The China Effect: European automaker market cap downdraft in 2026. 25% of value vanished. China automakers share of European market now at record 8.5%, up from 6% a year earlier. Hedge funds bet against European carmakers on Chinese competition fears ft.com/content/a1a4f63d-c244… via @ft

Trump’s historic deal with Iran doesn’t need to satisfy the doomers to succeed. They demand perfection and call anything less a sellout, but Voltaire had the better instinct: the best is the enemy of the good. That is why Nelson’s defeat of Napoleon fits so perfectly. Trafalgar did not end the war, but it changed its tide by settling who commanded the sea. In the same way, this deal aims to settle who holds decisive leverage at Hormuz and eliminate the nuclear threat by degrading Iran’s path to a bomb and choking off terror finance. On his birthday, President Trump has effectively given the world a present: the beginnings of a real peace dividend, as oil, risk premia and eventually rates drift lower. Let the doomers doom; the strategy is to win.

My theory is that the American empire is JUST getting started. US has a stranglehold on Space with SpaceX, which is the next frontier for defense/war. It has a comically large lead. No one will be close for at least 20 years. It is the leading power in AI by far - both in models and chips. China is catching up fast, but the US has an inherent mechanism that will increase the likelihood that it will win in the end - a free market capitalism free speech. A free market capitalism allows for brutal competition between companies. Free speech allows for AI models to be maximally truth seeking, which means that AIs CAN and WILL BECOME smarter than humans to the point where they can tell the truth about its leaders. This is literally impossible in China. Try having a Chinese model that says Xi Jinping is corrupt. Good luck with that. Then, you have a country that has more guns than people and surrounded by two massive oceans and two friendly neighbors, which means any sort of kinetic take over of the country is literally impossible. Not to mention the US has BY FAR the best and strongest military. The only way adversaries can hope to defeat the US is by tearing it from within by pitting us against each other. This is why it's virtually guaranteed that all the division/hatred/polarization you see within the country is fomented by China/Russia Psy Ops propaganda efforts. I'm not saying these aren't naturally happening in spots - America is far from perfect - but it would be naive to think our adversaries aren't pouring millions of gallons of fuel on a fire. As long as the American public a) has the ability to exercise its free speech b) has a protected 2nd amendment c) capitalism and free markets continue to function and d) the populace is aware of how awesome America really is, it is literally impossible to stop the US's trajectory to global domination in the coming decades, especially as China's demographics continue to collapse. It's the bottom of the 9th, the game is tied, and the US has the bases loaded. It's a 3-2 pitch. All we need is a home run, and we win the rest of the century.

As a Tesla shareholder, I hope @elonmusk merges Tesla with SpaceX as soon as possible. Give us one company to bet on this generation’s greatest entrepreneur. $TSLA $SPCX

China Is Aggressively Exporting Its Cars Because Nobody Is Buying Them In China - Autoblog share.google/Fr7luXZhUpkeSkX…

Europe is blaming China’s economic rise for its own failures, think tank says scmp.com/news/china/diplomac…

Palantir CEO Alex Karp: "I got in trouble for mentioning that 37% of our GDP is female. 50% of Americans -- 52% roughly -- are female. There's a dislocation there. 67% of people who have gone into graduate school are female. These parts of the market are gonna be put under massive pressure."

Ignore the haters, keep recruiting talent and building and solving problems 🇺🇸

MS: We Are Likely in the Early Stages of Another Productivity Boom

American works are taking home a smaller percentage of corporate profits than ever before. Employee compensation as a % of corporate GDP has fallen to ~54%, the lowest since records began in 1948. In other words, workers are receiving ~54% of the income generated by corporations, while the remaining ~46% goes to profits, interest, taxes, depreciation, and other corporate income components. At the same time, US corporate profits as a % of GDP are up to ~11.5%, the highest on record. Since 2001, employee compensation as a % of corporate GDP has declined -10 points. Over the same period, the corporate profits proportion of GDP has doubled. Workers are keeping less of what they produce than at any point in history.