Joe Stearns

previously @lukka and family office services @fidelity -all views are my own, here to learn and connect.

[Balaji @balajis]

Altimeter and Atreides together hold more than $25B in assets.

Elon and the founders of Uber, Shopify, Replit, and Vercel have all posted in support of Jensen’s reinstatement at @nvidia.

So, this has only begun. Anti-Jensen board members will likely face escalating pressure from employees, shareholders, partners, and customers until they step down and reinstate Jensen Huang, who was after all the founder and CEO that built Nvidia into one of the most important companies in world history.

[Joe Stearns @joestearnsx]

@SchwandtyPippen @PGATour @Internetinvite @GrantHorvatGolf @brysondech @ForePlayPod @RobbyBerger @Maxhoma @RRuffels @JDayGolf Two fundamentally different products

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Jensen

[Nick Gerli @nickgerli1]

The U.S. housing market took another leg down in October.

With existing sales hitting their lowest level since 2010.

3.75M annualized sales took place in Oct 2026, which is down 44% from the pandemic peak.

Adjusted for the size of the housing stock, demand is in its biggest depression ever. (worse than post-2008)

The reason sales are so low is because homebuyers have no interest in paying record prices at 7% mortgage rates.

Sellers need to get the memo: cut the price, or else your house will sit.

To track sales in your market, search your ZIP: https://t.co/NCo5SoC0G0

[Tyr Al Hatton @6900Yards]

When the wife asks how golf went today. (I told her I wasn't drinking.)

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

Imagine if you illegally entered Japan and then instead of removing you, a large segment of the Japanese population started protesting for your right to collect taxpayer benefits and vote in their elections…

Do you hear how insane that sounds?
It’s being normalized in America.

[Matt Mickiewicz @MattMickiewicz]

Over the past 10 days, I became the digital Nick Shirley.

Using public & private records my AI agent swarm found ~$787 million in government billing that made absolutely no sense.

Thread 🧵

[Cassandra Unchained @michaeljburry]

1. Never stop exercising or learning.
2.Accept compromise to begin relationships.
3. Manifest the power of compounding.
4. Never gamble.
5. Have kids and be a good parent
6. If it flies or floats, rent it.
7. Buy half the house you can afford.
8. Art in the eye of the beholder is cheap.
9. Be thankful for and to all.
10. Be charitable.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

China absolutely mogged by American ingenuity

[Everett Stern @EverettStern1]

Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent,

My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at @HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the @FBI, the @CIA, and eventually the @SECGov.

The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison.

I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at @PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return.

I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something.

Yesterday, your department fined @BankofAmerica $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act.

Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged.

Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working.

A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats.

This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried.

There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go.

Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him.

I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them.

This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one.

Three things would change the math overnight.

Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined.

End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.

And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them.

Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine.

I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it.

Respectfully,

Everett A. Stern
HSBC Whistleblower
Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit

[Joe Stearns @joestearnsx]

@TFG_Football If stays healthy will be top in the league by end of the year

[Joe Stearns @joestearnsx]

@barstoolsports @NjTank99 The greatest generation 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Barstool Sports @barstoolsports]

105 year old WWII veteran Dominick Critelli played the National Anthem on the Sax before the Islanders game

American Hero 🇺🇸

[Joe Stearns @joestearnsx]

@anothercohen Prezza, thank me later

[Shagun 💰 @shaguncrypto]

Buy a house you can afford on one income.

Keep the old car.

Have three kids.

Eat pancakes on Sunday mornings.

Take camping trips.

Coach their little league teams.

Invite neighbors over for dinner.

Put $1,000 a month into investments.

Pay off the house before 50.

Then spend your 60s watching your grandkids play in the backyard.

That’s a life worth getting rich for.

[bone @boneGPT]

"People aren't ready, this is gonna change everything"

You know what people weren't ready for? Fucking mammoths. Tigers eating them. Monkeys ripping their arms off. The black plague. The ice age. Smallpox. Vikings pulling up on the beach. Drinking water that gives you diarrhea until you die. Getting a scratch and losing your whole leg. The Mongols. The Spanish Inquisition.

One volcano can send us back to the dark ages and these safety guys are gonna be shocked. Oh the robots didn't kill us? It was a volcano? Imagine their disappointment as the hot ash rains down on them.

A solar flare is gonna explode your phone in your pocket your legs are gonna be covered in battery acid and your bank account will stop working. You're afraid of a computer program doing math?

"Things are moving too fast" homie you live on a rock that periodically deletes everything. You are one the most luckiest entities in a 100 light year radius living during a golden era. Cheer up.

My ancestors crossed an ocean in a wooden box because they ran out of fucking potatoes.

"The social disruption will be enormous!"

Nigga World War 2? World War 2? Hop in the people carrier we're landing on the beach.

Are these people out of their fucking minds? Do they not know what we've survived already?

A couple decades of air conditioning and people suddenly think oh this is the natural condition of mankind. No. We used to have eight kids because seven didn't make it. You're gonna be fine. Man the fuck up.

Accelerate.

[Today in History @TodayinHistory]

Happy birthday, Boston! The city was founded by Puritan settlers on this day in 1630.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.

You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.

I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.

But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.

Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.

Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.

So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.

If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

[U2 @U2]

Super Bowl XXXVI. 2002. A tribute to the lives lost on September 11, 2001.