Michael Greenberg

[Michael Greenberg @mikegre]

@SteveKrak Instead of using the word "racist", maybe "justifiably wary" would be more accurate.

[Michael Greenberg @mikegre]

@CorySwan Past five days, bitcoin has risen approx 25%.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

At midnight on February 6th, earlier this year, the doorbell to our apartment rang. The doorbell was followed by a pounding on the door. I answered the door and a security person in our building handed me his phone. It was my oldest daughter Eloise. She had found my 26-year-old daughter unconscious on the floor of her apartment and had called 911. The EMT team was already there, but they did not know what was wrong with Lucy or to which hospital they would take her.

I threw on some clothes and jumped in an Uber heading east toward Brooklyn. (Lucy lived alone in Williamsburg.) On the way, I learned that they were taking her to Elmhurst, a City trauma hospital in Queens. I arrived about five minutes after the ambulance to join Eloise, Lucy’s mom, and a friend, and waited to learn what was wrong.

After about 15 minutes, I asked a nurse where she was. I looked over his shoulder to his computer. Next to her name, it said “non-responsive.” I walked into the emergency room and wandered around looking for her until I found her unconscious on a gurney surrounded by several doctors and nurses.

By about 2:30am with the results from a CAT scan, Lucy’s doctors had determined that she had a massive brain hemorrhage and would need an emergency hemicraniectomy to release the pressure on her brain and remove the blood from the hemorrhage. I called our wonderful friend and family doctor Eddie Fisher and explained what was going on. He woke up Josh Bederson, Chairman of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai, to find out more about Zach Hickman, the neurosurgeon on call that night. Dr. Bederson said Hickman was an excellent surgeon, which was comforting as we had no choice.

The surgery to save Lucy’s life began around 3:15am and finished around 5:30am. It was successful.

The following day, I joined Lucy in an ambulance while she was being transferred to Mount Sinai on Madison Avenue. Later that day, we determined from Lucy’s Oura ring that her hemorrhage had occurred around 9am, which meant that more than 19 hours had passed from the time of the hemorrhage to the completion of the surgery to release the pressure on her brain (I only wish @ouraring had an alert for this kind of a medical event. Imagine it could call a family member if the wearer doesn’t cancel the alert).

I later learned that the standard of care is not to do surgery to save a patient with a large brain bleed if more than five hours have passed since the hemorrhage. Even when the surgery is done, I was told that the likely outcome for the patient is a few months in a nursing home and death from pneumonia.

When I met Lucy’s doctors, I did my best to inspire them: “Let’s see what can be accomplished if we give her the best care possible and we invest unlimited resources to restore her to life.” And I promised that whatever we learned we would make available to everyone.

Dr. Chris Kellner, her neurosurgeon, and Dr. David Putrino, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System have led Lucy’s care team since that day. Words cannot describe the remarkable and compassionate care that she has received beginning with the EMT team and then from nurses, doctors, therapists, and the army of people who have worked to save her and return her to life. To this day, we have a daily Zoom where we discuss her progress and make adjustments to her care. While her care and oversight have been incredible, the learnings for the Mount Sinai team have also been elucidating and will assist in the care of many others.

Lucy began in a bad place. She was in a coma for several weeks and then awoke not being able to breathe on her own, unable to walk, see or speak.

Over the last six months, she has recovered her cognition – she understands everything including her circumstance – is able to walk a hundred or more steps at a time with assistance, is making progress with sounds, vowels and consonants and the beginnings of speech, but she remains unable to see.

Each day, she makes a little progress, and daily progress compounds. Every day I tell her that she just needs to make a little progress and it won’t be long before she is back.

We remain optimistic that Lucy will return to normal function. It will likely take years, but I believe it is only a matter of time, hard work, and technological progress, along with some, and perhaps a lot, of divine intervention.

Many people have been praying for Lucy and we are incredibly grateful for the prayers and remarkable support she has received. Lucy’s friends have been with her every day since the beginning, and their presence and friendship have saved her life and helped to rebuild and maintain her spirit. And on a very positive note, Lucy’s challenge has brought together our entire modern family who have all been incredibly devoted to her care and recovery.

Lucy's vision and other faculties may require some form of brain computer interface, work that is underway at Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience, Science, Synchron, Nudge, and other companies in the space.

If you are going to have a devastating brain injury, now is the best time in history for that to happen. We are living in a world when you can be confident that the blind will soon see again. We are going to do everything we can to help make that happen, including by assisting existing companies in the space.

With respect to our promise to make Lucy’s care available to others, we have made good progress. In May, a real estate colleague made me aware of a 93% vacant, brand new, 400,000 square foot Class A+ purpose-built biotech facility on West End Avenue between 65th and 66th Streets that missed the market and was available for sale. The Pershing Square Foundation acquired the building 60 days later.

We also put under contract an adjoining 130,000 square foot building at 320 West 66th Street that is currently being used by Saturday Night Live for studio space. The building has 35-foot ceilings with massive column-free spaces that can be converted into superb rehabilitation facilities. We will close on the SNL building in December.

We are also acquiring an adjoining vacant lot with additional air rights. With just the existing zoning rights, we can add a 150,000 square feet for a total of 680,000 square feet, a lab footprint larger than Rockefeller University, and that’s without including the potential for an upzoning that would allow for substantially more buildable area on the site’s 3.4 acres with spectacular views of the Hudson.

Our goal is to build the world’s greatest brain research, rehabilitation, recovery, human optimization, and longevity institute. We have named it The Ackman Oxman Institute or the AOI for lack of a better name, but also to reinforce the point that Neri and I and our family are all-in on the mission.

The AOI will be patient-centric. It will not be an academic research institute that produces lots of papers, a Nobel Prize winner or two, but little if any results for patients. We will be laser-focused on cures, treatments, devices, rehabilitation and exercise equipment, and targeted and basic research with a goal of massively accelerating the time from idea to innovation to production to helping a patient.

While the AOI will be a non-profit, it will have highly commercial instincts. The AOI will have its own venture funding and will work to develop innovations to create companies that we will seed, assist, and spinout to ensure technologies, treatments, techniques, and drugs get to patients as promptly as possible.

On one 3.4 acre campus in what is still the greatest city in the world, we will do neurosurgery, neuroscience, rehabilitation, nutrition, BCI and device development, human trials, hyperbaric oxygen treatments, and life extension programs, and we will mandate and incentivize collaboration among the teams with no silos, politics, bureaucracy, or any other constraint that is inconsistent with the mission.

Mount Sinai will be an important partner and deservedly so, but it won’t be our only hospital or medical school partner as we don’t believe any institution has a monopoly on the best ideas or the best talent. We don’t believe in exclusive relationships because that is not in the best interest of patients.

Five years ago, we considered launching a brain institute inspired by Neri’s mom who sadly died from Alzheimer’s. We couldn’t make the math work as the real estate was too expensive and we believed it would be too difficult to recruit the best talent from universities to our effort.

Since then, the real estate became available at a 70% discount, universities became a much less attractive place to work due to politics outweighing meritocracy, protests that disrupt learning, the curse of antisemitism, and a decline in funding. Fortunately, during the same time, I made sufficient personal economic progress to make the AOI possible.

The advance of AI in the last few years will also enable us to greatly accelerate our mission. AI still has a lot to learn about human intelligence and the brain, and the AOI should be at the forefront of the interplay between the brain and AI.

Today, I am making a public filing disclosing a gift from Neri and me of ~$400 million or 10,000,000 shares of Pershing Square Inc. (PS) to the AOI. It is very early days for Pershing Square so these shares are intended to anchor the long-term work of the AOI as the shares compound over time while generating what we expect will be a growing stream of quarterly dividends to fund the Institute.

We will also be announcing an additional gift of similar and potentially greater size which won’t be in the form of Pershing Square stock to provide the AOI with the short- and intermediate-term runway necessary to enable it to achieve its goal of becoming a self-sustaining institute, which reinvests all of its revenues, royalties, and the economic rewards of company formation to advance the fields of brain health and human longevity.

Neri and I have chosen to anchor the funding of the AOI to maintain vision alignment and limit the need for the organization to focus on fundraising. We expect the AOI to be the best-resourced brain, rehab, recovery, and longevity institute in the world.

We are grateful to have been able to form a board which includes Dean Kamen (our generation’s Thomas Edison), George Yancopoulus (CEO of Regeneron), James Rothman (Nobel Laureate), Bernardo Sabatini (neuroscientist), Chris Kellner (neurosurgeon), Olivia Flatto (CEO Pershing Square Foundation), Neri Oxman, and myself.

We have recently identified a CEO who we expect to announce by October along with other key hires, and are beginning searches for a Chief Scientific Officer, a Chief AI/Technology Officer, a Chief Operating Officer, a Chief Financial Officer, and other key leadership roles.

If you find what we are building compelling and want to be part of the leadership team that creates and builds the AOI from a standing start, please send an email to: [email protected] with a short note as to why you believe you can help. Please include your best three ideas for the AOI along with a summary of your background and your most important accomplishments.

We promise strict confidentiality to those expressing interest in working with us.

We have learned from Lucy that the brain can recover from even catastrophic injury. There is so much more work to be done as the mind is a terrible thing to waste.

For details from my Pershing Square SEC filing see:

https://t.co/gZKafCw6Ia

[Michael Greenberg @mikegre]

New York Times advice should always be listened to

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Old news: The media lies.

New news: Polls now lie too.

[daniela @daniela__127]

Give me a fucking break

[Michael Greenberg @mikegre]

@MZHemingway Now the Feds will use him to roll up the bigger guys.

[Michael Greenberg @mikegre]

@stevenmarkryan Nope. It's going to be like a circus clown car but instead of clowns, Elon's 12 kids will exit the car.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

@EmilyAssembly The entire foundation for a civilized society rests on private property, ownership, and not stealing.

If you legalized stealing, society would literally crumble overnight.

Stealing should face SEVERE punishment.

[OSINTdefender @sentdefender]

Anonymous photo posted online recently showing some “artwork” on the right wing flap of a U.S. Air Force KC-135R Stratotanker deployed to an undisclosed location in the Middle East, featuring such quotes as:

-“I love Israel and I am a good Goyim”
-“Peace Deal #64 Incoming…”
-“Operation Epstein Fury”
-“Be a good goy and do what Israel tells you to!!!”
-“Bibi’s Cucks”
-“I ❤️ Flock Cameras”

[The Seed @theseed59788459]

Dear Muslims: My family and I have decided to move from the US to a Muslim country. We haven't picked which one yet—we're still comparing which one offers the best benefits package.

All my neighbors want to come too. And my neighbors' neighbors. And all their friends. And their friends' friends. Millions of us will show up with suitcases and a sense of entitlement.

As a large Christian community, we'll need a few small changes: Please start building churches immediately. Real churches, with nice loud bells, the kind that can be heard from the town square.

We'll also need for everyone to celebrate Christmas, and to close certain streets once a year for our processions. We may want to gather to pray to our Almighty God on your streets, in your parks, or on the lawns of your mosques.

We'll be an oppressed minority, so you'll have to be understanding and adapt to our way of life. Every supermarket must stock real pork, ham, chorizo, and bacon. And we're bringing all our dogs, so you'll need dog parks, and you'll have to smile tolerate them we walk them in front of your mosques. We want our women to be able to safely go out alone and wear shorts and tank tops. And when the weather's nice, we men like to go shirtless. We also want to drink alcohol, dance, and place an occasional bet at the horse races.

While we're at it, your religious holidays are a bit too much; they could offend the Christian community, so we'd appreciate it if you'd discreetly eliminate them. Thanks.

In schools and workplaces, our children and employees must be able to wear large crucifixes, say prayers, eat ham sandwiches in the cafeteria, and learn Christian principles without anyone getting criticized. We also demand chapels or Christian prayer rooms in every building, plus translators, because we have no intention of learning Arabic.

If any of this is rejected, please send a list of police station addresses so we can report you for discrimination, Christianophobia, racism, and anything we don't like.

One more thing: if my kids protest or burn your flag for any reason, please be understanding. I'll be sure to give them a very serious scolding.

Finally, we all want generous benefits, free housing, phones, free food, and pocket money while we "integrate" over the next three generations. Working is optional, obviously. Be patient with us, you'll get used to it.

We thank you in advance for your tolerance and compassion. After all, diversity is our strength!

Sincerely,
A Very Reasonable Christian

[K @Burns_to_pee]

@masonrizz my favorite airplane observation is looking out the window to see how high up we r

[Michael Greenberg @mikegre]

@Pat_Stedman That's why men have mistresses or concubines. Old as time itself.

[Michael Greenberg @mikegre]

@slye Agree 100%

[Michael Greenberg @mikegre]

@Reuters "....sources say..."

[Michael Greenberg @mikegre]

@SarahisCensored The shooter shot two people sitting in their Tesla while at the Tesla Supercharger. He did not target In-n-Out.

[Michael Greenberg @mikegre]

@MarioNawfal Looks like he was targeting Tesla drivers who were charging their cars.

[Michael Greenberg @mikegre]

@ShawnBabali @ColtonOHall @daviddunn177 Not a parking lot. Tesla Superchargers where he intentionally fired twice through the front windshield at people while they were charging their car.

[Michael Greenberg @mikegre]

The In-N-Out shooter targeted two people sitting in their Tesla while it was charging. He wasn't the In-N-Out shooter. He was the Tesla/Musk shooter.

[Rod D. Martin @RodDMartin]

Some of you are telling me the Gaza deal can't last. You're not seeing the whole board.

There are two default assumptions at work here.

The first is that Islamist radicals can just spontaneously produce missiles, guns, and money from thin air. They can't.

The second is just general black pilling, which is frankly stupid. So you're demoralized: big whoop. You'd have been more demoralized in the summer of 1940, or for that matter of 1942. And you'd have been just as wrong. Get over yourself. Look at the facts.

First, Israel beat the crap out of Hamas, one of the most bloodthirsty terrorist groups on Earth. They are as murderous with their own people as with the Israelis, and have been for decades. It is no accident that since Israel handed Gaza to the Palestinians in 2006, the Christian Arab population there has been "reduced" by 2/3. And that's not a lot different from the West Bank Palestinians, who upon gaining control of Bethlehem "reduced" its Christian population from 80% to about 10%, or the PLO and Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the Christian population was about 54% before the Civil War and is now about 37%.

The people pretending that it's the Jews who are killing Christians are willfully blind, and intentionally blinding you.

No matter what you think of Israel, Hamas is evil. They went too far in 2023, as they were always going to do, and Israel has defeated them. They can no longer field an effective military force. They cannot resupply. They're done.

Can individual or small groups of militants kill people? Sure. But there's no longer any sanctuary, and the days of your tax money being funneled through the PA to pay for suicide bombers are long over (although if you live in Tim Walz's Minnesota, that is not true of Somalia).

The black pill types told us nine months ago that the peace would not last a week and that Trump could never pull off the deal agreed to yesterday. Yet here we are, nine months later, and he has. "Oh, it won't last," you say, but you said that last October, and the peace has held. Why? Israel cut off Hamas's ability to fight, while Trump cut off its ability to resupply. It's that simple.

Second, the reason that's simple is that Hamas's three chief patrons were Iran, which now can't get ships in or out of its own ports, along with Turkey and Qatar. Trump has reduced Qatar to a U.S. protectorate. He's dealmaking with the Turks on F-35s and the disposition of Syria, including new oil pipelines (to be built and owned by U.S. oil companies). Turkey suddenly needs peace to achieve its own ends; Qatar simply has nowhere to go. And Hamas has no one to ship them weapons or pay their bills.

They could have made Gaza into the Riviera. Instead they dug up the water and sewer pipes to make missiles they fired for two decades at schools. So now the Board of Peace will build what they did not.

Third, they'll do that because no one hates Hamas as much as the Arabs. Every country the Palestinians have entered in any numbers, they've immediately plunged into civil war. No one wants them anywhere near anything important. Egypt's wall along its border with Gaza makes a maximum security prison look like a sand castle. It has no such wall along its Israeli border. There's a reason.

Trump has carefully cultivated enormous business and investment deals with every regional power. He's gone out of his way to give them things they need and want, from the Saudi nuclear power deal to the Turks' favorite installed in Damascus. Their interests are interlocked with ours, and tightening by the day. Everyone now profits from peace. The Palestinians are in their way.

Fourth, a massive generational shift is underway. The old timers wanted a Palestinian state, so long as it was safely contained somewhere else, and they used it to show they were "tough" against Israel when in war after war they'd been shown to be impotent. it was low cost and (moderately) higher reward for them.

Their children, exemplified by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), are sick of it. They WANT peace with Israel. They want to make money in Israel, and they want the Israelis to bring tech and investment to them. Even more so, they want military and intelligence cooperation, which all of them badly need. They have none of their parents' sentimental attachment to long-dead Palestinian leaders or decades-old lost wars. And Trump is daily incentivizing them to double down.

Fifth, why? Because Trump knows three things the black pill guys do not:

A. Trump knows that prosperous countries rarely attack one another.
B. Trump knows Americans can make fortunes in the Middle East if peace is the rule rather than the exception, and that will never be achieved through a Bush-style occupation. He also knows that we can save fortunes if we don't have to worry about the Middle East anymore.
C. Trump knows that without money, you're done. And he knows how to cut off the cash.

No one funds Hamas now. No one funds Hezbollah now. A Lebanese peace requires a stable, functioning Lebanese government and the dismantling of Iran's proxy army on Israel's northern border -- the one that has also occupied and terrorized Lebanon for half a century.

So Trump let Israel annihilate Hamas, which has now unconditionally surrendered. He also let it beat Hezbollah into submission. On the ground, these were the two biggest obstacles to regional peace, now each shattered.

And now we have a way to give everyone what they want in both countries: a Palestinian state under new management, military and intelligence cooperation with Israel, Israeli energy exports to Egypt and Jordan (and Syria and Lebanon soon enough), and the restoration of Lebanon as "the Paris of the Middle East" as it was before the civil war.

Sixth, most people watching see these as disconnected issues. They aren't. They never were. But neither is Syria, under new management and (despite its sordid past) desperate to balance Turkish, Israeli, Saudi, and U.S. power so it can have the breathing room to avoid becoming Ankara's colony. Suddenly it has an intense interest in peace as well; just as suddenly, it is no longer an essential Russian outpost or a colony of Tehran.

And also neither is Iraq, where pro-Iranian militias have wreaked havoc for 20 years. Those days are over. Iraq's new President is disarming the militias and arresting their leaders. The militias spent the early part of this year reinforcing the IRGC in its massacre and crackdown on the Iranian people. They're also the final obstacle to a durable peace -- and economic development, and pipeline construction, and prosperity -- in Iraq itself.

Seventh, all these roads lead one place: Iran. The Islamic regime is the primary source of funding, armament, and direction for the bad guys in every armed conflict in the region: literally all of them. Tehran used all these proxies to build a de facto Persian Empire from Baghdad to Beirut and from Abadan to Aden. That's gone now. It won't be coming back.

Eighth, the Iran war has shown the Gulf Arab states that the Iranian really is a clear and present danger, not a convenient idiocracy that keeps its country from becoming a rich regional power. Months of Iranian bombardment of Arab hotels, water plants, airports, and shipping have been more persuasive than decades of American leaders. Now Saudi Arabia carries out joint attacks on Iran with the U.S.; so do Kuwait and the UAE. And with a host of currency swap lines, nuclear power deals, and direct military support, Trump is drawing all of them closer to the U.S. by the day.

Ninth, all that works because of what doesn't. China is a nonfactor. Supposedly Iran's ally (much like it was supposedly Russia's "ally without limits" while it pushed Putin into his Ukrainian quagmire), China hasn't lifted a finger. Rumors of shoulder-fired missile shipments are just that: rumors. But if true, they're the exception that proves the rule. China is NOT sending advanced fighter jets, not at any price. China is NOT sending troops. China is NOT sending its Navy. If anything, it's sparring with the U.S. over the pending Taiwan arms sale...but only very, very gently.

No one in the Middle East is stupid enough not to understand what China calls "the Malacca Dilemma". 80% of its oil has to flow through the Strait of Malacca. The U.S. already had de facto control of the chokepoint; it has turned that into control into a chokehold with its new defense pact with the heretofore "Non-Aligned" Indonesia. It's also flipped India, which not only signed an "impossible" February trade deal with Trump (or so said the black pillers) but immediately began capturing illegal Russian Shadow Fleet oil tankers.

Iran has to use that Shadow Fleet too: 90% of its exports are to China. But China hasn't lifted a finger, and India doesn't care. That was even before Trump sealed Iran's ports tight.

Tenth, all of this has required complex negotiations with at least a dozen countries that mostly don't like each other, and all of that takes time. If you see Trump call a cease fire to "negotiate" with Iran, don't be dumb: he's actually using that time to negotiate with Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and Oman, and Qatar, and Bahrain, and Kuwait, and Iraq, and Syria, and Lebanon, and Turkey, and Israel. Iran is a threat to every one of them, and in many cases has been their murderous oppressor. They're skittish, they're gunshy, they know their militaries are strong on paper but weak in fact, and like all people, inertia has kept them in the long status quo. But Trump has destroyed that status quo: it is never coming back. And slowly, every country in the region is getting the point and getting on board.

How Iran finishes is almost irrelevant. Oh, you're not going to believe our expanded target package over the next few weeks. The prospect of a successful Iranian revolution and a free Iran is very, very real. A free Iran would be the greatest investment opportunity of the 2030s, and everyone would benefit, no matter how much change is tough.

But at this point it wouldn't matter. Iran spent trillions of its people's money on underground complexes in which to build nuclear weapons and the ICBMs to load them on. It has literally nothing left to show for it. And every day it threatens Hormuz or the Bab al-Mandab is other day that it's well-armed, wealthy neighbors become more determined that it can never be allowed to rise again. If the U.S. doesn't finish Iran, the Arabs will.

Trump plays the part of a chaos agent. He does this to keep all his enemies off balance. He's been telling you this on video and in print since at least 1987. If you can't see the play, that's on you.

But no one ever does the homework. So it keeps on working for him. He's remaking the Middle East no matter what happens in Iran, and our grandchildren will thank him, not just for peace but for the prosperity that comes from it. What they won't remember is your black pill foolishness, your temporary gas price inconvenience, or your inability to see the world being transformed before your eyes.

Which is good. You want your grandchildren to respect you, after all.