Graham

I like walks... and beaches... but not the two of them together...

[Bull Theory @BullTheoryio]

🚨Michael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbers.

Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake.

He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing.

Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor.

Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale.

Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models.

But here is what Burry is flagging.

Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory.

They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies.

Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle.

Now here is where American retirees enter the picture.

Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit.

Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene.

Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans.

When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center.

The numbers inside Athene are most alarming.

Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight.

Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets.

Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth.

The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times.

Burry's says:
Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing.

- Nvidia books the revenue.
- Apollo collects the fees.
- xAI gets the computing power.
- And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.

[Brooks Otterlake @i_zzzzzz]

I worry that Wembanyama will get caught up in the distractions of New York City, like the Rose Reading Room at the public library or the upcoming conference on participatory futures at The New School

[Lil Samsquanch @lilsamsquanch66]

Been drinking pretty much only Diet Coke to save water for Claude

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Game designers figured this out decades ago and it cost millions in failed launches.

Will Wright built SimCity with a fully accurate traffic simulation. Testers hated it. The cars behaved realistically, which meant nobody could build a functioning city because real traffic is an unsolvable nightmare. He had to make the simulation dumber before the game became fun.

The tension is permanent: the more accurately you model a system, the more it punishes the participant. Real medieval economies kept 90% of the population in subsistence farming. A historically accurate fantasy world doesn't produce heroes. It produces serfs.

Tolkien solved this by making his economy deliberately vague. No one knows what a gold coin buys in Gondor. That ambiguity is a design choice, not a shortcut.

The Reddit post is funny. The lesson underneath it is one of the hardest problems in simulation design: fidelity and fun are opposing forces, and you have to pick which one wins.

[jake rhodes @jakebrodes]

There are guys who sit in their houses in frisco TX and they watch landman and whenever landman drinks they drink and they wear a cowboy hat in their living room and they laugh when landman laughs. The wife sits with the son in the nursery all painted blue and thinks about blood

[UNT Football @MeanGreenFB]

Making our AP Poll debut at #⃣2⃣2⃣!

#GMG🦅

[𝔽𝕖𝕣𝕘𝕪 ⚡️ @Fergycookedd]

This might be the best passer ever, not once did this nigga even LOOK at Rui and still knew exactly where he was

[Front Office Sports @FOS]

Drew Mestemaker never started a varsity game at QB in high school, was a 0-star recruit, and decided to walk-on at North Texas.

The freshman now leads the country in passing, just threw for a school-record 608 yards, and has the Mean Green 7-1.

[jay @kendallhosseini]

this is what it feels like walking out of the movie theater after going to a 10 AM showing

[Graham @grahamxslam]

London is cool but everything kinda faintly smells like horseshit. Like… not strong, just kinda farm-y. I haven’t seen any horses so I assume they only come out at night.

[alli @sonofalli]

so you “manage” a product?

[Janessa Goldbeck @jgoldbeck]

🚨 There’s a lot of horrific news out of Washington right now—but you might have missed this: Senate Republicans just introduced a plan to sell off 120 million acres of our public lands.

Let me break down what’s in the bill and why it’s a full-scale land grab. 🧵

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

every "new transplant" city in the US has taken on the same slop aesthetic. austin, nashville, scottsdale -- all of them embody the same kind of beer garden yuppieism. scooters and axe throwing, plastic apartments and group fitness. no history, just remote first jobs.

[William Shatner @WilliamShatner]

So you told an AI program to draw… and you want to take credit for it? Who are you; Pythagoras? 🙄

[Graham @grahamxslam]

@chriskindafit If all you do is eat, sleep and breath basketball like he saw with Kobe, you know he resented putting players around Luka. Probably prayed at night “lord, why have you wasted such talents on such an oaf”. Fuck Nico. He would have traded Dirk too

[Iztok Franko @iztok_franko]

One thought that I had...thinking about 'fans will change their mind once Mavs win the title'? And let's say they even win one.

How relevant have the Raptors been since their title? How many Christmas games? How many national televised games? Jerseys sold?

[Rob DenBleyker @RobDenBleyker]

imagine putting a severance door in the bathroom so that version of you's entire life is peeing and pooping

[Graham @grahamxslam]

@wfaaweather Now’s not the time Delkus!