My proposal for radically simple capital gains taxation reform mattsly.com/fair-and-simple-…

🚨Michael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbers. Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake. He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing. Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor. Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale. Those 100,000 chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models. But here is what Burry is flagging. Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory. They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies. Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle. Now here is where American retirees enter the picture. Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit. Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene. Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans. When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center. The numbers inside Athene are most alarming. Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight. Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets. Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth. The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times. Burry's says: Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing. - Nvidia books the revenue. - Apollo collects the fees. - xAI gets the computing power. - And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.

Trump is NOT a Manchurian Candidate, sent by Russia and China to infiltrate America and bring it down. But often, it's very hard to say what a Manchurian Candidate would do differently.

god what a bleak chart

holy fuck, a hair dryer at a Paris airport broke Polymarket weather markets & made someone $34,000 richer - polymarket was settling Paris temperature bets on a single Météo France sensor sitting near the Charles de Gaulle runway perimeter - basically unguarded - the guy bought the long-shot outcome (like "22°C" when everyone expected 18°C) for pennies, since nobody thought it'd hit - then he walked up to the probe and briefly heated the air around it with a portable heat source, spiking the reading just long enough to register as the daily max - temperature snapped back to normal in minutes, the market resolved in his favor, and he cashed out - twice, on April 6 and April 15, before Météo France caught on and filed charges hyperstitions.

This is the true legacy of DOGE - the utter decimation of medical research. MAGA idiots will try to tell you this is just cutting DEI programs. Keep in mind DOGE was filled with such idiots they killed physics grants that mentioned 'polarization' (of light) because of "DEI".

oh my god. was trump told to tell the press that the image was "doctored," but misunderstood and told everyone that he was depicted as a "doctor"?

Crazy how the likes of MTG, Alex Jones and now even evangelical pastors are breaking with Trump before any of TechBros

If we didn't have a maniac as secretary of defense, a toady as secretary of state, and a nobody as chief of staff, they'd be spending today making sure the military checks in with them before obeying any orders from Trump, and getting in touch w/ Congress to arrange impeachment.

Our best-case scenario, ATM, is that our autocratic president is a bellicose liar who threatens genocide and war crimes to obtain totally undecipherable objectives. Best case.

President Trump treats America like his personal empire—waging unnecessary wars, enriching allies and himself, ignoring Congress, and leaving civilians and global stability in ruins, says Cato’s @Doug_Bandow. This is not what the Founders envisioned. ow.ly/3jyz50YClmN

I know it's boring and repetitive to talk about how grossly evil Trump is, but the fact remains: Trump is grossly evil, in a way that's pretty much unprecedented in this country.

Worst @WSJ op-ed of the Trump era? Choose your fighter. @JDVance: Trump's Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars. @MickMulvaney: If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully

We’ve known this from the get-go. This is the most corrupt Administration in American history.

the corruption is the most structurally significant part of the administration. drain. the. swamp.

Will any of the “data driven” Trump tech bros ever have the courage to admit they were wrong?

Elon, Andreesen, Sacks, Ackman, Chamath, Vivek, on and on, I remember when for all these guys it was critical to elect Trump because our national debt was a crisis and existential threat to the future of America only he would tackle. Don’t hear so much about that anymore.

biden total spend on ukraine: $180 billion the pentagon just asked for $200 billion for war in iran.

The reckless campaign against Iran will weaken America’s president. That will make him angry. Be warned: he makes a very bad loser econ.st/4lA7lEQ

This is wild. People in *every single one* of the top US allies now think it's better to depend on China than the US. The global balance of power is clearly tilting away from the US and toward China.