If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month.
In return you get a weekly premium newsletter including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large. It's a great way to support my free work, and you'll get full access to my massive archive of premium analyses of the tech and finance industry. I just did a two part Hater's Guide To AI Debt that's essential reading given the current climate around AI data center loans.
On Friday, I’ll interrogate generative AI’s effect on the economy to date — the dubious claims about productivity, the consequences of hyperscaler spending on treasury yields, how it’s driving inflation, and what could happen when the bubble finally pops.
If you want to get in touch — and especially if you have any juicy information about Anthropic, OpenAI, or any other companies in the AI bubble — hit me up on Signal at ezitron.76. I’m also on IB on your Bloomberg Terminal.
Lindsay Owens is the executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, who have done some of the most important work on surveillance pricing (using computers to spy on you to rip you off) and algorithmic wage discrimination (using computers to spy on you and steal your wages). Today, she publishes Gouged, a comprehensive, accessible guide to this modern scourge:
Owens and Groundwork have done as much as anyone to publicize and fight against the use of corporate power, computers and vast troves of commercial surveillance data to pick your pocket, shrink your paycheck and make the worst people on earth far richer. It was Katie Wells, a Groundwork fellow, who co-authored the report describing how the apps nurses use to get shiftwork collude with data-brokers to find out how much money nurses owe on their credit cards, so they can pay the most desperate nurses lower wages:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point
Owens helped coin the term "the age of recoupment," to describe this current moment in which companies that chased all their competitors out of the market with predatory pricing are now jacking up prices, knowing they're the only game in town:
Welcome back to another wild and crazy week in our world of EVERYTHING IS ABOUT AI.
I'm really trying to hang on with the inundation of AI news and I'm also trying to save you from the most boring bits of it. How many mopey Sam Altman pictures must we be subjected to daily??? Facebook's Muse is taking off. Shopify's letting agents shop stores. Anthropic's gonna get rich off their IPO while lighting everyone else's money on fire.
Oh and the WordPress guy replaced most of his board members.
Here's what's shaping up this week...
Digital rights activists have long railed at the use of the term "IP," criticizing it for being deceptively imprecise and also rhetorically dishonest. I get where these objections are coming from, but I think they're misguided.
Start with "deceptively imprecise." "IP" covers a lot of legal ground, from the "big three" of copyright, trademark and patent, to a whole arcane bestiary: anticircumvention, noncompete, trade secrecy, nondisparagement, database and publicity rights, and more. Each of these has a radically different policy basis and radically different contours.
Take copyright and trademark. Copyright is designed to allow companies (and the creators they hire or contract with) to commercially exploit creative works. In the US, copyright is a creature of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8:
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-3-2/ALDE_00013064/
This is Life as a Sacred Text, 🌱 an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives.
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It can feel impossible to take a break as a solo operator no matter how many times people tell us we should. That pressure is worse for podcasters because they risk losing their audience if the show gets too far behind.
So, what do podcasters do? They try to get ahead of their schedule. Batch episodes. Schedule out releases far in advance. But there's a major tradeoff there which is that you're basically working double or triple time in advance of your break.
Podcaster Stephanie Graham thought she had the perfect plan to take August off this year. She planned it out early. Set a concept and a schedule. Had interviews booked. But the project designed to give her a break ended up becoming bigger than she imagined. This is the story of "31 Days of Black Business."
Last year, everyone seemed to be off in August, but not me. In fact, I worked most summers, and I didn't think nothing of it. I freelance, so I welcome the work when it comes. I remember years ago listening to Gary Vee tout how important it was for a business owner to work in August. It's when everyone sleeps, but noooo, not us hustlers. I’m a hustler, so I agreed with that reasoning, but I’m over it now that it's hot as hell outside. The sun refuses to let us wear clothes. And on a hot summer day, after an exhausting work week, I hauled myself to the radio station, where I record my podcast live 2x a month. I left, tired, thinking: next year, I'm taking August off.
What's the most unusual way you've sold books?
We all know you can list your book at major retailers, but I want to hear how you've gotten creative with your book sales. I'm looking for ideas outside of the normal suggestions (social, email, website, retail). Which unexpected places have you found your readers?—Lex
This question is part of our Ask The Legends Series. Legends are invited to answer in the comments. Just sign in and comment on this post. Your experience helps our community and some of your quotes will be featured in our newsletter for added visibility.
The thing about a maddening itch between your shoulder blades is that it feels so good when you scratch it, and even better when someone else scratches it, and better still if that person hits the right spot because they love you and they've performed this service for you so often and attentively that they know exactly which spot to hit.
One of the recurring themes in Spider Robinson's short stories and novels is people who have close relationships suddenly realizing that they have acquired a psychic link. He comes up with endless ways to play this scene out, but my favorite – I think it's from one of the later Callahan's tales – is when one person scratches another between the shoulder blades and hits the exact right spot the very first time and they realize that they are now psychically linked.
Maybe it's a primate grooming reflex, maybe it's receiving a gesture of love and care. Maybe those are the same things. Having your itch scratched for you feels good. Not just primates, either: cats with the flexibility to reach any part of their body with all four of their paws and their teeth will nevertheless purr like a badly-tuned diesel outboard when you scratch them just right.
Since the outset, the free software/open source movement has extolled the virtues of technological self-determination, which is to say, deciding how the computers and programs you use will work. This is often described as "scratching your own itch."
The year is 2026, and you are a hyperscaler CEO. You zip up your Patagonia Vest, type UDPATE CALENDER WHERE WHY to your Muse agent, and it tells you that your CFO has sent you an email about something called a “critical finance meeting,” and you roll your eyes.
You were up until 2AM talking to your 38 GPT-6 agents that were vibe coding a dashboard of “company efficiency wins,” and if anything it’s kind of rude that your CFO is interrupting your “mindfulness hour” where you listen to Andrew Hubermann and do something called an “elevated ab crunch” that hurts your neck every time, somehow.
Behind you, your horribly-trained Shiba Inu (called “Basis Points”) angrily humps your Eames chair, and when you tell it to stop it only seems to hump it harder. Your CFO, who has been waiting for 15 minutes, appears on the video with a grim look in their eyes. “What is this? What is the need for this interruption?” you snap. “You’re ruining my mindfulness! Have you any idea how important my mindfulness is? It’s so early in the day, and I’ve barely had any mindfulness!”
Your CFO stops themselves from saying that it’s 12:15PM, and decides to cut to the chase. “Hey, so, remember our conversation last week?”
As we sit inbetween the Day of Atonement and Sukkot, I thought it might be nice to get an infusion of some of the amazing stuff that has been brewing around that you might not know about – things to enjoy, see, attend, hear, play, read, know about, and vibe around. On Sukkot we're commanded to rejoice, and these things might help gear you up for that.
What end of year purchases are you making?
I remember when my mom started her business, she'd buy new tech equipment at the end of the year. For that reason, I always think about whether it's time to upgrade my phone or laptop in this season. Are there any big purchases you're making as we close out the year? It could be hardware, software, programs, client gifts or surprise me!—Lex
This question is part of our Ask The Legends Series. Legends are invited to answer in the comments. Just sign in and comment on this post. Your experience helps our community and some of your quotes will be featured in our newsletter for added visibility.
This week's breaking news started on Sunday with the complaints that Create & Cultivate's LA festival for 4,000+ women entrepreneurs was the latest "Fyre Fest." After talking to a few attendees, I wrote a full story about what actually happened.
I'm getting a late start on the rest of what's happening this week, thanks to the plight of being a solo publisher/community convener blah blah blah but someone alerted me to some new venture capital nonsense that inspired me to get this out to you finally on Tuesday night.
Here's what's shaping up this week...
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month.
In return you get a weekly premium newsletter including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large. It's a great way to support my free work, and you'll get full access to my massive archive of premium analyses of the tech and finance industry.
On Friday, I’ll publish the second part of The Hater’s Guide to AI Debt (here's part 1) — where we’ll talk about the spiraling costs associated with standing up compute, why they won’t get better, and how the situation poses an existential risk to counterparties like Oracle. With that in mind, if you haven’t already, check out the first Hater's Guide To Oracle (or part 2), or perhaps my premium piece about how OpenAI Kills Oracle, or even my Hater's Guides To the SaaSpocalypse, Private Credit, and Private Equity.
If you want to get in touch — and especially if you have any juicy information about Anthropic, OpenAI, or any other companies in the AI bubble — hit me up on Signal at ezitron.76. I’m also on IB on your Bloomberg Terminal.
Well, fuck. California Attorney General Rob Bonta just surrendered to the Trump-aligned Ellison billionaires who want to take over and destroy Warners, merging it with the chudded out husk they've made of Paramount, leaving these two colossal, corrupt, useless assholes to control Warners, Paramount and Tiktok:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/paramount-settles-with-california-other-states-clearing-major-hurdle-warner-bros-2026-09-21/
In announcing the settlement, Bonta's office touted a long list of concessions the AG had wrung from the Ellisons before greenlighting this indefensible, illegal and dangerous merger. Every! single! one! of these concessions is meaningless bullshit. Bonta just handed the American movie and TV sector to two of the most odious creeps to draw breath, surrendering without firing a shot.
For a breakdown of how fucking useless this settlement is, read (who else?) Matt Stoller, whose piece breaking it down is titled "Happy Oligarch Day!"
One of the less remarked-upon aspects of becoming an atheist is how it changes the way you see a sunset. If you believe in an almighty, omnipresent God, then sunsets are one of God's intentional creations, which means that the beautiful colors refracting through the darkling sky were chosen to produce that effect.
To gaze upon a sunset with religious faith is to encounter the intentional act of another mind. To gaze upon that same sunset without faith is to look upon something striking, beautiful, and yet empty; not empty of wonder or beauty, but empty of purpose. No one hung that sun in the sky, no one chose its colors as it sank. It may still be beautiful, but that's a fundamentally different kind of beauty.
There's a sunset that sits halfway between a religious sunset and an atheist sunset: an artist's depiction of a sunset. This represents the choices of another person, another mind, and at the very least, that mind was talking to itself, trying to take something from inside the mind and put it outside of the mind.
Very often, the mind that directed the capturing of the sunset wanted to say something to other people, perhaps even you (think of a loved one sending you a cameraphone picture of a sunset). That painting or photo may not be divine, but it is certainly intentional. To look upon a painting of a sunset – or even a photo of a sunset – is to look upon something someone chose to make. You don't slip and accidentally create a sunset painting. Sunset paintings aren't accidents. The sunset painting has something to say.
Threads is popping off with allegations that this past weekend's Create & Cultivate festival was the latest "Fyre Festival." Naturally, I wanted to know if there was something here we should know about, as event hosts or as event goers. Were people abandoned with slices of cheese to fend for themselves? Or was this just a case of mismatched expectations? I talked to a few people who attended this year's event to find out what actually happened.
Create & Cultivate isn't my scene at all and I didn't go to this. I went to the Girlboss Rally of 2018 (also held in LA) and that was my whole life's fill of "inspiring" celebrities talking about their luxury product lines. But C&C is making a resurgence thanks to its original founder Jaclyn Johnson buying it back from private equity in 2023, alongside her partner and now CEO Marina Middleton. They've raised $2.6M in venture capital since then, hence going much bigger than ever before.
This year's event (which is still technically underway as I write this) was advertised as "the world's largest festival for women in business" with 4,000+ participants convening at The Beehive in South L.A. over two days. Several of those participants took to Threads this afternoon to air their grievances about the lines, about the food, about the heat and about whether or not this was all done poorly on purpose. The most interesting part—and what makes this different from Fyre Fest—is that it's a real mixed bag of reviews. Some people thought it was an abomination and others...had fun.
So, what were the actual problems? Here's a comprehensive list I gathered from talking with a few different attendees and from social posts:
'Tis the season to be promoting your business. We have just a couple months before corporate clients start sending "let's circle back in the new year" emails. For those of us who target smaller businesses or consumers, we need to get ahead of the hungry attention zombies heading their way.
Retail and e-commerce have a more obvious playbook for running holiday promotions. But the rest of us could still benefit from embracing some of this seasonal momentum. You already know you could run a sale, but what if slashing prices isn't the right move for your business?
In part one of this series, I talked to marketing experts about how to put together your holiday promotion strategy. For this issue, I asked entrepreneurs outside of retail what they were doing for Black Friday. Turns out there's WAY more to the holiday promo game than just sales. Some business owners even raise their prices this time of year.
You don't have to sleep on Black Friday just because you don't want to add to the noise. Being an online business right now means you have to get used to *loudly whispering* somewhere on the internet at all times. The question is what's the right approach for you and for your clients in this season. I surfaced 22 fresh ideas for you to consider, from repackaging content you've already made to teaming up for holiday cross-promotions.
What's working for you on LinkedIn?
I find LinkedIn to be a high value social network. It's my top source of traffic and it's one of the main ways paid subscribers find me, but I recognize that it can be tough to crack—especially if you're looking to connect with potential clients there. I'm also hearing that things have changed recently and folks are finding LinkedIn is not performing as well for them these days. I want to know what's working FOR YOU RIGHT NOW to reach and grow your audience on LinkedIn?—Lex
This question is part of our Ask The Legends Series. Legends are invited to answer in the comments. Just sign in and comment on this post. Your experience helps our community and some of your quotes will be featured in our newsletter for added visibility.
The year is 2026, and you are a hyperscaler CEO. You zip up your Patagonia vest, type UPDATE ME ON CALENDOR TOODAY into ChatGPT, and see that you have a meeting with your CFO. They tell you that while they love all those GPUs you’re buying for those data centers that will absolutely get built and totally agree that you should buy more, your company cannot actually afford to buy them at the current pace.
“But we’re one of the single-largest cash-generating companies in the world!” you scream so hard that your horribly-trained Shiba Inu starts chewing on the side of your Aeron chair. “We’ve been doing AI for years! Where is the money?”
The CFO furrows their brow. “Well, that’s the thing. We’re not actually generating that much cash from it, and actually appear to be losing money. Why do we want to buy more GPUs? We still haven’t installed most of the ones we bought-”
You begin to shake uncontrollably. “To. Do. Artificial. Intelligence. What. Is. It. You. Don’t. Understand. Why. More. GPUs. Now.” The Shiba Inu is now tearing into your Eames chair, but you’re too angry to notice.
I'm going to come right out and say it: statistical extrapolation is fine. One of the most useful ways to understand the present and anticipate the future is to measure the things that happened in the past, find the correlations among them, and extrapolate likely future outcomes from those correlations.
There is nothing wrong with this method. It is a productive and reliable way to uncover the causal relationships between natural phenomena, and to find ways to influence the world. If you discover that A reliably causes B, you can do A whenever you want B to happen.
However, the fact that this method works for some things does not mean that it works for all things. Naive, "theory-free" statistical extrapolation (the method that LLMs rely on) has hard limits. LLMs are very good at finding areas of statistical regularity and producing new material that matches this statistical picture: you can use an LLM to produce strings of words that are statistically indistinguishable from sentences and strings of pixels that are statistically indistinguishable from images.
The single most exciting and interesting thing about LLMs is how well this works. Call an LLM "a word-guessing program" and AI boosters will accuse you of reductionism. But the LLM is just guessing words, and the remarkable and amazing thing about this fact is the sheer plausibility of the sentences this method produces.
During these days between one time and another– what's on your heart?
Your mind?
Your soul?
I've typically gone frontal during this season but for a lot of reasons you can see that I'm trying to foster more of the community space here, and this seems honestly like a perfect time for an Ask the Community post.
The word "fascist" comes from the Latin fasces, a bundle of sticks; the symbology here is that a single twig is weak and brittle, but bundled together, many twigs are strong. It's a sound political theory, because in politics, coalitions are everything:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#governing-is-harder
The problem with fascism isn't the idea of bundling together different groups: it's the incoherence of that bundle. The fascist coalition is a collection of people who want mutually incompatible things. When one part of the fascist coalition wins (say, if Nick Fuentes's neo-Nazis triumph), the other faction loses (Fuentes gets to murder Stephen Miller and turn his skin into a lampshade). The fascist coalition is a coalition of enemies who all hate each other and dream of exterminating one another, held in check by a strongman who uses flattery, favors and threats to keep a lid clamped tight on this pressure-cooker:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/29/bondi-and-domination/#superjove
There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence
The industry strenuously denies this, of course. They insist that they are only days away from turning their balance sheets right side up. All they have to do is fix those unit economics, then they can make back the cost of producing their models by selling access to them. The problem is that the evidence for those improving unit economics is weak, while the evidence that they're faking their finances is very strong:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
Jeff Bezos and I are very different people. For one thing, he is a sociopathic billionaire who built his fortune by monopolizing bookselling while I am a penniless author of books. He was born in 1964 and is 62; I was born in 1971 and am 55.
We've met a few times and even corresponded some in Amazon's early years, though I haven't had contact with him in decades. Despite that very minor acquaintanceship and that long gap in our message history, I can tell you one thing I know for sure about Jeffrey Preston Bezos: he needs to pee all the time.
How do I know? Because peeing all the time is an inescapable feature of aging, and Bezos has eight years on me, and I have to pee all the time. Jeff Bezos, like all older people, must contend with a progressively weakening bladder. Honestly, it's a small price to pay in exchange for the everyday miracle of growing older (as opposed to perishing).
The only reason I mention Jeff Bezos's increasingly insistent bladder here is because of how hard it is to reconcile the very different circumstances of Bezos's bladder with the bladders of the hundreds of thousands of Amazon delivery and warehouse workers who are not allowed to pee at all. Amazon's warehouse and delivery workers are "reverse centaurs," monitored by a constellation of apps and cameras, and they are severely punished for falling behind in the cadence set by Amazon's software, and that robot timekeeper does not make allowances for pee breaks:
The day before a cloture vote scheduled for Tuesday, September 15, Senate Republicans have released a final draft of the Clarity Act cryptocurrency market structure bill: an industry-drafted attempt to deregulate the sector even further and strip away what little oversight existed. One of the biggest sticking points throughout negotiations has been an ethics regime meant to rein in President Trump’s personal crypto ventures, which brought in $1.4 billion last year alone.a Senators should vote no on cloture tomorrow: the supposedly “unprecedented” ethics restrictions, tacked on at the last minute, are riddled with loopholes to protect Trump’s grift.
Republicans tried and failed to pass off weak ethics language as a meaningful concession back in July [I107], with laughable provisions including prohibitions on officeholders issuing tokens with enforcement left only to a Department of Justice staffed by Trump-appointed loyalists. Under that revision, any violations would have resulted in a fine capped at $500,000 — less than 0.04% of Trump’s crypto income last year — and the ethics language was set to expire upon Trump’s exit from office in 2029, preventing any future, less-captured DOJ from prosecuting him.
After weeks of silence on subsequent ethics proposals, the White House indicated on September 14 — the day before the scheduled vote — that they would agree to “a significant portion” of the newest ethics proposal. And while the new draft language blessed by the White House appears to address some of the Democrats’ objections, they shouldn’t be fooled by ethics language that appears tailor-made to allow the president to continue his grift. While the new draft removes the sunset provision and increases penalties beyond the $500,000 cap, it leaves clear paths for Trump to dodge any enforcement in the first place.
Citation Needed is an independent publication, entirely supported by readers like you. Consider signing up for a pay-what-you-want subscription — it really helps me to keep doing this work.
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month.
In return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large.
On Friday, I’ll publish The Hater’s Guide to AI Debt — or, how buzz surrounding OpenAI and Anthropic have created massive concentration risk for world debt markets, and one which you’ll potentially be paying for, either through your pension funds and insurance premiums, or because you’ll have to live and work through the economic downturn that’s coming. For a taste of what’s to come, consider reading my Hater's Guides To the SaaSpocalypse, Private Credit and Private Equity.
If you want to get in touch — and especially if you have any juicy information about Anthropic, OpenAI, or any other companies in the AI bubble — hit me up on Signal at ezitron.76. I’m also on IB on your Bloomberg Terminal.
Of all the weird recurring motifs of the stories people tell me about the AI labor wars, the weirdest is when bosses demand to be reassured that their contractors and workers will absolutely use AI to get the job done.
That's weird for the obvious reason that for most people "AI" is a synonym for "low quality." No one ever said "My kid's math teacher was replaced with AI" in a happy tone of voice. No one ever said, "Oh, great, they replaced their customer service department with AI chatbots!" My teenager and her friends use "That's so AI" as a shorthand for "That's low-effort shit."
Not bosses, though. Bosses love AI and there's plenty of evidence that they're positively harassing the people who work for them with demands to use AI in their work:
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1weztw9/anyone_elses_boss_obsessed_with_chatgpt/
According to The Information, in early 2024, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan hosted a “coffee chat” with employees of the recently-acquired VMWare, and introduced them to his particular brand of management:
He may not be your dad, but Hock Tan sure is a motherfucker.
Broadcom is a company you likely know for its XPU platform — a collection of different bits of intellectual property and access to semiconductor parts that allow it to build custom AI chips, the best-known of which are Google’s TPUs. It just signed a $30 billion deal with Apple to build “custom ASIC silicon products.”
Apple was already a massive customer of Broadcom, which historically provided a good chunk of the wireless and radio frequency parts that you’d find inside iPhones and its other devices, representing at one point more than 20% of revenues, dropping to around 10% to 15% with the growth of AI chip sales and the acquisition of VMWare.
This is Life as a Sacred Text, 🌱 an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives.
It‘s always human-authored, and it's run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:
This newsletter is a reader-supported publication.
Paid subscriptions allow our tiny team to keep doing this work.
If you want in to the House of Study but paying isn't on for you right now, reach out and we'll hook you up, no questions asked. Always.
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Life is a Sacred Text is about truth & transformation, with ancient stories serving as mirrors & lights. Collective liberation. Always human-authored, run on a Nazi-free platform. ❤️
So, we've been breaking down the way venture capital has evolved over the last two decades or so (spoilers: it got worse!), but a lot of that has been kind of theoretical. Now it's time for us to talk about how that impacts players in the real world, at a practical level.
Let's take founders, the entrepreneurs who actually build companies and invent new technologies. Now, what I mean here are people who have a great idea for a product or a service, and who want to get it out to the world in order to make something amazing happen. (These days there's also a cohort of people who call themselves "founders", but who basically just identified a pile of money that they wanted to grab, and decided that they were willing to suck up to whatever investors they had to in order to get that pile of money. Let's file these horrid people away for later — we'll come back to them.)
The deal for founders used to be pretty straightforward. You'd have an idea you were obsessed with, you would build it out as far as you could with whatever resources you were able to scrape together yourself, or with the help of your friends and family, and then if you absolutely had to have more money to make your idea succeed, you might seek out some investors to help you get to the next level. The conventional wisdom was that investors were a bunch of predators (everyone called them "vulture capital", often to their faces), and that founders should go in extremely skeptical about them, but at times they were a necessary evil in order to achieve one's goal.
On the other side of the table, investors knew the deal, and the best of them understood their role within the ecosystem. Here in New York City, we had influential firms like Union Square Ventures priding themselves on how founder-friendly they could be, both by trying to be straightforward in their communication with founders and by having an understandable thesis for their investments, which would let founders anticipate whether their company would be of interest or not. This avoided wasting time on the part of both founders and investors.
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month.
In return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large. My Hater's Guides To the SaaSpocalypse, Private Credit and Private Equity are essential to understanding our current financial system, and my guide to how OpenAI Kills Oracle pairs nicely with my Hater's Guide To Oracle, as well as the Hater’s Guide To Oracle (Part 2).
I also just did a two part Hater's Guide To Circular Financing, covering the depths of NVIDIA's circular madness and the history of a very dangerous kind of "financial innovation."
Subscribing to premium is both great value and makes it possible to write these large, deeply-researched free pieces every week. This week's premium will be The Hater’s Guide To Broadcom, a company that has long ceased to innovate, and whose existence centers on buying successful companies and jacking up prices, and now, building chips for Anthropic and OpenAI, while also taking on (and backstopping) insane amounts of debt. In short, Broadcom is the unholy lovechild of NVIDIA and Oracle.
This newsletter is a reader-supported publication.
Paid subscriptions allow our tiny team to keep doing this work.
If you want in to the House of Study but paying isn't on for you right now, reach out and we'll hook you up, no questions asked. Always.
Shana tova to those of you who are preparing for a shiny new year! And big new year love to everyone else, too. Today I'm going to share an old favorite, below, that some of you might find helpful to reread (or encounter for the first time) just about now – but I'd like to share a few other resources of spiritual sustenence for the season, first:
You know that I wrote you a book, right? Good.
You know, sometimes it’s kind of hard to explain the “circular” part of circular financing to people, in the sense that some of the agreements are kind of clunky. NVIDIA funds OpenAI, who then spends that money to rent back NVIDIA GPUs from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or CoreWeave, and then that money is used…to buy servers from Taiwanese ODMs (original design manufacturers) that build their servers, who then buy GPUs from NVIDIA to put in them.
The reason it’s clunky is that people will, even if it’s not true, claim that there’s some indeterminately-large “other” subset of customers that are also buying compute or NVIDIA GPUs, and that we should as a result ignore our lying eyes and, if anything, celebrate how well this is all working. While there’s a ‘circle’ of ‘finance,’ it’s not a problem because somewhere in the mess of money exists a few real dollars, and because we can’t precisely measure them, there’s nothing to be concerned about!
Fear not, dear reader, because we finally have a pure, unfiltered circular financing operation to obsess over — SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy just filed its S-1, and it’s so incredibly circular that I’m genuinely surprised that they bothered to list.
That’s a good question, and not as obvious an answer as you’d think.
When I talked about the rise of Cancer Capital, I mentioned that it represents a massive shift from how venture capital has worked over the years. But my conversations in recent years with people in tech, and especially with those outside the industry, reveal that most folks have no idea just how huge that shift has been. It's easy to illustrate exactly how extreme things have gotten just by using a few examples, starting with companies that are familiar to everyone, and sharing some details of what I've seen firsthand.
First: The companies that defined the modern era of tech weren’t founded with venture capital.
Neither Microsoft nor Apple took a penny of venture capital funding when they were founded. Both got started from money they got from their founders and their first customers, and took off from there.
In Microsoft's case, they didn't get any venture capital investment until the company had been around for six years, and were already doing $17 million dollars a year in revenues. (That was a lot in 1981!) The founders didn't need any startup capital at the beginning because they basically formed the company in order to serve their first customer, and had revenues from the start. More strikingly, Microsoft didn't close their venture capital funding until after they had made their deal with IBM and shipped MS-DOS — the deal that actually made Microsoft into the industry-dominating player that they've been ever since.
Welcome back to our fourth and final installment of the Mystical Magical Mystery Tour, wherin we are going to wind our way to Tzfat and take it all home.
You can catch up on episodes 1-3 here:
When we last saw our heroes, there was a big flowering of Kabbalistic work all over medieval Europe – and we don't have all the receipts, but there are at least a few clues about where some of those traditions might have come from. Most notably, the Zohar came out of Spain ca. 1200.
Today we'll talk about a number of the ingredients that went into creating the famous, distinctive movement that was Tzfat Kabbalah, why it wasn't as much of a bro-zone as is often thought, and what happened after.
Kabbalah spread as Jews did: often not willingly. In addition to various pogroms and expulsions across Europe between the 12th-16th centuries, the expulsions in 1492 from Spain and by 1506 from Portugal were epoch-defining for the community. Many of these latter Jews wound up in Ottoman lands, including the families of Rabbis Joseph Karo (author of the cornerstone Jewish legal text the Shulchan Aruch) and Solomon Alkabetz (author of the liturgical poem Lecha Dodi), both enthusiastic students of Kabbalah.
Karo regarded himself as regularly visited by a heavenly mentor ("maggid") called the Mishnah that revealed kabbalistic doctrines to him. (Perhaps not coincidentally, this spirit thought Karo was the smartest teacher out there.) In 1534 or 36, in either Adrianople, Türkiye or Nicopol, Bulgaria (scholars disagree), Alkabetz, Karo and others were staying up all night studying Torah for the holiday of Shavuot when, as Alkabetz wrote:
We really, really need to talk about venture capital. Because it’s not “venture capital” anymore.
There’s a huge disconnect between what most people think of VC, where an investor has a big fund and cuts checks to help a founder build a company, and the current reality, where a handful of billionaire extremists use the cover of “VC” to advance an outrageous agenda where they’re accountable to no one.
I’m gonna explain this from a standpoint that almost never gets articulated: I’ve personally raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding as CEO of startups, and been directly involved as a board member or advisor in raising hundreds of millions more. I’ve sat in board rooms, across the table from the people I’m talking about here, or been at the industry events that they frequent. So this isn’t sour grapes because these VCs wouldn’t cut me a check, or some chip on my shoulder about these investors due to a business deal. This is what I know about these bad actors because I’m part of the community of creators and inventors who build the things that they used to invest in — back when they still cared about innovation.
Many of the trends in society and politics that people are most angry about, from data centers being forced down everyone’s throats, to all of our favorite apps and services being enshittified, to politicians being paid to ignore the will of the people, are all being supercharged by these cancer capitalists. They have warped the structure of venture capital into a form of oligarchy that answers to no market, no regulators, and no voters. So it’s worth understanding exactly how they did it.
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large.
My Hater's Guides To the SaaSpocalypse, Private Credit and Private Equity are essential to understanding our current financial system, and my guide to how OpenAI Kills Oracle pairs nicely with my Hater's Guide To Oracle, as well as the Hater’s Guide To Oracle (Part 2).
Subscribing to premium is both great value and makes it possible to write these large, deeply-researched free pieces every week. This week's premium will be the finale to The Hater's Guide To Circular Financing, where I’ll talk about the history of this particular flavor of financial shenanigans, and the current users outside of NVIDIA.
If you want to get in touch — and especially if you have any juicy information about Anthropic, OpenAI, or any other companies in the AI bubble — hit me up on Signal at ezitron.76. I’m also on IB on The Terminal.
Bitcoin prices have recovered somewhat to around $79,000 after a sustained period below $70,000 — and at times, below $60,000. The rebound was driven in part by the Treasury’s decision to ramp up bond buybacks in hopes of lowering interest rates, and a short squeeze that liquidated over $4 billion in bets against the asset.
As prices come up, guardrails are continuing to fall. Though the Senate has struck out for now on the Clarity Act, both the SEC and CFTC have pledged rulemaking if Congress can’t force the bill through. To that end, the SEC just dropped “Regulation Crypto”: a 400-page proposed rule that carves out exemptions and safe harbors to reduce disclosures and reporting requirements on crypto issuers.
The CFTC has promised crypto rulemaking, too, and is busy battling with states over prediction markets — invoking emergency authority it hasn’t used in decades to prevent the catastrophe that would surely occur if Michiganders and New Yorkers couldn’t bet on things like “will Trump say the word ‘golf’ this week” (or sports. Mostly sports.)
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[NVIDIA Company Meeting, the present day, YMCA playing]
JENSEN HUANG: We love NVIDIA, don’t we folks? We’re the biggest, most-beautiful semiconductor company, we make the biggest, hottest GPUs for Clammy Sammy and Wario Amodei’s huge, beautiful AI labs, but they can’t afford them because they’re losing so much money! [crowd booing]
It’s okay! It’s okay! Big strong men, the biggest muscles, big, beautiful, strong men like Satya Nadella are calling me, begging — they’re begging, can you believe it? — they’re begging me, “Sir, Sir, please ship me Vera Rubin sir! I can’t get enough!” [crowd braying] they can’t get enough of Vera Rubin! They’re begging me to get Vera over there! Vera! Where’s Vera! [scanning crowd] get her up here! No, no, don’t do it, she’s too shy!
We love Grace too, [voice turning gravely] Grace Blackwell, what a gal! I told them all we’re going to ship a trillion dollars of Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin by the end of 2027, our beautiful girls Grace and Vera, they’re our biggest and most-expensive girls yet, our Gee-Pee-Yous, the media says “we don’t believe you sir!” but I’m gonna make everyone buy ‘em, hell I’m gonna give ‘em the money to do it like I did with CoreWeave and then I’m gonna tell Clammy Sammy and say “Samuel, give ‘em a few billion like you gave to Michael Intrator,” and he’ll say “yes sir!”
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For those of you just tuning in (aka YOU, you gorgeous soul): I wanted to make sure that you were aware of this series that's been happening for the last few weeks in the House of Study; it's been a lot of fun. We've been looking at the history of Jewish mysticism, both through looking at specific texts and by connecting a bunch of historical dots that aren't often connected for layfolk because so many people look at trees and not the ecosystem of which the forest is a part. The first two installments are below. Would love to have you join us in this conversation. 🌱❤️
Welcome back to YOUR Jewish Mystical Mystery Tour, Part Three!
Catch up on One and Two, if you'd like– or just come along for this ride:
This is Life as a Sacred Text, 🌱 an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives.
It‘s always human-authored, and it's run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:
This newsletter is a reader-supported publication.
Paid subscriptions allow our tiny team to keep doing this work.
If you want in to the House of Study but paying isn't on for you right now, reach out and we'll hook you up, no questions asked. Always.
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Life is a Sacred Text is about truth & transformation, with ancient stories serving as mirrors & lights. Collective liberation. Always human-authored, run on a Nazi-free platform. ❤️
These days, the conversation in tech and business, and in a lot of society, is still all AI, all the time. And one of the most fundamental questions boils down to: How do you get people to change what they’re doing in regard to AI? For people who (understandably) have moral or ethical objections to the many harms caused by Big AI, there’s the challenge of how to drive action while lacking the resources and capital of the tech tycoons who’ve driven the broad cultural push towards AI adoption.
As a result of the power differential between those pushing AI and those fighting its advances, the typical rhetorical tactic for AI critics has been to try to attach stigma to the use of AI, and to the outputs of AI systems. There is also little cultural discussion, or even mention, of alternative offerings that aren’t from the Big AI companies, so the entire narrative is framed as either using the most harmful, exploitative, damaging AI tools from the likes of OpenAI, or using nothing at all.
And for the most part, this has been pretty effective for people who have any taste or sense of culture. If you’re a creator, or engaged in creative culture, you probably either can’t stand the AI aesthetic, or feel betrayed when you find out something that was appealing to you was AI-generated or made by someone who used generative AI to create it. The only creative discipline that’s broadly an exception to this is coding, where for the most part people don’t have as many aesthetic objections, but even there, people pretty stridently object to the slop aesthetic in user interfaces and other human-facing aspects.
There are, of course, diehard cohorts of AI advocates who insist that they love the AI aesthetic and don’t mind the hyper-real look to what these systems output, but the mainstream discourse in the arts, design and creative disciplines reached a consensus some time ago, and it’s fairly stringently enforced amongst fan communities.
Welcome back to part 2 of our Jewish Mystical Mystery Tour!
Here's Part One, if you missed it, or want a refresh:
So before we go much further we gotta look at the concept of the sefirot– what's often translated as "emanations" – of the divine.
The word is possibly from the Greek for “spheres” and possibly from the Hebrew for sapphire, in reference to Moses’ and the elders’ vision of God in Exodus. (As we saw last week, there's also a wordplay on the word for reading/speaking/counting.)
We first find them mentioned in Sefer Yetzirah, as mentioned last week. Unlike what we'll see later on, here they're considered truly to be dimensions of the physical universe.
For years, I’ve wanted to have a standalone version of Apple’s Touch ID authentication feature for my Mac, but without having to use an Apple keyboard. (I generally like their keyboards, but my daily driver keyboard these days is a big clicky mechanical beast.) I’d gone down various dead ends of trying to find substitutes, and even checked out the efforts where people had ripped apart expensive Apple keyboards just to scavenge the Touch ID sensors out of them. None of them quite solved the problem.
So today, I’m sharing an open source project called Dashboard Touch, which lets you make your own Touch ID-style sensor for your Mac, using low-cost off-the-shelf part. It’s based on an extensive refactoring of the excellent tinyTouch project by Zimeng Xiong, who recently cracked the code on how to make a useful fingerprint scanner system that’s also reasonably secure for regular Mac users. (You should definitely check out his project and support his new hardware build if you’re interested in this stuff.)
I took my own approach to this work because I wanted to focus a lot on having a friendly web interface for configuring exactly how the fingerprint sensor system works on your computer. When you get Dashboard Touch set up, it presents you with a nice web interface that runs right on your own Mac, letting you do things like set the color of the ring light on the fingerprint sensor, or capture your fingerprints so they’re recorded in the system.
Behind the scenes, the way the system works couldn’t be simpler. You buy a little fingerprint sensor, and a small microcontroller, wire them together (it was actually fun to get back to soldering stuff!), and then plug them into your computer with a regular USB cable. After you run the setup script, you just go to the web interface and add your finger(s) to the system.
This is Life as a Sacred Text, 🌱 an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives.
It‘s always human-authored, and it's run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:
This newsletter is a reader-supported publication.
Paid subscriptions allow our tiny team to keep doing this work.
If you want in to the House of Study but paying isn't on for you right now, reach out and we'll hook you up, no questions asked. Always.
Sign up for Life is a Sacred Text
Life is a Sacred Text is about truth & transformation, with ancient stories serving as mirrors & lights. Collective liberation. Always human-authored, run on a Nazi-free platform. ❤️
The crypto industry is having an increasingly rough time as prices remain depressed. Bitcoin is hovering around its lowest price since autumn 2024, well below the “Trump pump” prices spurred by traders who hoped his inauguration would bring about a crypto renaissance. Robinhood reported crypto trading revenue down 38% and trading volumes down 35% year-over-year.1 Coinbase reported a net loss of $359 million and has stopped using trading volume as a key metric, claiming it “no longer reflects the breadth of our business”. This is, I’m sure, entirely unrelated to the fact that their trading volume is down 38%/48% over the past three/six months.2 At least three crypto exchanges — AscendEx,3 BitMEX,4 and BitMart5 — announced in July they would be shutting down. Other darlings from the web3 bubble have also announced they’re closing up shop recently: the Proof of Attendance Protocol [W3IGG], the Step App “move-to-earn” product [W3IGG], and MVMT Labs [W3IGG]. Poolin, a bitcoin mining firm that once accounted for a fifth of the global hashrate, has filed for bankruptcy [W3IGG].
The president’s own Trump Media & Technology Group posted a $238 million loss. While losses are routine for the company, this quarter’s came alongside announcements that the firm would be unwinding multiple crypto-related partnerships with Crypto.com.
And despite many, many promises from pro-crypto senators, the Clarity Act didn’t make it to a vote before the August recess. A cloture vote is scheduled for shortly after the Senate reconvenes, though it now looks less like a serious attempt to pass the bill and more like an effort to provide crypto industry super PACs with a list of opposition spending targets.
Citation Needed is an independent publication, entirely supported by readers like you. Consider signing up for a free or pay-what-you-want subscription — it really helps me to keep doing this work.
My newest Citation Needed project made an appearance on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver!
It’s a work in progress, but you can see the new interactive version of my map of the Trump family’s crypto ventures at map.citationneeded.news.
The map contains hundreds of business entities and links to the Trump family (with more being added!), augmented with data from the president’s most recent financial filings to estimate how much money is flowing in. It will be queryable by other researchers and journalists.
Click any node or connection in the Trump crypto empire map to open its panel and view explanatory annotations and citations. Toggle the income overlay to see financial-disclosure figures from the most recent filings. Search for entities, or filter by category.
The vast majority of the documents people use to do business are really quite poor. Presentations that make your eyes glaze over, memos that are inscrutable or unclear, and all kinds of artifacts that say more about how they were created than whatever message they were ostensibly trying to communicate. It's been one of my great frustrations for years, and a big part of why I wrote Make Better Documents a while ago. That post captured a list of the suggestions I've been giving people for years on how to make better, more effective documents that can actually do work for you, instead of fighting at cross purposes to your larger goals.
To my great surprise, that list of suggestions on how to make better documents got a pretty huge response, and a lot of people told me they found it really helpful. So now, I've created a Better Documents skills.md file for people who use LLM tools like Claude to help assist them in creating business documents, to prompt their AI tools to make better documents by default.
If you're not familiar, agent skills are simple text files that describe new capabilities or processes that LLMs can take advantage of when carrying out tasks. (They're Markdown files — more proof of how Markdown is taking over the world!) The way this skill works is that it's distilled the broad principles I outlined in that post into a series of 5 tests, covering areas like whether you've properly considered your target audience, whether the overall structure is correct, if you've overdone things with your formatting, and if things are named clearly, and then either generates a new file that follows those rules, or reviews an existing document to make sure it is obeying best practices.
It's nothing too fancy, but I've been using it for a while, and shared it with a few friends, and people have told me they found it handy and it's improved some of their routine documents. I'm especially glad that people have found it useful even if they're the kind of folks who would never let an LLM generate a document on their behalf, but do think software tools are useful for things like spell check or grammar check. I see this as being a tool in that kind of category.
The Clarity Act, a sweeping cryptocurrency market structure bill aimed at enshrining the crypto industry’s deregulatory wins into law, may be dead. Republicans’ “compromise” on ethics, endorsed by the President — a temporary provision that would expire when Trump leaves office, enforced only by a Justice Department run by his former personal lawyer — has been met with the response it deserves: Senator Angela Alsobrooks, one of two Democrats who voted to advance the bill out of Senate Banking, called it “an unserious offer”.
The crypto industry has spent $200 million (and counting) since 2024 to elect a Congress that would pass sweeping deregulatory crypto legislation. What they got was a bill too corrupt for Democrats to pass, a Republican majority too cowardly to rein in the president, and a president who won’t sign anything that meaningfully threatens his $1.4 billion-a-year grift.
Citation Needed is an independent publication, entirely supported by readers like you. Consider signing up for a free or pay-what-you-want subscription — it really helps me to keep doing this work.
With the Senate only in session for about two more weeks before the August recess, the Clarity Act cryptocurrency market structure bill’s chances of passing are growing slimmer by the day. Any hope of the bill clearing both chambers before August is already dead, given that the House begins its recess session at the end of this week. The Senate has a little longer — until August 7 — although some Senators have already said they will be absent next week to attend the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham.1
President Donald Trump’s most recent financial disclosure reveals that he earned more than $1.4 billion in income from his cryptocurrency businesses alone last year. These crypto-related ventures account for more than half of the $2.2 billion in income Trump reported overall, through an unprecedented self-enrichment scheme that has made him and members of his family fabulously wealthy while investors who bought into his projects have lost money hand over fist. Forbes most recently estimated Trump’s personal net worth at $6.5 billion, a staggering increase from his estimated $2.3 billion valuation as a private citizen in 2024.1
The bulk of the crypto windfall came from Trump’s two primary crypto ventures. He brought in $635 million thanks to a licensing agreement with “Celebration Coins” — likely an erroneous reference to Celebration Cards LLC, one of the firms in the web of companies responsible for the $TRUMP memecoins. Another $529 million came via sales of World Liberty Financial’s $WLFI token, whose buyers are not named in the disclosure but include crypto billionaire Justin Sun.
The filing also reports more than $260 million from equity sales in Stablecoin Holdco LLC and WLF Holdco LLC, both entities in the World Liberty Financial tangle of companies. Again, the buyers are not disclosed, but some of these proceeds are likely his share of the $500 million investment by the United Arab Emirates into World Liberty Financial, inked shortly before the White House approved the sale of highly restricted AI chips to the country [I83, 87, 93, 94]. That we know the investment came from the UAE, which was simultaneously negotiating deals with both President Trump and World Liberty-connected Steve Witkoff [I95], is known only thanks to outside reporting by the Wall Street Journal.
Trump’s family members are also profiting handsomely from their roles in the family’s crypto empire, and from their own crypto-related ventures. Industry groups clearly see them as conduits to favorable political outcomes — Donald Trump Jr. was named to advisory roles at both the Kalshi and Polymarket prediction market platforms, for example, and likely not solely on the basis of his business acumen. That segment of the industry has enjoyed a particularly favorable shift in regulatory stance, with the CFTC — under the control of a single Trump loyalist Commissioner — intervening to fight back against state regulators in court cases against these firms [I101, 104, 105]. But because they don’t serve in formal roles, Trump’s family members are not required to file financial disclosures, leaving much of their earnings hidden from public view. Despite this, both sons have met with high-level officials from at least eight foreign governments since Trump’s re-election, to talk both business and policy.2
One aspect of strategy that’s been largely lost in the tech industry in recent years is how to compete against platforms, since the major tech companies have gotten so big that markets are no longer competitive. However, the AI market is still early enough, and users and society are still angry enough, that the Big AI companies can lose.
But for them to lose, everybody else in the ecosystem has to carry out the nearly-lost art of platform strategy. Tech companies (and even open source communities!) used to carry out these tactics in emerging product categories ranging from desktop office suites to operating systems to web browsers, though over the decades, the lesson that big tech learned was, basically, that they should play dirty.
You win platform strategy battles through power and persuasion. We're going to get both.
Historically, we would have relied on regulators or media to help hold bad actors in the tech space accountable, but in the United States, these entities are largely not going to help very much. Some state and local governments may assist, and some independent journalists or smaller media outlets are pushing for accountability, but the most powerful entities are either captured or complicit in many cases, so we don’t have the institutional pushback that had sometimes been present in earlier points of technological change.
I was hard at work building Tech Influence Watch, my campaign finance tracker that helps you follow how the cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries are influencing politics, hence the slightly longer gap between recap issues. The industry spending didn’t slow down in the meantime — if anything, it’s ramped up as more states held their primaries — and crypto-related Trump corruption and legislative maneuvering has continued apace. That means there’s lots to cover, so let’s get right into it.
I helped Reuters with a recent report that concluded that, unlike their investors, “the [Trump] family always wins” in its crypto business deals. While the Trump family has profited $2.3 billion from their crypto ventures, according to Reuters’ estimates, investors have lost a conspicuously similar $2.3 billion. I saw a lot of reactions to the piece to the effect that investors didn’t “lose” money, they were merely paying for pardons or other benefits. But I think Reuters did a great job of highlighting the everyday people who’ve been suckered by the Trumps’ various crypto schemes, who genuinely believed they would make money if they bought the $TRUMP memecoin or shares in the family’s crypto-linked businesses. “When a stock has presidential backing in a way — at least from his sons — you would think it would go up,” explained one buyer of shares in ALT5 Sigma. (ALT5 Sigma is a Trump-linked treasury company that holds a significant quantity of $WLFI tokens issued by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial [I90, 92, 98].) He’s a machinist who’s lost $32,700 — 79% of his initial investment — not someone pursuing a pardon or regulatory relief.1
And although that machinist expresses hope that his investment might recover, he may well be in for an even worse outcome. Alt5 Sigma, which recently renamed itself to AI Financial,a has reported in its most recent quarterly SEC filing that it is continuing to lose money, raising “substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern within one year”.2 The company tries to soften this news with the claim that it has a “significant financial resource” in the 7.3 billion $WLFI tokens held in its treasury, but also acknowledges “significant market price risk” if it were to sell them.
The filing reports these tokens have a fair value of $703.4 millionb — a figure the company derives, in its own words, from “quoted (unadjusted) prices”: that is, the number of tokens × market price, with no discount for the position’s size and illiquidity. That “value” was stale almost immediately. In a June 10 disclosure, the company valued the same holdings at roughly $380 million, having lost more than $300 million in paper value in just ten weeks.3 Even that figure overstates what a sale could fetch, because a company in distress holding a fire sale on tokens issued by a related company is practically guaranteed to crash the token price. And furthermore, the firm acknowledges that all tokens are locked until at least late August, with some subject to extra conditions on sale.
“[T]here can be alternatives. What we can imagine is, rather than the ChatGPT killer, a lot of different little AIs from little responsible players.”
That’s me, in The Guardian a few days ago, trying to distill a message that I’ve been trying to get out as broadly as possible for quite a while now. It's sort of like hoping a comet will take out the major AI players and a bunch of smaller new players will be the smarter, better-adapted mammals that take their place instead.
We’re in another one of those big inflection points for AI. Trump administration policymakers for AI suspended access to Anthropic’s newest product. All of these policymakers have a web of investments in competing players — including SpaceX, which is about to IPO — and the corruption and grift of this cohort are so extensive that it’s impossible to judge what the actual risks and reality are around any of these platforms or technologies, since no one involved is an honest broker.
More broadly, there’s been the widespread pushback against AI culturally, one that is undeniably strongest amongst those who were born in this century. But the adoption patterns and usage data show that even younger people are using some AI tools. And that’s a pattern that we’ve seen before, with social media. We have a significant group of people knowing that a technology contradicts some of their values, preferences, or beliefs, but using it anyway.
The Second Circuit of Appeals, which in November 2025 heard oral arguments in Sam Bankman-Fried’s appeal of his November 2023 conviction [I96], has upheld the verdict and rejected Bankman-Fried’s request for a new trial with a new judge. I’ve purchased the full document so it’s uploaded to CourtListener’s RECAP archive.
The appeal was one of Bankman-Fried’s few remaining options after Judge Lewis Kaplan denied his motion for a new trial in April [No new trial].
Bankman-Fried tried to argue before the Second Circuit that his FTX cryptocurrency exchange was solvent before, during, and after its bankruptcy, and that its dramatic collapse was simply the result of a temporary liquidity squeeze caused by a sudden wave of withdrawals. (At various points he has made clear that his definition of “solvency” is his own, novel one.)
Indeed, some of FTX’s investments — particularly one in the Anthropic artificial intelligence firm, which develops the now popular Claude suite of AI tools — proved lucrative after FTX’s demise, and substantially helped to fund restitution to FTX’s customers.
Sixteen years after the Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate spending in American elections, corporations and billionaires are regularly spending tens of billions of dollars on our elections. While many people are aware that interests like big oil, big pharma, and big banks spend heavily on elections, there are some newer entrants in this field that voters largely don’t know about. The cryptocurrency industry alone spent $130 million in 2024, and is on track to spend even more in 2026. Now AI is following the same playbook, with the same operatives running both campaigns.
I’ve spent the past two years tracking this spending through Follow the Crypto, which I just relaunched this week as Tech Influence Watch — an expanded real-time tracker covering both crypto and AI political spending across the 2026 cycle.
But crypto and AI are just the newest entrants in a system that was deliberately built to let them do exactly what they’re doing. To understand that system, I wanted to talk to someone who’s been fighting for years to dismantle it.
Tiffany Muller is the president of End Citizens United, the organization working to end the influence of big money in politics. In this conversation, we talk about what Citizens United enabled, how it’s shaped policy outcomes on everything from climate to gun control to healthcare, what’s different about this newest wave of tech industry spending, and what it would actually take to fix the system.
I’ve been running my website Follow the Crypto since 2024, tracking the cryptocurrency industry’s influence on our democracy. The industry spent more than $130 million buying the 2024 elections, and the strategy worked. Pro-crypto politicians have proposed or passed industry-drafted legislation that threatens to open the floodgates to even more predatory crypto products, regulatory agencies were gutted, and crypto executives bought direct access to the President and positions in the White House. Now the artificial intelligence industry is following the same playbook.
Continuing to track only crypto would mean missing half the story. The same operatives are running both campaigns. Josh Vlasto, longtime adviser and spokesperson for Fairshake — the cryptocurrency super PAC network responsible for the bulk of crypto’s 2024 spending — is now simultaneously heading Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC network.1 Chris Lehane, the political consultant and Coinbase board member who helped establish Fairshake and famously told Coinbase employees who questioned whether a crypto voter bloc existed that they would simply invent one,2 is now also an OpenAI executive and one of the people behind the Leading the Future PAC network.3 The same venture capital firms are funding both: Andreessen Horowitz, a crypto heavyweight in the 2024 elections, is now splitting its political spending across crypto and AI PACs.
The PACs may look different from the outside, but they’re increasingly the same operation with aligned goals: deregulate the tech sector, slash consumer protections, and allow tech companies to capture even more enormous profits at the expense of everyday people.
So I’ve expanded the site to track both. It’s now called Tech Influence Watch, and it documents more than $400 million (and counting) in contributions from crypto and AI companies and their executives this election cycle. When two industries with shared backers and shared operatives are spending this much to write their own regulations, someone needs to be watching.
If you followed along with the recent joyful celebrations of the Artemis cruise around the moon, and took a moment to dive into the photographic archives of the mission, you might have noticed that all of the original images were shared by NASA on the venerable photo sharing service Flickr. What you might not know is… why?
First, some background for folks who might not know what Flickr is, or who may have forgotten. Flickr is a social sharing site for photography which was founded in 2004, and these days people might say that it shares some of its cofounders with Slack, though back when Slack started, everybody said that the company was started by some of the founders of Flickr. That’s because Flickr was arguably the most influential site of the Web 2.0 era, helping define everything from the user interface design to the bright colors to the easy way that developers could access data from the platform. A lot of the things that we take for granted on the modern social internet, like a friendly “voice” used to communicate to users, were pioneered by Flickr, and then quickly came to be considered standard expectations for the apps and sites that followed. It’s hard to imagine that sites from Tumblr to Grindr would have omitted their final “e”s without Flickr’s precedent.
Flickr spun out of a Canadian gaming company called Ludicorp, founded by Stewart Butterfield (later CEO/co-founder of Slack) and Caterina Fake (later an investor and chair of Etsy). The photo-sharing service was extracted from the pieces of a somewhat unsuccessful attempt at multiplayer gaming called “Game Neverending”, but it retained the playfulness of that game even as it became a social app. Flickr also inherited the fine-grained privacy controls and thoughtful community features of earlier social platforms like LiveJournal — along with being actively, intentionally moderated by actual humans who worked diligently to prevent destructive behaviors on the platform. This meant that, more than 20 years ago, this early photo sharing community typically had better social norms than people see on today’s social media apps. (A little side note: Part of Flickr/Ludicorp’s initial funding was with public money. What a remarkable way to fund lasting innovation!)
With all of these groundbreaking features, Flickr didn’t just inspire lots of other entrepreneurs to create a new wave of Web 2.0 startups, it also attracted millions of users who, for the first time, began taking photos with the primary goal of sharing them online. Prior to this moment, the earliest phones with decent cameras were coming to market (it would be years until the iPhone came out), and other photo services of the time were still often oriented towards taking film to processing facilities, and then having the professionals at those facilities scan the resulting images and post them to a clunky online service where you could tediously click through them in a virtual album. Until Flickr, photo sharing online was essentially still analog, even if the experience was technically happening online.
The cultural battles over AI have broken down over predictable lines in the past few years, with critics rightfully calling out the big AI platforms for training on content without consent, recklessly building without considering environmental impact, and designing platforms that are unaccountable because their code and weights (the parameters that describe how an AI model works) aren’t open for third-parties to evaluate. The AI zealots have done themselves no favors, by not only dismissing all of these valid criticisms, but by also making increasingly outlandish and extreme claims about the capabilities of the Big AI platforms, while simultaneously scaremongering about the brutal effect they’ll have on people’s lives and careers. It’s no wonder the public sentiment about AI has become so negative.
But a small cohort of us who are curious about LLMs as a technology, yet deeply critical of Big AI companies for their impact on society, have been asking what would “good” AI look like? Is it possible to make versions of these technologies that provide real benefits, and actually help people, without all of the attendant harms? We’ve had prior eras of machine learning tools that were useful technologies without being massively destructive — are the negative externalities intrinsic to LLMs in general?
We might have just gotten our first glimpse at an AI that’s actually good.
This is just one small example that I saw recently, in a very unexpected place, but I can’t get it out of my mind. It’s not a tool that every person in the world is going to use, but it feels a bit like the famous William Gibson quote, “The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.” This might be a little tiny bit of a good AI future, and now we just need to distribute the same kind of thing to a lot more people.
