Lark

i read the papers so you don't have to

[Lark @xlarckk]

Paul McCartney’s ex-wife asked him for £125 million in their divorce. She got £24.3 million and a 58-page ruling about why the judge did not believe her.

Heather Mills married him in 2002. They had a daughter, Beatrice. The marriage lasted 4 years.

When they split, they could not agree on money. Six days in court in February 2008 changed nothing. So the judge decided for them.

Mills had no lawyer with her. She stood up and argued the whole case herself, against a Beatle.

She wanted £125 million. He offered £15.8 million. The judge landed on £24.3 million, about $48.6 million at the time.

That money covered a house in London worth £2.5 million, £600,000 for her, and £35,000 a year for their daughter.

Then the judge explained his decision, and it got brutal.

He wrote that much of her evidence was “not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid”. Parts of her story he called plain make-believe.

She had told the court she was wealthy before the marriage and that McCartney held her career back. The judge found the opposite. She earned more while married to him, including £1 million from a single modelling job in one year.

He was not only harsh. He called her a kindly person, praised her charity work, and said she fought her own case with “steely, yet courteous, determination”.

Mills tried to stop the ruling being published. The Court of Appeal refused. All 58 pages went out to the world.

In the video below she stands in front of the cameras and says she is “very, very pleased”.

She asked for 5 times what she got. Greedy, or just a high opening price?

[Lark @xlarckk]

Paul McCartney’s ex-wife asked him for £125 million in their divorce. She got £24.3 million and a 58-page ruling about why the judge did not believe her.

Heather Mills married him in 2002. They had a daughter, Beatrice. The marriage lasted 4 years.

When they split, they could not agree on money. Six days in court in February 2008 changed nothing. So the judge decided for them.

Mills had no lawyer with her. She stood up and argued the whole case herself, against a Beatle.

She wanted £125 million. He offered £15.8 million. The judge landed on £24.3 million, about $48.6 million at the time.

That money covered a house in London worth £2.5 million, £600,000 for her, and £35,000 a year for their daughter.

Then the judge explained his decision, and it got brutal.

He wrote that much of her evidence was “not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid”. Parts of her story he called plain make-believe.

She had told the court she was wealthy before the marriage and that McCartney held her career back. The judge found the opposite. She earned more while married to him, including £1 million from a single modelling job in one year.

He was not only harsh. He called her a kindly person, praised her charity work, and said she fought her own case with “steely, yet courteous, determination”.

Mills tried to stop the ruling being published. The Court of Appeal refused. All 58 pages went out to the world.

In the video below she stands in front of the cameras and says she is “very, very pleased”.

She asked for 5 times what she got. Greedy, or just a high opening price?

[Lark @xlarckk]

Nobody could find Aretha Franklin’s will for almost a year. Then her niece reached into the couch cushions and pulled out $18 million.

Aretha died in August 2018 at 76. No lawyer, no typed will, nothing signed. Four sons, a fortune, and no instructions.

A year later the niece was digging through the house for paperwork. She found two handwritten wills. One was locked in a cabinet. The other was in a spiral notebook, shoved inside the couch Aretha used to sleep on.

Both were four pages of scribbles. Both were real. And they said different things.

2010, the cabinet will: the house goes to her son Ted.

2014, the couch will: the house goes to her son Kecalf and the grandchildren.

That house was worth $1.1 million the day she died.

The cabinet will had one extra line in it. Kecalf, 53, and Edward, 64, had to “take business classes and get a certificate or a degree” before they could receive anything. The couch will quietly deleted that.

So the brothers went to court. They stayed there for 5 years.

Kecalf’s side was simple. The couch paper was written later, and where you find a page does not change what is written on it.

Ted’s side was the opposite. His mother did serious things properly, with a lawyer. A notebook in the sofa was not how she made decisions.

On July 11, 2023 a Michigan jury picked the couch.

Kecalf walked out of the courtroom and said: “We just want to exhale right now. It’s been a long five years for my family, my children.”

Ted left almost immediately. He still gets a third of her music royalties.

Which one would you believe, the will she locked away or the one she slept on?

[Lark @xlarckk]

@punpunism if humanity can wage a war without human casualties, it will be the greatest achievement in our entire history🙏

[Lark @xlarckk]

@punpunism That’s interesting

I really hope we can reduce the number of victims sometime soon

[Lark @xlarckk]

THE MAN RUNNING ONE OF THE BIGGEST HEDGE FUNDS ON EARTH TELLS STANFORD STUDENTS THAT THE MOST IMPORTANT SKILL IN MONEY IS ADMITTING YOU WERE WRONG

Ken Griffin built Citadel from a personal trading operation into a firm that moves enormous amounts of capital every day. Sitting on stage in front of a room of MBA students, he walks back through how it started and what actually carried it.

The founding story takes a few minutes. The rest is about the machine. How you build an edge when every competitor has the same data, the same screens and roughly the same people. His answer keeps coming back to process rather than genius.

▸ 03:24 How Ken founded Citadel

▸ 12:51 Building a competitive advantage

▸ 15:15 How AI is changing Citadel

▸ 24:58 Investment Process

▸ 31:43 Acknowledge When You're Wrong

The section on AI is worth the time on its own. He talks about what it is already changing inside the firm and where it stops being useful, which is a more honest answer than most people in finance give right now.

Then the part that sticks. He treats being wrong as a normal operating cost, not a failure. The trouble starts when someone protects a position because admitting the error feels worse than losing the money.

Markets don't punish being wrong. They punish staying wrong.

[Lark @xlarckk]

https://t.co/L2PLIOU9J0

[Lark @xlarckk]

YOUR MONEY LOSES VALUE EVERY YEAR AND SOMEBODY IS COLLECTING IT

Prices don't rise because shops got greedy. They rise because somebody printed more money than there are things to buy, and he spends 90 minutes refusing to let the room escape that.

Every other explanation gets taken apart in front of the audience. Greedy businesses — they were just as greedy last year when prices were stable. Unions demanding more — that raises wages in one industry, not the price of everything at once. Oil producers — that makes fuel expensive and leaves less money for everything else, which pushes other prices down, not up.

His test is simple. Inflation is prices rising everywhere, together, for years. Only one thing does that: more money chasing the same quantity of goods.

Then comes the part that makes it political. Why would anyone print more money?

Because it's a tax nobody has to vote for. Raising taxes costs elections. Printing quietly takes the same value out of everyone's savings, and the blame lands on shopkeepers and foreigners instead of the people who did it.

He gave this in the 1970s, when prices in America were rising faster than at any point in living memory and every official explanation pointed at someone else.

[Lark @xlarckk]

https://t.co/L2PLIOU9J0

[Lark @xlarckk]

WHEN A BANK MAKES YOU A LOAN, IT DOESN'T LEND OUT SOMEBODY ELSE'S SAVINGS. THAT MONEY DIDN'T EXIST UNTIL YOU SIGNED

The story everyone learns is that banks are a middleman. People deposit, the bank lends that money to someone else, everyone gets a small cut.

That isn't what happens. When a loan is approved, the money appears in your account as a new entry. Nobody's deposit moved. The total amount of money in the country just went up.

Which means commercial banks — not the government, not a printing press — create most of the money in circulation, and they do it by lending.

▸ 08:04 fractional reserve banking

▸ 10:12 money creation

▸ 20:23 bank panic

▸ 31:47 how market makers work

▸ 50:05 passive funds

The flip side is that a bank never holds enough cash to cover its deposits. It doesn't need to, because everyone doesn't ask at once. Until they do, and then the whole thing collapses in a day — not from bad loans, but from timing.

The fix turned out to be simple and psychological. Guarantee the deposits, and there's no reason to run. The guarantee stops the panic precisely by never having to be used.

Most people use this system every day and have never been told the first part.

[Lark @xlarckk]

https://t.co/L2PLIOU9J0

[Lark @xlarckk]

THE MAN IN CHARGE OF AMERICA'S MONEY DURING 2008 WENT BACK TO A CLASSROOM AND TAUGHT UNDERGRADUATES HOW HE DID IT

He was still in the job when he gave these. Not a retired official writing memoirs — the sitting head of the institution, standing in front of students, explaining decisions he'd made 3 years earlier that moved trillions of dollars.

He starts with why a central bank exists at all, and the answer is older and simpler than most people assume.

A bank takes your deposit and lends most of it out. That's the whole model, and it means no bank on earth holds enough cash to pay everyone back at once. It doesn't need to, as long as people stay calm.

▸ 15:04 a financial panic

▸ 19:01 long-term illiquid assets

▸ 19:58 lender of last resort

▸ 34:23 speculative attack

▸ 44:55 the Great Depression

The moment they stop being calm, the bank is finished. Not because it made bad loans, but because everyone showed up on the same morning. A perfectly healthy bank can die in an afternoon purely from the belief that it might.

So somebody has to be able to hand over unlimited cash, instantly, to stop a panic that has nothing to do with whether the bank is actually solvent. That's the original job. Everything else got bolted on later.

He also spends real time on the Depression, and it isn't a history detour. He built his academic career studying it, then ended up running the same institution during the closest thing to it in 80 years.

[Lark @xlarckk]

https://t.co/L2PLIOU9J0

[Lark @xlarckk]

A VENTURE INVESTOR EXPLAINS WHY MOST OF HIS INVESTMENTS ARE SUPPOSED TO LOSE EVERY DOLLAR

Any other business would call that a catastrophe. Here it's the plan.

The arithmetic is the part nobody outside the industry knows. Put money into 20 companies. Around half of them go to zero completely. A few return what you put in and nothing more. One of them returns 50 times your money, and that single one pays for all the failures and the entire fund's profit on top.

Which changes what you're actually looking for. If you only need one winner, there's no point backing something that will reliably work and return double. Doubling your money on a small bet doesn't move the fund at all.

▸ 05:02 how VCs raise money

▸ 07:13 VC math

▸ 16:22 what we look for

▸ 28:40 how to close deals

▸ 32:09 how to build billion dollar companies

So the incentive runs backwards from ordinary business sense. He isn't hunting for safe. He's hunting for the thing that sounds slightly insane and could be enormous if it isn't.

He also explains where the money comes from in the first place, and it isn't rich individuals. It's pension funds and university endowments, who hand over cash for 10 years and can't ask for it back.

That time horizon is what makes the whole thing possible. You can afford 10 dead companies if nobody is checking the balance until year 10.

Most industries punish failure. This one prices it in and moves on.

[Lark @xlarckk]

https://t.co/L2PLIOU9J0

[Lark @xlarckk]

https://t.co/L2PLIOU9J0

[Lark @xlarckk]

OXFORD INVITED KANYE WEST TO GIVE A LECTURE AND HE BARELY TALKED ABOUT MUSIC

He opens with art school at 5 years old and scholarships at 18, and then goes somewhere nobody in that room expected. Design. Class. Who gets permission to make things and who doesn't.

The thing he keeps circling back to is that creativity doesn't die from a lack of talent. It dies in a classroom where the safe move is to sit at the back and hide whatever makes you strange.

▸ 04:42 the mentality that suppresses you

▸ 07:26 hiding the black nail polish at the back of the class

▸ 17:30 time is the only luxury

▸ 19:30 ants or crabs

▸ 21:39 the division by class

Halfway through he uses an image that sticks with you. Ants build something together. Crabs in a bucket drag each other back down. He's describing what happens to people who try to move from one class into another, and who does the dragging.

Then he lands on the line the whole talk was walking toward. Time is the only luxury. Everything else can be bought, replaced, or lost and bought again.

He was 37 and in the most publicly mocked stretch of his life, standing in front of Oxford students explaining why the mockery was the point.

[Lark @xlarckk]

CREDIT SUISSE'S CHIEF INVESTMENT STRATEGIST WENT TO GOOGLE TO EXPLAIN WHY BEING BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE STOPPED WORKING

The argument goes like this. When a field is young, the gap between the best and the average is enormous, so skill explains almost everything. As it matures, everyone trains the same way, uses the same tools, reads the same research. The gap between the top and the middle collapses.

Nobody got worse. The differences got smaller. And once differences are that small, whatever is left over — the bounce, the timing, the draw — decides who wins.

▸ 07:00 reversion to the mean

▸ 08:33 the paradox of skill

▸ 11:33 Olympic men's marathon times

▸ 13:02 the arc of skill

▸ 17:05 what age money managers deliver their best returns

At 11:33 he puts up a century of marathon results. The winning time keeps falling, and the spread between first place and twentieth keeps shrinking right along with it.

Then he moves the same shape onto investing. The industry got more educated, better equipped, faster. Which means the surviving edge is thinner than it used to be, and a bigger share of any single year's result is noise.

That's the uncomfortable version. In a field full of professionals, being good is table stakes. It doesn't separate you. It qualifies you for a coin flip.

[Sable @itssablee]

https://t.co/9j1xfuyucQ

[Roan @RohOnChain]

My friend applied to 250 tech jobs in two years. No MIT. No Stanford.

Last month SpaceXAI offered him $850,000.

I asked him how he broke in from zero.

He sent me the exact video that got him in. Google's 1 hour course on "Full AI Engineering in 2026".

Ex- Google Jeff Dean shows you exactly how to build AI agents like Grok Bot from scratch.

I watched it last night.

Halfway through, I realized I could break into an AI lab in weeks, not years.

Bookmark this and read the article below.

• 00:00 - LLM foundation
• 17:22 - how to actually use AI models
• 30:03 - AI prompt engineering
• 52:35 - one human coordinating 100 AI agents

[Lark @xlarckk]

@punpunism at first I thought it was a doll...

[Lark @xlarckk]

@leszoonex now robots have made their way into sports too 😭

[Lark @xlarckk]

@haider1 ChatGPT >>> Claude

[Lark @xlarckk]

@punpunism this looks like a horror movie :D

[Lark @xlarckk]

@Rossst_03 does anyone still remember the 2008 crash...

[Lark @xlarckk]

@Krishnasagrawal but Netflix cant wait :<