Moskowitz: Allegedly, Corey Lewandowski was shaking people down. He was saying, ‘If you want a contract, you’ve got to go hire this firm.’ That $100,000 number we heard, where anything over $100,000 had to come to Kristi Noem’s desk—well, it turns out it did go to her desk, but Corey Lewandowski was sitting at her desk.
And that was really all about Corey being able to see where the money was going so that he knew who, allegedly, to go shake down. You don’t know who to shake down—you don’t know who to force to hire you as a lobbyist—if you don’t know who’s owed money from the department. That obviously created a tremendous amount of bureaucracy and slowed the department down as well.
Then he put his minions in all of these places—on the procurement teams—so he would have insight into procurement. He could tell them: this goes to that company, this goes to that company.
The committees are going to ask for bank records. They’re going to see all sorts of things. I think what we’re going to find is that his wealth has increased dramatically.
$BX President Jon Gray: "You don't want to put that much leverage, even on a great business, because the key is you've got to be able to get to the other side… If you have too much… you may be forced to sell, dilute your ownership at exactly the wrong moment."
Oaktree's Howard Marks: "The other way to go broke is to buy private, illiquid assets in vehicles that promise liquidity to the investors, and then have a run on the bank."
I think we are close to megacaps announcing pause in AI capex. When it happens we will see US memory stocks drop 50% (Korea 30%), like silver few weeks ago. This is a Trumped up market of rolling bubbles (quantum cmp, rare earths, tether-gold, crypto, nuclear, AI capex ...)
@dampedspring With a CAGR of +4% combined over his two hedge funds post Soros I find myself in agreement with Musk. America hopes he does better in this career change.
Lucky people work very hard, have high integrity, show up on time, have good manners, show high rate of learning, are self-aware, optimistic, kind and generous.
Terumo has agreed to buy UK-based organ medical tech company OrganOx in a deal valued at around $1.5 billion, seeking entry into the organ transplant field https://t.co/2bgUEll9sE
Ford CEO Jim Farley on China EVs: "It's the most humbling thing I have ever seen. 70% of all EVs in the world are made in China; They have far superior in-vehicle technology. Huawei and Xiaomi are in every car," Farley added. "You get in, you don't have to pair your phone. Automatically, your whole digital life is mirrored in the car."
Farley said that part of the reason Ford couldn't offer something similar was because tech giants such as Google and Apple "decided not to go in the car business."
"Beyond that, their cost, their quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West. We are in a global competition with China, and it's not just EVs. And if we lose this, we do not have a future Ford," Farley said.
💯. It’d be a last “desperate” act. Iranian economy is largely oil exports. How would closing the strait affect their economy? What are resources are they using to close the Strait and how long can they hold it?
It’s a 0.00001% probability.
Most of these are diabolical schemes to give us stuff cheaper.
#2 is simply wrong, VATs are applied to all consumption. They are highly regressive taxes seemingly necessary to run a European style state. They may be bad things, but they are mostly on their own people, and they ain’t tariffs.
We can agree that piracy and theft are wrong.
Most of this is nonsense but I guess it doesn’t matter anymore as we’re post facts.
Terry Smith called passive investing a market distortion that creates a 'momentum-based strategy' on autopilot.
Here’s why Fundsmith aims to be 'the last active manager standing' and the companies discussed in the Fundsmith Annual Shareholders' Meeting of 2025: