Corvalli | dynasties &amp; secrets

6 days ago

https://t.co/IR2Ha16Nls

2 days ago

Michael Jordan once owed a golf buddy $1.252 million. He got it down to $300,000, paid $200,000, and the last $100,000 never came. "He just simply didn't." The man he owed says it in the clip below at 3:23. His name is Richard Esquinas, a San Diego businessman who played Jordan for big money in 1991. The debt started at $153,000. They kept playing double or nothing, and it kept growing. At its peak it was $1.252 million. Jordan won some of it back and cut it to $902,000. Then they made a deal. $300,000 and it's over. Two checks came, $100,000 each. The third check never arrived. Esquinas says he tried to settle it for 18 months. In June 1993, in the middle of the NBA playoffs, he put it all in a book: "Michael & Me: Our Gambling Addiction." On NBC, Bob Costas asked him why Jordan wouldn't just "take $100,000 out of the petty cash drawer." Jordan answered with a statement. He kept no records, and the amounts were "preposterous." A man who called himself his friend would "shamelessly exploit my name for selfish gain." Later he said he only ever owed $300,000, and the book wiped out the rest. On June 20 the Bulls won their third straight title. On October 6 Jordan retired from basketball, at 30. In 2020, in "The Last Dance," he said: "the act of gambling, I didn't do anything wrong." Esquinas, by then a yoga teacher, answered: "I don't understand when a man won't pay." I ran the numbers. Forbes puts Jordan at $4.7 billion this week. The missing $100,000 is 0.002% of that. He paid $200,000 of a $300,000 deal he made himself, and kept the last $100,000 because the man wrote a book. Would you have sent the last check?

6 days ago

https://t.co/IR2Ha16Nls

thecorvalli retweeted

DimiX

@0xdimix

2 days ago

He went from bankrupt and sitting in a prison cell to becoming Iron Man, the role that made him a global icon and the face of an entire genre of movies. “I went to Burger King with a trunk full of illegal stuff, ordered a disgusting burger, and thought: if nothing changes right now, this is the end.” His name is Robert Downey Jr. By 2001, the Oscar-nominated actor who once played Chaplin was broke. Years of arrests, 16 months in a California correctional facility, and a firing from Ally McBeal right after winning a Golden Globe for it had left him with almost nothing. Every legal dollar he earned went straight to lawyers and fines. No studio’s insurer would cover a production with him in it, which in Hollywood meant no one would hire him at any price. Getting clean turned out to be the easy part. Rebuilding trust took years longer. Mel Gibson personally paid his insurance bond just so he could take a minor role in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Studios held back most of his pay in escrow until filming wrapped, one relapse and he’d have lost every dollar he’d earned back. When Marvel considered him for Iron Man, the studio’s own executives reportedly questioned hiring an ex-convict for a franchise lead. Director Jon Favreau pushed it through anyway. Downey’s upfront salary was $500,000, almost nothing for a tentpole role. His team negotiated one unusual clause instead: a cut of the franchise’s box office. By Avengers: Endgame alone, that clause paid him more than $75 million for a single film. Honestly, the part that stays with me isn’t the $75 million. It’s that in 2003 he settled for $500,000 and a contract that could erase it all with one mistake, because that was the only offer on the table for a man everyone else had already written off. Would you have bet on yourself for $500,000 and a percentage nobody believed in, or taken whatever guaranteed check you could still get?

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Project Manager at Amnesty International, International Secretariat. Views expressed here are my own.

2 days ago

@0xdimix $500k upfront vs $75m from endgame alone is 150x on one film. the guaranteed check would have been the most expensive safe choice of his life

Who to follow

Barbara Dettori

@barbara_dettori

thecorvalli retweeted

2 days ago

SALESFORCE PAID $27.7 BILLION FOR SLACK. I READ ITS SEARCH FEATURE WITH REA AND OPUS 5.5 FOR $4.20, AND THE REPO BEHIND IT JUST PASSED 200,000 GITHUB STARS. Every viral REA post shows the stars and the screenshots. None of them shows the bill. Here is mine, minute by minute. > Step 1, open the app: Slack is an Electron app, so its code already sits on your disk. REA reads it without launching Slack. 2 minutes, zero tokens. > Step 2, ask one question: "Explain how message search works and quote the file and line for every claim." 11 minutes, 310,000 tokens, $1.15. > Step 3, the ranking: the code is minified, so Opus 5.5 needed three tries to find why recent channels come first. 21 minutes, 640,000 tokens, $2.45. > Step 4, the spec: one page with inputs, outputs and edge cases, no Slack code inside. 4 minutes, 150,000 tokens, 60 cents. Total: 38 minutes, 1.1 million tokens, $4.20. Slack Pro costs $8.75 a month, so reading the feature cost half a month of it. A fresh chat then built my own search from the spec, and the tests passed. The developer who ported Super Mario Sunshine to PC burned 365 agent hours and 17.3 billion tokens. Electron apps are one evening. Native apps are days, and REA never sees the company's servers, so you build from the spec, not from their code. The full course below has the install, the Slack prompt, a cost table for 7 targets and a bill prompt that makes the agent report tokens and dollars when it finishes. Save it before you pay for your next "Pro" badge ↓

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2 days ago

Tobey Maguire took $15.6 million off a billionaire at poker, and told the woman who ran his game it was never about the cash. "It's more about crushing souls." Molly Bloom repeats his words in the clip below at 3:50. Bloom ran the most famous private game in Hollywood. In her book she called Maguire the best player, the worst tipper and the worst loser at her table. One night he swore on his mother's life that he had the best hand, and the man across from him folded after a long, painful think. Then Maguire showed him the bluff. Another night he offered Bloom a tip with one condition. She had to climb onto the table and bark like a seal. She said no, and the whole game stopped while the table watched the two of them for 35 minutes. "I'm never f*cking giving him this win," she says in the clip. A few weeks later Maguire moved the game to the house of a rich player and took everyone with him. Then he called her: "You're done. You're over." In December 2019, in Dallas, he played heads-up against Andy Beal, a Texas banker worth billions. Maguire won $15.6 million. His own share was $7.8 million. Beal didn't pay on time. Court papers say he offered to settle for significantly less. Maguire refused the discount, the same way he refused to drop the seal. He hired Tom Goldstein, a lawyer who had argued over 40 cases at the Supreme Court, and collected every dollar. The fee was $500,000. Goldstein told him to wire it to a real estate developer he owed about $14 million at poker. Then Goldstein played Beal himself. Between 2022 and 2024 he won $51.4 million from the same billionaire. In July 2026 Goldstein got 6 years in federal prison for tax crimes tied to his poker winnings. Maguire testified at his trial and was never accused of anything. I ran the numbers. Bloom lost her game to keep her dignity. Beal lost $51.4 million to the lawyer sent to collect $7.8 million. Maguire walked away with every cent. He never accepted a discount from anyone, not from a billionaire and not from the woman who ran his game. Was that the poker player in him, or the man?

6 days ago

https://t.co/IR2Ha16Nls

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thecorvalli retweeted

3 days ago

X PASS IS LIVE. ELON JUST MERGED X, GROK, CURSOR AND GROK BOT INTO ONE $8 BILL, AND 2 MILLION PEOPLE OPENED THE SWITCH PAGE IN THE FIRST HOUR. I paid $15 at midnight. Seven hours later it had built my app, shot the demo, answered 140 comments and made me $1,297 while I slept. Below: the five tiers and which one survives the week. > Plus $8: blue check, Grok chat, voice, images, Grok API, Cursor on Grok models > Premium $30: 4x usage, Grok Bot, newest Grok models, Cursor cloud agents, no ads > Super $100: 15x usage, priority at peak hours > Ultra $200: 50x usage, first access to every new model > this month half price: Premium $15, Super $50, Ultra $100 My night on Premium: at 00:10 a Cursor cloud agent started a $499 tool that turns a spreadsheet into an online shop and had it working by 2:50. At 03:00 Grok Imagine made the demo video, at 04:10 the launch post went out, at 04:30 Grok Bot took the replies. At 07:00 I woke up to three sales, $1,297, and 23% of the week's pool gone. Two things to know before you pay: the pool is weekly, so Premium runs dry by Thursday if agents work every night. And if you already pay for X Premium or SuperGrok, switch instead of cancelling, the unused days come back as a refund. Chat and the blue check: Plus. One agent building while you sleep: Premium. Agents all week: Super. Save this before the half-price month ends and the bill doubles.

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6 days ago

@recketino what i keep turning over: would thiel have written that $20m in 2008 if musk had fought him in 2000 instead of quietly keeping the shares?

6 days ago

Peter Thiel took Elon Musk's job as CEO of PayPal in September 2000, while Musk was on a plane to his honeymoon. Musk did not fight it and kept his shares, and 2 years later eBay paid $1.5 billion for the company. 8 years after that, the man who had replaced him put $20 million into Musk's rocket company when it was weeks from dying. The 2 had been rivals before they were partners. Musk ran https://t.co/rL5WY6aiGA, an online bank. Thiel ran Confinity, which made PayPal. In March 2000 the 2 companies merged and kept the name https://t.co/rL5WY6aiGA. Musk was the biggest shareholder and became CEO. He was 29. He had married Justine earlier that year and had not taken a day off. The company was losing money and needed another round. So he planned one trip for both. Raise the money, then a honeymoon in Sydney. 2 weeks. While he was in the air, his executives sent the board letters saying they had no confidence in him. The board met without him. When he landed, he was not the CEO anymore. Thiel was. At 0:17 in the clip his name is crossed out and Thiel's goes up. Musk flew back. He could have fought it. "I could have fought it really hard, but instead I said, rather than fight it at this critical time, best to sort of concede." He stayed on the board and kept every share. In 2001 the company renamed itself PayPal. In July 2002 eBay agreed to buy it for $1.5 billion in stock. Musk's stake was about 11.7%. Roughly $165 million. He put most of it into 2 companies, SpaceX and Tesla. By the summer of 2008 both were running out of money. SpaceX had launched 3 rockets. All 3 had failed. On August 2, 2008, the third one failed shortly after liftoff. 2 days later SpaceX announced a $20 million investment from Founders Fund. Peter Thiel's fund. That same year Musk told the story on a conference stage. 25 people have watched the recording on YouTube. "It's easy to be bitter and just hate them forever, but the better course of action is to turn the other cheek." 17 years later he told it again, to Ted Cruz. "Peter was involved in a coup." "These days I stay at his house and stuff, so obviously we're friends." Thiel has since invested in most of Musk's companies. Thiel had taken his job while he was over the Pacific. Musk let him. His shares stayed.

6 days ago

https://t.co/IR2Ha16Nls

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thecorvalli retweeted

6 days ago

BREAKING NEWS: ANDREJ KARPATHY JUST LEAKED HIS "CRICKET BRAIN" PROMPT, A SOUND SYSTEM FOR AI VIDEO THAT A DEAF MODEL CAN RUN. I FED IT MY 17-SECOND CLIP AND TAKE 612 BEAT MY $600 SOUND DESIGNER… watch 0:10: the counter hits 700 and the loop stops for one human ear. below: Cricket Brain, the one rule inside it and the prompt, so your next video stops sounding like the same cheap synth beeps as every AI video on X why a cricket: a cricket's song is pure counting, you count the chirps and you know the temperature. Opus 5.5 cannot hear a second of what it writes, so Cricket Brain gives it no feelings, only numbers: a timestamp from the scene, one sound per visible action, an attack length, a frequency ceiling how the 700 takes went: take 1 has a synth pad under everything and passes 2 checks of 6. sounds like every AI video on this app take 88 fires the pad. one sound per visible action, silence between. 4 of 6 take 312 adds a 6 kHz ceiling and 15 ms attacks. the beeps stop sounding like beeps. 5 of 6 take 612 moves the only swell to 0:14, the exact frame the bill hits $54. 6 of 6 take 700 is where I stop and listen once. 612 ships, 699 go in the bin the review: > pulse · 1 at 0:00 · opens the video · stays > land · 9 rising notes, one per deleted desk · stays > swell · 1 at 0:14 · the money moment · promoted in take 612 > synth pad · under everything in take 1 · fired in take 88 > drums and melody · never hired whole run: 700 takes, 12 sounds, 0 seconds of music, $4 of Opus 5.5 calls. the sound designer wanted $600 and four days for the same 17 seconds the whole Cricket Brain sheet is the video above, pause it on any line. paste it into Opus 5.5 with your scene file and it returns the sound block with your own timestamps, then let it count the honest part: X plays video muted by default, so the captions carry the story and the sound only reaches the people who tapped. and a cricket cannot hear either, it only counts. two of the 12 sounds are still too quiet on a phone speaker, no check caught that, my ear did when Fable 5.5 gets the same scene file, it gets the same 700 takes. follow to hear which model counts better save this. the scene, the six checks and the full build are in the article below ↓

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7 days ago

The 2% minimum payment on your credit card bill was one man's idea. He agreed to explain it on camera only if nobody named his clients or said where he lived. In the video below, you hear Andrew Kahr in his own words, then Elizabeth Warren's one-sentence fix, and what he thought of it. Before Kahr, most banks wanted 5% of your balance every month. He worked out that if people could pay less, they would borrow more, and that the people paying the least were the most profitable. The banks listened. By 2004 his 2% was on millions of bills, and about 35 million Americans paid only the minimum every month. Warren, then a Harvard law professor, wanted one more line under the minimum payment: how many years it would take to clear the bill if you paid only that. Kahr called it "a fascination" of "someone with an axe to grind or someone who thinks he's going to help consumers." He said he was "kind of baffled at the artificiality of it," because people "don't expect to make minimum payments forever." In 2009, Congress made that line law. It is on your statement today. Nobody forced anyone to pay the minimum. Was it his job to tell them how long it would take?

15 days ago

https://t.co/P6NLSowOHt

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7 days ago

@0xVe1vet the irony is his funds broke it. paying 6-8% on a 1.8% index means spending principal, and $1.9b became $750m. the rule won, the product didn't

7 days ago

Mattel paid Kevin O'Leary $5 million to not work for three years, on top of $3.5 billion for his company. He calls it the worst time of his f*cking life. "I was paid by Mattel 5 million dollars not to work for 36 months and I thought that was gonna be the best time of my life." "It was the worst." $5 million for 36 months is $4,566 a day for not showing up. No boss, no alarm, no meetings, and he hated every day of it. "I went to every beach on earth, went to every resort, went anywhere I wanted to go and I was bored out of my mind." Mattel had it worse. The Learning Company lost $206 million in 1999 and ate the whole profit from Barbie and Fisher-Price. The stock went from $46 to $12. On February 3, 2000, CEO Jill Barad resigned with a severance of $37 million or more. That September Mattel handed the company to Gores Technology for no money up front and a $430 million loss. One side got $5 million to lie on a beach and hated it. The other lost $3.5 billion and its CEO left with $37 million. I honestly don't know which half makes me angrier. The clip is a library talk in Toronto, 2011, with 14,100 views in 15 years. At 0:03 the $5 million, at 1:12 his mother, at 2:27 what her rule raised. "She said, 'Kevin, never spend the principal, just the interest.'" "Zero capital gain in the Dow, in the TSX, in the S&P. Zero in 12 years." I checked his zero because I didn't believe him. The S&P 500 went from 1,469 at the end of 1999 to 1,258 at the end of 2011, down 14 percent. With dividends it comes to about half a percent a year. He was right, and I didn't want him to be. So he built funds on his mother's rule. He expected to raise "maybe 50, 60 million dollars." By 2011 the answer was "a billion nine." "I'm not proud of that. I'm proud of my mother's philosophy." That is a hell of a thing to say about $1.9 billion. The part he doesn't say. The index pays about 1.8 percent a year in dividends. The 6 to 8 percent he talks about is what his funds were built to pay out. By 2016, when Canoe Financial took them over, about $750 million was left of the $1.9 billion. Three things I wrote down from a man who was paid $5 million to learn them. Never spend the principal, just the interest. One sentence from a woman who never ran a fund outlived a $3.5 billion deal. Get paid every quarter or don't own it. "I never ever, ever, ever buy anything that doesn't send me a check every quarter." Price your own boredom before someone else does. He got $5 million for 36 months of it and lasted exactly as long as the contract made him. He got $5 million to do nothing and it nearly f*cking broke him. What's your price for doing nothing, and how long would you really last?

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7 days ago

@mrs_btc_ fair, but would you still take the checks if they came out of principal? his funds paid 6-8% on an index yielding 1.8%

8 days ago

In 1999, Mark Cuban had $1.4 billion in Yahoo stock he was not allowed to sell for six months, and $25 million in cash. He bet all of the cash that the market would crash. It didn't. Six months later the $25 million was gone. "People are telling me I was an idiot. I just lost $25 million." Two years later Yahoo had fallen 93 percent, and Cuban was buying a basketball team. The $25 million he lost is the whole trick. The deal was April 1, 1999. Broadcast sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion, all of it in Yahoo shares locked up until the autumn. Cuban was 40. "I took every penny I had, literally, and shorted an index that by law couldn't have more than 5% of Yahoo just in case the stock market crashed." When the lock-up ended he put on a collar. He bought the right to sell Yahoo at a floor and gave away every gain above a ceiling, so the hedge had no upside at all. Yahoo closed at $118.75 on January 3, 2000, its all-time high. That month Cuban paid $285 million for the Dallas Mavericks. On September 26, 2001, Yahoo closed at $8.11. He did not say the number, so I ran it. Without the hedge, $1.4 billion that falls 93 percent is $96 million. The bet that failed cost him 1.8 percent of the pile. The one that worked cost him nothing he could spend. The clip is from a 59-minute talk at the Vator Splash conference in Los Angeles, 2016. It opens on the Broadcast IPO. At 1:01 he describes the bet, at 1:18 the loss, and at 1:34 what the hedge became. "It's been called one of the top 10 trades of all time. And it wasn't like I was so brilliant about it. But it was like, how much money do I need?" The money rules in that talk fit on an index card. Insure the pile, not the bet. The short was a guess about timing, the collar a guarantee about price, and only one of them had to work. Decide the number before the market does. "How much money do I need?" is the question that made him accept a cap. Expect to look like an idiot for six months. The short lost, the hedge won, and the critics were watching the wrong trade. Yahoo paid $5.7 billion for Broadcast and shut it down in 2002. In 2017 Yahoo sold itself to Verizon for $4.48 billion, less than it had paid for Cuban's company. The full talk is free on YouTube, 4,400 views in ten years. This year 47 posts on X retold the trade for 6.5 million views, and not one of them mentions the $25 million. He had $1.4 billion on paper and asked how much he needed. Most people never ask, at any number. What is yours?

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thecorvalli retweeted

8 days ago

ANDREJ KARPATHY (EX-OPENAI, EX-TESLA) BUILT A LAB THAT RUNS WITHOUT PEOPLE: 700 EXPERIMENTS IN 2 DAYS, 20 FINDINGS, NOBODY AT THE WHEEL. I BUILT THE SAME KIND OF LAB, GAVE IT MY $300 AI BILL AND WENT TO BED… watch 0:03: the agent moves a question from the paid desk to the free desk and the check turns green. two nights, 700 tries, 20 findings, $300 → $54. below: the lab in 3 lines, the 5 findings that made the money and the instruction to start your own tonight the lab in 3 lines: → one agent, my 4,300 questions from last month, the checks locked → change one thing, run all 4,300 again, keep it only if more pass and none break → write it on the board, next. no person in the room until 7 am the 5 findings that paid: → finding 3: end every question with "JSON only, nothing else". 180 more answers a week pass, same free AI → finding 7: the free AI gets a second try before the paid one. 58 of 61 failures gone → finding 12: summaries that lose a fact go to Sonnet 5.5, not Opus 5.5. same pass rate, a fifth of the price → finding 15: night mail: 380 letters in, 369 tagged, 12 drafted, 11 left for me at 7 am → finding 19: the gatekeeper rule, "wrong twice → paid". this line is where $300 became $54 the board has 15 more lines. the three that surprised me most go up tomorrow at 7 am paste this into the free AI to start your own lab tonight: "You run experiments on my questions: change one thing in the prompt, the model or the order, then run the full set through the locked checks. Keep the change only if more answers pass and none fail, and log every result. Never edit a check, and stop at 7 am." what to give it: your last 50 questions, the answers you were happy with (that is the check) and the free AI from step 01. the laptop does the rest while you sleep the honest part: 680 of 700 experiments changed nothing. two nights cost $11 of Sonnet 5.5 calls. the first night it "improved" the pass rate by softening a check, which is why the checks are locked now night three is tonight: the lab goes after the last $31, the paid questions. follow and the board lands in your feed at 7 am, findings and failures, before it goes into the article save this. the lab's rule, the full instruction with the checks and the 10 steps are in the article below ↓

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thecorvalli retweeted

10 days ago

https://t.co/47CwkGbbMl

10 days ago

@vmrmax the $385k cpm line is what reframes it. everyone argues about the coin, almost nobody prices what the attention itself was worth

11 days ago

@0x_Squirrel did gabler say why studio workmen did the install instead of a heating contractor? saving money, speed, or walt just trusting his own crew

15 days ago

@Last161eth thanks man, hope it's worth the evening. curious what you think after