MikeChu

Engineer | Individual Investor | Individual Entrepreneur

[MikeChu @VSTP7]

@MarioNawfal The biggest lesson I have learned is: if you realize you have made a mistake, stop immediately and correct it.

[Jensen Huang @JensenHuang]

Gavin, spot on.

AI is bringing manufacturing back to America and reindustrializing the nation after decades of offshoring.

AI is creating demand that drives investment in our aging power grid and sustainable energy, powered by market forces, not subsidies.

AI is creating construction and manufacturing jobs across energy plants, chip fabs and data centers.

AI is creating new companies and industries. $400 billion has been invested in AI startups in the past six months alone.

Builders must partner with communities to build in their hometowns, earn trust and create local benefits.

We have an opportunity to create lasting benefits for communities across America and help America lead the next industrial revolution.

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Deployment of Roman confirmed

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe

Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far.

And it will be stunningly beautiful.

[MikeChu @VSTP7]

The fusion of everyone's Iron Man and JARVIS in the physical world

[phil beisel @pbeisel]

The merger of Tesla and SpaceX will likely happen because of Optimus.

Optimus is Starmind. Starmind is Optimus. Ecosystem driving product.

Starmind is the central character in the Optimus story. The physical bot is simply its logical endpoint.

An unassailable moat for the companies.

Read my article. It explains why.

@CernBasher and I also discuss this at length on our pod https://t.co/tAGx9ngOCk starting at 1:05.

[MikeChu @VSTP7]

@pbeisel The fusion of everyone's Iron Man and JARVIS in the physical world

[Li Zexin 李泽欣 @XH_Lee23]

Here's a video list for people who haven't been to China and people who want to come again for more.

A Chinese photographer spent 5 years, visited 220 cities, and captured all of this.

The place name is in the upper left.

[Starlink @Starlink]

For those impacted by the devastating earthquake in Colombia, Starlink is providing free service through September 12 to new and existing customers. We are also deploying Starlink to support emergency response agencies and restore connectivity in the hardest-hit areas → https://t.co/JttML6too3

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

True

[This Week in AI @ThisWeeknAI]

Both this week’s guests agree with Sam Altman, that we’re already in a version of the Singularity. But they can’t quite agree on why.

On TWiAI Ep 24, Grant Lee of Gamma and Philip Johnston of Starcloud help us define what that word actually means, and explain why - if the Singularity is here - things have not gotten more WEIRD.

0:00 Guest intros: Grant Lee (Gamma) and Philip Johnston (Starcloud)
1:22 Nvidia's open weight letter
2:16 Everyone loves open models
8:11 Starcloud's first H100 in space
19:47 Series A extension economics
20:39 How Gamma stayed lean and balanced work and fun
30:40 Betting on a compute-constrained world
35:48 Different approaches to pricing
44:59 Where does the AI moat really live?
57:41 Are we in the Singularity?
1:04:42 Starcloud's mission to Alpha Centauri

cc: @thisisgrantlee, @GammaApp, @PhilipJohnston, @Starcloud_, @jason, @alex
🎥 Watch the full episode here 👇

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet.

The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax.

So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K.

Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail.

Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card.

The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price.

Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

🤨

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

South Africa won’t allow Starlink to be licensed, even though I was BORN THERE, simply because I am not Black!

We were offered many times the opportunity to bribe our way to a license by pretending that a Black guy runs Starlink SA, but I have refused to do so on principle.

Racism should not be rewarded no matter to which race it is applied.

Shame on the racist politicians in South Africa. They should be shown no respect whatsoever anywhere in the world and shunned for being unashamedly RACISTS!

[Daily Loud @DailyLoud]

Woman claims she makes more money than her boyfriend of 3 years and supports him financially while he figures things out.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇺🇸 A @Tesla pulled off a split-second crash avoidance move that looked straight-up impossible.

It’s the kind of moment AI and robotics fans live for: proof FSD tech could actually make roads safer.

Great reflexes… for a car.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

North Korean intelligence agents built an entire fake company to compromise one JavaScript developer. And it worked.

UNC1069 didn't hack Axios. They befriended its maintainer. They cloned a real company founder's identity, built a branded Slack workspace with fake employee profiles and LinkedIn post channels, then scheduled a Microsoft Teams call with what appeared to be a full team. During the call, a fake error message said his system needed an update. He installed it. That update was the RAT.

From one developer's laptop, they had everything: npm credentials, publishing access, the keys to a package installed in 80% of cloud environments. Axios gets 100 million downloads per week. The attackers published two poisoned versions at 12:21 AM UTC on a Sunday night, tagging both the latest and legacy branches within 39 minutes. The malicious dependency had been pre-staged 18 hours earlier with a clean decoy version to build registry history. Three separate RAT payloads were pre-built for macOS, Windows, and Linux. The malware self-deleted after execution to erase forensic evidence.

The poisoned versions were live for about three hours before npm pulled them. Huntress observed 135 endpoints across all operating systems calling the attacker's command-and-control server during that window. Wiz found the malicious versions in roughly 3% of environments scanned. Every affected machine needs full credential rotation: npm tokens, AWS keys, SSH keys, CI/CD secrets, everything in .env files.

The part that keeps getting worse: this isn't isolated. The same threat cluster compromised Trivy (a security scanner), KICS, LiteLLM, and multiple GitHub Actions in the two weeks before Axios. Google estimates hundreds of thousands of stolen secrets are now circulating from these combined attacks. The maintainer had 2FA enabled. He said himself: "I have 2FA/MFA on practically everything." The exact method of token compromise is still undetermined.

One person. One fake Teams call. 100 million weekly downloads weaponized in under three hours. The npm ecosystem runs on mass trust in individual maintainers who volunteer their time, and North Korean intelligence now has a repeatable playbook for turning that trust into a delivery mechanism.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Bukele made a bet that security is the foundation layer. That everything, GDP, tourism, foreign investment, diaspora return, builds on top of safety. The numbers say he was right. The method will be debated for decades.

In 2015, El Salvador had a murder rate of 106.3 per 100,000. The literal murder capital of the world. Six years of failed truces, 16 killings per day, entire neighborhoods paying monthly extortion to MS-13 just to keep their doors open.

Today the murder rate is 1.9 per 100,000. That's a 98% drop. In 2025 it fell further to 1.36. In 2026 so far, the country is on pace for 0.22 homicides per day. El Salvador is now safer than the United States, Canada, and most of Western Europe.

The second-order effects are where the real story lives. Tourism went from 1.7 million visitors in 2019 to 3.9 million in 2024 to over 4 million in 2025. Tourism's share of GDP doubled from 6.4% to 14% in five years. A guy whose father was killed by gang members over $200/month extortion demands left the country in 2014, came back in 2024, and opened an Airbnb.

85,000 arrests. 80,000+ gang members detained. The world's highest incarceration rate at 1,086 per 100,000. A 40,000-capacity mega-prison with plans to double it to 80,000. 94% approval rating. Re-elected with 85% of the vote while the constitution previously banned consecutive terms.

The tradeoff is real and it's worth stating clearly: suspended due process, mass detention, documented cases of torture and abuse, zero transparency, dismantled judicial independence, no free press access. Every human rights organization on earth has flagged it. The constitutional court that allowed his re-election was packed with his own appointees.

And his approval rating went up.

Murder capital of the world to safer than the United States in seven years. 106 per 100,000 to 1.9. Tourism doubled. GDP contribution tripled. The JW Marriott is breaking ground in a city where taxi drivers wouldn't cross certain blocks a decade ago.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The universe is a time machine and the math on the distance ladder will break your brain.

2,000 light-years gets you Rome. Go to 500 light-years and you're watching the Black Plague consume Europe in real time. At 80 light-years, you catch World War II. At 4.24 light-years, the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, the light arriving right now left Earth in 2022. Someone there is watching us argue about whether GPT-4 is sentient.

Now scale that in the other direction. The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away. An observer there right now sees Earth before modern humans existed. They're watching early hominids figure out stone tools. They have no idea what's coming.

The closest alien civilization is statistically estimated at 33,000 light-years away. They would be watching humans invent agriculture for the first time. Writing hasn't been invented yet. Cities don't exist. From their perspective, we are a species that just figured out how to plant wheat.

Here's what makes the physics cruel. To actually see a human-sized object on Earth from just 20 light-years away, you'd need a telescope array roughly 100 million kilometers across. That's more than half the diameter of Earth's orbit around the Sun. To see Rome from 2,000 light-years? The optics required would be larger than our solar system.

The light is real. The photons that bounced off Roman soldiers are still traveling outward at 300,000 km/s right now, carrying that information forever. The universe has a perfect recording of every moment in Earth's history, expanding in all directions at the speed of light.

The problem was never distance. The problem is that no civilization, no matter how advanced, can build a lens big enough to read it.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

A social media acquisition turned into the data layer for an AI company, turned into the compute backbone for a space infrastructure company preparing the largest IPO in history.

"No plan" is what it looked like from the outside. From the inside, it was a supply chain.

Twitter in 2022 had 7,500 employees and shipped maybe two major features a year. Musk cut 80% of the staff. The remaining 1,500 shipped Community Notes, long-form posts, creator revenue sharing, Grok integration, Spaces monetization, and video in the next 12 months. That output-per-engineer ratio triggered a wave of layoffs across every major tech company. Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, all followed within months. 150,000+ tech workers cut industry-wide. Every CEO quietly thanked him for the political cover to do what their boards had been begging for.

Then the mergers started stacking.

X merged into xAI in March 2025, valued at $33 billion. Billions of real-time human conversations became training data for Grok. That alone made X worth more as an AI input than as an ad platform.

xAI merged into SpaceX in February 2026. Combined valuation: $1.25 trillion. The largest merger of all time. SpaceX generated an estimated $8 billion in profit on $15-16 billion of revenue in 2025. Starlink has 9.2 million subscribers projected to generate $20-24 billion this year.

Grok is now embedded in Tesla vehicles, integrated with Starlink, and deployed inside the Pentagon. One AI model operating across cars, satellites, and defense infrastructure, trained on data from a social network that everyone said he overpaid for.

And the next step is the one nobody is pricing in. SpaceX filed with the FCC in January for up to one million orbital data center satellites. Each AI Sat Mini generates 100 kilowatts of power for onboard AI processors, with plans for megawatt-class versions. SpaceX is building a chip fab called Terafab in Austin designed to produce 50x the current global output of advanced AI chips, including a radiation-hardened D3 chip built specifically for space. Musk's thesis: once launch costs drop low enough, orbit becomes the cheapest place on (or off) Earth to run AI. Unlimited solar power. No land constraints. Cooling is free.

He paid $44 billion for a social network and turned it into the data layer, distribution platform, and training ground for an AI company that now sits inside a $1.25 trillion space infrastructure business preparing the largest IPO in human history.

Three years ago Fidelity marked the investment down 88%. Today it's part of a company filing to put AI in orbit.