Orrovetch

One eye on AI. One on the money.
Decoding tools, markets & the noise between.
Follow the signal.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

STEVE JOBS WAS WORTH OVER $200 MILLION AT 25.
HIS DAUGHTER’S CHILD SUPPORT WAS $385 A MONTH.
HER MOTHER WAS ON WELFARE.
Lisa Brennan-Jobs was born in 1978. Her father was 23. He helped choose her name, then told people she wasn’t his.
A DNA test proved he was. His answer to Time magazine was that 28% of American men could be the father.

Her mother cleaned houses and took welfare to get by. San Mateo County sued Jobs to get the welfare money back. The settlement: $385 a month.

In December 1980, Apple went public. Jobs became one of the richest young men in America almost overnight.

Apple’s next computer was called the Lisa. For years he insisted the name was a coincidence.

In her memoir, the scenes are small and brutal. Her mother crying on the phone, begging him for money, until little Lisa takes the receiver and tells him to just give her some money. Her mother asking for a house, and Jobs buying one for himself.

At 14 she moved in with him. The rule was she couldn’t see her mother for six months.

Decades later, he was dying of pancreatic cancer and she was by his side. On TODAY she remembered what he kept repeating:

“I owe you one, and I’m so sorry.”

Did she forgive him? Not then. Now, in many ways, yes.

His widow and sisters said her book differs dramatically from their memories.

One of the richest men of his generation, arguing over $385 a month with his own child.

Does a deathbed apology fix 30 years, or is it just the easiest thing to say at the end?

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@mitansh_j07 And the first breach was caught back in June. They swapped the laptop, rotated credentials, and the attackers just came back through a different engineer three months later.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

HACKERS STOLE $6.3 BILLION FROM BINANCE IN 20 MINUTES.
THE PREVIOUS RECORD WAS $1.5 BILLION.
IT ALL STARTED WITH A FAKE JOB INTERVIEW.

The FBI says North Korea did it. Here’s how, according to Binance’s own post-mortem.

June. An engineer on Binance’s wallet team installs a popular AI coding tool. The installer has been tampered with. Binance catches it, replaces his laptop, rotates his credentials. Everyone moves on.

September. A second engineer is approached on a job-hunting platform. Video interview with “HR”. Then a second round with the “CEO” of a company that doesn’t exist. He’s asked to download a technical assignment. The code runs the moment he sets it up.

October 20. Using his machine and Binance’s own internal AI tool, the attackers take over two more engineers’ computers. On one of them they find a token with permission to deploy software.

October 29, 8:05 p.m. UTC. The first transaction hits.

In about 20 minutes, $6.3 billion leaves Binance across ten blockchains. One single transaction is worth more than $2.5 billion. Then the money is split across roughly 12,000 wallets.

$3.8 billion in Ethereum. $1.5 billion in Bitcoin. $628 million on Tron.

Tether and Circle froze about $3 billion in stablecoins. The $1.5 billion in Bitcoin can’t be frozen.

Binance covered the losses from its SAFU fund and company reserves. When withdrawals reopened, users pulled out $4.65 billion in nine hours.

Three days later, co-CEO Richard Teng went on stage in Hong Kong:

“We tripped up. It’s a very painful lesson.”

The scariest part isn’t the amount. It’s that nobody broke the encryption. They broke the people, and then used the company’s own AI against it.

Every big company is now giving AI agents access to money, code and systems. Is your bank next, or is this the moment everyone finally slows down?

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@artembkk Funny part is Nvidia did fine anyway. Anthropic still runs a lot on Nvidia GPUs, and now Jensen owns a piece too. He just paid a much higher price for it.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

NVIDIA PASSED ON ANTHROPIC.
AMAZON PUT IN $8 BILLION.
NOW ANTHROPIC IS HEADED FOR A $1.2 TRILLION IPO.

When Anthropic needed billions to build its models, the richest chip company in the world said no.

Google and Amazon said yes. They wrote the checks, and in return Anthropic trained on their chips instead of Nvidia’s.

Years later Nvidia had to buy its way in, committing up to $10 billion at a $350 billion valuation.

Now Bloomberg reports IPO buyers are talking $1.2 to $1.3 trillion, and the listing could come as early as this month.

Jensen Huang, the man who sells the shovels to the whole AI gold rush, admitted it himself:

“And so that was my miss.”

Was this the biggest mistake of Jensen’s career, or did Nvidia win anyway by selling chips to everyone?

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

MONICA LEWINSKY MADE ABOUT $300K FROM JENNY CRAIG.
BILL CLINTON CHARGED UP TO $750K FOR A SINGLE SPEECH.
SAME SCANDAL. VERY DIFFERENT BALANCE SHEETS.

From 2007 to 2014 the Clintons reported about $140 million in income, mostly from speeches. She got a book, a TV interview and a name she couldn’t use for a career.

Who really paid the price for that scandal?

[trixie @0xtrixie01]

Monica Lewinsky was 22 when she started having sex with the President of the United States. Bill Clinton was 49 and her boss. She was an unpaid White House intern. They hooked up nine times in the Oval Office. Then her friend from work secretly recorded 20 hours of their phone calls and handed them to the prosecutor. And it was Monica, not the president, whose life was destroyed.

Monica started her internship in July 1995. Four months later she was alone with Clinton for the first time. Their last encounter was in spring 1997. By then she had been moved to a job at the Pentagon.

That's where she met Linda Tripp. Monica told her everything. On the advice of literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, Tripp started recording their calls in secret, which was illegal in Maryland where she lived. And Tripp told Monica not to dry-clean the blue dress with the president's semen on it.

On January 16, 1998, Tripp invited Monica to lunch at the Pentagon City mall food court. She came down the escalator with two FBI agents. They took Monica to room 1012 of the Ritz-Carlton next door. For about 12 hours prosecutors told her she could go to prison for 27 years. She was 24.

Ten days later Clinton went on national TV: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

Monica got immunity and handed the blue dress to Ken Starr. In August the FBI took Clinton's blood for a DNA test. It matched. Clinton admitted the relationship. In December 1998 he was impeached. He stayed in office.

Monica says sympathy lasted "five seconds." After that she was called "a stalker, a whore, mentally unstable, a bimbo."

In 1999, 70 million Americans watched her interview with Barbara Walters. She made $1 million from the international rights and about $500,000 from a book. Jenny Craig signed her for $1 million if she lost 40 pounds. They paid her $300,000.

In 2018 NBC asked Clinton if he owed her an apology. "No, I do not." In 2020 he said he felt "terrible" that the affair had defined her life.

In 2021 Monica produced the TV series about her own scandal, Impeachment: American Crime Story. In 2025 she said Clinton should have resigned instead of throwing a young woman "under the bus." "I lost my future." "I bet nobody has asked Bill if he ever thought about changing his name."

He got impeached and kept his job. She got a blue dress, 27 years on the table and a name she can't change.

Some lessons are written in other people's mistakes. Watch it once. Remember it forever.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

ELON MUSK SPENT $474 MILLION ON THE MIDTERMS.
$212 MILLION WENT TO ONE TEXAS SENATE RACE.
HIS CANDIDATE LOST BY 12 POINTS.

According to a New York Times analysis, it was the most any single donor has ever spent in one election cycle.

Ken Paxton lost Texas to James Talarico. Texas now has its first Democratic senator since 1988.

Over the next two days, Musk’s net worth fell by about $113 billion, according to Bloomberg. Tesla dropped 11.5% in one session and SpaceX fell 8%.

The reason is not only politics. Texas holds a quarter of all planned US data center capacity, and the new Democratic governor has proposed a moratorium on new construction. Investors are pricing in investigations and a war against AI infrastructure.

Musk joked on X that his space lasers didn’t work this time.

Talarico on election night:

“All the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas.”

Can a billionaire still buy an election in America, or did $474 million just prove he can’t?

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@intspg The fees were wild, hundreds of millions to lawyers and advisors. And customers got paid at Nov 2022 prices when BTC was around $16K, so a lot of them still feel robbed twice.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

SAM BANKMAN-FRIED PUT $500 MILLION INTO ANTHROPIC. HIS BANKRUPTCY SOLD IT FOR $1.3 BILLION. ANTHROPIC IS NOW WORTH $965 BILLION.

Before FTX collapsed, SBF was spraying money everywhere. Stadium names. Super Bowl ads. Politicians.

And one small AI lab almost nobody had heard of. Anthropic.

In November 2022 FTX imploded. SBF was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 25 years.

The bankruptcy team had one job. Turn whatever was left into cash and pay customers back.

So in 2024 they sold the Anthropic stake. About $1.3 billion. A clean 2.5x on paper. Everyone called it a win.

Then Claude happened.

In February 2026 Anthropic was valued at $380 billion. In May it raised $65 billion at $965 billion. Now it is preparing an IPO.

The same stake, sold for $1.3 billion, would be worth tens of billions today.

From prison, SBF told Tucker Carlson what he thinks FTX would look like if nobody had touched it:

"Today it would have about $15 billion of liabilities and about $93 billion of assets."

That is his claim, not a fact. He is still a convicted fraudster.

But the Anthropic part is real. One of the worst people in crypto made one of the best AI bets of the decade. And the people cleaning up his mess sold it at the bottom.

Was selling the right call, or the most expensive mistake in bankruptcy history?

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@VCBrags Fumbled the bag and the customers’ bag too.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@BeanmealBrandon Exactly, and that’s basically his defense. Paying it back later doesn’t make taking it okay, the jury agreed.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@gaborgurbacs Yep. Even if the bet works, you still end up in a cell.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@PepRoundUp Possible, but nobody’s found it, and they looked hard. The estate recovered enough to pay customers back in full.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@Ruragonian He is, 25 year sentence. This interview was recorded from prison back in March 2025.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@fesak Yeah the “prodigy” story never held up. His parents got sued by FTX for millions they received, that part’s real.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@Ramon____ It’s from his Tucker Carlson interview, March 2025. He recorded it from prison.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@fracsandtexas Court filings show it. Biggest buyer was a Mubadala-linked fund from Abu Dhabi, almost $500M. Second was Jane Street, the firm SBF worked at before FTX. They got it at a huge discount to what it’s worth now.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@DutchAlchemist Agreed, a good bet with stolen money is still stolen money. The jury saw it the same way.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@devm0de That’s what gets me. He didn’t even need to gamble, just sitting on FTX and the Anthropic stake would’ve been enough. Greed made the call.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@JacobBadura He’s in federal prison and everything got seized, he’s not funding anything now. The political donations before the collapse were real though, tens of millions in 2022.

[Orrovetch @Orrovetch]

@iPARCELFORCE 25 years and he’s still talking like it’s his money lol