Jared McKenzie

Texan.

[Tony Seruga @TonySeruga]

Every week, these strange white crates leave a high-security Tesla compound in Lathrop, California.

They’re showing up near the Hoover Dam. At an Air Force base in Georgia. In the heart of New York City…

An estimated 4,000 of them are now spread across 48 locations in 14 states. And more roll out every week.

But you won’t see this on CNBC, and you won’t read about it in the Wall Street Journal.

Because these mystery Elon crates have nothing to do with electric vehicles, space, social media, crypto, biotech, robots, or AI…

The “mystery Elon crates” are Tesla Megapacks — grid-scale battery storage units being deployed across the country for utility, military, and commercial energy projects. Tesla is quietly building the backbone of America’s grid-storage infrastructure while everyone’s distracted by culture-war bullshit — but it is the actual story worth paying attention to.

No secret technology. No hidden invention. Just the most boring, most profitable, and arguably most important thing Tesla does — hidden in plain sight.

[Jared McKenzie @jmckenzie122]

@ElBalondePlaya @edgaralandough Some would say all of the things he mentioned are forms of therapy.

[CooperBaggs 💰🍞 @edgaralandough]

You're a man. Get out of your fucking room. Pack your laptop. Go to a coffee shop. Work from a hotel. Rent an Airbnb for the weekend. Take a train to another city. Go for a long walk. Go ANYWHERE but the same four walls. Sometimes changing your environment can break the mental loop you're stuck in. You don't need to wait until you feel motivated. Put your shoes on. Step outside. Get some sunlight. See different faces. Move your body. Work somewhere new.

[Jared McKenzie @jmckenzie122]

@gabriel1 Being resourceful in every way possible is the key to success as a founder. Don't know something? Pick up your phone and scroll your contacts app until you find a name -> call them -> ask about what you don't know -> if they don't know it, ask if they know someone -> repeat.

[Mike Solana @micsolana]

amazing

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

It’s just a series of generational wins after another.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Don’t pass on generational trauma

[Jared McKenzie @jmckenzie122]

@brian_armstrong @huntermmonk

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Integrity.

[Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee]

Audit the shit out of what you consume and who you hang with.

It's just real! Who you hang out with determines your future success... so surround yourself with positive people who support you. Support paired with accountability is always a winning formula.

[ErikDPrince @realErikDPrince]

Off Leash update 20 August 2026

STRAIT OF HORMUZ
•Axios reported that the U.S. has stealthily set up a shipping corridor on the Oman side of the Strait of Hormuz that has seen 15-20 tankers per day enter or exit the Persian Gulf over the past few weeks.
•Those transits were not included in Kpler's recent shipping data, which showed traffic through the Strait at a three-month low last week.
•The U.S.-backed transits take place at night, under the cover of darkness - and the additional cover of U.S. Air Force fighter jets ready to intercept missiles or drones Iran lobs in the general direction of the tankers.
•[Thanks to U.S. strikes on Iran's radar and maritime surveillance systems, Iran has lost most of its visibility into the southern side of the Strait and is increasingly firing in the general direction of where small IRGC spotter boats observe tankers.]

IRAN
•The UAE announced it would end all trade with Iran on Tuesday, after accusing Iran of firing missiles into its territory. [Iran denies targeting the UAE, and claims the offending strikes were part of a false flag operation that the U.S. and / or Israel staged to provoke the UAE to impose punitive measures - like this embargo - on Iran.]
•The blockade could prove devastating for Iran. The UAE is Iran's largest source of imports, supplying around $19.1 billion of non-oil goods - such as gold, electronics, and consumer goods - annually. Iran sends around $6.6 billion of exports - including food and spices - in the other direction. Dubai's role as a global financial hub with comparatively light regulation means it's also a key part of Iran's off-the-books trade and sanctions evasion.
•If the UAE cracks down on illicit dealings and vigorously enforces its blockade, it could help achieve Pres. Trump's goal of forcing Iran into economic isolation.
•To that end, Trump threatened Iran's trading partners yesterday, with a warning that "ANY country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences." It's not clear whether U.S. pressure influenced the UAE's decision to embargo Iran.

UKRAINE
•Pres. Zelensky was forced to sack his Deputy Chief of Staff, Iryna Mudra, after she was arrested on charges of money laundering.
•The revelation of rot inside his own office is badly timed for Zelensky. It comes just a day after former defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov - who Zelensky also ousted, but not for cause - spoke out about a crisis in Zelensky's government and called for new elections.
•Fedorov plans to continue his crusade for reform. He'll travel to the U.S. next week, and there's speculation that he'll call on U.S. officials to seek their support for his efforts to force elections.

GAZA
•Under pressure from critics, Israel's military said it would open criminal investigations into its troops' conduct in two cases that sparked widespread outrage: the killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab and six of her family members in Jan. 2024, and the shooting deaths of 14 medical workers and a UN employee in Mar. 2025.
•Critics note that Israeli military investigations are slow and rarely result in convictions - even though the military only investigates the most egregious cases that generate the greatest public uproar. The military declined to take up three other cases in which troops killed aid workers, finding no grounds for a criminal investigation in any of those.

NORTH KOREA
•Kim Jong Un's influential sister, Kim Yo Jong, cast doubt on Pres. Trump's claim that her brother had had a "very positive" response to Trump's recent gestures of friendship. She said she was "completely unaware" that her brother had responded at all - though she noted he had "fond personal memories and feelings" towards Trump.
•Kim proclaimed that North Korea still views joint U.S.-South Korea military drills as "provocative and aggressive" - even though they were shortened and scaled down on Trump's orders - and said that if the U.S. intended the reduction "as some kind of ‘goodwill measure’, they will not get the answer they desire."
•The answer Trump desires is rumored to be Kim's agreement to meet for an eighth time this fall. That could still happen, though: CSIS's Korea chair, Victor Cha, pointed out that Kim Yo Jong often plays "bad cop" in dealings with the U.S. so that her brother can be the "good cop." Her tough talk may only be bluster.

[James - JGOD @JGODYT]

Tom telling everyone this almost a year ago🤣🤣🤣

[Laura Loomer @LauraLoomer]

Vetting matters!

[Jared McKenzie @jmckenzie122]

@KyleFinken

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 BREAKING: Nick Shirley has just released stunning footage where he PERSONALLY CONFRONTS the wife of AG Rob Bonta, Mia Bonta, who's behind the STOP NICK SHIRLEY ACT

She tries to CUT HIM OFF and RUN, then her staffer steps in 🤯

This bill will block Shirley's anti-fraud investigative journalism and subject him to THOUSANDS OF PENALTIES if the fraudsters get upset about him recording them

"Especially immigration providers..."

BONTA: "It's disinformation as you are offering right now!" *Runs into car*

@nickshirleyy exposing it all!

[Sam Lambert @samlambert]

some engineers are struggling to adapt to using agents because they are not used to being outcome oriented.

[Tim Ventura @timventura]

Can we engineer the vacuum to generate power and thrust? Former Skunk Works technologist Charles Chase discusses the UnLAB, coherent matter waves, Casimir energy and quantum-vacuum propulsion. FULL INTERVIEW: https://t.co/oaFnpe5BNL
@THEUnLAB

[Nick shirley @nickshirleyy]

Meet the California State Assembly Chief of Staff… in Sacramento he printed and handed out, “Allegedly Nick Shirley has a small penis, prove me wrong”

@TerrySchanz used tax-funded public resources to try to slander a journalist.

A perfect example of California politics.

[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

[Jared McKenzie @jmckenzie122]

Reverse engineer the problem and why it exists from first principles and iterate until you find the groups of people that experience that problem consistently, and understand why they experience it.

Then curate unique profiles of who exactly each type of person is, what they do, how the live, what their habits are, what they value in life.

Then create unique profiles associated with each of those people to create look alike audiences based on. Then carpet bomb every LAL and eliminate the losers that have low hit rates until your CPC and CPA turn into ROAS.

Then, do it again, and again, and again. Eventually, you -will- find your customer(s). Then duplicate the process.