Thoughts
On tech, AI, business, and what actually works.
July 21, 2026
Paris and Sacramento reached for the same billionaire tax in the same season — which tells you neither continent ever solved the problem. Europe's billionaires are half heirs who pay less income tax than America's; America's philanthropy creed is losing its race with compound interest. An investigation into two aging answers to the same question.
July 18, 2026
Everyone knew you could cast a toy car in one shot — and that you couldn't do it to a real one. Tesla built the machine that didn't exist and turned 70 parts into a single aluminum casting, deleting ~300 robots and cutting rear-underbody cost 40%. Then it hit the wall: defect yields, a repair bill that totals lightly-damaged cars, and rivals who can buy the same press. Inside gigacasting's real — and contested — competitive advantage.
July 18, 2026
Marc Andreessen calls it 'The Deal' — the unwritten compact that made America celebrate its founders. He watched it break between 2013 and 2024, then watched Washington spend eighteen months rebuilding it by executive order. The full 6,500-word account, adversarially fact-checked — including the June 2026 week when the new regime pulled Claude Fable 5 off the market and started deciding who gets GPT-5.6.
July 17, 2026
AI made execution nearly free, and the slop flood is what losing the price filter looks like. For seventy years, cost silently decided what got built, what came first, and when building stopped — now every builder has to make those three declarations on purpose, or not at all.
July 17, 2026
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab shipped its first model, Inkling, and admitted in writing that it isn't the best one available. That confession is the first coherent AI business strategy built on the premise that the frontier is a loss-leader — and that the real economics live in making a good-enough model yours.
July 15, 2026
In June 2024 Google forced its biggest advertisers off credit cards with a no-exceptions ultimatum, calling it a better billing experience. The payments math tells the real story: roughly $300 per $10,000 in card fees versus a dime by bank transfer — plus tighter control, verified identities, and a bet that advertisers had nowhere else to go.
July 14, 2026
The AI buildout's tightest chokepoint isn't Nvidia — it's HALEU, the reactor fuel that Big Tech's new nuclear fleet needs, and Centrus Energy's Piketon, Ohio plant is the only facility in America licensed to make it. Inside the $900 million bet, the Russian irony, the 40x supply gap, and the five-year window before the monopoly ends.
July 13, 2026
AI's binding constraint is no longer chips — it's electricity. A map of the companies selling the electrons: the dominant incumbents with decades of contracted hyperscaler revenue, and the wild cards that could pay off like lottery tickets over the next ten years.
July 6, 2026
Jensen Huang tells customers that even if rivals gave their chips away, NVIDIA would still be the cheaper choice. Independent benchmarks, MLPerf audits, and the purchasing behavior of the smartest compute buyers say he's mostly right — with one instructive exception.