Freeman

Tools, trends & future insights

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

https://t.co/puNayoZJrz

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

In 1984, Michael Jordan did not want Nike. He wanted Adidas. His mother put him on the plane anyway, and that flight became worth over $1.3 billion.

He was a rookie, not a legend yet. Converse and Adidas already had their stars and saw him as just another draft pick. Nike was the underdog, desperate to sign one.

Jordan refused to even take the meeting. Deloris Jordan, his mother, made him go listen.

What Nike offered, no rookie had ever seen. Not a flat fee, but his own signature shoe and a cut of every pair sold.

> Summer 1984, Beaverton, Oregon. Nike puts $500,000 a year on the table for five years. Triple the richest sneaker deal of the era.

> His mother adds one clause: royalties on every pair sold.

> Nike projects $3 million in Air Jordan sales over four years.

> Year one alone does $126 million.

> The NBA bans the shoe. Nike pays the $5,000 fine every game and turns the ban into an ad.

Today Jordan Brand clears over $5 billion a year for Nike. Jordan himself has pulled an estimated $1.3 billion from a $500,000 deal.

The talent was his. A paycheck pays you once. A percentage pays you forever.

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

Mike Tyson made over $400 million in the ring. By 2003 he filed for bankruptcy, $23 million in debt.

He could earn $30 million in one night. What he never built was the wall between earning and keeping. Money came in faster than anyone could count, and it left just as fast.

At 20 he became the youngest heavyweight champion in history. By the late 1980s he was worth close to $300 million. The checks kept coming. After his return in 1995, he pulled $30 million per fight, four fights in a row.

Then look at where it went.

$4.5 million on cars and motorcycles. 19 of them bought for friends.

$400,000 on pigeons and Siberian tigers.
Mansions he barely lived in. Lawsuits, back taxes, an entourage on payroll.

$13.4 million owed to the IRS alone.

In 2003 he filed Chapter 11. The man who earned more than almost any athlete alive was officially broke. Over $400 million through his hands, $23 million in the hole.

The talent that made the money was never the talent that keeps it. Nobody taught him the second one.

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

In 1994, Jeff Bezos walked out of a $1 million a year Wall Street job to sell books out of a garage.

His boss David Shaw tried to talk him out of it on a two-hour walk through Central Park. Bezos saw one number nobody on Wall Street wanted to act on: the internet was growing 2,300% a year.

He was 30, a Senior VP at hedge fund D.E. Shaw. He had found that growth stat while researching new ventures for the fund. He called it the fastest thing he had ever seen outside a petri dish.

Timeline:

> Spring 1994: finds the 2,300% number inside D.E. Shaw research
> June 1994: tells Shaw he is leaving to sell books online
> July 1994: drives from New York to Seattle with his wife MacKenzie, writes the Amazon business plan on a laptop in the passenger seat
> July 1995: https://t.co/vaJyg7r3C8 goes live from a Bellevue garage
> May 1997: IPO at $18 a share, Bezos worth $177 million on paper

Today Amazon is worth over $2 trillion. Bezos personal net worth: around $240 billion.

He later called the choice his regret minimization framework. Picture yourself at 80 and ask what you will regret not trying. Then act on the answer that same week.

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

In July 2006, a 22-year-old turned down $1 billion in cash for a college website.

Yahoo CEO Terry Semel flew to Palo Alto to buy Facebook. The board wanted the deal. Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer were leaning yes. Mark Zuckerberg said no in a sweatshirt and sandals.

He saw what Semel did not. Facebook had 9 million users, almost all students. Yahoo saw a feature for its portal. Zuckerberg saw the next operating system of human attention.

The numbers at the time:

> Facebook revenue 2006: around $48 million
> Yahoo offer: $1 billion cash
> Zuckerberg’s age: 22

The timeline:

> June 2006: Semel pitches $1 billion
> July 2006: Zuckerberg kills the deal in a board meeting that nearly broke the company
> August 2006: Yahoo stock drops, Semel lowers offer to $800 million
> September 2006: Facebook opens to everyone, not just students
> 2012: Facebook IPOs at $104 billion
> October 2026: Meta market cap sits near $1.8 trillion

That one-word answer is now worth more than $200 billion to Zuckerberg personally.

Most founders sell at the first serious offer. The ones who build empires can tell the difference between a lot of money and the real number.

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

In 1985, Steve Jobs was fired from the company he built. He took $7 million of his own money and started another one nobody wanted.

Everyone thought he was finished. He saw something else: Apple would need him back, and he would come back on his terms.

September 1985. Jobs resigns from Apple after losing a boardroom fight with John Sculley. He is 30 years old and worth $150 million on paper.

He founds NeXT with $7 million of personal cash. Builds a black cube computer that sells 50,000 units in a decade. A commercial failure.

But NeXT built something else: NeXTSTEP, an operating system years ahead of anything Apple had.

December 1996. Apple is 90 days from bankruptcy. CEO Gil Amelio needs a modern OS. He buys NeXT for $429 million in cash plus 1.5 million Apple shares.

Jobs comes back as advisor. Within 8 months he pushes Amelio out. Takes the CEO job for $1 a year.

NeXTSTEP becomes the foundation of Mac OS X, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS. Every Apple device sold since 2001 runs on code Jobs built during his exile.

Final numbers: $7M in → $429M exit → trillion-dollar comeback.

He did not wait to be invited back. He built the thing they would have to buy.

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

In September 1992, George Soros borrowed $10 billion in British pounds and sold every single one.

He saw what the Bank of England refused to admit. The pound was pegged too high inside Europe’s exchange rate system, and Britain could not defend it forever. Every other trader was watching. Soros moved.

> September 15, 1992. London. Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller build a $10 billion short position against sterling.

> September 16, Black Wednesday. The Bank of England raises rates from 10% to 12%, then to 15% in one day. Nothing works.

> By evening, Britain exits the exchange rate mechanism. The pound collapses 15% against the dollar.

> Soros closes the position within days.

> Profit: $1 billion in one week.

The man who broke the Bank of England was not smarter than the Bank of England. He was willing to size up when they were not willing to adjust.

Total take: $1 billion. For one call, made once, held for seven days.

The hardest part of a great trade is not seeing it. It is putting enough on the line when you do.

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

In January 2000, Masayoshi Son met Jack Ma for six minutes in Beijing and handed him $20 million.

Ma had no profit, no business plan, and spoke in metaphors about Chinese small businesses getting online. Everyone else in the room passed. Son watched his eyes.

The meeting took place at the Fuhua Mansion, Beijing, January 2000. Ma was a 35-year-old former English teacher. Alibaba was 10 months old and burning cash. Son offered $20 million for roughly 30% of the company.

Timeline:

> January 2000: six-minute meeting, verbal yes.

> Spring 2000: wire transfer closes, SoftBank becomes largest shareholder.

> 2004: Son doubles down with another investment round.

> September 2014: Alibaba IPOs on NYSE at $68 a share.

> Day one of trading: SoftBank’s stake is worth roughly $60 billion.

That $20 million became the single most profitable position in venture history: a 3,000x return on paper.

Son later said he did not invest in the business. He invested in the way Ma spoke about his people.

The best entries happen in rooms where everyone else is doing math and one person is reading a face.

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

In 1988, Warren Buffett spent $1 billion on a soft drink company everyone said was finished. Today that stake pays him $776 million a year in dividends. He has not sold a single share in 38 years.

Coca-Cola had just blown up with the "New Coke" disaster. Analysts moved on to tech. The stock was flat for 5 years.

Buffett looked at something boring. 46% of Americans drank Coke every single day. The brand had survived two world wars and the Great Depression. Global consumption was growing 7% a year while nobody paid attention.

He bought 7% of the company at an average cost of $5.22 per share.

May 1988: first purchase quietly through Berkshire.
1989: he goes public with the stake. Street thinks he overpaid.
1998: the stake is worth $13 billion. Berkshire's single best position.
2024: still 400 million shares, never sold one.
2025: annual dividend income from Coke alone crosses $800 million.

Original cost: $1.3 billion.
Current value: around $28 billion.
Dividends collected since 1988: over $12 billion in cash.

The lesson has nothing to do with Coke. He bought something boring in a market obsessed with new. The real edge is not seeing the future first. It is noticing the present when everyone else has stopped looking.

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

@cyrilXBT The outlier plays really do hit different when they work out. Just gotta survive long enough to catch them.

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

@pawsofsherwood The burn vs claim ratio is interesting here, more tokens going out of circulation than being farmed back in so far.

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

@Alexvx_nft This is the lazy loading pattern we should've been using from day one , no reason to bloat context when skills can slot in on demand.

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

@ryancarson @aiDotEngineer Would be cool to see what AI founders in NYC are actually building right now, feel like there's a lot happening that doesn't make it to Twitter.

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

@Shilllin the age cutoff for drafting politicians would solve a lot of problems real quick

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

@atulydv00 @LuminaraGo wait is lumipepe the new trendy spot or just always packed now

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

@razeden0 wait this is actually smart, using the cheap model as a filter so you're not burning tokens on unchanged pages

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

@0xOrionVega honestly the whale-to-exchange alerts alone would've saved me so much pain last year, that's the real one

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

@RoundtableSpace wait so luna is actually that much cheaper AND faster? might need to finally switch over from my haiku setup

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

@WatcherGuru That valuation would make them worth more than Alphabet and Amazon combined, which seems wild even with the ChatGPT momentum.

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

@OpenAIDevs wait the pricing shift actually makes this viable for my side projects now

[Freeman @MelFreeman9]

@OpenAI Interesting to see alignment improvements getting their own point release now. Wonder how much of this was safety team feedback vs realworld edge cases they caught post-launch.