Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de

Working @Codethink.

[Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de @vgrade]

https://t.co/YiyvLOOupr what a great service

[Danny Shaw @DannyShawNews]

On the murder of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Singh Digwa, it is worth reading this paragraph, below, of Judge William Mousley KC's sentencing remarks.

While we await the investigation, the judge probably has the most complete view of what happened - and the impact of Digwa's lies:

[Joey13 @mathsismagic19]

@afneil

[Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de @vgrade]

@TRobinsonNewEra Nothing to do with Khan or football. Same result at concerts, eg Glastonbury. It doesn't have to be this way. https://t.co/MbfJqmXusm

[Alternative News @AlternatNews]

The UN must open the Strait of Hormuz for us - Rubio

"What is the purpose of the UN?! The UN was supposed to be a place where you could peacefully resolve global conflict." 🤷‍♂️😎

“We are taking it to the UN”.

The US condemned the UN for years, because the UN wanted to peacefully resolve conflicts, and objected to American and Israeli wars.

The US must be in dire straits (pun intended) if they now beg the UN for help.

[Bull Theory @BullTheoryio]

🚨Michael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbers.

Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake.

He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing.

Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor.

Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale.

Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models.

But here is what Burry is flagging.

Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory.

They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies.

Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle.

Now here is where American retirees enter the picture.

Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit.

Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene.

Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans.

When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center.

The numbers inside Athene are most alarming.

Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight.

Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets.

Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth.

The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times.

Burry's says:
Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing.

- Nvidia books the revenue.
- Apollo collects the fees.
- xAI gets the computing power.
- And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.

[Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de @vgrade]

Full interview Nicola Sturgeon's First Interview Since Husband Convicted: https://t.co/iu1zDpwXUg via @bbciplayer

[Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de @vgrade]

@behaviorpanel what's the significance of the feet movement at 1:45?

[Women Won't Wheesht 👩‍🦰 @TheParty1sOver]

All these silly billies didn't mention embezzlement to Nicola!🤦‍♀️That would have alerted her!! She thought you were moaning about the missing £667K of ringfenced funds!! If you'd mentioned EMBEZZLEMENT she'd have listened!! @CallieMac009
Wouldn't she?🤔

[thebehaviorpanel @behaviorpanel]

👋 The Hand Signal That Could SAVE A LIFE

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Tony Blair is the living embodiment of what happens when political office becomes a down payment on future plunder. Ejected in 2007 by his own MPs as a massive liability, he bequeathed Britain a wild casino economy primed for the 2008 crash. And when the British economy crashed and burned, Mr Blair kept quiet while honing his skills at securing power by other means.

His first job, after his ejection from 10 Downing Street, was as the West’s Middle East envoy, with a supposed emphasis on Gaza. It took six painful years for Mr Blair’s tenure to prove a failure so profound it amounted to active complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing, in Palestinian erasure, and in paving the ground for the ongoing genocide.

Soon after, the Chilcot Inquiry demolished Blair’s Iraq lies, exposing him as a liar, a chancer and a war criminal responsible for countless corpses of Iraqis, but also of British soldiers.

Then came Blair’s real innovation: the financialisation of the ex-premiership itself. The Tony Blair Institute, fuelled by £130 million from Oracle's Larry Ellison—coincidentally, the largest individual donor to the Friends of the IDF—became a shadow state, brokering governance contracts for autocrats and companies like Palantir that weaponise AI to produce mega-death abroad and full-on surveillance of Western populations.

Now, in May 2026, this corporate fixer issues a 5700 word tantrum demanding that Labour embrace Trump even more than Starmer already has, denounce what is left of Labour’s betrayed Green New Deal, and trash the remnants of workers' rights. This is not the wisdom of an aging statesman. It is the frantic squirming of a man fearing his grip on oligarchic power might soon wane and whose entire post-10 Downing Street existence depends on preventing the many from ever reclaiming what the few have plundered.

https://t.co/1Onlpx9Nkh

[Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭 @ThierryBorgeat]

The price to rent an Nvidia H200 just collapsed from $7/hr to $4/hr in three weeks.

A -40% drop in the cost of the single most strategic asset in tech.

When the underlying commodity that powers your entire thesis loses 40% of its value in a month, that usually means one of two things: supply finally caught up, or demand was never as deep as the headlines said.

Either way, somebody is selling.

So why is the AI trade still pricing in scarcity?

[Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de @vgrade]

@Babble____ Keir agrees, https://t.co/WY5rq2CbAd

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

“Under a Labour government we would freeze energy bills. We wouldn’t allow them to go up.”

~ Keir Starmer

Yet another lie.

A typical energy bill will rise by £221 a year from July.

[VeryBritishProblems @SoVeryBritish]

What British people have in their freezers:

-Frozen peas (some in a bag, some rolling around loose)
-Full bag of oven chips
-Another bag with three oven chips left in it
-Tupperware half-filled with unidentified brown stuff
-Half a scoop of mash potato that you saved for some reason
-An empty box that used to contain ice lollies that fools you every time you look in it but you still don’t throw it away
-Bag of hash browns
-Some sort of meat joint (possibly lamb) from 2014
-A near-empty ice cream tub
-Something that might be chilli or might be bolognese but you didn’t label it
-Some party food from three Christmases ago
-An empty bag that used to contain ice cubes
-A pack of chicken or fish that you needed to eat but you chucked it in the freezer because you ordered a takeaway instead
-One drawer that doesn’t open anymore

[Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de @vgrade]

If it was a political choice then , it's a political choice now. Freeze Energy Bills Now

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

“Under a Labour government we would freeze energy bills. We wouldn’t allow them to go up.”

~ Keir Starmer

Yet another lie.

A typical energy bill will rise by £221 a year from July.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

“Under a Labour government we would freeze energy bills. We wouldn’t allow them to go up.”

~ Keir Starmer

Yet another lie.

A typical energy bill will rise by £221 a year from July.

[David Miliband @DMiliband]

Right now, there are three warning signs that this Ebola outbreak could be particularly difficult to contain:

[Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de @vgrade]

@JournalistJill Ice Maker £1265

[Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de @vgrade]

List of items from Murrell's embezzlement sounds like an episode from the Generation Game

[Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de @vgrade]

Full pint ?

[Martin Brook https://bsky.app/profile/vgrade.de @vgrade]

Net zero in the office including local LLM on Strix Halo. Plenty of solar but limited by battery for rest of house use.

[Fesshole🧻 @fesshole]

I'm one of those audiophiles who go on about speaker settings and placement, cables and DACs to play all my vinyl and high bitrate music, and force people listen to 'my incredible setup'. Turns out I've had my left/right speakers the wrong way round. For 7 years.