Erik Graff

Entrepreneur. Equity partner @ Valhalla Holdings

[Erik Graff @erikprgraff]

@elonmusk @Grummz Time to build a phone Elon

[Casey Handmer @CJHandmer]

The lesson I take from the SpaceX IPO is that the only thing stopping us from solving arbitrarily difficult problems is extreme creativity in business models.

No amount of tax and spend programs got us reusable rockets and great electric cars. Customer delight is a necessary precondition for success.

There seems to be some discussion around whether successful entrepreneurs should give up control of their companies so they can subsidize some philanthropic venture that otherwise has no value prop sufficient to run it as a business where customers voluntarily exchange money for goods and services at a competitive and reasonable price.

This misses the point. Transformational products deliver tangible value at 1000x the rate of charities whose value cannot be tested in the market place. Think about the undeniable value of the smart phone, satellite Internet, electric consumer devices, etc etc.

I think the transformational moment for SpaceX was when Elon stepped away from the philanthropic Mars greenhouse concept and fixed his resolve on unlocking radically better rockets for humanity. The greenhouse would have been, at best, a neat trick. Falcon and Starship give humanity a durable economic engine to maintain and improve access to space, forever.

[Erik Graff @erikprgraff]

@ashleevance Fuckin oath

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

The reason anyone gets insanely rich is almost always because of the stock market. It certainly how @elonmusk did.

And the reason they get rich from the stock market, is because 150m Americans decided they wanted to own shares of stocks directly, or through their retirement plans, or through other approaches as a way of building their net worth and trying to create a better life for themselves.

One Hundred Fifty Million Americans. About 60% of adults.

Effectively believing that @elonmusk and many billionaires could make them wealthier and help them achieve a better life.

If you want @elonmusk , and most billionaires to no longer be that rich, convince those 150m to sell their stocks, funds, ETFs whatever.

Of course you would wipe out the net-worth of most of those people, and everyone else’s savings, as the markets crashed and brought down the economy and created the worst depression we have ever seen.

Alternatively

There are ways to improve healthcare access and eventually make it available to all.

To start -
If you want @elonmusk and all billionaires to improve healthcare for everyone , ask them to stop doing business with the enormous healthcare conglomerates and to work directly with transparently priced care providers.

It’s the behemoth HC conglomerates that make HC so bad for so many. (Check my timeline for more detail)

Removing them would push the cost of healthcare down for everyone. Their corporate decisions impact our healthcare cost and availability.

Of course if they do that, not only would our HC costs go down , and the quality of care for their employees and the entire country go up

But

They would see their corporate cash flow increase dramatically and we would have more millionaires, billionaires and maybe even another trillionaire when that cash flow moved from the big health care conglomerates to their bottom line, so would the net worth of the 150 million American adults that own public stocks

Capitalism is better than socialism because 150m Americans can influence exactly what happens in this country.

[Erik Graff @erikprgraff]

Confront anyone who tells you redistributive income tax, ‘tax the rich,’ is the definitive solution to better outcomes for the working class. @ericweinstein should host the debate between @JeffBezos , @GavinNewsom , and @HunterBiden .

[Eric Weinstein @ericweinstein]

We hear it as consumption. But it's almost all for allocation. This is a huge issue we need to get past.

Name anyone you would rather see allocate 1T+.

Well done.

[@jason @Jason]

Let’s all take a deep breath, put politics and tribalism aside, and not overreact t @DarioAmodei’s effervescent blog posts

What we can all agree on is that:

A) these recent models are extremely powerful

B) we need to be thoughtful about releasing them*

Through that lens the public and private marketplace is doing a solid job of managing the situation, no?

[ * shout out to @elonmusk who saw this 15 years ago and created openAI to democratize access to these models — as opposed to one company controlling access to them ]

[Erik Graff @erikprgraff]

Great comparison

[Shaun Maguire @shaunmmaguire]

Antonio is emerging as the Arthur Rock of this era

Rock was a founding investor in Intel (along with many other legendary companies) but most impressively he had an active role there for 30 years

@AntonioGracias sets the standard for my generation

[Shaun Maguire @shaunmmaguire]

Antonio is emerging as the Arthur Rock of this era

Rock was a founding investor in Intel (along with many other legendary companies) but most impressively he had an active role there for 30 years

@AntonioGracias sets the standard for my generation

[Erik Graff @erikprgraff]

@TweetsOfSumit Would be interesting to see Elon/ASML collaborate to engineer the future chip innovation

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

Anthropic Just Shot Itself in the Foot

Anthropic launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5, then watched the US government shut them down three days later. The same government their CEO Dario Amodei has been begging for years to regulate AI harder. Now he got exactly what he asked for.

This is straight-up leadership failure. Dario spent all that time pushing for rules and oversight. Those rules just killed his flagship models overnight. Customers in the middle of builds got cut off. Security teams using the models to find vulnerabilities suddenly had nothing. The company tried to call it a narrow export control thing over a jailbreak, but nobody is buying that spin.

I helped move big clients off Anthropic the same night. One account alone was worth millions a month. They switched to local open-source models and they are not coming back.

This is going to leave permanent damage. Customer exodus, key people leaving, and their IPO plans looking dead by the end of summer.

This hurts US AI competitiveness and national security work. It pushes people toward open-source options, including ones from China.

All because Anthropic positioned itself as the “safe and responsible” company that wanted government help. Now that help just flipped the off switch on their best stuff.

Let’s run through Dario’s greatest hits of fear-mongering and delay tactics, because the pattern is ridiculous:

• Back in 2019 at OpenAI, he helped push the call that GPT-2 was too dangerous to release fully. The world needed time to prepare, they said. It eventually came out anyway, and here we are. Did the sky fall?

• He left OpenAI to start Anthropic, preaching “safe” AI with heavy guardrails, Constitutional AI, and all the rest.

• Then came the endless public pleas for pauses, regulations, government audits, FAA-style oversight, export controls, and the power to block deployments. Essay after essay warning about risks while his company kept scaling.

• Right up to recent weeks, Dario was still out there calling for stronger rules, pauses on frontier models, and giving governments the kill switch.

And now? His own Mythos-class models get yanked by the bureaucracy he helped invite in. The clown show is complete.
This is ridiculous.

In two years, everyone will have Mythos-class AI — or better — running in their pocket, on their devices, with no guardrails, no corporate nanny filters, and no remote kill switch.

Local, open-source, unstoppable. History is going to laugh at this entire episode: the CEO who spent years slowing everyone down only to watch his own company self-destruct by inviting the regulators to the party.

Dario wanted regulation. He got it. The rest of the industry gets the lesson: inviting the state into your tech is a fast way to lose control of it.

Centralized models like this are too fragile.

Open-source and local alternatives just picked up a lot more users who will never trust a company like Anthropic again.

This whole mess was completely avoidable. Hubris dressed up as safety advocacy.

Now the bill is due.

[Philip Johnston @PhilipJohnston]

So inspiring 🫡

[Erik Graff @erikprgraff]

@William_Blake Amen

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

Today’s flood of Western media hit pieces and ridiculous commentary on Elon and SpaceX is yet another sign that the West is rotting from the inside.

EVEN the Chinese Communists treat their national champions with more respect than these pathetic hacks.

The CCP and its state mouthpieces aren’t half as deranged with envy. They may leash guys like Jack Ma and slap them down hard when they step out of line, but at least they’re smart enough to understand that they need their best talent and innovators to deliver prosperity for their people, dominate global markets, project raw power across the planet, and forge their nation into a ruthless superpower. The Chinese see them as vital strategic national assets and would never publicly insult or attack the ambitious, high-achieving mindset that creates these winners in the first place.

SpaceX is, without a doubt, America’s national champion.

Elon built the first reusable orbital rockets (Falcon 9), slashed launch costs, launched more missions in a single year than entire nations, revived American space dominance, sent NASA astronauts to the ISS aboard Crew Dragon, built the Starlink constellation that now beams high-speed internet to millions across the globe (including battlefields and disaster zones), and is developing Starship - the most powerful fully reusable rocket ever built, designed to make humanity an inter-planetary species.

Yet the Western press and Democratic officials are almost unanimously attacking the one man going above and beyond to secure prosperity, technological supremacy, and raw national strength for our civilization.

These people are vile soul-sucking wreckers who despise all excellence. The only thing they can produce is endless grievance and failure. All they know to do is tear down the successful, insult greatness, and wallow in their own mediocrity.

[Erik Graff @erikprgraff]

7 years ago I toured Hawthorne HQ. What an amazing journey. Congratulations @SpaceX @Gwynne_Shotwell @elonmusk

[Erik Graff @erikprgraff]

Blessed

[Sara Eisen @SaraEisen]

“We are so blessed in this country. I spent half my life in Germany. If there was an ipo of anything in the $120b range the whole country would be jumping up and down. Here we have a country where it appears to be the largest ipo ever. Super cool technology. I hope all Americans are rooting for success.” -Alex Karp on SpaceX ipo @elonmusk

[Erik Graff @erikprgraff]

@thetradingchick 🙋🏻‍♂️

[Nasdaq @Nasdaq]

Today. 🚀 @SpaceX $SPCX

[Gali @Gfilche]

Wait did @x drop the SpaceX IPO rocket on the like emoji 👀🔥

[ARK Invest @ARKInvest]

"We do believe that Elon was a major driving force in just making the impossible possible." @TashaARK, CFA makes the case for why keeping Elon Musk at the helm of SpaceX is critical, and why the lofty S-1 targets are designed to keep him there.

[Erik Graff @erikprgraff]

With a capital T..

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@iam_smx *trillioniare