Kevin Pignone

Franchise executive, wine lover, Red Sox fan, proud father, wed to a special lady

[Steven Ehrlich @Steven_Ehrlich]

This is the most important thing that you will read today.

[Kevin Pignone @kbpignone]

@postcrabcore Yes

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Liftoff of Starship!

[Tyler Milliken @tylermilliken_]

This catch by Ceddanne Rafaela had a 5% catch probability. That’s the lowest for any grab he’s made in 2026.

Opportunity Time: 3.9 sec
Distance needed: 69 FT

Only did that twice in 2025. Rafaela and PCA are tied for the most 5 Star catches in 2026 (4).

[Bernie Moreno @berniemoreno]

🚨 The banking cartel is in full panic mode. 🚨

While Americans were celebrating Mother’s Day with their families, the CEO of the American Bankers Association sent a frantic alert to every bank CEO in the country, demanding “immediate engagement” to lobby Senators and kill stablecoins that would finally let everyday Americans earn real yields on their own money.

This line in the letter sticks out: “we believe committee members may not be fully aware of the risks to the economy by the stablecoin loophole.” That’s both intellectually dishonest and simultaneously demeaning. First, there is no “loophole.” This entire issue was litigated during the GENIUS Act debate. @BillHagertyTN worked tirelessly on this issue and this statement is an insult to his and others work.

For decades, these banks have treated your deposits like their personal piggy bank, paying you next to nothing while lending YOUR money out for massive profits and executive bonuses.

During the Biden era, these same banks worked hand-in-glove with @SenWarren and her allies to debank Americans, including President Trump’s own family. They shut down accounts of conservatives, patriots, and anyone who dared challenge the regime, all while regulators applied pressure under schemes like Operation Choke Point 2.0. It wasn’t about risk. It was about political control.

Now that innovative stablecoins threaten to break their monopoly and give you actual financial freedom? They’re running to Congress again, screaming about “threats to economic growth and financial stability.”

Translation: Protect the racket at all costs.

The Senate Banking Committee votes on landmark crypto legislation this Thursday.

As a member of that committee, my message is clear:

Hands off the people’s money. Let Americans choose real competition and better returns. No more shielding Wall Street from the future. The banking elite’s days of rigging the system and debanking their political enemies are over. Innovation, freedom, and the American people will win.

I’m voting to break the cartel.

[Dan Roche @RochieWBZ]

Payton Tolle gets the start vs TB on Sunday, Mother’s Day.

Payton lost his Mom Jina to colon cancer two years ago.

She used to always say to him, "Be a Tigger not an Eeyore!"

I asked Payton about that shortly after his MLB debut last year.

Great advice for us all!

[Rob Bradford @bradfo]

Want to get fired up? Listen to Pedro:

[Kevin Pignone @kbpignone]

God Speed Artemis #nasa

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

Everyone is covering Terafab as a chip factory.

It is not a chip factory.

Last night in Austin, Elon unveiled a facility that makes masks, fabricates chips, and tests them inside a single building with a nine-month recursive improvement cadence. No such loop exists anywhere else on Earth. Then he told you 80% of the output goes to space. Then he showed you a 100-kilowatt AI satellite with solar panels and radiators, scaling to megawatt range. Then he said Optimus plus photovoltaics will be the first von Neumann probe, a machine capable of replicating itself from raw materials found in space.

Nobody connected the sequence.

Terafab produces 1 terawatt per year of compute. The entire United States consumes 0.5 terawatts of electricity. Musk is building a single factory whose output in AI silicon exceeds twice the power consumption of the country it sits in. And he is sending 80% of it off-planet because Earth literally cannot power what he is building.

Follow the mechanism. Terafab seeds the chips. Starship launches Optimus robots and solar arrays at 100 million tons per year. The robots mine lunar and asteroid regolith for silicon, iron, and nickel. They 3D-print more robots. They fabricate more solar panels. They assemble more AI satellites. Each satellite runs hotter-burning D3 chips designed specifically for vacuum, where free radiative cooling eliminates the thermal constraints that strangle every terrestrial data center on the planet. The nodes replicate. The replication is exponential.

This is a Dyson Swarm bootstrap hidden inside a semiconductor announcement.

The math is public. The Sun outputs 3.828 times 10 to the 26th watts. A 2022 paper in Physica Scripta calculated that 5.5 billion satellites at 290 kilograms each, robotically manufactured from Mars resources, capture enough solar energy to meet all of Earth’s power needs within 50 years. A 2025 paper in Solar Energy Materials calculated a partial swarm capturing 4% of solar output yields 15.6 yottawatts, roughly a billion times current human civilization’s total energy budget. Musk just announced the factory that builds the chips that go inside the satellites that replicate themselves forever.

92% of advanced logic chips are fabricated in Taiwan. One factory in Austin does not fix that. But one self-replicating system seeded by that factory, launched by the only company with reusable heavy-lift rockets, assembled by the only humanoid robot in mass production, and powered by the only star within reach, does not fix a supply chain. It obsoletes the concept of supply chains entirely.

The market priced this as a $20 billion capex story about semiconductor independence.

The actual announcement was the engineering blueprint for Kardashev Type II.

Humanity sits at 0.73 on the Kardashev scale. 18 terawatts. The distance between here and harnessing a star is not a technology gap. It is a recursion gap. And recursion is exactly what a single building in Austin that makes its own masks, builds its own chips, tests its own chips, and launches the output into orbit on its own rockets was designed to close.

Every civilization that makes it past this point never looks back.

[Dinesh D'Souza @DineshDSouza]

Democrat Sen. Fetterman just called out CA Gov. Newsom for his attacks on Nick Shirley: “Shouldn’t we agree - eliminate all the waste?… Why can’t you celebrate any journalist or activist doing that?”

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Katherine Boyle just identified Elon Musk’s most important contribution to America, and it has nothing to do with the products he shipped.

Boyle, General Partner at a16z: “I think Elon’s most important contribution to this country is training two generations of engineers to work with their hands again.”

For ten years, America’s sharpest technical minds optimized ad clicks and built messaging apps. Software consumed ambition. The physical world became something you abstracted into APIs, not something you touched or understood.

Elon didn’t reverse that through inspiration. He reversed it by building companies that required understanding manufacturing or failing completely.

SpaceX and Tesla forced engineers to learn how metal fractures, how tolerances cascade through systems, how physical iteration costs months and millions per failure. No debugging. No patches. Just physics that doesn’t negotiate.

Boyle: “Training two generations of engineers.”

The product isn’t the cars. It’s the people. Look at who’s founding America’s critical hard-tech companies now. The common thread isn’t Stanford or MIT. It’s time on factory floors at SpaceX or Tesla.

They learned welding. They learned that “impossible” just means unsolved engineering, not violated physics. They learned failure in the physical domain where mistakes compound instead of reverting.

Elon didn’t build companies. He accidentally rebuilt industrial knowledge that had been decaying for thirty years while America’s best minds chased digital scale.

Boyle: “Work with their hands again.”

Three words that sound quaint but describe a civilizational inflection point.

Software dominated because it scaled infinitely at zero marginal cost. Physical manufacturing was slow, expensive, unfashionable. Building real things became what you did if you couldn’t code.

Elon made atoms matter again. Made manufacturing the hardest problem worth solving. Made physical engineering prestigious in ways it hadn’t been since humans walked on the moon.

The evidence is everywhere now. Technical talent that doesn’t default to “which app” but asks “which physical thing should exist that currently doesn’t.”

Ambition redirected from optimizing engagement metrics to building rockets. From scaling users to scaling factories. From virtual products to physical infrastructure.

That shift matters more than any vehicle or spacecraft Musk delivered. Products obsolesce. Redirecting an entire generation’s engineering ambition from digital to physical compounds across decades and rebuilds industrial capability at civilizational scale.

We stopped just coding the future. We started machining it, welding it, breaking it in reality until physics confirms it works. That transformation from virtual to tangible ambition is reconstructing American manufacturing one engineer at a time.

And those engineers are now training the next wave. The compounding has started. The School of Elon doesn’t need Elon anymore. It’s self-sustaining, spreading through an entire generation that learned building real things matters more than building virtual ones.

That’s not just a business achievement. That’s a civilization remembering how to make things that matter in the physical world again. And it might be the only thing that saves American technological leadership when the competition is just building faster because they never forgot.

[Kevin Pignone @kbpignone]

@collision @dwarkesh_sp @elonmusk K

[Dave Portnoy @stoolpresidente]

Just keep buying crypto right? It’s getting uncomfortable. I think that’s when you need diamond hands.

[friendscallmeJay @Jaypotta]

Today as the Dead faithful celebrated the life of Bob Weir, John Mayer delivered perhaps the only “Ripple” that’s ever made me smile-cry… Highly suggest.😔

[BaseballHistoryNut @nut_history]

Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter were doing a segment on live TV and David Ortiz purposely interrupted them by running the bases and yelling “third deck” as if he just hit another homerun at Yankee stadium.

Absolute comedy gold from Big Papi and the best thing you’ll likely to see today.

[Kevin Pignone @kbpignone]

@OleTimeHardball David Ortiz

[RYAN SΞAN ADAMS - rsa.eth 🦄 @RyanSAdams]

@haydenzadams @Uniswap @devinawalsh @nkennethk THE GENSLER ERA IS OVER

[Joseph Chalom @joechalom]

Ethereum stands out as the superior treasury asset: productive, yield-bearing and compounding.

It aligns long-term capital with onchain value creation, setting a new standard for institutional balance sheets.

[Steve Perrault @Steve_Perrault]

I’m dying. Jeter couldn’t hate this more 😆😆