We didn’t have “HR” when building Palantir, for similar reasons - I avoided Ryan’s mistake.
And when we needed some PeopleOps, we hired technical leaders.
Going into the vast majority of companies and firing most of their HR and Marketing departments would tend to create value!
Corporate life will teach you that knowing the job is only half the battle.
The real skill is staying calm in meetings, reading the room, managing ego, receiving vague feedback, and not replying emails with your real thoughts.
I don’t think there is enough reporting on the idea that in the last 3 years , a standard startup playbook has been to lie, cheat, make things up, scam people , break the law, steal things, lie more and then pass it off as “growth hacking”
A price cap on credit card interest rates would, if adopted, lead radical change in underwriting standards, product availability, and probably credit limits, which many people who want to borrow money would perceive as negative.
Holy shit is Meta evil lmao
***10%*** of Meta's revenue is from ACTUAL SCAMS that they KNOW ARE SCAMS
When Zuck found out, he shut down... the ANTI-scam team
Imagine trusting this man - or any of these cartoon villains - with Actual Fucking Superintelligence
Latest podcast from @Gregory_C_Allen has an insane section on criminal activity at Meta.
Internal docs leaked to Reuters show:
• 10% of all Meta revenue comes from ads for scams & banned goods ($16B/year)
• Meta estimates it's involved in 1/3 of all successful scams in the US
• That suggests they drive $50B in scam losses for US consumers alone each year
• Meta earns ~$3B annually from scam/banned goods ads run by Chinese operations alone
The China case study:
• In 2024, Meta made $18B from Chinese companies advertising to foreign consumers
• Internal teams found ~19% was scams/banned content
• An anti-fraud team successfully cut these ads in half
• When Zuckerberg saw the revenue impact, he told them to "pause" and the team was disbanded
• By mid-2025, banned ads climbed back to 16% of China revenue
• This results in money being stolen and going directly from ordinary Americans to Chinese criminals
The deliberate enabling:
• Fraud earns 10% of all revenue, but anti-fraud teams were blocked from any action costing >0.15%, so they couldn't effectively do anything
• Meta charged higher rates for suspected fraudulent ads — a "scam tax"
• Their algorithm naturally identifies people vulnerable to frauds and feeds them more and more
The cold calculation:
• Meta anticipated up to $1B in regulatory fines for this
• But they make $3.5B every 6 months from high-risk ads
• They view these fines as just "cost of doing business"
Senators Blumenthal & Hawley now calling for FTC/SEC investigations in a blistering letter, noting that all this happened while Meta cut safety staff and moved billions over to VR and AI.
WTF.
Breaking: an auto source tells me Toyota never even considered California, instead announcing a $912M investment in the states of Kentucky, Mississippi, West Virginia, Tennessee and Missouri. Why?
"California is lost. Not one of our employees wants to live there because it's too expensive and your taxes would be too high for our families."
• Missouri's state tax rate is 0 to 4.7%
• Mississippi has an individual tax rate of 4% with a multi-year phase down to 3% by 2030.
• Kentucky's state tax rate will decrease to 3.5% effective January 1, 2026.
• West Virginia's tax rate is 2.22 to 4.82%
• Tennessee does not have a state individual tax
California has a state tax rate of 13.3%
For those who so carelessly work in a space I’ve spent my career in, I have little regard or tolerance. Raising money does not make you a visionary. It provides room to prove how you execute and win. Execution is all that matters to me.
I was not a culture fit
Deadlines in implementations were slipping. So, let’s dig in and figure it out across prod/eng. Except, prod stopped attending meetings…prod consistently didn’t ship, or communicate, prod motion was unpredictable and random.
Guess it’s ok to not delivery for customers? 🚩 🚩
Walt you cantankerous, grumpy bastard I hear some of you saying. It’s ok to miss deadlines! It’s ok to fail!
I agree. Communicate. Make it right. The customers signed contracts. Be an adult, and make it right.
Nope. Leave them hanging…there’s a conference to plan.