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 that dives deep into the finances of the AI bubble. Over the past few months, I’ve published a two part guide to the world of AI debt, an analysis of the (dubious) impact of generative AI on the global economy, deep analyses of the biggest players in the AI infrastructure space like NVIDIA (part one and two) and Oracle (part one and two), and the role private credit is playing in funding AI data centers, and how private equity, reeling from years of successive failed software acquisitions, is doubling down on the AI bubble.
On Friday, we’ll take a look at the JOBS Act — or, the Obama-era legislation that created the regulatory environment that would ultimately prove essential for the AI bubble to inflate - and why it might be time to reform or entirely repeal it.
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.
Every morning, I revisit my blog headlines from this date, going back 25 years, 20 years, 15 years, 10 years, 5 years, and one year. I publish the most interesting ones in a section of my newsletter that I call "object permanence," and I think it's the most useful part of my day.
"Object permanence," of course, is a reference to the stage in an infant's development when they acquire the ability to connect events in the past to events in the present, which is why it's the point at which babies cease to be amazed by peek-a-boo. I've been blogging for more than a quarter century, and these daily trawls through the things I considered important enough to share are an unexpectedly powerful way to connect the events of the past to the events of the present.
Take cybersecurity, subject that is filling today's headlines, primarily due to a spate of poorly understood (and criminally poorly explained) incidents in which AI companies' hacking tools broke into various servers on the internet, sometimes trashing them:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake
Wouldn't it be cool if we could see all the books Legends have written in one place?
That's what Brian Kerr asked during our Q2 Earnings Call back in July. A Legends bookshelf with all the titles for you to browse. You might think Legends are just writing business books but NOT SO, we've got Legends writing thrillers, urban fantasy, memoir, entertainment and music, poetry, history and personal development. We definitely have a solid business section too.
I have finally put something together to feature these tremendous works. It's called the Legends Book Fair 📚
You can submit books or browse the Book Fair through the end of the year. I will feature the Book Fair from time to time in the newsletter and new Legends will discover in on the blog too. It's a perfect time to get your books out in front of our network so people can buy them as gifts or read them over the holidays.
Wow, it's only Monday and we might already have our lead story. Airtable layoffs are here (as literally everyone predicted) and so begins the demise of the software many of us still love.
It was a slow start to the week of October 12, other than the Airtable news, because Monday was a holiday in the US, Canada and lots of other places so I don't have more stories for you yet. My thoughts on Airtable's layoffs below. Stay tuned as I track more of what happens in our business world live.
Here's what's shaping up this week...
Today:
1) One snapshot of this political moment.
2) A less-discussed lens on how the Religious Right brought us here.
3) What that, and our other wisdom, teaches us about how to mobilize now.
It's easy to forget while we're so immersed in it, but this white supremacist, Christian nationalist authoritarian chapter of history was never a foregone conclusion.
Note: Christian nationalism is a movement that asserts that the US was founded as, is now, and should be, a Christian nation. It's not synonymous with Christianity.
FUN FACT!
The U.S. Was Not, In Fact, Founded As a Christian Nation
despite the many other harms baked into its founding documents
If you work in the media, you have doubtless had a lifetime of encouragement to treat copyright as your primary source of economic protection, and doubtless you've been told that this protection arises from the fact that copyright is a property right – specifically, it's a subspecies of "intellectual property":
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-ip/
Property rights are capitalism's holy sacrament, so of course, it's natural to treasure any property right you can lay claim to. But this is a trap. Creative workers aren't asset speculators, we're workers. When we bargain with a media company to sell them our copyright, we're just bargaining to sell our labor, not our property.
This is a distinction with a difference. Property rights are alienable. When you negotiate to sell your property to someone else, you propose to transfer the title to that property. If you sell your house, you don't get to move back in if you change your mind later. Sell your car, and you must not get in and drive it away.
Holly Stars doesn't wait by the phone. When she has something to share, she gets busy knocking on doors, handing out flyers, pulling up at markets and hosting her own shows.
She's done that for years as a comedian and as a drag performer and now, she's doing it as an author. Holly released her second book, Missing in Soho (a drag queen detective novel) in February. It was published by Penguin, but having their support didn't stop her from putting together a slate of epic events to promote the latest adventure in her series. All year, Holly's been touring around the United Kingdom meeting readers face to face at markets, at book stores, and at her own cabarets. I heard about the Missing in Soho book tour earlier this summer from her friend Lucy Werner and wanted to know more about how this came together. Holly shares Lucy's Hype Yourself mindset. If you don't get out there and tell people what you're up to and why they should care, no one else will do that for you.
I appreciate Holly's go get 'em spirit, but there's more to this story than a plucky attitude. Behind the scenes of this tour, Holly used a set of reusable techniques all authors can borrow to get their book in the hands of more readers.
Holly's book takes place in a cabaret club in Soho (London) so when looking for a place for the launch party, she immediately thought of the Phoenix Arts Club, where she got her start performing. She already had a relationship with the venue so she contacted them about hosting the launch.
If you haven’t written a book, what would your first book be about?
I'm thinking about writing a book next year and I want to hear what you would write about. It could be fiction or non-fiction. My first book will definitely be non-fiction but I'd like to write fiction someday too. What book do you have in the back of your mind? —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.
It's our second birthday! We are looking for 50 new Legends who want to join us in being part of a new kind of small business media. You save $30 off the new price when you join us this week. Price goes up Monday.
Revenue Rulebreaker covers how solopreneurs make money. We do that with original stories that take you inside realistic businesses like Lucy Werner's story about rebuilding after accidentally deleting her Substack and Steph DragonHeart Benedetto's piece about charging for discovery calls. We've covered everything from how entrepreneurs get paid to speak to whether you should add "fractional" to your title to how to do Black Friday as a service provider.
We produce new stories every week and we keep up with the headlines you need to know about things like what's up with ThriveCart, what's going down with Airtable and what actually happened at Create & Cultivate. We recently shipped a Tech Watchlist so you can keep track of which tools we're watching.
No one else is covering our space this way. In fact, small business owners on Threads speculated that ThriveCart finally had a public response to their outage this year because our story ranked higher than their communications on Google. I have received DMs from our founders and tools we have covered. Our stories help you make smarter business decisions and they help keep our tech tools accountable.
There are many ways in which every billionaire is a policy failure, but the most corrosive and destructive way in which billionaires are policy failures is this: billionaires, despite being unelected and unaccountable, possess the power to control – and ruin – millions of peoples' lives.
Despite what the Prosperity Gospel and the Efficient Market Hypothesis would have you believe, having billions of dollars is in no way a reliable predictor that you also possess the wisdom to unilaterally dictate how thousands or millions of other people must live their lives, and that dictatorial power is most the tangible effect of being a billionaire.
Billionaireism is many things, but above all else, it is the power to do whatever *you* want to do, at the expense of whatever *other* people want to do. To be a billionaire is to live a life unthwarted, above the power of your workers, your neighbors, or your government and its laws. It is the right to get high on your own supply. It is the right to live a life in which no one ever calls you on your bullshit.
Billionaires aspire to live a one-sided libertarian fantasy in which they have the unlimited right to do whatever they want, and *you* have the right to do whatever they tell you to do.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are in a glorious, splendiferous, outrageous era of crap!
Some call it “high-yield,” some call it “speculative-grade,” but to those of us living in the real world, we know them as junk bonds, the formerly-sleepy world of below-investment grade debt that’s exploded in the last six years.
The high-yield market has continued to balloon over the last few years thanks to the vagaries of the global economy and, in recent years, the arrival of an entirely new category of crap - AI.
And “junk,” in the case of today’s newsletter, is going to extend so much further than simply “high-yield,” and into the murky world of leveraged loans that have been used to fund dodgy software deals and an increasing amount of data center debt deals.
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. ❤️
If you were creating a new website today from scratch, which platform would you use?
I'm starting a new photography service and need to create a portfolio website. My professional website has long been on WordPress, but I don't love it. The obvious alternative feels like Squarespace, but I've seen plenty of complaints about that, too. What's the best option these days? —Mike De Socio
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.
Up until very recently indeed, airlines were the only businesses that I dealt with regularly that practiced "price discrimination," charging different customers different prices for the same seats.
Economists broadly like this "second-order" price discrimination, where a company charges customers different prices based on the circumstances of the purchase, such as a bakery discounting bread at the end of the day. When an airline cranks up the price of an itinerary that doesn't include a Saturday stay, they're using that fact as a proxy for "price-insensitive" business travelers whose bosses can afford to pay more for a ticket, rather than paying a worker overtime to spend a weekend away from home after a meeting.
Despite the arguments about "efficiency," it's safe to say that *fliers* hate this. The airlines' pricing algorithms are so opaque and capricious that anyone who buys a ticket at *any* price inevitably feels like they got a bad deal. This situation is only exacerbated by the airlines' extreme and aggressive secrecy over their pricing strategies, which includes lawsuits against websites that use historical pricing data to predict when a plane ticket will be the cheapest to buy:
https://www.eff.org/document/preliminary-injunction-american-airlines-v-farechase-inc
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 dive into the world of junk debt – or, what happens when a hyperscaler's credit rating slips into the abyss, or what might happen as a certain money-losing AI lab moves into the world of junk, building on the story I'll tell today.
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.
Since the mid-1950s, we have changed the thing that "AI" refers to every 5-10 years. The current thing we're calling "AI" is about a decade old, and all this label-switching leads to a lack of clarity as to what (this) "AI" is. Unless you know that, you can't understand AI's technical capabilities, limitations, and (most of all) its political economy.
The thing we now call "AI" is a lineal descendant of the thing we were calling "AI" immediately before to the current "AI" emerged: that preceding AI is regular-degular "machine learning" (another flexible term, alas!). That slightly older AI was very similar to the current "AI", using comparable statistical techniques to analyze inputs and produce outputs. For example, the previous "AI" created the social media algorithms that have been the subject of so much discussion for 15+ years.
The difference is that this older AI was grounded in explicit, causal software models of the world. In the previous "AI" iteration, applying machine learning to playing chess required that a programmer first create a software model of a chess game, describing (in code) a chessboard, chess pieces, and the rules of chess. Then, the programmer fed a bunch of training data about chess games that had been played before to an "AI" system that analyzed their statistical relations and assayed chess moves.
The need to understand and describe a thing before you could apply "AI" to it is a bottleneck, because it requires programmers to understand how a thing works before they can incorporate it into an "AI" system. Lots of programmers know how to play chess, but far fewer understand the human pancreas, planetary weather systems, or patterns of mineral deposition in the Earth's crust.
We're repeatedly told that the killer app for pervert glasses – Meta's AI-enabled camera glasses and their imitators – is that they will remind you of someone's name and spare you the social awkwardness of not recognizing them.
I admit to finding this proposition very seductive. I'm mildly face-blind (I had two aunts I wasn't able to reliably tell apart until I was 12 or 13 and one of them changed her hair), and I meet a lot of people and often find myself incredibly embarrassed when I can't place someone that I know I'm acquainted with.
Actually, the emotion I feel when I don't recognize someone or can't place their name is worse than embarrassment: it's shame. I worry that my chronic inability to remember people's names/faces will make them feel like they're unimportant to me. And shame is such a shitty, gross emotion: it's the invasive thief of joy that shows up whenever things are bad for the purpose of making them worse.
If there were some way to confine pervert glasses to helping people remember names, I'd be all over them. But when it comes to actual, existing pervert-glasses, the main purpose is to covertly capture strangers and shame them. And when (not if) these pervert glasses get hooked up to facial recognition, they will become high-volume doxing factories that will reward the attention-hungry with viral fame.
We're starting this week with some good news for once! CultureCon seemed to go great over the weekend and the Zero Click Marketing book finally has a release date. Also, beehiiv's Tyler Denk opened a...sauna in Medellín?
Last week, I released our Tech Watchlist and I will continue to track those companies for you in our weekly headlines. More companies are chomping at the bit to rescue us from Airtable's expected demise. Softr's the latest one to create a pointed migration guide.
Here's what's shaping up this week...
I had a moment the other day standing at a traffic light staring into space where I remembered what it was like to have a shitty job. It's been so long since my boss at The Black Tux gave me the ultimatum that would lead to me starting my own company. So long since I had to work on a meaningless project for Nissan that was going straight into some executive's trash bin. So long since I had to commute two hours each way through LA traffic to be "face-to-face."
This is the best job I have ever had and it feels crazy that it is still working. We celebrate our two year anniversary this month. The only reason we've made it this far is because of you. Your investment in our network and in our publication are what makes this valuable to everyone else. Our mission here is to keep more solopreneurs and online small businesses in business. You have shown up in a major way this quarter to ensure that happens.
We had a truly stellar third quarter. I am over the moon pies about it. A bunch of Legends worked together on projects. Others found a business confidant they regularly chat with. Several Legends hosted each other on podcasts or interviewed each other for newsletter features. I also love when Legends read a story and put it to work for their business. We have a few great examples of that too.
We absolutely smashed our Legends goal. We stand at 438 Legends and that's in large part due to Legends referring each other and to Amelia Hruby's podcast Off the Grid. Those two sources combined were the reason over 50% of the new Legends joined us this season.
The post-war "peace dividend" owed its existence to three factors: industrial capacity, political freedom and pent-up demand.
Political freedom: the war's orgy of capital destruction of the majority of the wealth (and thus the power) of the world's oligarchs;
Demand: Making up for years of neglect and privation during the war required new production of infrastructure and consumption goods.
In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty and his students analyzed painstakingly assembled records of 300 years' worth of capital flows, showing that wealth tends to pool in the hands of the already-wealthy. This creates mounting instability, thanks to the misrule of a shrinking class of increasingly powerful hereditary, unaccountable oligarchs whose whims and follies trump the material and political needs of the vast majority:
After years of political pressure, hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the campaigns of pro-crypto politicians, and at least $8 million in lobbying,1 the Clarity Act collapsed at the eleventh hour when a procedural vote to advance the broad-ranging cryptocurrency market structure bill fell far short of the 60 votes it needed. While the crypto lobby had a long wishlist for Trump’s presidency — and has already secured wins such as the Genius Act stablecoin bill and regulatory capture at the CFTC and SEC — broad legislation that would cement the deregulation of the crypto sector while giving it a veneer of legitimacy was their top priority.
This is good news. The Clarity Act isn’t about “clarity” any more than the PATRIOT Act is about patriotism. It promised regulatory structure but would have carved out crypto from the scrutiny applied to similar financial products, instead building a custom regime to allow it to operate without meaningful oversight. Trump has already dismantled the agencies that should police the sector, replacing bipartisan commissions with a handful of loyalists who have dismissed the majority of crypto enforcement actions and investigations. But those are changes that can be reversed when Trump leaves office. Legislation is far more durable — which is why the crypto industry so desperately wanted the Clarity Act to lock in deregulation. Rebuilding from Trump’s devastation won’t be easy, but today we can be grateful there won’t be additional bad legislation blocking the way.
As I wrote just prior to the Clarity Act vote, Republicans had decided to plow ahead with a bill that had only token provisions to address Trump’s crypto corruption, without securing bipartisan agreement. When Democrats made a last-minute counteroffer, which would have reportedly added more restrictions on things like the amount of crypto elected officials could hold and paid crypto promotions, Republicans shot it down. Senate Banking spokesman Jeff Naft characterized the Democratic proposal as an attempt to “move the goalposts again” after he said Republicans had agreed to numerous Democratic demands.2
While members of both parties had been working together on a final version of the bill after it advanced out of the Senate Banking Committee in mid-May, that cooperation eroded as the time left to feasibly pass the bill dwindled. Republicans repeatedly shared draft text with the crypto industry — or even the general public — before providing it to their Democratic colleagues.3
This week, the Wall Street Journal ran an alarming illustration of AI’s potential share of GDP that I’d argue did more to muddy the waters than actually telling anyone anything, mostly because its measurement, for whatever reason, covered 2025 to 2032, meaning that six out of the eight years of the analysis were estimates of spending.
To be fair, this analysis came from the Brookings Institution’s Stijn van Nieuwerburgh rather than the Journal itself, but I cannot express how profoundly unhelpful it is to discuss things years in the future.
The Journal itself acknowledged this, giving us a far-more-useful number, emphasis mine:
Yet it’s important to be specific that this is almost entirely a result of AI data center construction and GPU sales rather than anything to do with the companies actually renting AI compute. In other words, AI itself isn’t helping boost America’s economic growth, but rather the infrastructure for it to theoretically run on.
How do you get over having to promote yourself A LOT?
I get this question a lot, especially from introverts or people who've never had to market their work before, but I never know how to answer it. Entrepreneurs all have to be their own marketer and as the world gets noisier, you've got to be pretty loud to be heard. How did you get over the fear of self-promotion? What makes it easier?—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.
Here's a funny thing about the right to vote: it wasn't won by voting.
From the Magna Carta to the US Constitution to the Emancipation Proclamation to 19th Amendment, voting rights (what you might call "Big P" Politics) were always downstream of protests, riots, petitions, mass movements, strikes and good, old fashioned community organizing (that is, "small p" politics).
Which is to say, Big P politics matter, but to make them matter, we need a lot of small p politics. That means that democracy isn't something you do every couple of years with a ballot paper (though that's an important aspect of the process). Democracy is continuous.
If you've ever wondered why your vote seems to accomplish so little, I think you can blame the near-abolition of small p politics by Big P politicians of every stripe. Indeed, Obama's genius was summoning up an army of door-knocking, phone-banking small p political activists and then euthanizing that organization after he won the election:
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. ❤️
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Every year, for 25 years, I’ve written on the observance of this anniversary. Some years, it’s been for me, some years it’s been for the people who’ve been with me along the way. Some years, I didn’t know why I was even doing it any more. But this year, for the first time in a long time, I can feel exactly what story I want to tell.
Right from the day of the attacks, that evening, I remember people all around the world saying to us, “Today, we are all New Yorkers.” It was so earnest, a statement so sincere, that I am still surprised how much it moved me. It might be hard for folks to imagine now, but it felt so real, that people everywhere — including people across America — felt like they loved us in New York City, and they were grieving with us, and cared about us.
And now we’re here in 2026, where it’s been wondrous to watch the world, for the first time since then, tell us once again that… their hearts are with New York City. This time, not in grief, but in joyous celebration. Celebration of our victories: Knicks in five! The Liberty and Gotham FC were champs less than two weeks after that! The World Cup lit the city up! Hip hop fans in the city came together for career-cappers by Wu-Tang and Jay Z. Countless festivals popped off, parades were more alive than ever, and nearly every one of those festivals and parades featured a shout-out to, or appearance from our wildly popular mayor Zohran Mamdani.
There are so many more highlights of how our city is serving us: the rollout of universal child care for 2-K, expansion of school safety zones to slow traffic for our kids, fixing up playgrounds, tickets for kids to go to Broadway and regular folks to go to the U.S. Open, repairing the BQE, $100 million in tips rightfully going to delivery workers, simplified paperwork for small businesses, the launch of the offices of Deed Theft Prevention, Insurance Affordability, Worker Power, and lots more.
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. ❤️
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
AI didn't make me faster. It made me willing to throw away a draft I would have died defending.
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.
52 bug-fix loops in 6 months, and why the '10x developer' narrative is missing the point
