MARK CUBAN DUMPED BITCOIN -- TOM LEE THINKS THAT’S A SIGNAL. Tom Lee says crypto has disappointed lately, but the future of $BTC and $ETH hasn’t changed. In his view, the “rage quitting” happening now looks a lot like the final stage of crypto winter. 👀

Mark Cuban explains how to launch a company without raising a single dollar: Cuban argues that the vast majority of small businesses can get off the ground without any outside capital at all. "Most businesses, I'd say at least 90, if not 95% or more percentage of small businesses, startups can start without raising any capital at all. You just use sweat equity." His advice is to start lean: "You just have to try to start smarter, smaller." But Cuban is honest that the early stage isn't glamorous. The real challenge, he explains, comes down to a tension between paying your bills and building something of your own. "The hard part for most people is that tradeoff between do I keep my job or how do I start a company when I have a job? I worked as a bartender at night." @mcuban continues: "Whatever you have to do, that's part of being an entrepreneur. So if you have to work on weekends, you have to Uber at night, Uber on weekends so you have some income coming in so you can work on your... company, or you work your regular job during the week and at night and weekends, that's when you work on your startup." For Cuban, this is actually the good news, because it means the door is open to anyone willing to put in the hours: "Anybody can be an entrepreneur if they're willing to work their ass off 24 hours. That's what it takes." He sums it up with a line that captures the whole philosophy: "Entrepreneurs work 80 hours so they don't have to work 40."

Mark Zuckerberg on why a "ragtag group of children" built Facebook when Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo couldn't: Zuckerberg returns to a question he's thought about from time to time: why was his small team able to build Facebook when much bigger companies didn't? "It wasn't like it was a super novel idea. There was Friendster before, there was MySpace, there's all this stuff. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, they all had versions of it. Why didn't they do it?" It wasn't talent or resources. If anything, the odds were against him: "We were like a ragtag group of children. And they had all these serious engineers and serious infrastructure." So what was the difference? According to Zuckerberg, big companies lose because they can't see the value in new ideas early enough: "I kind of think the reason is because people doubt new ideas before they come to fruition." He traces the exact sequence of doubt that social networking had to survive: "The narrative with social networking is like, this is just a college kid thing. Okay fine, maybe not college kids, but it's probably a fad. Maybe it seems like it's going to be around for a while, but it's probably not going to make money. Okay, it's making money, but the switch to mobile is going to be pretty hard. And then by the time we figured that out, it was too late. The companies had lost their advantage." The failure, he suspects, rarely comes from a total absence of belief. Somewhere inside every big company, someone saw it: "There's probably some team buried deep inside those companies that believed in it, and probably some VP person who is like, eh, that's probably not the biggest priority, and just pours sand in the gears." His conclusion is a prediction about where opportunity actually lives. Even when a large company holds an obvious distribution advantage, he doesn't think it protects them: "I would guess that big companies are going to fumble two-thirds of those." And the opportunities that don't come with an obvious incumbent advantage, the ones that plug into existing distribution channels are, in his words, "just kind of free."

Mark Cuban recently asked why health insurers are not liable for malpractice when their denials harm patients. We've been asking the same question. It's becoming clear to American public, physicians, and the adminstration that the health system is specificaly designed to avoid accountability. Read Executive Director Dr. Brad Wenstrup's new op-ed in @thehill:

Market Overview: 🔹 Crypto mcap down 4.26% to $2.47T. BTC -4.52%, ETH -13.57%. 🔹 Long liquidations hit $654M on Thursday, nearly double the usual. 🔹 Funding rates rising across majors despite the drawdown. 🔹 Strategy buys zero BTC this week, repurchases $1.5B in 2029 convertible notes instead. 🔹 MasterCard secures NY BitLicense for stablecoin and digital payment infrastructure. 🔹 Grayscale delays its IPO to at least Q4 2026, citing market conditions. 🔹 S&P +2.06%, Nasdaq +3.68% as equities soared while crypto failed to find a bid. 2/6

@market_sleuth 100% John - "wen top" is the wrong question. The one that pays: where does the marginal dollar go after it? I just dropped a new piece that maps it

Mark Zuckerberg says Apple's lack of innovation since the iPhone will lead to its decline "They haven't really invented anything great in a while. Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, and now they're kind of sitting on it 20 years later" "Year over year, I'm not even sure they're selling more iPhones at this point. Part of it is that each generation doesn't actually get that much better, so people are taking longer to upgrade" "They built stuff like AirPods, which are cool, but they've thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone" "I'm pretty optimistic that because they've been so off their game in terms of not really releasing many innovative things... eventually they'll get beat by someone"

Mark Zuckerberg says he doesn't drink coffee or caffeine and does jiu-jitsu instead "Sometimes on vacation, I'll drink it recreationally. I don't like any kind of chemicals or anything like that" "My sister gives me such a hard time about that. She's like, 'You're just sitting there raw dogging reality'" "I wake up and I fight people... It's neurologically stimulating, good cardio and strength, it's a good day" "Better than caffeine for me. I'm just not into that stuff"