I am the customer Nintendo went into a federal court and described to a judge as not entitled to a single dollar. I bought the Switch 2 at $499.99, which was the tariff price, and when the company's lawyers told the court the buyers are owed nothing, I am one of the buyers they meant. I want to be the first to say they are right. I got exactly what I bargained and paid for. Those are their words. I have made them mine. People are angry, and I do not think they understand how a purchase works. When the console was announced it was $449.99. Then the tariffs came, and Nintendo said the price had to go to $499.99, and I understood. A tariff is a cost, and costs get passed to me. That is a supply chain doing its job. I stood in a line at 11 p.m. and I paid the extra $50 the way you salute a flag, because that $50 was not going to Nintendo, it was going to the country. I felt like a patriot holding a shopping bag. My brother-in-law waited for a price drop. I told him the price does not drop, the price is the price. He is still waiting. I am playing. Then a court ruled the tariffs were illegal. And the money started coming back. It came back to Nintendo. It came back to Sony and to Microsoft. The number I read was $81 billion in tariffs refunded to companies, and somewhere in that number is my $50, except it is not mine anymore. It went home to Redmond, Washington, and I could not be happier for them. Here is the part the angry people cannot hold in their heads. The tariff I paid was real. The refund Nintendo got was also real. Both are true, and only one of them has my name on it, and it is not the refund. I paid a tax that no longer exists, on a console I already own, and Nintendo collected that same tax back from the government, and the console still works, and I got exactly what I bargained and paid for. Sit with the elegance of it. Nintendo paid the tariff. Nintendo charged me the tariff. The government gave Nintendo the tariff back. That is one tariff doing the work of three, and at no point in that beautiful circle am I owed a cent, because I clicked confirm. A deal is a deal. Mine included a tax that expired and a price that did not. Some man in Washington filed a class action. He wants the $50 back, for all of us. I read the complaint. I found it embarrassing. He keeps saying it is unfair, which is the word you reach for when you did not read the terms. Nintendo's lawyers said I am not entitled to a rebate simply because of intervening legal developments, and I read that sentence three times and agreed with it harder each time. Intervening legal developments. That is not my business. My business was $499.99 and a console, and the console is under my television right now doing everything I was promised. I am whole. I am so whole I could scream. I have started correcting people online. When a guy posts his receipt and asks where his refund is, I tell him the truth: you got the console. Did it arrive? Did it turn on? Then you have no claim. That is what a price is. It is the number you agreed to, forever, no matter what happens to the number afterward. I did not buy a stake in the tariff. I bought a machine. Nintendo bought the tariff, and the tariff appreciated, and that is called investing, and I am not an investor. I am a fan. My wife asked if I felt cheated. I told her I feel loyal. There is a difference, and the difference is worth exactly $50. When you love a company you do not audit it. You do not go through its pockets looking for your own money. You pre-order the next thing. Which I did. There is a new color coming and I have already paid for it, and if a tariff shows up on that one too I will pay it twice, once going out and once coming back, because that is the relationship. I put in. They keep. That is a marriage, and you do not ask a marriage for a refund. And it is not only Nintendo, which is the part that makes me proud to be an American consumer. Sony did it. Microsoft did it. Every company that ever added a line to your receipt for a cost that later vanished kept the vanishing for itself and left you the line. Your car. Your groceries. The fee on the fee on your checking account. You paid the surcharge for a war that ended, and the peace dividend went to the shareholder. You got exactly what you bargained and paid for. I need you to say it with me. It is the only prayer that keeps the console warm. So no, I do not want my $50. I want you to understand that I never had it. It was Nintendo's $50 the whole time, briefly parked in my checking account on its way home. I got exactly what I bargained and paid for. The price just happened to include a part I would never get back, and I would pay it again tomorrow. The new color ships in September. I am first in line. A deal is a deal.

Back in 2022 when I invested in SpaceX, Starlink only had about 500,000 subscribers. I remember many people laughed at me and thought I was nuts for betting on this company thinking Starlink internet was going to be a MAJOR business of SpaceX one day. Fast forward to today in 2026… Starlink has exploded to over 12 million active customers worldwide (24x the number when I invested). They’ve been adding users at a crazy pace lately. Here are the biggest subscription based businesses in the world right now by subscriber count: 1. Netflix - 300 million 2. Spotify - 250 million 3. Amazon Prime - 200 million 4. Disney+ - about 150 million Now I believe Starlink will one day have the LARGEST subscriber base in the world. With Starship making launches way cheaper and direct-to-cell tech coming, doubters still think I’m crazy… but they said the same thing back then too. Time will tell.

I forecast the care of the old. Last year that care was worth $1.01 trillion, which is more than this country spends on all of Medicaid, and it cost my budget nothing. I know why it cost nothing. I arranged for it to cost nothing. In my model the care of 59 million aging people has a line, and the line is called informal care, and informal care is priced at zero. It is not an error. Informal care is the technical term for a daughter. When a daughter does it, the care is informal, and informal is free, and free does not appear in a budget. The whole solvency of long-term care in this country rests on my being allowed to value 49.5 billion hours of labor at $0, because the person doing it loves the person she is doing it for. There are two kinds of care, and the entire job is the difference between them. Formal care is a home aide. She is real, she is trained, and she costs $16.78 an hour, which the program must find and does not have. Informal care is that same aide's patient's daughter. She costs $16.78 an hour times zero, which the program can always afford. My work, reduced to one sentence, is to convert as much formal care into informal care as the families will absorb without saying so out loud. I have an instrument for the conversion. It is the waiting list. Right now 707,378 people are waiting for the program to send help into their homes. The average wait is 39 months. People see that list and call it a failure. I see it and call it the most efficient line I run. Every month a person waits for a paid aide who never arrives, an unpaid one arrives instead, and she arrives for free, and I have moved another $16.78 an hour off my books and onto a kitchen table. The list is the system billing the family and addressing the invoice to no one. The daughters are 61% of my capacity, and they start early. My model assumes she begins around 34, which is young enough that she is also raising children and holding a job, so I am billing the same woman three times, and only one of the three bills has her name printed on it. She spends about $7,242 a year of her own money on the care I declined to fund. I do not count that as a cost either. It is her money, spent on my obligation, and it clears without ever touching my ledger, which is the cleanest kind of spending there is. People bring me the trillion-dollar figure as though it will alarm me. It is the proudest number I own. $1.01 trillion of care, delivered on time, at a budget cost of nothing, by a workforce that cannot resign because resigning has a face. No program in this government performs like that. If I proposed it from scratch, I would be laughed out of the room. I did not have to propose it. I had to not fund the alternative, and wait. There is one risk in the model and I watch it closely. The daughters are a supply, and a supply can fall. Fewer of them are having children, more of them are working full days, and some of them are finally saying the quiet thing at the kitchen table. If they ever stop arriving, $1.01 trillion lands on my desk overnight with a price attached, and the program is insolvent by the following Tuesday. So I track them. I keep a slide on their fertility and a slide on their hours at work, and I read the two of them the way a dam operator reads a river. The old will need more care next year, and more the year after that. My model needs the daughters to grow at the same rate, so I have written that requirement into the forecast. It is the only line in my budget that depends entirely on love, and it is, by a wide margin, the largest. I file it under informal care. She files it under Mom.

Well, tomorrow's the day for solana:gf9VEb8NqCUgCNNo1sz47LT4gvUvsHJmhW6Q1ndpump - Asia's biggest IPO of 2026, priced at ¥8.66 (~$1.28) on Shanghai's STAR Market. @HyperliquidX has had it at $6-7 for two straight weeks. My call here is different from @SpaceX and @cerebras , so let me be precise. I expect it to open well above ¥8.66. I do NOT expect it to reach the Hyperliquid price - and I don't think it should. That gap isn't purely a valuation call. You need RMB 500k in a mainland account to buy a STAR Market IPO, and offshore money was shut out of the book entirely. HL isn't competing with a market global investors can access. It IS the access. So I expect a premium to persist after listing. That premium is the price of admission - what someone outside the mainland pays for exposure they otherwise cannot get at all. One thing changes tomorrow. Pre-IPO these contracts run a funding multiplier of 0.005 - basically free to hold a big premium. On conversion @tradexyz flips them to the standard 0.5 against the real Shanghai price. That's 100x the carry, overnight. So: sharp compression, but not to zero. Where it settles is the market's honest price on access. SK Hynix's ADR settled ~15%. China's A/H premium has run 20-50% for years. That's the number I'll be watching tomorrow. Not the pop. And zoom out - because in ten weeks Hyperliquid has taken on two of the biggest structural problems in capital markets of the last 50 years: 1. IPOs priced below clearing, moving value out of issuers and their existing shareholders and into the pockets of the buyside. 2. The world's second-largest equity market being effectively closed to everyone outside of it. Same venue. Same mechanism. Continuous price discovery, open to anyone. @HypeStrat $PURR #pricediscovery#

Will AI create new job opportunities? My daughter Nova loves cats, and her favorite color is yellow. For her 7th birthday, we got a cat-themed cake in yellow by first using Gemini’s Nano Banana to design it, and then asking a baker to create it using delicious sponge cake and icing. My daughter was delighted by this unique creation, and the process created additional work for the baker (which I feel privileged to have been able to afford). Many people are worried about AI taking peoples’ jobs. As a society we have a moral responsibility to take care of people whose livelihoods are harmed. At the same time, I see many opportunities for people to take on new jobs and grow their areas of responsibility. We are still early on the path of AI generating a lot of new jobs. I don't know if baking AI-designed cakes will grow into a large business. (AI Fund is not pursuing this opportunity, because if we do, I will gain a lot of weight.) But throughout history, when people have invented tools that unleashed human creativity, large amounts of new and meaningful work have resulted. For instance, according to one study, over the past 150 years, falling employment in agriculture and manufacturing has been “more than offset by rapid growth in the caring, creative, technology, and business services sectors.” AI is also growing the demand for many digital services, which can translate into more work for people creating, maintaining, selling, and expanding upon these services. For example, I used to carry out a limited number of web searches every day. Today, my agents carry out dramatically more web searches. For example, the Agentic Reviewer, which I started as a weekend project and Yixing Jiang then helped make much better, automatically reviews research articles. It uses a web search API to search for related work, and this generates a vastly larger number of web search queries a day than I have ever entered by hand. The evolution of AI and software continues to accelerate, and the set of opportunities for things we can build still grows every day. I’ve stopped writing code by hand. More controversially, I’ve long stopped reading generated code. I realize I’m in the minority here, but I feel like I can get built most of what I want without having to look directly at coding syntax, and I operate at a higher level of abstraction using coding agents to manipulate code for me. Will conventional programming languages like Python and TypeScript go the way of assembly — where it gets generated and used, but without direct examination by a human developer — or will models compile directly from English prompts to byte code? Either way, if every developer becomes 10x more productive, I don't think we’ll end up with 1/10th as many developers, because the demand for custom software has no practical ceiling. Instead, the number of people who develop software will grow massively. In fact, I’m seeing early signs of “X Engineer” jobs, such as Recruiting Engineer or Marketing Engineer, which are people who sit in a certain business function X to create software for that function. One thing I’m convinced of based on my experience with Nova’s birthday cake: AI will allow us to have a batter life! [Original text: ]

Becoming a pilot nearly killed me, twice. It also saved my life. Fifteen years ago, my world was upside down. I was in founder mode building a company, raising three young kids, navigating a struggling relationship, leaving my religion, inflamed, sleep deprived, fatigued, and fighting chronic depression. Driving home from work one day, I saw a sign inviting prospective students to take a discovery flight. I thought this flight might occupy my mind, giving me an hour of desperately needed relief. Thirty minutes after arriving at the airfield, the instructor and I were seated in a Cessna 172. The instructor told me to take the controls and explained the departure procedure. Caught off guard, I suggested it would be better if I just observed. He insisted I take the controls, reassuring me that his hands would be on the dual controls at all times so not to worry. Reluctantly, I took the controls. We radioed our departure to the local airspace, lined up, and accelerated down the runway. At 63 mph, I pulled back the controls to raise the nose, and up we went. All of my life’s pain disappeared as I became absorbed in managing the throttle, pitch, heading, radio, traffic surveillance, and my instrument panel. I was mesmerized. I earned my pilot’s license two months later and bought my first airplane, a Bonanza A36. It could fly faster, further and have more passengers than my trainer airplane. I made myself a promise to never fly alone, and hired a full-time co-pilot. General aviation accident rates are nearly 10x higher than commercial airlines. I began flying myself everywhere across the country. For business: Austin, NYC, and Omaha. For family trips: Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore, Bahamas, and later, with a longer range airplane, we flew to Europe via Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Scotland, London, Paris and Rome. In my first year of flying, I nearly died twice. I had hired a co-pilot for my safety, and ironically both incidents resulted from his errors. However, the worst mistake was my failure to recognize the bigger pattern: despite my co-pilot having logged over 1,000 flying hours, nearly all of the hours were “in the pattern”, meaning instruction time around the airport and not “in the wild” (out in high stress, cross country operations with severe weather). Lesson learned. After these two near-death experiences, I decided that I’d need to either stop flying or get a jet. A jet would give me engine redundancy and the capability to cruise above weather systems rather than through them. The Bonanza had a ceiling of 14,000 (before I needed to supplement oxygen), where a jet could fly in the 30,000’s and 40,000s, above weather. A jet would also allow us to always fly with the assistance of air traffic control in controlled airspace versus in un-cleared VFR (visual flight rules) flight. I purchased a small jet, a Citation Mustang, and completed my type rating (licensed to fly the airplane). It was a steep learning curve. Jet speed is different from small airplane speed. Everything happened faster, the airplane was more complicated, and multi-engine dynamics were a big step up. It was exhilarating. Part II In an unexpected twist, learning to fly brought me back from the depressive dead. When I started flight instruction, my personal life was a mess. The most irritating part of my existence was that every day, around 7pm, just after putting the kids down, I’d overeat. I tried everything to stop myself but nothing would work. My willpower at that time of day from the stress and strain of life was zero and I was powerless against the chemicals in my body that demanded this daily self-destruction ritual. My pants were too tight and I couldn’t button the top button. It drove me insane. But I refused to concede and buy a bigger pair. I turned to my pilot training to help me design a solution: I needed structured operations for my food consumption and self control. Aviation is substantially more safe than driving because it operates on structured protocols, checklists, and active risk management. Safety and performance are a system. You don’t just get into an airplane and wing it. Before every flight, there is a pre-check routine where you thoroughly inspect the airplane, ensuring everything is in flight-ready condition. There are other checklists for starting the airplane, taxing, taking off, cruise, descent and landing. There is a manual beneath your seat with a written protocol for anything that could go wrong with the airplane. You are required to memorize and execute procedures flawlessly under pressure. Aviation culture assumes human fallibility and designs systems to overcome those limitations and liabilities. As I was learning this new way of thinking and operating, I wondered if these new autonomous systems would map to my personal life. I was in desperate need of help and nothing I had tried was working. It was clear that Evening Bryan, the version of me who took control of my body at 7 pm, was no match for the stress and weight of the day. He wasn’t a bad guy, he just wasn’t equal to the responsibility of withstanding that tension. It was a system error to ask him to operate Evening Bryan under his duress. I put Morning Bryan in charge instead and he made an operational guide for all other Bryans to follow. Morning Bryan is my best Bryan. He’s responsible, motivated, high on will power, and thinks long term. He created a checklist that required all Bryan’s to be finished eating by 5 pm. No matter what, no more food after 5 pm. That was when the danger zone started. There wouldn’t be any exceptions, ever. This worked. It was challenging for the first few days but it quickly generated it’s own momentum. I started sleeping better, losing weight, and feeling less fatigued. That simple trick fixed years of mayhem that had been unfixable. With that success behind me, I expanded the protocols to include food types, amounts and timing. In retrospect, after a few months of this new system, it seemed weird that I previously winged it daily, stumbling from meal to meal. I felt like I got back 40% of my total energy capacity that was being spent thinking about, planning, debating, and regretting my food consumption. My life today basically runs like an airplane. Part III Aviation culture then jumped into other areas of my life. I’d started a new company, Kernel, to build a non-invasive brain interface to merge human cognition with AI. I’d been thinking about what mathematician Alfred North Whitehead observed: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." Society is on a continuous curve of increased automation. We solve one layer and step up on the next. This is how we scaffold progress. Clean water infrastructure, power grids, washing machines, dishwashers, and are examples of automating tasks that previously took hours. It was the mashup of aviation culture, Kernel, AI and automation that got me imagining building my Autonomous Self. An automated system that keeps me in pristine physical condition, youthful vibrancy and peak performance. A system that would allow me to not die. Don’t Die was born. For the past five years, I’ve been engineering the v1 human prototype for Don’t Die: an autonomous system built to preserve and protect life. It accounts for biological fallibility, offloading human limits to deterministic protocols. As we integrate deeply with AI, stepping up through layer by layer physiological automation will allow us to navigate frontiers previously unimagined. Immortalism is the corresponding philosophy that honors existence as our species' highest value and pursues that objective through quantitative and mathematical means. I never would have guessed that a discovery flight would have flown me in this direction.

I recently started dabbling in robotics, and a thought hit me. 🤖💭 Robots, AI agents, and business systems (ERP/WMS) all end up talking past each other in completely different data, don't they? Robots emit point clouds and sensor values on a millisecond scale 📡, AI agents want text with sources 📄, and business systems hold structured records on an hour-to-month scale 📊. Wiring these three together with bespoke integrations gets unrealistic fast — the number of pairs explodes as N×(N−1). 💥 So I ran an experiment: what if everyone dumps their data into the same search system and pulls out what they need by searching? Can search become a common protocol? I called it Multi-World Search (MWS). 🔍 Inside MuJoCo on a single MacBook 💻, I let a Gemini agent drive end to end across 7 business scenarios — a maintenance handoff 🔧, reconciling physical inventory against stale records 📦, and my personal favorite: three robots pinning down a defective lot without any direct communication 🐜. To avoid faking the "it worked!", I attached falsification tests that fail when you change the input. ✅ I'd be glad if it became a starting point for anyone just getting into robotics. Take a peek. 🙏✨ 📝 Blog: #Robotics# #AIAgents#

Elon Musk just explained why AI and robotics will create an unprecedented explosion in global bandwidth demand “With the advent of AI and humanoid robotics and, you know, vehicle robotics and just a massive number of robots, the appetite for bandwidth will be much greater than it has been in the past. If you think of a human consuming, or producing, perhaps a few hundred bits per second of output and actually, the average human is outputting less than one bit per second over the course of a day, which is 86,400 seconds. Now computers could easily do billions of bits per second continuously over a 24-hour period. So this is why I would expect the appetite for bandwidth to grow dramatically with the growth of AI and robotics. And really, I think Starlink is the only thing that can actually service that bandwidth.”