Matt Sly

built @futureme as a 20 year side hustle, sold in 2021. led product at startups, amzn and msft. over the hill jock. cancer survivor. political centrist.

[Matt Sly @mattsly]

My proposal for radically simple capital gains taxation reform

https://t.co/ag4IxTnGBa

[Matt Sly @mattsly]

@Jason I like this in theory, but have you seen a viable plan to execute on this?

"The solution to this is obviously paying royalties to IP holders, as we've always done, not seizing half the equity."

[Matt Sly @mattsly]

@elonmusk This was such a hypocritical move. This project was actually what "government efficiency" should be.

Excellent article about the project:
https://t.co/0WZkS0EyAL

[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.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Trump is NOT a Manchurian Candidate, sent by Russia and China to infiltrate America and bring it down.

But often, it's very hard to say what a Manchurian Candidate would do differently.

[Matt Sly @mattsly]

@Jason Jason - can you explain why, other than the seed money (only young kids), someone should open a Trump account vs a 529, custodial brokerage, utma or Roth? Given that withdrawls are taxed as income vs cap gains, I don’t see any benefit.

[Hiroo Onoda @OnodaCapital]

god what a bleak chart

[@aaronjmars @aaronjmars]

holy fuck, a hair dryer at a Paris airport broke Polymarket weather markets & made someone $34,000 richer

- polymarket was settling Paris temperature bets on a single Météo France sensor sitting near the Charles de Gaulle runway perimeter - basically unguarded

- the guy bought the long-shot outcome (like "22°C" when everyone expected 18°C) for pennies, since nobody thought it'd hit

- then he walked up to the probe and briefly heated the air around it with a portable heat source, spiking the reading just long enough to register as the daily max

- temperature snapped back to normal in minutes, the market resolved in his favor, and he cashed out - twice, on April 6 and April 15, before Météo France caught on and filed charges

hyperstitions.

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

This is the true legacy of DOGE - the utter decimation of medical research.

MAGA idiots will try to tell you this is just cutting DEI programs. Keep in mind DOGE was filled with such idiots they killed physics grants that mentioned 'polarization' (of light) because of "DEI".

[manny @mannyfidel]

oh my god. was trump told to tell the press that the image was "doctored," but misunderstood and told everyone that he was depicted as a "doctor"?

[Matt Sly @mattsly]

Crazy how the likes of MTG, Alex Jones and now even evangelical pastors are breaking with Trump before any of TechBros

[Bill Kristol @BillKristol]

If we didn't have a maniac as secretary of defense, a toady as secretary of state, and a nobody as chief of staff, they'd be spending today making sure the military checks in with them before obeying any orders from Trump, and getting in touch w/ Congress to arrange impeachment.

[Amanda Carpenter @amandacarpenter]

Our best-case scenario, ATM, is that our autocratic president is a bellicose liar who threatens genocide and war crimes to obtain totally undecipherable objectives.

Best case.

[Matt Sly @mattsly]

@nickkokonas Very much agree!

Simplicity should have broad political appeal. The obfuscation industrial complex is economic deadweight loss and doesn’t give us the policy dexterity we will need

My idea on capital gains:
https://t.co/ag4IxTnGBa

[Cato Institute @CatoInstitute]

President Trump treats America like his personal empire—waging unnecessary wars, enriching allies and himself, ignoring Congress, and leaving civilians and global stability in ruins, says Cato’s @Doug_Bandow. This is not what the Founders envisioned.
https://t.co/c7uMOA6XZS

[Matt Sly @mattsly]

@Karl_Townes I was shocked Jaylen Brown was a #3 pick after an solid but by no means smazing freshman year

[Matt Sly @mattsly]

@Jason @ewarren @AOC @BernieSanders @RoKhanna Warren’s policy is a bad idea.

But rather than just complaining, how about proposing alternative ideas to address wealth disparity that also moves us towards a more sustainable budget? The current tax code is an loophole ridden mess.

Here’s my idea:

https://t.co/ag4IxTnGBa

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

I know it's boring and repetitive to talk about how grossly evil Trump is, but the fact remains: Trump is grossly evil, in a way that's pretty much unprecedented in this country.

[Matt Sly @mattsly]

@markpinc That's an interesting idea, but not really a counter-proposal to a wealth tax as I don't think it would do much to erase the ~$600B - $900B from the deficit that we need to put us on a more sustainable fiscal path.

[Tim Miller @Timodc]

Worst @WSJ op-ed of the Trump era? Choose your fighter.

@JDVance: Trump's Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.

@MickMulvaney: If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully