In my latest for the WSJ, I document how the California Billionaire Tax proposition is built on a bed of statistical lies and data manipulation by Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, the two economists who helped design the proposal.

Ro Khanna is a resentful and economically illiterate centimillionaire who was just handed wealth by his family, which is why he dislikes people who create wealth by delivering innovations like electric cars and satellite internet:

Somewhere from the living room of his 3rd or 4th vacation home, Bernie Sanders has summoned one of his staffers ($37K TC) to begin drafting a blog post titled "The Problem with Trillionaires"

Would just say that it will be interesting to see how much Steyer paid his three celebrity endorsers (Fonda, Ruffalo and Khanna). Taking payments from billionaires for useless endorsements, priceless.

Fable 5 estimates that Musk employs a half million direct and indirect people in the US connected to businesses he created paying in $5-7B into SS. Bernie knows this but chooses to distort reality to create villains and divide our country

I had a really good customer experience with the IRS today on a website issue. Wait time was brief and quality of service was strong.

One thing I remember clearly about the peak 2000 thing as that on the weekend, every brunch spot was overrun by people in their MBA sweatshirts. Is there less MBA hiring this time?

It’s official: Prop D has failed! San Franciscans don’t fall for misleading campaigns. Backers spent big on a tax that would drive jobs and revenue out of the city. Voters saw through it and voted to keep businesses here and back SF’s recovery. sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s…

2025 was my toughest year in startup land. A whole bunch of companies did not make it. The people were amazing, and the risk was worth it. 2026 has almost been opposite. Updates are rosy. Investors are doing follow on rounds.

I never met Gordon Wood, but I have a story about him. In one of my grad school seminars, we read Wood’s Creation of the American Republic. The sheer erudition and evidentiary depth of the book bowled me over. Back then, before kids and before life accelerated to warp speed, I used to call my mother every Sunday to catch up. Lots of times, we ended up talking about what I was reading that week in my grad seminars or for leisure. Mom had an omnivorous mind, and she was always looking for something else to read. She was a true intellectual—curious about almost everything, always eager to integrate new arguments or ideas into her existing schemas of how the world worked or to have those schemas challenged and changed. When we talked that particular Sunday, I think I tried to describe to her part of Wood’s argument about the relationship between the state constitutions during the Articles of Confederation era and the federal Constitution. Maybe I was tired, maybe I didn’t completely understand her questions, but the end result of the conversation was that Mom had questions about Wood’s argument that I didn’t answer satisfactorily. I told her that she should probably just read the book, and we said goodbye. She did eventually read the book, but the next Sunday, Mom started our conversation by saying, “Well, I had a lovely conversation with Gordon Wood this week.” For a split second, I thought she was joking, but then I remembered who I was dealing with. I started to sweat. “How?” I asked. A whole variety of unlikely scenarios in which the foremost historian of the American Revolution and my mother, who lived in Wichita, Kansas, might have met ran through my mind. “Oh, I just looked up his office phone number on Brown’s website and called, and he picked up!” Mom said. I decided I would have to find another profession. As it ended up, Gordon Wood spent about an hour on the phone with my mother answering her questions about the Constitution. Ever since, I’ve had a soft spot for the man when I imagine him picking up the phone in Providence and finding Becky Elder from Wichita on the other end of the line. His generosity in that moment spoke very well of him. Rest in peace, professor.

We won big this election. ✅ Stephen Sherrill won District 2 ✅ Alan Wong won District 4 ✅ Phil Kim won Board of Education ✅ Prop A passed ✅ Prop B passed ❌ Prop C failed ✅ Prop D failed The results signal continued support for the progress San Francisco has made over the last two years, and for leaders focused on affordability, effective governance, and long-term economic growth. We’re proud of the campaigns we ran to get good information out to voters, grateful to everyone who supported this work, and ready to do it again in November.

Overlooking Omaha Beach is a cemetery in which the Americans who died on D-Day were buried. To walk through this graveyard is to walk through America, for the names of the dead are the common names of our friends and relatives. Once when visiting there, I tried to imagine what that day might have felt like. I started at the water line and ran, evading imaginary bullets. I was obsessed with how tired I was. I was in good shape then, but running on a track is one thing; running into a hail of German bullets and scrambling to find cover is another. I could not imagine myself rising and attacking the Germans, dug in as they were, and I could not imagine how the soldiers could have done so either. There were many men, many specialties and many levels of courage, but for me, standing over all were the infantry who jumped into the water and ran into the German hell. In the cemetery, I could only look at the graves and ask the question that must be asked of heroes: What kind of men were these? I felt envious of their achievement and grateful I was not there. Soldiers pay the price, while analysts like me pretend to understand by taking a run on a beach. Only those who were there can know what war is. The task of a government is not to find safety or capitulation, for there is none there; it is to prepare for a war in which men will not have to cross a beach filled with death. The most dangerous thing in the world is wishful thinking. On Omaha Beach, all sides confronted truth and gave us a peace in which we must embrace reality.

San Francisco is booming. But here is the deal, the ability to absorb growth is limited and constrained by housing. So I expect for practical reasons startup formation to spread geographically and yes, the return of remote work to reach and attract talent.

How the decision to launch D Day right now in 1944 was made. open.substack.com/pub/alexke…

"The leading Democratic candidates for two key positions are disconcertingly receptive to a disastrous idea: blowing up California’s insurance market just as it’s starting to reach more stable ground. This would, in turn, destroy the state’s efforts to build more housing and make it virtually impossible for would-be homebuyers to secure a mortgage."

And all of this is cheered by the special interests (just they are quieter than the Seattle mayor). Instead of fighting to retain business and all that tax and employee revenue, CA laughs. We are bailed out constantly by landing what’s next. If we do not, we will be Illinois.

This is Todd “Let’s Roll” Beamer, who died heroically while trying to retake United Flight 93 from Al Qaeda terrorists on 9/11. His final resting place, is in Cranbury, NJ — where he was living with his wife and children before his murder. Cranbury is located in NJ-12, where the new Democratic nominee for Congress is Adam Hamawy. Hamawy was a close associate and translator to Omar Abdel-Rahman, aka the ‘Blind Sheikh,’ an arch terrorist convicted of masterminding multiple plots against targets in NYC — including the World Trade Center. Hamawy testified at Adbel-Rahman’s trial, as a defense witness. It has also been reported that Hamawy traveled to Bosnia to volunteer at an organization that was later unmasked as an Al Qaeda front group. One of Hamawy’s loudest and most high-profile supporters and endorsers has openly declared that America deserved the 9/11 attacks. Hamawy is now the prohibitive frontrunner to represent Todd Beamer’s district in the United States Congress.

This shots are all fair. My read as one who went all in on the Mahan train is not that we don’t get it, it shows how badly we want an effective governor for CA that we were willing to make a late push with Mahan.

We tried. Not a great day for Mahan but I do feel he will do big things in the future.