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🚨 Pope Leo XIV just declared the Iran War unjust. Called it a war crime. Said it is “not solving anything.” Then told Americans directly: call Congress. End this war. The same Pope Trump called weak on crime. The same Pope Trump fabricated a nuclear quote from. The same Pope whose brother received a bomb threat after Trump attacked him. The same Pope Speaker Johnson lectured on theology. 1.4 billion Catholics heard their leader call this war a crime.

I am the Director of Summit Outcomes for the Presidential Advance Team. My job is to land in a foreign capital and leave with a word the President can say on the tarmac. We landed in Beijing 6 days after rolling back the tariffs we spent 4 years imposing. 145% to 30%. The average rate before the trade war was approximately 3%. In Geneva, we called this "creating the conditions for productive dialogue." The conditions were that we had already conceded. I want to be clear: Beijing was a success. We went in with 7 objectives. We left with 3 photo categories, a tentative agreement China has not confirmed, and a bag of burner phones we threw off Air Force One on the tarmac. Diplomacy. My team prepared the deliverables matrix in March. 241 line items organized by urgency, feasibility, and what we call "headline potential." The President reviewed it for 4 minutes. He circled "big deal" and "historic" and wrote "MORE" next to the Boeing section. That became the strategy. Boeing was the centerpiece. 500 aircraft was the White House number we briefed to reporters before departure. 300 was the floor. The Chinese offered 200. Their commerce ministry released the number before we could brief the press. Boeing stock dropped 4.73% that afternoon. Boeing referred questions about the order to the White House. The company receiving the aircraft could not confirm it was receiving aircraft. We called it "fantastic." In Washington, "fantastic" means the other side named the number and the market already priced in your failure. I should note: in 2017, the President announced $250 billion in deals during his first China trip. 300 aircraft. An $84 billion shale gas investment in West Virginia from China Energy Investment Corporation. I can tell you the exact amount of that investment that materialized. Zero. The shale facility was never built. The 2017 Boeing order was renegotiated twice and partially canceled during the trade war the President started 8 months later. There is a binder in my office labeled "2017 OUTCOMES: DO NOT REFERENCE." It is 3 inches thick. It has not been opened in 4 years. We do not reference it because the outcomes are the reference. The agricultural package was what we call a "scaffolding commitment." Billions in purchases over 3 years, structured so the announcement is front-loaded and the verification is someone else's administration. U.S. Trade Representative Greer said "double-digit billions." Beijing's Commerce Ministry issued a statement about "deepening cooperation in agricultural trade." Those are not the same sentence. By design. My deputy maintains a glossary of every term we have invented for agreements that are not agreements. It is 41 pages. He updates it after each summit. Last quarter he added "scaffolding commitment," "streamlined licensing framework," and "mutual recognition of shared concerns." He is in line for a promotion. NVIDIA was the quiet win. H200 chips approved for approximately 10 Chinese companies. We don't say "approved." We say "under a streamlined licensing framework." The chips ship. The export controls remain "in effect." The framework is the loophole wearing a lanyard. The controls exist because these chips in Chinese hands threaten American national security. The chips are shipping to Chinese hands. The controls remain in effect. Both of these are true. Fentanyl was discussed for 9 minutes. Both sides agreed it was a problem. Both sides agreed to continue discussing it. We added it to the deliverables matrix under "ongoing mutual engagement." The previous version of the matrix also listed it under "ongoing mutual engagement." That was in 2023. I copied the line item from the 2023 matrix into the 2026 version. Changed the date. The language was identical. But Taiwan. Taiwan was the deliverable we didn't put on the matrix. I watched the Taiwan exchange from the overflow room on a 12-second delay. I had the contingency statement drafted in 3 versions: "productive exchange," "frank discussion," and "both sides reaffirmed their respective positions." I used none of them. There was no contingency for silence. Chairman Xi released his remarks before the meeting was over. While the President was still seated across the table, Chinese state media published the transcript. "Clashes and even conflicts." His bluntest language on Taiwan in the history of the relationship, released to 1.4 billion people while we were still pouring tea. We called this "sequencing." The President was asked whether he would defend Taiwan if China attacked. He chose not to answer. We wrote that down as "a strong listen." The $14 billion arms sale. Already approved by Congress. The largest in the history of the Taiwan Relations Act. Taiwan's parliament spent months appropriating the $25 billion to proceed with this package and the $11 billion tranche approved last year. They finally secured the funding this month. The President told Fox News it was "a very good negotiating chip." He used the word "chip." Referring to the defense of 24 million people. Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense sent our office a letter requesting clarity on the delivery timeline. 3 pages. It referenced specific weapons systems by name: F-16V Block 70 fighters, HIMARS launchers, Harpoon coastal defense missiles. The letter was addressed to me. I filed it under "pending." On Air Force One, a reporter asked about the 1982 Six Assurances, the framework in which the United States committed not to consult with Beijing before selling arms to Taiwan. The President said: "What am I going to do, say I don't want to talk to you about it because I have an agreement wrote in 1982? No, we discussed arms sales." 44 years of bipartisan Taiwan policy, dismissed in 2 sentences at 38,000 feet. We are calling this "a modernized approach to alliance management." Our readout mentioned trade, agriculture, energy, and regional stability. It did not mention Taiwan. I wrote it. Their readout opened with Taiwan. I have staffed 7 summits across 2 administrations. This is the first where I could not draft a single deliverable as a success without a qualifier. In my office there is a laminated card that lists every synonym for "undecided" that polls above 40% approval. "Active review" is 3rd. "Determination" is 7th. Both tested well with independents in the Midwest. He also said: "Taiwan would be very smart to cool it a little bit. China would be very smart to cool it a little bit." He was eating a cheeseburger. He said this while eating a cheeseburger. Secretary Rubio told NBC that Taiwan arms sales "did not feature prominently." This is accurate in the same way that the iceberg did not feature prominently in the Titanic's itinerary. Representative McCaul, Republican of Texas, former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the United States must "arm Taiwan so they can defend themselves." He said Xi was "very aggressive" regarding Taiwan during the summit and that "most of what Xi talked about was Taiwan." Representative Meeks, Democrat of New York, ranking member of the same committee, said Xi has "leverage over the president" but not "over the United States Congress and the American people." He noted that Congress already approved the package. "The president is the one that's holding it up." Representative Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, compared Taiwan to Ukraine. He called both "fortresses of democracy on the front lines." Speaker Johnson said Taiwan needs to "stay independent and secure." The bipartisan consensus was that something had gone wrong. The bipartisan action was press quotes. No vote. No resolution. No hearing scheduled. 4 members of Congress from both parties said the right words to reporters and then went to lunch. That's how the system processes alarm. I monitor 14 accounts we classify as "aligned messaging amplifiers." Within 4 hours of the Taiwan exchange, 9 went silent. 2 pivoted to fentanyl. 1 posted 3 words: "Not like this." It received 280,000 impressions in 90 minutes. He deleted it and posted about the border instead. The President patted Chairman Xi on the back 7 times during the Zhongnanhai garden walk. We counted. He called him "my friend" in 4 languages, 2 of which he does not speak. He asked if other world leaders had been invited to the compound. They had. Putin was there last year. The President asked if his tour was longer. 15 CEOs flew with us to Beijing. Their combined net worth approaches $1 trillion. Cook. Musk. Jensen Huang. Larry Fink from BlackRock. Jane Fraser from Citigroup. David Solomon from Goldman Sachs. Stephen Schwarzman from Blackstone. Kelly Ortberg from Boeing. The CEO of Visa. The CEO of Mastercard. The CEO of Qualcomm. Illumina. Micron. Cargill. GE Aerospace. Musk and Huang rode on Air Force One. The others flew commercial. Tesla's Shanghai factory produces approximately half of the company's vehicles worldwide. Musk's presence on Air Force One was noted by my counterintelligence liaison. No further action was taken. We organized the state banquet seating chart by net worth. I am told this was the President's suggestion. They came for market access. Xi told them China would "open further to American business." That was the deliverable. Those 5 words. No specifics. No timeline. No sectors named. 15 chief executives flew to Beijing and received a sentence. Chairman Xi has delivered this sentence at every summit I have staffed. It has not once been followed by a named sector, a timeline, or a specific commitment. It is received as news each time. 43 lobby badges in a Ziploc bag. That's what my team collected from the CEOs after the garden tour. Standard protocol. The badges were embossed with the Great Hall of the People seal. Several executives asked if they could keep them. We said no. One asked twice. 15 executives with combined access to American financial, defense, and technology infrastructure had spent 3 hours inside the Great Hall of the People. We secured the lobby badges. The S&P 500 futures dropped 1% on the morning after the summit. The KOSPI fell 6.12%. China's CSI 300 fell 1.12%. UBS told clients that "much increasingly scarce jet fuel has been burned to produce nothing of real substance." Fortune's headline was "Wall Street sees nothing of real substance." The markets liked the anticipation. The markets did not like the deliverables matrix. Iran was the item we listed as "mutual recognition of shared concerns." The President told reporters they "feel very similar." Xi sat in silence. China's Foreign Ministry did not comment on any commitment regarding the Strait of Hormuz. The President then told reporters the United States "doesn't need the Strait of Hormuz open at all." Oil hit $109 per barrel. Deutsche Bank flagged it as a market-killing statement within the hour. The President described Iran as "a little bit crazy." This was during a toast. Over Peking duck. Rare earths. I prepared a 40-page brief on critical mineral dependency. Supply chain maps for 14 minerals. $1.2 trillion in dependent U.S. industries. Roughly 4% of GDP. The President circled the GDP figure and wrote "big." In the meeting, he asked Chairman Xi if rare earths were "the things in magnets." They are. They are also in every F-35, every Patriot missile battery, and every MRI machine in the country. The discussion lasted 11 minutes. 3 of them were about magnets. No agreement on export licenses. China exposed our dependency last year and has not let us forget it. The Supreme Court struck down our tariffs separately, which was helpful context for the discussions. Fentanyl received 9 minutes. Magnets received 3. We are calling the rare earth outcome "a foundation for continued engagement." There is a poster in the Advance Team office that says "A foundation is not a building." It has been there since my first summit. No one has removed it. On the flight home, my team collected every item the Chinese government had distributed. The credentials. The pins. The keepsakes. The rose seeds Chairman Xi offered for the White House Rose Garden. Standard counterintelligence protocol. All of it went into a bag and off the plane before wheels-up. We threw away the roses. We kept the talking points. The Boeing order grew on the flight home. 500 before departure. 200 in Beijing. 750 somewhere over the Pacific. Boeing had not confirmed 200. The President told reporters on Air Force One it was "a pretty historic couple days." I wrote the line that preceded it: "Tonal reset with significant forward momentum." He used "fantastic" instead. In previous administrations, a tonal reset preceded the deliverables. In this administration, the tonal reset is the deliverable. He has used "fantastic" for every summit since 2017. I have not checked whether the word still polls well. I am told it does. Beijing has not confirmed any of the agreements announced by U.S. officials. This is consistent with the 2017 visit, where $250 billion in deals were announced and an estimated $10 billion materialized. It is consistent with the October summit, where pledges were also made and also not fulfilled. We have a term for this in the Advance Team. We call it "precedent." I have already labeled the binder for 2026. We go back in September. Same matrix. New line items. The verification will be someone else's administration. The President has already asked for the word "monumental." I am told it polls well.

42 years ago today, TOTO hit No. 1 on the #Hot100# with its classic rock staple “Africa.” #BBChartRewind# 📈🌍 The band had earned two top 10 hits before “Africa”: “Hold The Line” reached No. 5 in 1979 and “Rosanna” climbed to No. 2 in 1982. They returned to the region for a fourth time with “I Won’t Hold You Back” (No. 10 peak, also in 1983). “Africa” has since been certified Diamond by the @RIAA, and tallied nearly 4 billion global streams, according to @luminate_data. Take a look at the top 10 of the chart when TOTO hit No. 1, and swipe to see the full chart that week.

GameStop's bid for @eBay summarised The deal • @gamestop is offering $125 per share for eBay, which is a big 46% premium over eBay's recent stock price • Half the payment would be in cash and half in GameStop shares • This values eBay at about $55.5 billion • Not a done deal yet, but GameStop already owns about 5% of eBay through stocks and derivatives. They're filing official notices tomorrow How GameStop Plans to Pay For It • They already have ~$9.4 billion in cash and investments • A major bank (TD Securities) gave them a "highly confident" letter for $20 billion more. The rest comes from issuing new GameStop shares The Big Money-Saving Plan • GameStop believes they can cut $2 billion in costs per year pretty quickly by trimming eBay's spending on marketing, product development, and admin. For context, eBay spent $2.4 billion on marketing last year but only added 1 million new buyers • If successful, this would boost earnings significantly in the first year The strategic story • Turn their 1,600 physical stores into hubs for authenticating items, taking in products, shipping, and even live selling/streaming • Double down on trading cards (Pokemon, One Piece, Sports), collectibles, and refurbished tech - categories where GameStop already has expertise • @ryancohen (CEO) would become CEO of the combined company What This Means for Collectibles and TCGs GameStop's stores could become convenient places for people to bring in cards, sneakers, comics, or memorabilia for authentication and selling on eBay - making it easier and safer for average collectors to buy and sell The focus on live commerce and physical fulfillment may also boost visibility hobby (that is ever growing), potentially driving higher prices and more volume in trading cards TLDR: position collectibles as mainstream, accessible retail assets instead of just online-only, which could attract new buyers and increase liquidity across the entire space.

I am the VP of Workforce Strategy at Meta and I built a spreadsheet called the Replacement Ratio that is, without exaggeration, the most elegant financial instrument in this building. Column A is headcount. Column B is quarterly CapEx allocation. Column C is what I call the Narrative Yield — how much each layoff announcement moves our price-to-earnings multiple. At Meta, cutting 8,000 people generates approximately 2.3x more shareholder value as a story than the $27 billion those people actually cost us. Like a controlled demolition where the dust cloud is worth more than the building ever was. I discovered this by accident in November 2022. We announced the first round on a Thursday. 11,000 people. The stock jumped 4% before market close. Our share price was $90 that week. I pulled up the actual savings — roughly $2.3 billion in annual compensation — and compared them to the market cap movement and the ratio was so disproportionate I thought I'd made an error. I had not made an error. I had discovered the Narrative Yield. The announcement IS the product. The terminations are just the input cost of producing it. Then Mark sent the second memo in March 2023. 10,000 more. "Flatter is faster," he wrote. "Leaner is better." "Keep technology the main thing." My team built talking points around each phrase. I remember testing "returning to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles" and watching three analysts independently upgrade the stock within 48 hours. Not because the ratio mattered. Because the sentence contained the word "optimal" and the word "ratio" and both of those words trigger the part of an analyst's brain that releases dopamine. We cut 21,000 people total. Our stock went from $90 to $600. Mark's net worth grew by approximately $170 billion. That is $9 million per fired employee. I calculated that number on a Tuesday afternoon and then went to get a coffee from the espresso bar in Building 40 that still operates at full capacity. The barista's name is Diego. He makes a very good cortado. He was not in any of the rounds. Our entire global payroll is $27 billion. Every engineer, every content moderator, every cafeteria worker who restocks the oat milk refrigerator in Building 21 next to the motivational poster that says EFFICIENCY IS CARING in Helvetica Bold, which was printed four days before we eliminated the internal print shop. All of them. $27 billion. Our CapEx guidance this year is $60 to $65 billion. Susan Li said it on the call in January — two weeks after we announced the latest round. The combined Big Four spend is $350 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025. Up from $165 billion just two years ago. If I fired every single employee tomorrow, all 72,000, the savings would cover maybe 42% of one year's data center buildout. The humans are a rounding error in the budget of machines that replace them. So what are the layoffs paying for? They are paying for the sentence. The one Susan Li reads on the earnings call: "These actions help us move more quickly while also helping to offset the substantial investments." That sentence is worth $40 billion in market cap. I know because I A/B tested the language with investor relations in March. We tested seven versions. Version C outperformed Version A by 340 basis points. Version C is the one with "actions" instead of "terminations." Version F used "workforce adjustments" and tested even higher but Legal flagged it as too close to the phrasing in the severance agreements. So we went with C. Turns out the market doesn't mind what you do. It minds what you call it. We call it a lot of things. "Flattening the org." "Removing redundancies." "Focusing our investments on our highest priorities." "Raising the bar on performance management." That last one was January 2025. Mark's memo. 3,600 people. He called them "lowest performers." The memo went out on January 14th. The earnings call announcing $60-65 billion in spending went out on January 29th. Fifteen days. My team scheduled both. The proximity is not accidental. You announce the human cost first so that when you announce the machine cost, the narrative is "disciplined" rather than "reckless." Sequencing is everything. We tested the reverse order once, hypothetically, in a simulation. The model predicted a 2.1% stock dip. Discipline first. Ambition second. Always. The performance framing was my suggestion. If you call them layoffs, it triggers severance obligations and unemployment benefits in thirty-seven states. If you call them performance-based terminations, it triggers nothing. Same people. Same desks cleared. Same badge deactivated at 5 AM before they woke up. Different word. Different $180 million in severance liability. I keep a legal pad in my desk where I track the savings per euphemism. "Performance management" saves approximately $50,000 per head in reduced severance. At 3,600 heads, that is $180 million. The cost of drafting the memo was forty minutes of Mark's time and sixteen hours of my team's time. That is approximately the best ROI in the history of corporate communications. Better than the Narrative Yield itself. Each phrase tests differently with different analyst cohorts. Growth-focused analysts respond to "investing in AI." Value analysts respond to "disciplined cost management." Same 8,000 people. Different sentence. Different $40 billion. The notification protocol is standardized now. Laptop access revoked at 5:47 AM Pacific. Badge deactivated at 5:48. Slack channels disappear at 5:49. Calendar cleared at 5:50. Personal email notification sent at 6:00. The thirteen-minute gap between systems going dark and the employee being told why is not cruelty. It is security protocol. We cannot have 3,600 people with simultaneous access to internal systems and knowledge that they have been terminated. The window for sabotage is too wide. So we close the window first and explain later. Some of them find out from the press release. Some of them find out because their phone loses work email at 5:47 and they check Twitter. I do not love this part. But I respect the engineering of it. Thirteen minutes. Clean. We announced the January cuts the same week Mark said "people will be more important than ever." My team wrote both statements. There is no contradiction if you understand that "people" and "headcount" are different financial instruments. People are the future. Headcount is the cost of having had a past. I keep a framed printout of both quotes side by side on my office wall. Not as irony. As a reminder that language is architecture. Meanwhile: we spent $77.86 billion buying back our own stock between 2022 and 2024. $27.96 billion. $19.77 billion. $30.13 billion. Each buyback inflates the share price. Each share price increase makes the layoff announcement look more justified in retrospect. The stock went up because we cut. We used the cash from cutting to buy back stock. The buyback made the stock go up more. The stock going up proved the cuts were correct. I mapped this loop on a whiteboard in January 2024 and one of our financial planning analysts took a photo of it and made it her laptop wallpaper. The total severance bill for 21,000 employees was approximately $2.5 billion. We spent 31 times that amount buying back stock. The humans cost less to remove than the stock cost to inflate. That is not a metaphor. That is the actual ratio. I have it in Column E. Reality Labs lost $60 billion between 2020 and 2024. Sixteen billion in 2023 alone. It was never subjected to the "Year of Efficiency." No one asked the metaverse division to be leaner or flatter or faster. The humans were asked to be efficient so the machines could be profligate. I did not design this asymmetry. I just maintain the spreadsheet that tracks it. The rehire pipeline is my favorite part. Half those roles reopen in Hyderabad and São Paulo within nine months at 31% of the loaded cost. Revenue per remaining employee went from $1.3 million in 2022 to $2.7 million in 2024. Each survivor now generates more than double what their predecessor generated. Not because they work harder. Because the denominator shrank and the numerator — AI-driven ad revenue — grew independently of human effort. We call it geographic rebalancing. The Workforce Transitions team keeps a Lucite tombstone on their shelf from the 2023 round, 11,000 MANAGED DEPARTURES etched in Helvetica, right next to a half-empty bottle of Clase Azul someone brought back from the offsite in Cabo where we planned the 2024 round. The same team is hosting a culture workshop next month called "Our People, Our Purpose." I wrote the talking points. Amazon is doing 30,000. Intel cut 21,000. Microsoft invented "voluntary departures" for 125,000 people, which is the most inspired euphemism since "rightsizing," because it implies the 125,000 chose this. Google cut 12,000 and called it a "moment of clarity." Salesforce eliminated 4,000 customer support roles and cited AI directly. Combined across the industry: 644,000 tech workers laid off since 2023. Combined CapEx on AI infrastructure: $350 billion this year alone. They spent seven to ten times more on GPUs than on severance for the humans those GPUs replaced. The layoffs are the press release for the spending. The spending is the excuse for the layoffs. It is a perpetual motion machine that runs on the difference between what a person costs and what their departure is worth. The free food budget for remaining employees is approximately $800 million per year. $10,000 to $12,000 per person. Artisanal pizza. Sushi bar. Pour-over coffee stations. The campus amenities operated without interruption during every round. Nobody asked the cafeteria to be efficient. I eat lunch there every day. It is very good. The oat milk is organic. Column D is the one I'm most proud of. It tracks average severance duration against local unemployment rates and cross-references media coverage density by market to optimize announcement timing for minimal news cycle disruption. January announcements get buried in earnings season. September announcements get lost in back-to-school cycles. I have mapped every dead zone in the American attention span and they are all on my calendar. January 14th — two weeks before Super Bowl coverage saturates every newsroom — was not an accident. The 3,600 number was calculated to stay below the threshold that triggers a WARN Act filing in California. 3,600 across twelve states. Below the threshold in each. That was also Column D. I presented the Replacement Ratio at our Q2 planning offsite last Tuesday. Someone from Legal asked if we'd modeled the human impact. I said yes. Column D. That's what Column D is. They promoted the spreadsheet to a standing dashboard. It refreshes hourly. Net income last year was $62.4 billion. Headcount is 72,000. The dashboard calculates revenue per head in real time. Every departure makes the number go up. Every departure makes the announcement worth more. Every announcement makes the stock go up. Every stock increase makes Mark $4.7 billion richer per percentage point. I named the Slack channel #narrative-yield#. It has 340 members. None of them are in Column A.

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