @EllenLevy]

@Beezer232 Welcome back!!!!!

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The last time Americans googled "can't sell house" this much was 2008, when nearly 1 in 4 mortgages was underwater. Today it's under 2%. Same search, opposite crisis.

In 2008, people couldn't sell because their homes were worth less than their loans. Selling meant writing a check to the bank. At the bottom, 12.8 million homes were deeply underwater.

In 2026, homeowners are sitting on a record $18 trillion in equity, about $212K per borrower. Delinquency is 3.55%, lower than it was in 2019. Almost nobody is being forced to sell.

And that is exactly why nothing sells. The buyer needs a price that works at 6.3% rates. The seller is anchored to a 2022 price and a 3% loan, and with six figures of equity behind them, they can wait forever. So both sides sit. America has 6 million more jobs than 2019 and 1 million fewer home sales a year.

2008 was a solvency crisis. Everyone had to sell and nobody could afford to buy. 2026 is a liquidity freeze. Nobody has to sell, so nobody does. In 2008 that search meant losing the house. In 2026 it means being trapped in it.

The place to watch is where the freeze is thawing the 2008 way. Texas and Florida now account for 39% of all underwater mortgages in the country, and the number of owners who are both underwater and behind on payments nearly doubled in a year. Insurance premiums and property taxes force sales in a way interest rates never could.

A frozen market doesn't crash. A forced one does. Two states are quietly switching categories.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

At midnight on February 6th, earlier this year, the doorbell to our apartment rang. The doorbell was followed by a pounding on the door. I answered the door and a security person in our building handed me his phone. It was my oldest daughter Eloise. She had found my 26-year-old daughter unconscious on the floor of her apartment and had called 911. The EMT team was already there, but they did not know what was wrong with Lucy or to which hospital they would take her.

I threw on some clothes and jumped in an Uber heading east toward Brooklyn. (Lucy lived alone in Williamsburg.) On the way, I learned that they were taking her to Elmhurst, a City trauma hospital in Queens. I arrived about five minutes after the ambulance to join Eloise, Lucy’s mom, and a friend, and waited to learn what was wrong.

After about 15 minutes, I asked a nurse where she was. I looked over his shoulder to his computer. Next to her name, it said “non-responsive.” I walked into the emergency room and wandered around looking for her until I found her unconscious on a gurney surrounded by several doctors and nurses.

By about 2:30am with the results from a CAT scan, Lucy’s doctors had determined that she had a massive brain hemorrhage and would need an emergency hemicraniectomy to release the pressure on her brain and remove the blood from the hemorrhage. I called our wonderful friend and family doctor Eddie Fisher and explained what was going on. He woke up Josh Bederson, Chairman of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai, to find out more about Zach Hickman, the neurosurgeon on call that night. Dr. Bederson said Hickman was an excellent surgeon, which was comforting as we had no choice.

The surgery to save Lucy’s life began around 3:15am and finished around 5:30am. It was successful.

The following day, I joined Lucy in an ambulance while she was being transferred to Mount Sinai on Madison Avenue. Later that day, we determined from Lucy’s Oura ring that her hemorrhage had occurred around 9am, which meant that more than 19 hours had passed from the time of the hemorrhage to the completion of the surgery to release the pressure on her brain (I only wish @ouraring had an alert for this kind of a medical event. Imagine it could call a family member if the wearer doesn’t cancel the alert).

I later learned that the standard of care is not to do surgery to save a patient with a large brain bleed if more than five hours have passed since the hemorrhage. Even when the surgery is done, I was told that the likely outcome for the patient is a few months in a nursing home and death from pneumonia.

When I met Lucy’s doctors, I did my best to inspire them: “Let’s see what can be accomplished if we give her the best care possible and we invest unlimited resources to restore her to life.” And I promised that whatever we learned we would make available to everyone.

Dr. Chris Kellner, her neurosurgeon, and Dr. David Putrino, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System have led Lucy’s care team since that day. Words cannot describe the remarkable and compassionate care that she has received beginning with the EMT team and then from nurses, doctors, therapists, and the army of people who have worked to save her and return her to life. To this day, we have a daily Zoom where we discuss her progress and make adjustments to her care. While her care and oversight have been incredible, the learnings for the Mount Sinai team have also been elucidating and will assist in the care of many others.

Lucy began in a bad place. She was in a coma for several weeks and then awoke not being able to breathe on her own, unable to walk, see or speak.

Over the last six months, she has recovered her cognition – she understands everything including her circumstance – is able to walk a hundred or more steps at a time with assistance, is making progress with sounds, vowels and consonants and the beginnings of speech, but she remains unable to see.

Each day, she makes a little progress, and daily progress compounds. Every day I tell her that she just needs to make a little progress and it won’t be long before she is back.

We remain optimistic that Lucy will return to normal function. It will likely take years, but I believe it is only a matter of time, hard work, and technological progress, along with some, and perhaps a lot, of divine intervention.

Many people have been praying for Lucy and we are incredibly grateful for the prayers and remarkable support she has received. Lucy’s friends have been with her every day since the beginning, and their presence and friendship have saved her life and helped to rebuild and maintain her spirit. And on a very positive note, Lucy’s challenge has brought together our entire modern family who have all been incredibly devoted to her care and recovery.

Lucy's vision and other faculties may require some form of brain computer interface, work that is underway at Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience, Science, Synchron, Nudge, and other companies in the space.

If you are going to have a devastating brain injury, now is the best time in history for that to happen. We are living in a world when you can be confident that the blind will soon see again. We are going to do everything we can to help make that happen, including by assisting existing companies in the space.

With respect to our promise to make Lucy’s care available to others, we have made good progress. In May, a real estate colleague made me aware of a 93% vacant, brand new, 400,000 square foot Class A+ purpose-built biotech facility on West End Avenue between 65th and 66th Streets that missed the market and was available for sale. The Pershing Square Foundation acquired the building 60 days later.

We also put under contract an adjoining 130,000 square foot building at 320 West 66th Street that is currently being used by Saturday Night Live for studio space. The building has 35-foot ceilings with massive column-free spaces that can be converted into superb rehabilitation facilities. We will close on the SNL building in December.

We are also acquiring an adjoining vacant lot with additional air rights. With just the existing zoning rights, we can add a 150,000 square feet for a total of 680,000 square feet, a lab footprint larger than Rockefeller University, and that’s without including the potential for an upzoning that would allow for substantially more buildable area on the site’s 3.4 acres with spectacular views of the Hudson.

Our goal is to build the world’s greatest brain research, rehabilitation, recovery, human optimization, and longevity institute. We have named it The Ackman Oxman Institute or the AOI for lack of a better name, but also to reinforce the point that Neri and I and our family are all-in on the mission.

The AOI will be patient-centric. It will not be an academic research institute that produces lots of papers, a Nobel Prize winner or two, but little if any results for patients. We will be laser-focused on cures, treatments, devices, rehabilitation and exercise equipment, and targeted and basic research with a goal of massively accelerating the time from idea to innovation to production to helping a patient.

While the AOI will be a non-profit, it will have highly commercial instincts. The AOI will have its own venture funding and will work to develop innovations to create companies that we will seed, assist, and spinout to ensure technologies, treatments, techniques, and drugs get to patients as promptly as possible.

On one 3.4 acre campus in what is still the greatest city in the world, we will do neurosurgery, neuroscience, rehabilitation, nutrition, BCI and device development, human trials, hyperbaric oxygen treatments, and life extension programs, and we will mandate and incentivize collaboration among the teams with no silos, politics, bureaucracy, or any other constraint that is inconsistent with the mission.

Mount Sinai will be an important partner and deservedly so, but it won’t be our only hospital or medical school partner as we don’t believe any institution has a monopoly on the best ideas or the best talent. We don’t believe in exclusive relationships because that is not in the best interest of patients.

Five years ago, we considered launching a brain institute inspired by Neri’s mom who sadly died from Alzheimer’s. We couldn’t make the math work as the real estate was too expensive and we believed it would be too difficult to recruit the best talent from universities to our effort.

Since then, the real estate became available at a 70% discount, universities became a much less attractive place to work due to politics outweighing meritocracy, protests that disrupt learning, the curse of antisemitism, and a decline in funding. Fortunately, during the same time, I made sufficient personal economic progress to make the AOI possible.

The advance of AI in the last few years will also enable us to greatly accelerate our mission. AI still has a lot to learn about human intelligence and the brain, and the AOI should be at the forefront of the interplay between the brain and AI.

Today, I am making a public filing disclosing a gift from Neri and me of ~$400 million or 10,000,000 shares of Pershing Square Inc. (PS) to the AOI. It is very early days for Pershing Square so these shares are intended to anchor the long-term work of the AOI as the shares compound over time while generating what we expect will be a growing stream of quarterly dividends to fund the Institute.

We will also be announcing an additional gift of similar and potentially greater size which won’t be in the form of Pershing Square stock to provide the AOI with the short- and intermediate-term runway necessary to enable it to achieve its goal of becoming a self-sustaining institute, which reinvests all of its revenues, royalties, and the economic rewards of company formation to advance the fields of brain health and human longevity.

Neri and I have chosen to anchor the funding of the AOI to maintain vision alignment and limit the need for the organization to focus on fundraising. We expect the AOI to be the best-resourced brain, rehab, recovery, and longevity institute in the world.

We are grateful to have been able to form a board which includes Dean Kamen (our generation’s Thomas Edison), George Yancopoulus (CEO of Regeneron), James Rothman (Nobel Laureate), Bernardo Sabatini (neuroscientist), Chris Kellner (neurosurgeon), Olivia Flatto (CEO Pershing Square Foundation), Neri Oxman, and myself.

We have recently identified a CEO who we expect to announce by October along with other key hires, and are beginning searches for a Chief Scientific Officer, a Chief AI/Technology Officer, a Chief Operating Officer, a Chief Financial Officer, and other key leadership roles.

If you find what we are building compelling and want to be part of the leadership team that creates and builds the AOI from a standing start, please send an email to: [email protected] with a short note as to why you believe you can help. Please include your best three ideas for the AOI along with a summary of your background and your most important accomplishments.

We promise strict confidentiality to those expressing interest in working with us.

We have learned from Lucy that the brain can recover from even catastrophic injury. There is so much more work to be done as the mind is a terrible thing to waste.

For details from my Pershing Square SEC filing see:

https://t.co/gZKafCw6Ia

[Ellen Levy @EllenLevy]

@shak @Neko This is absolutely amazing, @shak i’d love to talk to you more about it. I have a brainstorm for you. Besides, it would be a great excuse to reconnect.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Hosted a dinner last night with a group of IT leaders of large enterprises around agent adoption in the enterprise. Some quick notes:

* Change management remains one of the biggest topics for driving workflow transformation. Still most processes need to be upgraded to modern operating models to work with agents, which is a mix of technology, data, and human process change. Lots of emphasis on getting data (structured and unstructured) into a setup that can work with agents properly.

* IT teams are finding increasing success embedding full engineers into the business functions (essentially internal FDE) that go and implement agents into the internal workflows. There’s so much technical work to be done to make agents successful, that they can accelerate months or quarters of failed experiments by having someone technical in the workflow early.

* Consensus that the tech function is becoming more important than ever. It’s clear that the business could only expect automation to affect a minority of the business before (e.g. ERP) but now it can impact all of knowledge work. This means IT is becoming a more central role to the workflows across the company.

* Workflows are cross functional, and getting agents to work cross functionally is a complicated data modeling and permissions issue. Single users don’t have access to this. Which means you need to have agentic systems take on their own roles and have their own privileges, which is non-trivial given agents can’t keep things secure on their own.

* Huge variance in budgets between coding work and the rest of knowledge work. Some companies had a $1,000 a month budget for developers, and others had much higher amounts (like $5,000) that were merely triggers to notify the team vs. block them. Far smaller budgets for non-coding work at the moment.

* More companies are building their own multimodel systems for routing workloads by task to frontier and lower cost models. Lots of energy around open weights models, but still more in experimentation instead of at scale usage (some companies can’t due to perceived Chinese issue).

* Clear sense that all enterprise software must be headless in the future. Relief that they don’t need to train employees on hundreds of different apps. However, clear frustration with the traditional vendors that don’t play extremely nice (technically or cost wise) with agents in a headless fashion. Huge warning for existing software vendors.

* Mythos or mythos level-models are finding more and more sophsiticated security risks. The chaining together of vulnerabilities is what’s novel right now, and companies are coming up with long backlogs of what they need to go patch quickly.

Even more discussed, but just a few of the hottest topics.

[Logan Brown @loganbrown799]

Loved speaking to @atlblog about how the legal profession is changing re AI and how AI native law firms are doing it differently

[Jesse Tinsley @JesseTinsley]

Imagine telling someone in 1999…

The year is 2026.

The President is Donald Trump in his second non consecutive term.

The richest man in the world is PayPal cofounder Elon Musk… but not because of fintech or Paypal. Because of rockets, electric cars, AI, satellites, brain chips and something called “Boring Company”.

Apple is worth trillions but its main business isn’t computers… its selling glass rectangles everyone stares at for 9 hours a day.

People don’t watch TV. They watch teenagers explain geopolitics, finance, and relationship advice in ~60 second videos.

The biggest taxi company owns no taxis.
The biggest hotel company owns no hotels.
The most powerful media companies are social networks where everyone argues with strangers for free.

Kids are making millions filming themselves playing video games.

AI Robots write emails, code, legal memos, songs, essays, and breakup texts.

The internet is mostly bots arguing with humans who are trying to prove they aren’t bots.

You can summon a car, groceries, a doctor, a date, a private jet, or a dog walker from your phone.

People pay real money for invisible currencies, digital monkeys, AI girlfriends and pictures that disappear after 24 hours.

The richest companies in the world don’t sell oil, steel, or cars. They sell attention, compute, data, and addiction.

And somehow, after all of that everyone is still using Excel.

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

This guy made a paper plane out of his match ticket during a UEFA Nations League match in a stadium in Germany.

The result was unexpected

[Jen Horsburgh @jenatlionra]

I just wanted to update my resume. Instead, I accidentally proved how a multi-billion-dollar AI tool hallucinates a glass ceiling for women.

I changed a single variable: My name.

Here is what happened when "Jennifer" became "Jeff."

[Logan Brown @loganbrown799]

Lol this isn't true and telling people this is irresponsible.

Clause is really great at providing a broad overview of concepts and appearing correct but not great at drafting documents from scratch or making sure all legal protections are there

Sometimes situations need different contracts than originally presented or needs multiple contracts.

We see ai generated contracts that appear to be well drafted but are missing key provisions. Claude also doesn't know to ask that follow-up questions that can have deal altering implications.

[Logan Brown @loganbrown799]

Legal AI is good for consumers and will be despite additional regulations. I think this is more complicated than lawyers just wanting to protect their industry.

Right now AI is wrong a lot. It hallucinates and provides incorrect information. It's horrific at drafting contract from scratch. I see it everyday at Soxton.

AI is great at explaining broader concepts and getting folks to the right resources.

We are a d2c/b law firm using ai first to lower prices but still ensure accuracy by having human oversight. We're $20 a month and $100 a contract w/ an experienced lawyer in the loop.

[Logan Brown @loganbrown799]

At https://t.co/2CyK8NpGVQ, we’ve helped hundreds of startups with thousands of contracts. We’re just getting started.

Today we’re launching a suite of new features to help startups move faster and be VC-ready from day one including:

- Due diligence audit to spot (and fix) legal issues before they become deal blockers

- Initial cap table setup

- Funding scenario modeling so you can understand dilution and outcomes before you raise

Sign up for our waitlist here: @SoxtonAI

[Ellen Levy @EllenLevy]

Felt that one in Menlo Park.

[Earthquakes @earthquakesApp]

[USGS] M4.2 Nov-26 14:19:11 UTC, 8 km E of Gilroy, California, Depth:9.0km, https://t.co/BwyuQwkdbc #quake

[Stanford Men's Water Polo @StanfordMWP]

Top-5 DUB!

#GoStanford

[Stanford Women's Golf @StanfordWGolf]

MEGHA GANNE CLINCHES THE BIG MATCH WITH THIS INCREDIBLE PUTT IN SUDDEN DEATH 😱🌲

[Earthquake Alerts @QuakesToday]

4.8 magnitude #earthquake. 3 km from #Berkeley, #CA, United States https://t.co/OhjjCjip9l

[Ellen Levy @EllenLevy]

Wow. That was definitely an #earthquake here in the Bay Area!!!

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Multi-agent systems were found to use 15X more tokens than regular AI chat. This is Jevons paradox. Any efficiency improvement in AI models will quickly get eaten up by doing far more complex work with AI Agents. We’re only at the start of this curve right now.

[Ellen Levy @EllenLevy]

This is so impressive… Such a validation of the unique character of the coach, the team, and the university.

[Coach Dillingham @KennyDillingham]

😍😍😍