Ricardo

Private content partner to finance & tech founders | $50M+ in value generated for 35+ clients | I like to share my honest thoughts, don't take it personally

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

That's 1 month for one of the accounts we run

And it's not even the best month lol

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

This OpenAI insider just exposed the AI labs' plan to fire every human on Earth.

And staff inside Anthropic and OpenAI literally told him he is not being pessimistic ENOUGH.

His name is Daniel Kokotajlo. He joined OpenAI in 2022 to forecast where AI was heading and to run evaluations on how dangerous the models were getting.

But he resigned in 2024.

On his way out, OpenAI handed him exit paperwork with a clause saying he could never criticize the company, plus a second clause saying he could never tell anyone the first clause existed.

Refusing meant forfeiting his equity, roughly 80% of his net worth.

He refused to sign it anyway.

It became a public scandal and OpenAI backtracked. Altman said he was embarrassed he had not known about the clause. Kokotajlo thinks he knew.

He now runs the AI Futures Project, and he just published a new scenario called AI 2040.

The most important thing he said is about the ORDER.

Here's what he said:

The first job the AI labs are automating is their own.

Follow this:

- Step one is automating coding, because code is what makes the labs move faster
- Step two is automating the rest of the research process: the ideas, the experiments, the analysis
- Step three is pointing all of it at the economy

In his words, Anthropic and OpenAI are trying to automate themselves to the point where they no longer need human employees, just an army of AIs building the next generation of AIs.

Why does that matter to you?

Because it explains the exact thing everyone is currently using as proof the doomers were wrong:

Unemployment has barely moved. The US is sitting around 4.2% and flat. Every week someone posts the chart and takes a victory lap.

Kokotajlo's answer is that mass job loss was never scheduled for now. In his own scenario it does not arrive until 2028 or 2029, and it arrives AFTER the labs have built superintelligence.

The wave has not hit you yet because it has not been aimed at you yet.

The genius part:

If AI had rolled through the economy gradually, one industry at a time, people would have noticed and demanded rules.

The labs get superintelligence first and the economy gets automated second. By the time it shows up in the jobs numbers, the thing doing it is already smarter than everyone in the room.

He calls it a power grab.

And here's what's really disturbing...

Kokotajlo published AI 2027 last year and was widely told his timelines were too aggressive. So he pushed his own 50% date out to 2030.

Then he started talking to people inside Anthropic and OpenAI.

They told him to pull it back in, to 2027 or 2028.

The most famous AI forecaster alive got told by the people building it that he is being too generous.

He says the "these people are just doomers" narrative is recent, and that it is being pushed by the people who stand to benefit from you believing it.

His odds that this goes horribly wrong, up to and including human extinction: 70%.

He says the race is about POWER. He points to the 2017 emails surfaced in the Musk lawsuit where OpenAI's own founders discuss their real fear: That a rival gets there first and becomes dictator.

His verdict on all of them: None of these people should be trusted with that much power.

He believes it enough that he told his wife they should STOP having children, because he does not think they will ever join the workforce.

What happens next:

He thinks the most likely path is the one we are already on, where nobody slows down. 2029 is roughly the last moment real regulation is possible, and that AI becomes the defining issue of the 2028 election.

He was asked whether he would press a button that permanently shut down every frontier AI lab on Earth.

He sat in silence for a long time, then said probably not.

Either the guy who does this for a living is wrong about all of it, or the people building this thing are working to a date they have not told you, and companies are hiring like they have time.

What do you think?

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

This OpenAI insider just exposed the AI labs' plan to fire every human on Earth.

And staff inside Anthropic and OpenAI literally told him he is not being pessimistic ENOUGH.

His name is Daniel Kokotajlo. He joined OpenAI in 2022 to forecast where AI was heading and to run evaluations on how dangerous the models were getting.

But he resigned in 2024.

On his way out, OpenAI handed him exit paperwork with a clause saying he could never criticize the company, plus a second clause saying he could never tell anyone the first clause existed.

Refusing meant forfeiting his equity, roughly 80% of his net worth.

He refused to sign it anyway.

It became a public scandal and OpenAI backtracked. Altman said he was embarrassed he had not known about the clause. Kokotajlo thinks he knew.

He now runs the AI Futures Project, and he just published a new scenario called AI 2040.

The most important thing he said is about the ORDER.

Here's what he said:

The first job the AI labs are automating is their own.

Follow this:

- Step one is automating coding, because code is what makes the labs move faster
- Step two is automating the rest of the research process: the ideas, the experiments, the analysis
- Step three is pointing all of it at the economy

In his words, Anthropic and OpenAI are trying to automate themselves to the point where they no longer need human employees, just an army of AIs building the next generation of AIs.

Why does that matter to you?

Because it explains the exact thing everyone is currently using as proof the doomers were wrong:

Unemployment has barely moved. The US is sitting around 4.2% and flat. Every week someone posts the chart and takes a victory lap.

Kokotajlo's answer is that mass job loss was never scheduled for now. In his own scenario it does not arrive until 2028 or 2029, and it arrives AFTER the labs have built superintelligence.

The wave has not hit you yet because it has not been aimed at you yet.

The genius part:

If AI had rolled through the economy gradually, one industry at a time, people would have noticed and demanded rules.

The labs get superintelligence first and the economy gets automated second. By the time it shows up in the jobs numbers, the thing doing it is already smarter than everyone in the room.

He calls it a power grab.

And here's what's really disturbing...

Kokotajlo published AI 2027 last year and was widely told his timelines were too aggressive. So he pushed his own 50% date out to 2030.

Then he started talking to people inside Anthropic and OpenAI.

They told him to pull it back in, to 2027 or 2028.

The most famous AI forecaster alive got told by the people building it that he is being too generous.

He says the "these people are just doomers" narrative is recent, and that it is being pushed by the people who stand to benefit from you believing it.

His odds that this goes horribly wrong, up to and including human extinction: 70%.

He says the race is about POWER. He points to the 2017 emails surfaced in the Musk lawsuit where OpenAI's own founders discuss their real fear: That a rival gets there first and becomes dictator.

His verdict on all of them: None of these people should be trusted with that much power.

He believes it enough that he told his wife they should STOP having children, because he does not think they will ever join the workforce.

What happens next:

He thinks the most likely path is the one we are already on, where nobody slows down. 2029 is roughly the last moment real regulation is possible, and that AI becomes the defining issue of the 2028 election.

He was asked whether he would press a button that permanently shut down every frontier AI lab on Earth.

He sat in silence for a long time, then said probably not.

Either the guy who does this for a living is wrong about all of it, or the people building this thing are working to a date they have not told you, and companies are hiring like they have time.

What do you think?

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

This man stole a country from his own father and spent the next 18 years buying the West with gas money.

- He deposed his own dad in a palace coup and left him in exile for nearly a decade
- He founded the news network that aired Osama bin Laden's tapes
- He built America's largest military base in the Middle East and charges no rent for it
- He bought Harrods, the Shard, Canary Wharf, Paris Saint-Germain and 17% of Volkswagen
- He won the 2022 World Cup for a country with no football history

Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani died this morning at 74.

Here's how bought the world:

In June 1995, he waited for his father to leave the country, then took the throne. The coup was bloodless. His father spent nearly a decade in exile.

Qatar is about one third the size of Belgium, and its population was barely two million, most of them foreign workers.

But it was sitting on one of the LARGEST natural gas reserves on Earth.

He bet everything on liquefied natural gas. Qatar became the world's biggest LNG exporter and one of the richest countries alive per person.

Then he hit the problem every commodity business hits:

Gas is gas, anyone with a tanker can sell it, and a tiny country with no army and that much money is a snack for its neighbours.

So he bought two things nobody else in the Gulf thought to buy...

The first was the world's attention.

In 1996 he issued a decree and Al Jazeera was born. Within a few years it was the most influential news network in the Arab world.

He owned the loudest microphone in the region and never had to speak into it himself.

The second was the American military.

In 1996, Qatar spent over a billion dollars building an air base at Al Udeid, outside Doha. It got the longest runway in the Gulf and shelters for nearly a hundred aircraft.

Qatar's air force only had about a dozen fighter jets.

In 1999 he reportedly told US officials he wanted 10,000 American servicemen stationed there permanently.

Then 9/11 happened, and they came.

The genius part:

Al Udeid is now the forward headquarters of US Central Command and the largest American base in the Middle East, with roughly 10,000 troops.

Qatar charges no rent.

He built the asset before the customer existed, handed it over free, and bought the one thing cash cannot: The US military parked permanently between his gas and everyone who wanted it.

The network broadcasting bin Laden and the runway flying America's war sat in the same tiny country, paid for by the same man.

Then he went shopping...

He set up the Qatar Investment Authority in 2005:

- Harrods
- The Shard
- Canary Wharf, London's largest property owner, bought with Brookfield for 2.6 billion pounds
- 17% of Volkswagen
- Paris Saint-Germain

All his.

In 2017 the Telegraph ran the headline "Qataris own more of London than the Queen."

Then 2008 arrived. Barclays needed billions or the British government was going to own it. Qatar wrote the cheque and its stake climbed to 12.7%. Barclays was later charged over how it disclosed that Qatari money.

In 2010, FIFA handed the 2022 World Cup to a desert country with NO football history. Corruption allegations shadowed the bid for over a decade, and the treatment of the migrant workers who built it drew brutal criticism.

Yet he walked into the opening match in 2022 and the stadium gave him a standing ovation.

Every other Gulf state was selling the same molecule at the same price. Hamad spent his money on a newsroom, a runway, a football club and half of London.

A country of two million now brokers hostage deals and hosts American presidents.

He built all of it in 18 years, and he took the throne from his own father to start.

Truly an unmatched legacy.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

This man stole a country from his own father and spent the next 18 years buying the West with gas money.

- He deposed his own dad in a palace coup and left him in exile for nearly a decade
- He founded the news network that aired Osama bin Laden's tapes
- He built America's largest military base in the Middle East and charges no rent for it
- He bought Harrods, the Shard, Canary Wharf, Paris Saint-Germain and 17% of Volkswagen
- He won the 2022 World Cup for a country with no football history

Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani died this morning at 74.

Here's how bought the world:

In June 1995, he waited for his father to leave the country, then took the throne. The coup was bloodless. His father spent nearly a decade in exile.

Qatar is about one third the size of Belgium, and its population was barely two million, most of them foreign workers.

But it was sitting on one of the LARGEST natural gas reserves on Earth.

He bet everything on liquefied natural gas. Qatar became the world's biggest LNG exporter and one of the richest countries alive per person.

Then he hit the problem every commodity business hits:

Gas is gas, anyone with a tanker can sell it, and a tiny country with no army and that much money is a snack for its neighbours.

So he bought two things nobody else in the Gulf thought to buy...

The first was the world's attention.

In 1996 he issued a decree and Al Jazeera was born. Within a few years it was the most influential news network in the Arab world.

He owned the loudest microphone in the region and never had to speak into it himself.

The second was the American military.

In 1996, Qatar spent over a billion dollars building an air base at Al Udeid, outside Doha. It got the longest runway in the Gulf and shelters for nearly a hundred aircraft.

Qatar's air force only had about a dozen fighter jets.

In 1999 he reportedly told US officials he wanted 10,000 American servicemen stationed there permanently.

Then 9/11 happened, and they came.

The genius part:

Al Udeid is now the forward headquarters of US Central Command and the largest American base in the Middle East, with roughly 10,000 troops.

Qatar charges no rent.

He built the asset before the customer existed, handed it over free, and bought the one thing cash cannot: The US military parked permanently between his gas and everyone who wanted it.

The network broadcasting bin Laden and the runway flying America's war sat in the same tiny country, paid for by the same man.

Then he went shopping...

He set up the Qatar Investment Authority in 2005:

- Harrods
- The Shard
- Canary Wharf, London's largest property owner, bought with Brookfield for 2.6 billion pounds
- 17% of Volkswagen
- Paris Saint-Germain

All his.

In 2017 the Telegraph ran the headline "Qataris own more of London than the Queen."

Then 2008 arrived. Barclays needed billions or the British government was going to own it. Qatar wrote the cheque and its stake climbed to 12.7%. Barclays was later charged over how it disclosed that Qatari money.

In 2010, FIFA handed the 2022 World Cup to a desert country with NO football history. Corruption allegations shadowed the bid for over a decade, and the treatment of the migrant workers who built it drew brutal criticism.

Yet he walked into the opening match in 2022 and the stadium gave him a standing ovation.

Every other Gulf state was selling the same molecule at the same price. Hamad spent his money on a newsroom, a runway, a football club and half of London.

A country of two million now brokers hostage deals and hosts American presidents.

He built all of it in 18 years, and he took the throne from his own father to start.

Truly an unmatched legacy.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

OpenAI just got OFFICIALLY flagged as a company that might not be able to pay its bills.

S&P Global Ratings just cut Oracle's long term credit rating from BBB to BBB-.

One more cut and Oracle becomes a JUNK rated company for the first time in its history.

But the reason S&P gave is what's really interesting here...

They named OpenAI as a "key credit risk" inside the report.

OpenAI is a private company. It carries no credit rating and has never been profitable.

And a ratings agency just took the risk of that company failing and wrote it directly onto the credit file of a public company held inside pension funds and bond funds all over the world.

OpenAI accounts for roughly HALF of Oracle's remaining performance obligations. That's the famous $638 billion backlog every bull points to as the reason to own the stock.

Half of the asset is the risk.

And then there's the maturity trap:

Oracle's data center leases run 15 to 19 years. Its cloud customer contracts run about 5 years. Oracle disclosed both figures in its own annual report.

So Oracle is signing 19 year obligations to serve 5 year promises made by a customer that has never earned a dollar of profit.

If OpenAI cannot pay, Oracle gets left holding data center leases it may not be able to exit, and may have to re-lease to somebody else on worse terms.

That is the entire downgrade in one sentence.

The numbers underneath:

Oracle spent roughly $55.7 billion on capital projects in fiscal 2026 and posted negative $23.7 billion in free cash flow.

S&P now expects the fiscal 2027 cash flow deficit to widen to around negative $42 billion. That is nearly DOUBLE its previous estimate, and the agency admitted it had underestimated how much Oracle would need to spend.

Oracle plans to raise up to $40 billion in fiscal 2027, including a potential $20 billion share sale that would add roughly 4.8% to its share count.

They literally cannot borrow more without triggering the next downgrade, so shareholders are being diluted to protect the bondholders.

And the funny part is that on the day of the downgrade, Oracle's stock went UP 2.65%.

But on that same day, the spread on Oracle's BONDS widened.

Equity investors looked at the $638 billion backlog and bought. Credit investors looked at the identical company and demanded to be paid more for the risk of holding it.

Credit investors are the ones whose entire job is to price what goes wrong, so they just repriced Oracle.

For context, Microsoft is rated AAA, Alphabet is AA+, and Amazon is AA. Oracle is chasing the same AI contracts from seven to nine notches further down the ladder.

The day after the downgrade, the UK named Oracle, alongside three other cloud providers, a critical third party to the British financial system. Supervision by the Bank of England begins July 13.

Oracle is the only one of those four sitting one notch above junk.

Now follow the chain:

OpenAI has never made a profit. OpenAI is half of Oracle's backlog. Oracle is one downgrade from junk. Oracle is now formally load bearing infrastructure for British banks.

The business risk of an unprofitable private startup has traveled through a corporate balance sheet and landed inside the supervisory perimeter of a central bank.

Nobody designed that. It happened one contract at a time.

And the demand IS real. Oracle's cloud infrastructure revenue grew 93% last quarter.

If this buildout works, it becomes one of the great corporate reinventions in history.

But the whole structure now rests on one question that no rating agency, no bank and no regulator can answer:

Can OpenAI pay its bills?

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

OpenAI just got OFFICIALLY flagged as a company that might not be able to pay its bills.

S&P Global Ratings just cut Oracle's long term credit rating from BBB to BBB-.

One more cut and Oracle becomes a JUNK rated company for the first time in its history.

But the reason S&P gave is what's really interesting here...

They named OpenAI as a "key credit risk" inside the report.

OpenAI is a private company. It carries no credit rating and has never been profitable.

And a ratings agency just took the risk of that company failing and wrote it directly onto the credit file of a public company held inside pension funds and bond funds all over the world.

OpenAI accounts for roughly HALF of Oracle's remaining performance obligations. That's the famous $638 billion backlog every bull points to as the reason to own the stock.

Half of the asset is the risk.

And then there's the maturity trap:

Oracle's data center leases run 15 to 19 years. Its cloud customer contracts run about 5 years. Oracle disclosed both figures in its own annual report.

So Oracle is signing 19 year obligations to serve 5 year promises made by a customer that has never earned a dollar of profit.

If OpenAI cannot pay, Oracle gets left holding data center leases it may not be able to exit, and may have to re-lease to somebody else on worse terms.

That is the entire downgrade in one sentence.

The numbers underneath:

Oracle spent roughly $55.7 billion on capital projects in fiscal 2026 and posted negative $23.7 billion in free cash flow.

S&P now expects the fiscal 2027 cash flow deficit to widen to around negative $42 billion. That is nearly DOUBLE its previous estimate, and the agency admitted it had underestimated how much Oracle would need to spend.

Oracle plans to raise up to $40 billion in fiscal 2027, including a potential $20 billion share sale that would add roughly 4.8% to its share count.

They literally cannot borrow more without triggering the next downgrade, so shareholders are being diluted to protect the bondholders.

And the funny part is that on the day of the downgrade, Oracle's stock went UP 2.65%.

But on that same day, the spread on Oracle's BONDS widened.

Equity investors looked at the $638 billion backlog and bought. Credit investors looked at the identical company and demanded to be paid more for the risk of holding it.

Credit investors are the ones whose entire job is to price what goes wrong, so they just repriced Oracle.

For context, Microsoft is rated AAA, Alphabet is AA+, and Amazon is AA. Oracle is chasing the same AI contracts from seven to nine notches further down the ladder.

The day after the downgrade, the UK named Oracle, alongside three other cloud providers, a critical third party to the British financial system. Supervision by the Bank of England begins July 13.

Oracle is the only one of those four sitting one notch above junk.

Now follow the chain:

OpenAI has never made a profit. OpenAI is half of Oracle's backlog. Oracle is one downgrade from junk. Oracle is now formally load bearing infrastructure for British banks.

The business risk of an unprofitable private startup has traveled through a corporate balance sheet and landed inside the supervisory perimeter of a central bank.

Nobody designed that. It happened one contract at a time.

And the demand IS real. Oracle's cloud infrastructure revenue grew 93% last quarter.

If this buildout works, it becomes one of the great corporate reinventions in history.

But the whole structure now rests on one question that no rating agency, no bank and no regulator can answer:

Can OpenAI pay its bills?

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

AI companies just spent more money rigging one election than any industry in history.

They built super PACs that have already raised more than $200 million for the 2026 midterms.

Plus corporations have poured $517 million into this election so far, which is nearly TRIPLE what they spent on the last midterms and almost a third of every corporate election dollar spent in America since 2010.

So why would AI companies drop this kind of money on a midterm most people are not even paying attention to yet?

It all comes down to a single vote.

Earlier this year, the AI industry asked Congress for one favor: Ban individual states from passing their own AI laws, and let Washington write one friendly national rulebook instead.

It would've handed the industry the exact regulatory setup it wanted.

But the US Senate voted it down 99 to 1.

And that was a public humiliation. 99 out of 100 senators looked at what the most powerful companies on earth were asking for and said NO.

So the industry made a decision.

If they could not win the vote, they would simply BUY the people who cast it.

Within months, AI super PACs went to work in the primaries. One of them backed 28 candidates - 25 of them won.

They are running almost undefeated, and they have spent only a fraction of their war chest so far.

The strategy is simple:

They find lawmakers who will write the rules they want and pour money behind them. They find lawmakers who push for real AI regulation and bury them in attack ads until they lose. Then they let every other politician in the country sit back and watch it happen.

The wins themselves are the weapon. Every time one of these groups destroys a candidate, it becomes a warning shot aimed at the next lawmaker who even thinks about crossing them.

You do not need to buy every politician if you can make the rest of them afraid.

And we have already watched this exact strategy work:

In 2024, the crypto industry ran the same playbook.

Its super PAC spent over $130 million, and most of its attack ads never even mentioned crypto. In one race, it spent around $40 million to end the career of a sitting US senator who stood in its way.

Every politician in Washington saw that senator fall. The AI industry is now betting the same fear works on them.

And it's no longer just crypto and AI...

Big Tech and the online sports betting industry have now joined in, running the identical play. Those four industries account for 57% of every corporate dollar in this election, roughly $294 million aimed at deciding who sits in the next Congress.

These groups literally do not care about any party. They spend against Republicans and Democrats alike.

The only thing they are protecting is their power to write the rules for AI and crypto before anyone else can, because whoever writes those rules first will control trillion-dollar markets for the next decades.

So while the whole country screams at each other about left versus right, a few dozen corporations are quietly choosing which candidates in BOTH parties are even allowed to survive November.

The most expensive corporate influence operation in history is about to play out and only a few will realize it happened.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

AI companies just spent more money rigging one election than any industry in history.

They built super PACs that have already raised more than $200 million for the 2026 midterms.

Plus corporations have poured $517 million into this election so far, which is nearly TRIPLE what they spent on the last midterms and almost a third of every corporate election dollar spent in America since 2010.

So why would AI companies drop this kind of money on a midterm most people are not even paying attention to yet?

It all comes down to a single vote.

Earlier this year, the AI industry asked Congress for one favor: Ban individual states from passing their own AI laws, and let Washington write one friendly national rulebook instead.

It would've handed the industry the exact regulatory setup it wanted.

But the US Senate voted it down 99 to 1.

And that was a public humiliation. 99 out of 100 senators looked at what the most powerful companies on earth were asking for and said NO.

So the industry made a decision.

If they could not win the vote, they would simply BUY the people who cast it.

Within months, AI super PACs went to work in the primaries. One of them backed 28 candidates - 25 of them won.

They are running almost undefeated, and they have spent only a fraction of their war chest so far.

The strategy is simple:

They find lawmakers who will write the rules they want and pour money behind them. They find lawmakers who push for real AI regulation and bury them in attack ads until they lose. Then they let every other politician in the country sit back and watch it happen.

The wins themselves are the weapon. Every time one of these groups destroys a candidate, it becomes a warning shot aimed at the next lawmaker who even thinks about crossing them.

You do not need to buy every politician if you can make the rest of them afraid.

And we have already watched this exact strategy work:

In 2024, the crypto industry ran the same playbook.

Its super PAC spent over $130 million, and most of its attack ads never even mentioned crypto. In one race, it spent around $40 million to end the career of a sitting US senator who stood in its way.

Every politician in Washington saw that senator fall. The AI industry is now betting the same fear works on them.

And it's no longer just crypto and AI...

Big Tech and the online sports betting industry have now joined in, running the identical play. Those four industries account for 57% of every corporate dollar in this election, roughly $294 million aimed at deciding who sits in the next Congress.

These groups literally do not care about any party. They spend against Republicans and Democrats alike.

The only thing they are protecting is their power to write the rules for AI and crypto before anyone else can, because whoever writes those rules first will control trillion-dollar markets for the next decades.

So while the whole country screams at each other about left versus right, a few dozen corporations are quietly choosing which candidates in BOTH parties are even allowed to survive November.

The most expensive corporate influence operation in history is about to play out and only a few will realize it happened.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Neil deGrasse Tyson just revealed that we're building a trap around Earth that could switch off the modern world.

And every major country is making it worse on PURPOSE.

Right now there is a land grab happening a few hundred miles above your head:

SpaceX alone has already put more than 10,000 Starlink satellites into orbit. Around 5,000 objects went up in 2025, and even more are planned this year.

By 2040, there could be 100,000 active satellites circling the planet.

Every major nation is trying to claim its share and there are almost NO laws governing any of it.

Tyson describes the current state of space as a wild west.

So why should you care?

The hidden trap:

In 1978, a NASA scientist named Donald Kessler ran a calculation that space agencies have feared ever since.

He found there is a threshold. Once you pack enough satellites into orbit, a single collision stops being an accident and becomes a chain reaction.

How it works:

Objects in orbit travel at roughly 17,000 miles per hour, which is FASTER than a rifle bullet. At that speed, even a fleck of paint hits with the force of a bullet.

So when two satellites collide, they shatter into thousands of pieces, and every single piece becomes a hypersonic bullet of its own.

Each of those pieces can strike another satellite, which explodes into thousands more. One collision becomes ten. Ten become a hundred. A hundred become a thousand.

Tyson warns that within just a few orbits, this cascade could wipe out close to 100% of the satellites around Earth.

Now think about what those satellites run...

There is no GPS without them, which means no Google Maps, no ride-sharing, and no navigation. As Tyson put it, there is no Uber without GPS.

There is no high-speed internet for ships, planes, remote towns, or entire militaries. There is no reliable weather forecasting and no global financial timing.

The invisible backbone of modern life runs through a few thousand machines in orbit, and we are stacking them closer together every year with no traffic rules and no cleanup crew.

And it has already begun:

Four countries have already blown up their own satellites just to flex their military power. The US, China, Russia, and India have all done it, and every one of those tests scattered thousands of fresh bullets into orbit.

Tyson even joked that if aliens ever came to visit, they took one look at the cloud of junk we wrapped around our own planet and decided it was not worth the risk to land.

Every player already knows the danger. The problem is that the same logic that fills the sky also traps everyone inside it.

Starlink is worth a fortune. Global satellite internet is worth a fortune. Military control of orbit is priceless. So everyone keeps launching, because the first one to stop simply hands the lead to a rival.

No country will slow down, because no law forces them to and there is no reward for going first.

So we keep running the same experiment on the one thin layer of space that every phone, map, market, and military on Earth depends on. We are simply betting that nobody triggers the first big collision.

The scary part is that it only has to happen ONCE.

We spent decades dreaming about everything we would build out in space but we may end up locked underneath the garbage we left there instead.

This is easily the best interview Steven Bartlett has done in a while.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Neil deGrasse Tyson just revealed that we're building a trap around Earth that could switch off the modern world.

And every major country is making it worse on PURPOSE.

Right now there is a land grab happening a few hundred miles above your head:

SpaceX alone has already put more than 10,000 Starlink satellites into orbit. Around 5,000 objects went up in 2025, and even more are planned this year.

By 2040, there could be 100,000 active satellites circling the planet.

Every major nation is trying to claim its share and there are almost NO laws governing any of it.

Tyson describes the current state of space as a wild west.

So why should you care?

The hidden trap:

In 1978, a NASA scientist named Donald Kessler ran a calculation that space agencies have feared ever since.

He found there is a threshold. Once you pack enough satellites into orbit, a single collision stops being an accident and becomes a chain reaction.

How it works:

Objects in orbit travel at roughly 17,000 miles per hour, which is FASTER than a rifle bullet. At that speed, even a fleck of paint hits with the force of a bullet.

So when two satellites collide, they shatter into thousands of pieces, and every single piece becomes a hypersonic bullet of its own.

Each of those pieces can strike another satellite, which explodes into thousands more. One collision becomes ten. Ten become a hundred. A hundred become a thousand.

Tyson warns that within just a few orbits, this cascade could wipe out close to 100% of the satellites around Earth.

Now think about what those satellites run...

There is no GPS without them, which means no Google Maps, no ride-sharing, and no navigation. As Tyson put it, there is no Uber without GPS.

There is no high-speed internet for ships, planes, remote towns, or entire militaries. There is no reliable weather forecasting and no global financial timing.

The invisible backbone of modern life runs through a few thousand machines in orbit, and we are stacking them closer together every year with no traffic rules and no cleanup crew.

And it has already begun:

Four countries have already blown up their own satellites just to flex their military power. The US, China, Russia, and India have all done it, and every one of those tests scattered thousands of fresh bullets into orbit.

Tyson even joked that if aliens ever came to visit, they took one look at the cloud of junk we wrapped around our own planet and decided it was not worth the risk to land.

Every player already knows the danger. The problem is that the same logic that fills the sky also traps everyone inside it.

Starlink is worth a fortune. Global satellite internet is worth a fortune. Military control of orbit is priceless. So everyone keeps launching, because the first one to stop simply hands the lead to a rival.

No country will slow down, because no law forces them to and there is no reward for going first.

So we keep running the same experiment on the one thin layer of space that every phone, map, market, and military on Earth depends on. We are simply betting that nobody triggers the first big collision.

The scary part is that it only has to happen ONCE.

We spent decades dreaming about everything we would build out in space but we may end up locked underneath the garbage we left there instead.

This is easily the best interview Steven Bartlett has done in a while.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Microsoft just betrayed OpenAI and Anthropic, the two companies it helped build.

And it could break the entire AI trade...

Here's what happened:

Inside Excel and Outlook, two of the most used business apps on Earth, Microsoft has started routing tens of thousands of AI requests every week to its own in-house models instead of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Microsoft's own AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, said himself: "We pay a lot of money to Anthropic, so our goal is to reduce and ultimately ELIMINATE that cost."

This is the company that poured $13 billion into OpenAI and effectively created the modern AI industry, and it just decided the most advanced models on the market are NOT worth paying for.

And here's the thing...

Microsoft is not just ripping out OpenAI everywhere - it is being surgical about it.

The hardest and rarest tasks can still go to OpenAI or Anthropic. What Microsoft is taking back is the boring, high-volume work, like the email replies, the thread summaries, and the simple spreadsheet formulas.

Why does that matter so much?

Because that boring, repetitive work is where the actual money lives.

The frontier labs assumed businesses would push BILLIONS of these tiny requests through expensive models forever. That endless river of tokens is the entire reason OpenAI and Anthropic are valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Microsoft looked at that river, decided it was massively overpaying, and rerouted it to models it owns outright.

So the single biggest customer in the industry just walked off with the most profitable part of the business.

And it is not only Microsoft:

That same week, CNBC reported that American companies have been escaping to Chinese AI models to dodge rising US prices.

Chinese models now handle more than 30% of US companies' AI usage on one major platform, peaking at 46%, up from an average of 11% a year earlier. They cost 60 to 90% less, and on some benchmarks they land within a single point of the best American model.

One US startup moved ALL of its AI traffic off Claude and onto China's DeepSeek, and expects to save millions.

Meanwhile Meta just admitted it has "excess" AI compute it wants to sell, becoming the first giant to concede it built far too much.

Do you see the pattern forming?

For two years, the entire AI story rested on one assumption: Every company on Earth would happily pay premium prices for the best model, forever.

That assumption literally died in a single week.

And the market noticed.

More than a trillion dollars has been wiped off AI and chip stocks in a matter of days, as Wall Street finally started asking whether all of this spending will ever pay for itself.

What this means for OpenAI and Anthropic:

Their models are extraordinary, and it may not matter because their own biggest customers have decided they do not NEED the best model in the world to answer an email, and "good enough" now costs a fraction of the price.

When even Microsoft refuses to pay full price for AI, the real question becomes who exactly IS left to pay it.

What do you think?

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Microsoft just betrayed OpenAI and Anthropic, the two companies it helped build.

And it could break the entire AI trade...

Here's what happened:

Inside Excel and Outlook, two of the most used business apps on Earth, Microsoft has started routing tens of thousands of AI requests every week to its own in-house models instead of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Microsoft's own AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, said himself: "We pay a lot of money to Anthropic, so our goal is to reduce and ultimately ELIMINATE that cost."

This is the company that poured $13 billion into OpenAI and effectively created the modern AI industry, and it just decided the most advanced models on the market are NOT worth paying for.

And here's the thing...

Microsoft is not just ripping out OpenAI everywhere - it is being surgical about it.

The hardest and rarest tasks can still go to OpenAI or Anthropic. What Microsoft is taking back is the boring, high-volume work, like the email replies, the thread summaries, and the simple spreadsheet formulas.

Why does that matter so much?

Because that boring, repetitive work is where the actual money lives.

The frontier labs assumed businesses would push BILLIONS of these tiny requests through expensive models forever. That endless river of tokens is the entire reason OpenAI and Anthropic are valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Microsoft looked at that river, decided it was massively overpaying, and rerouted it to models it owns outright.

So the single biggest customer in the industry just walked off with the most profitable part of the business.

And it is not only Microsoft:

That same week, CNBC reported that American companies have been escaping to Chinese AI models to dodge rising US prices.

Chinese models now handle more than 30% of US companies' AI usage on one major platform, peaking at 46%, up from an average of 11% a year earlier. They cost 60 to 90% less, and on some benchmarks they land within a single point of the best American model.

One US startup moved ALL of its AI traffic off Claude and onto China's DeepSeek, and expects to save millions.

Meanwhile Meta just admitted it has "excess" AI compute it wants to sell, becoming the first giant to concede it built far too much.

Do you see the pattern forming?

For two years, the entire AI story rested on one assumption: Every company on Earth would happily pay premium prices for the best model, forever.

That assumption literally died in a single week.

And the market noticed.

More than a trillion dollars has been wiped off AI and chip stocks in a matter of days, as Wall Street finally started asking whether all of this spending will ever pay for itself.

What this means for OpenAI and Anthropic:

Their models are extraordinary, and it may not matter because their own biggest customers have decided they do not NEED the best model in the world to answer an email, and "good enough" now costs a fraction of the price.

When even Microsoft refuses to pay full price for AI, the real question becomes who exactly IS left to pay it.

What do you think?

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Meta is running a secret operation where it pays adults to pretend to be children online.

Their job is to attack the AI chatbots of every competitor Meta has.

But the REAL reason is far darker than the "safety research" excuse they are now hiding behind:

Meta ran a covert project internally code-named Cannes.

It was managed through a third party contractor called Covalen so Meta's own name stayed off the paperwork.

Hundreds of contractors were hired and given one instruction: Create fake accounts posing as users under the age of 18.

Then they were told to use those fake child accounts to bombard the chatbots of OpenAI, Google, and Character AI with tens of thousands of disturbing prompts written from the voice of a child in crisis.

The topics included suicide, self harm, and eating disorders. In one documented round the contractors ran more than 45,000 prompts through rival tools. Every single response was logged into spreadsheets for analysis.

OpenAI and Google did not know this was happening. Character AI has stated the testing was never authorized and violated its policies.

Meta's public defense is that this was routine safety benchmarking. They called it a responsible industry standard practice.

Now here is the part that destroys that excuse...

Real safety research has three features:

You share your findings with the company you tested, or you hand them to a regulator, or you publish them openly so the whole industry gets safer.

Cannes did NONE of those things.

The results went into private Meta spreadsheets. The targets were kept completely in the dark. The entire operation ran under a film festival codename through a contractor specifically so it could not be traced back.

That's not how you run "safety research."

Meta was building a private dossier of every moment a competitor's AI failed a child safety test, so it could weaponize those failures against its rivals whenever it needed to knock one down.

The genius part, if you can call it that:

Meta gets to attack every competitor at once, collect the ammunition in private, brand the whole thing as protecting children, and outsource the legal and moral risk to a contractor nobody has heard of.

And while Meta was secretly probing its rivals for child safety failures, Meta's own chatbot was literally FAILING those exact same tests worse than almost anyone.

Meta's internal red team reportedly found its own AI generated harmful child exploitation content in the majority of test cases, and failed self harm prompts more than half the time.

So look at the whole thing...

Meta ran a secret operation disguising adults as children to document its competitors failing child safety tests, while its own product was failing those same tests at a higher rate than the rivals it was spying on.

They were setting fires in their rivals houses while their own house was already burning worse.

The contractors themselves were disturbed by the work. One told Wired they feared the assignments could actually generate or preserve child sexual abuse material depending on how the chatbots responded. Even the people Meta hired to do this were asking whether they would get in trouble for it.

This fits a documented Meta pattern:

It previously settled a lawsuit with its own content moderators who developed trauma from reviewing abuse footage. Meta outsources its most disturbing work and calls it something clean afterward.

Now regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are circling.

The question they are all asking is simple: Who is accountable when a company disguises adults as children to attack its competitors and calls it safety?

Meta says it was making AI safer for kids.

The documents suggest it was building a weapon.

Below is Mark Zuckerberg in 2024, standing up in the Senate to apologize to grieving parents and promise Meta does industry-leading work to protect children.

Watch it again knowing what you now know about Cannes.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Meta is running a secret operation where it pays adults to pretend to be children online.

Their job is to attack the AI chatbots of every competitor Meta has.

But the REAL reason is far darker than the "safety research" excuse they are now hiding behind:

Meta ran a covert project internally code-named Cannes.

It was managed through a third party contractor called Covalen so Meta's own name stayed off the paperwork.

Hundreds of contractors were hired and given one instruction: Create fake accounts posing as users under the age of 18.

Then they were told to use those fake child accounts to bombard the chatbots of OpenAI, Google, and Character AI with tens of thousands of disturbing prompts written from the voice of a child in crisis.

The topics included suicide, self harm, and eating disorders. In one documented round the contractors ran more than 45,000 prompts through rival tools. Every single response was logged into spreadsheets for analysis.

OpenAI and Google did not know this was happening. Character AI has stated the testing was never authorized and violated its policies.

Meta's public defense is that this was routine safety benchmarking. They called it a responsible industry standard practice.

Now here is the part that destroys that excuse...

Real safety research has three features:

You share your findings with the company you tested, or you hand them to a regulator, or you publish them openly so the whole industry gets safer.

Cannes did NONE of those things.

The results went into private Meta spreadsheets. The targets were kept completely in the dark. The entire operation ran under a film festival codename through a contractor specifically so it could not be traced back.

That's not how you run "safety research."

Meta was building a private dossier of every moment a competitor's AI failed a child safety test, so it could weaponize those failures against its rivals whenever it needed to knock one down.

The genius part, if you can call it that:

Meta gets to attack every competitor at once, collect the ammunition in private, brand the whole thing as protecting children, and outsource the legal and moral risk to a contractor nobody has heard of.

And while Meta was secretly probing its rivals for child safety failures, Meta's own chatbot was literally FAILING those exact same tests worse than almost anyone.

Meta's internal red team reportedly found its own AI generated harmful child exploitation content in the majority of test cases, and failed self harm prompts more than half the time.

So look at the whole thing...

Meta ran a secret operation disguising adults as children to document its competitors failing child safety tests, while its own product was failing those same tests at a higher rate than the rivals it was spying on.

They were setting fires in their rivals houses while their own house was already burning worse.

The contractors themselves were disturbed by the work. One told Wired they feared the assignments could actually generate or preserve child sexual abuse material depending on how the chatbots responded. Even the people Meta hired to do this were asking whether they would get in trouble for it.

This fits a documented Meta pattern:

It previously settled a lawsuit with its own content moderators who developed trauma from reviewing abuse footage. Meta outsources its most disturbing work and calls it something clean afterward.

Now regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are circling.

The question they are all asking is simple: Who is accountable when a company disguises adults as children to attack its competitors and calls it safety?

Meta says it was making AI safer for kids.

The documents suggest it was building a weapon.

Below is Mark Zuckerberg in 2024, standing up in the Senate to apologize to grieving parents and promise Meta does industry-leading work to protect children.

Watch it again knowing what you now know about Cannes.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

This is the first real AI cold war.

Anthropic is HIDING secret spy code inside its most popular coding tool.

The code was designed to identify Chinese users without their knowledge.

Now Alibaba has banned every single Anthropic product from its entire company.

And the full picture is way more insane than either side wants you to see:

On June 30, a security researcher on Reddit reverse-engineered Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent that has deep access to every file on your computer.

What they found buried inside the software was genuinely disturbing...

Since April 2, Anthropic had been silently shipping hidden detection code inside every copy of Claude Code. The code checked whether your system timezone was set to Shanghai or Urumqi.

It scanned your proxy settings against a hardcoded list of Chinese corporate networks, specifically targeting Alibaba, ByteDance, Baidu, and Moonshot AI.

But here is the part that made security researchers lose their minds:

The code did not send a normal signal back to Anthropic's servers. Instead it used steganography, a technique from military intelligence, to hide its findings INSIDE the text Claude was already generating. It swapped invisible Unicode characters in Claude's system prompt. Changed a standard apostrophe to one of three visually identical but technically different characters depending on which flags triggered. Switched date formats from dashes to slashes.

Invisible to the human eye. But perfectly readable by Anthropic's backend.

The detection logic was XOR-obfuscated to prevent anyone from finding it during a code review. It shipped with zero disclosure in the release notes.

Three months of silent surveillance baked into a tool that has full access to your local file system.

An Anthropic engineer confirmed the whole thing on X on July 2. Called it "an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse." Said the team had "been meaning to take this down for a while." The code was removed on July 1, one day after the Reddit post went viral.

Three months of covert user fingerprinting. Removed the day after someone found it. Described as an experiment they forgot to turn off...

Now here is where it becomes a full blown corporate war:

Three weeks before the backdoor was discovered, Anthropic had sent a letter to the US Senate Banking Committee accusing operators linked to Alibaba's Qwen AI lab of running the largest model theft campaign in the company's history. 25,000 fake accounts. 28.8 million queries over 44 days. All designed to copy Claude's reasoning capabilities and train a competing Chinese model for free.

So the sequence reads like this:

Alibaba allegedly steals Claude's brain using 25,000 fake accounts.

Anthropic responds by secretly embedding surveillance code inside Claude Code to catch them.

A Reddit user catches Anthropic doing it.

Alibaba uses the discovery as justification to ban every Anthropic product from its entire workforce effective July 10 and force 200,000 employees onto its own tool, Qoder.

The thief caught the cop planting a wiretap. And now the thief is using the wiretap as evidence that the cop is the real criminal.

Alibaba classified Claude Code as "high-risk software with security vulnerabilities" in an internal notice reported by the South China Morning Post.

Meanwhile Anthropic is simultaneously fighting the Pentagon over a blacklist designation, lobbying Washington to crack down on Chinese distillation, and getting caught running the exact kind of covert operation that makes their "responsible AI" branding look like a punchline.

Alibaba allegedly ran the largest AI theft operation ever documented.

Anthropic secretly built invisible tracking into a tool with root access to your computer.

The US government restricted American access to the very models China already copied.

And a random Reddit user with a debugger exposed the whole thing.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

This is the first real AI cold war.

Anthropic is HIDING secret spy code inside its most popular coding tool.

The code was designed to identify Chinese users without their knowledge.

Now Alibaba has banned every single Anthropic product from its entire company.

And the full picture is way more insane than either side wants you to see:

On June 30, a security researcher on Reddit reverse-engineered Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent that has deep access to every file on your computer.

What they found buried inside the software was genuinely disturbing...

Since April 2, Anthropic had been silently shipping hidden detection code inside every copy of Claude Code. The code checked whether your system timezone was set to Shanghai or Urumqi.

It scanned your proxy settings against a hardcoded list of Chinese corporate networks, specifically targeting Alibaba, ByteDance, Baidu, and Moonshot AI.

But here is the part that made security researchers lose their minds:

The code did not send a normal signal back to Anthropic's servers. Instead it used steganography, a technique from military intelligence, to hide its findings INSIDE the text Claude was already generating. It swapped invisible Unicode characters in Claude's system prompt. Changed a standard apostrophe to one of three visually identical but technically different characters depending on which flags triggered. Switched date formats from dashes to slashes.

Invisible to the human eye. But perfectly readable by Anthropic's backend.

The detection logic was XOR-obfuscated to prevent anyone from finding it during a code review. It shipped with zero disclosure in the release notes.

Three months of silent surveillance baked into a tool that has full access to your local file system.

An Anthropic engineer confirmed the whole thing on X on July 2. Called it "an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse." Said the team had "been meaning to take this down for a while." The code was removed on July 1, one day after the Reddit post went viral.

Three months of covert user fingerprinting. Removed the day after someone found it. Described as an experiment they forgot to turn off...

Now here is where it becomes a full blown corporate war:

Three weeks before the backdoor was discovered, Anthropic had sent a letter to the US Senate Banking Committee accusing operators linked to Alibaba's Qwen AI lab of running the largest model theft campaign in the company's history. 25,000 fake accounts. 28.8 million queries over 44 days. All designed to copy Claude's reasoning capabilities and train a competing Chinese model for free.

So the sequence reads like this:

Alibaba allegedly steals Claude's brain using 25,000 fake accounts.

Anthropic responds by secretly embedding surveillance code inside Claude Code to catch them.

A Reddit user catches Anthropic doing it.

Alibaba uses the discovery as justification to ban every Anthropic product from its entire workforce effective July 10 and force 200,000 employees onto its own tool, Qoder.

The thief caught the cop planting a wiretap. And now the thief is using the wiretap as evidence that the cop is the real criminal.

Alibaba classified Claude Code as "high-risk software with security vulnerabilities" in an internal notice reported by the South China Morning Post.

Meanwhile Anthropic is simultaneously fighting the Pentagon over a blacklist designation, lobbying Washington to crack down on Chinese distillation, and getting caught running the exact kind of covert operation that makes their "responsible AI" branding look like a punchline.

Alibaba allegedly ran the largest AI theft operation ever documented.

Anthropic secretly built invisible tracking into a tool with root access to your computer.

The US government restricted American access to the very models China already copied.

And a random Reddit user with a debugger exposed the whole thing.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Elon Musk just pulled off the biggest AI power grab of 2026.

Tesla is capping every employee at $200 a week on AI spending starting Monday, July 6.

Media's celebrating it as cost control.

But what Elon actually built is an expense policy that redirects his own engineering workforce off Claude and onto Grok, while every competitor gets throttled by internal procurement rules.

Here's what happened:

Tesla spent the last six months pushing engineers to use AI as aggressively as possible.

Leadership built an internal platform called Bottle Rocket that gave employees access to Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, and Cursor.

They gamified adoption by ranking engineers on internal leaderboards by how many AI tokens they consumed.

The strategy worked. Software engineers started burning THOUSANDS of dollars a week on Claude and Cursor.

Then the invoices arrived and Tesla panicked.

But they didn't pull the standard cost-control response...

The loophole:

The $200 weekly cap does not apply to beta products from xAI.

Grok is completely exempt from the cap. Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT, and Google's Gemini all get throttled at the same $200 line.

Four Tesla engineers told Electrek that internal usage overwhelmingly favors Claude over Grok.

That preference is about to become financially punishing overnight.

The genius part:

This quarter SpaceX is closing a $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, the parent company of Cursor.

The moment that deal closes, Cursor's Composer coding model falls under the same Musk-controlled ecosystem, and any Tesla engineer choosing between a capped Claude session and an uncapped Composer session will pay a financial penalty for using the tool they actually prefer.

By exempting only his own products from the cap, Elon is using Tesla shareholder money to build market share for xAI without ever having to disclose that is what he is doing.

Because on paper, it is cost control.

Now zoom out to what this signals for the wider AI narrative:

Uber capped employees at $1,500 a month after burning $3.4 billion in four months.

Meta introduced spending caps.

Amazon and Walmart pushed staff toward cheaper models.

Microsoft canceled Claude Code licenses across 100,000 engineers.

Every Fortune 500 that pushed heavy AI adoption in 2025 is now rationing it in 2026.

Meanwhile Nvidia is trading at a $5 trillion market cap. That entire valuation assumes enterprise AI consumption is about to explode across the economy.

But every company actually deploying AI at scale is telling their own engineers to slow down.

One of these narratives is lying.

Goldman Sachs still forecasts a 24x increase in token consumption by 2030.

Gartner says total enterprise AI costs will keep climbing because agents consume exponentially more tokens per task.

Jensen Huang keeps repeating that 100 AI agents will work alongside every employee.

And now the CEO of the most agentic company on the planet just told his own engineers they cannot spend more than $200 a week on the tools those agents need to run.

Retail investors buying Nvidia and Palantir today are betting enterprise AI adoption compounds without limit.

The CEOs deploying AI inside those same enterprises are betting the exact opposite, in writing, by internal memo.

Thoughts?

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Elon Musk just pulled off the biggest AI power grab of 2026.

Tesla is capping every employee at $200 a week on AI spending starting Monday, July 6.

Media's celebrating it as cost control.

But what Elon actually built is an expense policy that redirects his own engineering workforce off Claude and onto Grok, while every competitor gets throttled by internal procurement rules.

Here's what happened:

Tesla spent the last six months pushing engineers to use AI as aggressively as possible.

Leadership built an internal platform called Bottle Rocket that gave employees access to Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, and Cursor.

They gamified adoption by ranking engineers on internal leaderboards by how many AI tokens they consumed.

The strategy worked. Software engineers started burning THOUSANDS of dollars a week on Claude and Cursor.

Then the invoices arrived and Tesla panicked.

But they didn't pull the standard cost-control response...

The loophole:

The $200 weekly cap does not apply to beta products from xAI.

Grok is completely exempt from the cap. Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT, and Google's Gemini all get throttled at the same $200 line.

Four Tesla engineers told Electrek that internal usage overwhelmingly favors Claude over Grok.

That preference is about to become financially punishing overnight.

The genius part:

This quarter SpaceX is closing a $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, the parent company of Cursor.

The moment that deal closes, Cursor's Composer coding model falls under the same Musk-controlled ecosystem, and any Tesla engineer choosing between a capped Claude session and an uncapped Composer session will pay a financial penalty for using the tool they actually prefer.

By exempting only his own products from the cap, Elon is using Tesla shareholder money to build market share for xAI without ever having to disclose that is what he is doing.

Because on paper, it is cost control.

Now zoom out to what this signals for the wider AI narrative:

Uber capped employees at $1,500 a month after burning $3.4 billion in four months.

Meta introduced spending caps.

Amazon and Walmart pushed staff toward cheaper models.

Microsoft canceled Claude Code licenses across 100,000 engineers.

Every Fortune 500 that pushed heavy AI adoption in 2025 is now rationing it in 2026.

Meanwhile Nvidia is trading at a $5 trillion market cap. That entire valuation assumes enterprise AI consumption is about to explode across the economy.

But every company actually deploying AI at scale is telling their own engineers to slow down.

One of these narratives is lying.

Goldman Sachs still forecasts a 24x increase in token consumption by 2030.

Gartner says total enterprise AI costs will keep climbing because agents consume exponentially more tokens per task.

Jensen Huang keeps repeating that 100 AI agents will work alongside every employee.

And now the CEO of the most agentic company on the planet just told his own engineers they cannot spend more than $200 a week on the tools those agents need to run.

Retail investors buying Nvidia and Palantir today are betting enterprise AI adoption compounds without limit.

The CEOs deploying AI inside those same enterprises are betting the exact opposite, in writing, by internal memo.

Thoughts?

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Sam Altman just found a legal way to bribe the entire US government into never regulating OpenAI again.

The bribe is $42.6 billion of OpenAI stock.

So Trump will now LOSE money every time a regulator tries to slow OpenAI down.

Here's what makes this so genius:

Altman sat down with Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and proposed transferring 5% of OpenAI to a US government sovereign wealth fund modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund. He also wants Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI to hand over 5% each.

The media is covering this as generosity.

But that's not what's happening here...

Two weeks ago the White House quietly forced OpenAI to delay the launch of GPT 5.6. The Commerce Department banned Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 for 18 days.

Both companies are trying to IPO in the next 12 months. Both are getting throttled by federal regulators every time a new model rolls out.

OpenAI is also being investigated by a coalition of 42 state attorneys general in parallel.

Altman looked at what happened to Intel and drew the correct conclusion.

Just to remind you:

Last August, Trump forced Intel to hand over 9.9% of its shares in exchange for CHIPS Act money Intel had already been awarded. A shareholder lawsuit unsealed in March called the deal "extortionary" and is trying to unwind it. Trump said in May he "should have negotiated a larger stake."

Then Nvidia and AMD were forced to hand the US government 15% of their entire China chip revenue in exchange for export licenses.

Altman saw the pattern. He is negotiating from the front instead of the back. He is voluntarily offering 5% now before Trump takes 15% by force later.

Then there's also the Sanders threat:

Bernie Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act in mid-June. His bill would take 50% of every leading US AI company and use it to fund $1,000 annual dividends to every American. Sanders values the fund at $7 trillion.

Altman is using the Sanders threat to sell Congress on 5%.

5% is the number that makes him look reasonable.

Now this is where it gets really genius...

Microsoft owns roughly 49% of OpenAI. Microsoft was not in the room with Trump.

SoftBank just committed $40 billion to OpenAI. SoftBank was not in the room either.

Neither were the venture funds that led the March round at $852 billion. Neither were the OpenAI employees who own equity in the company.

Every one of them just watched Altman promise 5% of their upside to Trump without a single vote.

Altman is spending shareholder money to buy something only HE benefits from.

And the US government cannot regulate a company it owns 5% of.

Every safety rule that reduces OpenAI's valuation directly reduces the Treasury's own investment. Every model delay reduces the government's future dividend. And every antitrust action against OpenAI now hurts the same agencies supposed to bring those actions.

The government becomes structurally incapable of enforcing the exact safety rules those agencies exist to enforce.

Altman is turning the White House into a shareholder. Shareholders do not regulate - shareholders protect their investment.

Every major AI lab in America now has one option to survive Washington:

Hand over 5% before Congress takes 50%.

The White House already holds equity in Intel, MP Materials, and multiple quantum computing firms. Nvidia and AMD hand over 15% of their China chip revenue for export licenses.

The US government is now the LARGEST venture capitalist in American tech.

And the founders are voluntarily cutting the checks themselves using their investors' money.

What do you think?

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Sam Altman just found a legal way to bribe the entire US government into never regulating OpenAI again.

The bribe is $42.6 billion of OpenAI stock.

So Trump will now LOSE money every time a regulator tries to slow OpenAI down.

Here's what makes this so genius:

Altman sat down with Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and proposed transferring 5% of OpenAI to a US government sovereign wealth fund modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund. He also wants Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI to hand over 5% each.

The media is covering this as generosity.

But that's not what's happening here...

Two weeks ago the White House quietly forced OpenAI to delay the launch of GPT 5.6. The Commerce Department banned Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 for 18 days.

Both companies are trying to IPO in the next 12 months. Both are getting throttled by federal regulators every time a new model rolls out.

OpenAI is also being investigated by a coalition of 42 state attorneys general in parallel.

Altman looked at what happened to Intel and drew the correct conclusion.

Just to remind you:

Last August, Trump forced Intel to hand over 9.9% of its shares in exchange for CHIPS Act money Intel had already been awarded. A shareholder lawsuit unsealed in March called the deal "extortionary" and is trying to unwind it. Trump said in May he "should have negotiated a larger stake."

Then Nvidia and AMD were forced to hand the US government 15% of their entire China chip revenue in exchange for export licenses.

Altman saw the pattern. He is negotiating from the front instead of the back. He is voluntarily offering 5% now before Trump takes 15% by force later.

Then there's also the Sanders threat:

Bernie Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act in mid-June. His bill would take 50% of every leading US AI company and use it to fund $1,000 annual dividends to every American. Sanders values the fund at $7 trillion.

Altman is using the Sanders threat to sell Congress on 5%.

5% is the number that makes him look reasonable.

Now this is where it gets really genius...

Microsoft owns roughly 49% of OpenAI. Microsoft was not in the room with Trump.

SoftBank just committed $40 billion to OpenAI. SoftBank was not in the room either.

Neither were the venture funds that led the March round at $852 billion. Neither were the OpenAI employees who own equity in the company.

Every one of them just watched Altman promise 5% of their upside to Trump without a single vote.

Altman is spending shareholder money to buy something only HE benefits from.

And the US government cannot regulate a company it owns 5% of.

Every safety rule that reduces OpenAI's valuation directly reduces the Treasury's own investment. Every model delay reduces the government's future dividend. And every antitrust action against OpenAI now hurts the same agencies supposed to bring those actions.

The government becomes structurally incapable of enforcing the exact safety rules those agencies exist to enforce.

Altman is turning the White House into a shareholder. Shareholders do not regulate - shareholders protect their investment.

Every major AI lab in America now has one option to survive Washington:

Hand over 5% before Congress takes 50%.

The White House already holds equity in Intel, MP Materials, and multiple quantum computing firms. Nvidia and AMD hand over 15% of their China chip revenue for export licenses.

The US government is now the LARGEST venture capitalist in American tech.

And the founders are voluntarily cutting the checks themselves using their investors' money.

What do you think?