Mantsika Matooane

I build things. Chief Information Officer. Corporate Director. Technology, Capital Markets, Banking.

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

@NQOBZR @Capeverdeinfo Absolutely! Added to wishlist! Plus we fly into Nelson Mandela International Airport in Praia (RAI).

[Milk Road AI @MilkRoadAI]

This is WILD!

One of the best investors alive held Micron for six years, made roughly a double, then sold, right before it went up 15 times (Save this).

Here is the full story of why he sold, why it made sense, and what changed after.

Pabrai's original thesis was built on one idea, the DRAM market had evolved from a bloodbath into a rational oligopoly.

For decades, memory was one of the worst businesses on earth, companies chased market share by cutting prices, competitors matched them, and the whole industry raced to the bottom.

By 2017, something had changed.

Twenty memory suppliers had consolidated down to three, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron controlling roughly 94% of the DRAM market together.

More importantly, all three appeared content to hold their positions rather than fight for more, which is the exact dynamic that makes an oligopoly print money.

Then in 2022 and into 2023, Samsung broke that behavioral agreement.

As demand weakened in phones and PCs, Samsung refused to cut production while the other two pulled back, causing a catastrophic oversupply that sent DRAM prices down over 30% in consecutive quarters.

Samsung's own operating profit fell 96% year over year, and Micron swung to an operating loss for the first time in seven years.

Pabrai looked at the situation, saw the core assumption of his thesis, rationality had broken down, and sold.

With the information available at the time, that was the right call.

What he could not have priced in was the AI demand wave that hit immediately after.

ChatGPT launched, the hyperscaler AI buildout accelerated, and suddenly the question in the memory market was no longer how to avoid over supplybut rather, how to build enough capacity to feed Nvidia's GPU clusters.

Every AI GPU requires High-Bandwidth Memory stacked directly on the chip, and Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are the only three companies on earth that can make it.

The rational oligopoly came back but now by a demand surge so extreme that all three players are running flat out and still cannot keep up.

The numbers that followed were staggering.

Micron was around $70 when Pabrai sold in 2023, and it climbed past $1,200 by now, a 15-plus times move.

Quarterly revenue went from roughly $4 billion in early 2023 to nearly $24 billion by Q2 2026 almost a 6x increase in three years.

Micron's entire 2026 HBM supply is sold out under non-cancellable contracts, with $22 billion in prepaid customer deposits locking in pricing through 2030.

Pabrai acknowledged the honest truth, the outcome was driven by outlier events that were genuinely difficult to anticipate.

The specific combination of the AI training boom, the hyperscaler capex explosion, and the speed at which HBM became the critical bottleneck in every AI data center, none of that was visible with confidence in late 2023.

The rational oligopoly thesis was correct all along but it just needed one more variable that nobody saw coming.

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

@midjourney How do we place orders for midjourney health scanners?

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

@OfficialLoganK @GoogleAIStudio Is @googleAIstudio now issuing only AQ* Gemini keys that only work with studio apps?

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

@Cloudflare A cloudflare tunnel in front of everything?

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

How did Runway and Neon get into training date for my AI? Since letting AI make all the decisions, the AI's preference is driving growth in some tools.

[Anastasis Germanidis @agermanidis]

Runway added more than $40M in net new ARR so far this quarter, and we're less than halfway through. The biggest growth period in the history of the company.

Generative video has hit its inflection point. Enterprises like Amazon and Robinhood are using Runway daily to reshape how they tell stories and reach customers, on our frontier video and world models.

Thank you to our team and our customers. The best is yet to come.

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

Me in 2023: 'memory is the issue'. But also not doing anything about it :-( #tradeyourconviction!! This is how one misses the biggest trade run

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

@theamberyang @jamescham It is going to be exciting to watch! My view has not changed in two decades; the scarcity will be memory.

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

I need to learn how to #trademyconvictions. How does one miss SanDisk, MU when it is clear in dec2025 that all things memory?

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

Context windows have been getting so long, RAG so good, we almost doubted 'memory' is an issue. But two things are converging: the price of memory chips is rising, and the big labs are elevating memory to what Sam refers to 'GPT2 era of memory'. Very exciting.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Everything is markdown now and it will likely be an important part of the rest of human history.

@gruber must think this is extremely funny.

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

@nickgraynews This from @leerob changed our approach. https://t.co/Tmids0iPgW

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

@killedbygoogle Where do we export Google Keep notes to?

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

@thsottiaux What's happening next week?

[Bryson DeChambeau @brysondech]

Highly recommend going to South Africa 🇿🇦

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

@steipete @kevinrose Will have to switch to Codex now.

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

@kevinrose Same. Forced me to try composer and it worked well.

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

Session limits. Rate limits. Anyone know how to avoid Gemini TTS 10,000 rate limits.

[Thariq @trq212]

To manage growing demand for Claude we're adjusting our 5 hour session limits for free/Pro/Max subs during peak hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged.

During weekdays between 5am–11am PT / 1pm–7pm GMT, you'll move through your 5-hour session limits faster than before.

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

@ta_kweila @NolwAzi_Tusini Not the 'soaked oats' 😀 separating us into groups.

[Dr. Gumani Tshimomola @TshimomolaGK]

The elephant in the @CityofJoburgZA room is right here. The governance and service delivery model is too costly. It creates space for extreme forms of rent-seeking, produces complex oversight arrangements, and ultimately nothing gets done.

We must reverse this. Collapse these entities and rebuild internal departments, not service trading boards as incentivised by Treasury. Build internal municipal capacity. Municipalities are permanent institutions, so we must invest in strengthening them.

No one is willing to confront this. @helenzille , not @HermanMashaba, not anyone. This mess will not be resolved unless we start here.

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

@sama 😱

[Mantsika Matooane @mantsika]

@openclaw Why is our favourite model company not embracing the molt? First the API keys, then competing product, now trademark?