Trust me when I say this… life is so much better when you’re living on your own terms and chasing your own dreams instead of spending your life building someone else’s. I know because I’ve lived both. I spent 8 years at Apple. From the outside, it looked like I had it all. I was paid well, worked with incredibly smart people, and got to help build some of the best products in the world. I’m grateful for that experience because it taught me a lot. But deep down, I was never fully fulfilled. No matter how great the job was, I was still helping someone else achieve their vision. I wanted the freedom to build my own, take my own risks, and create something that was truly mine. Today, I’m my own boss. Literally no one can tell me what to do, where to be, how to act, or anything. There are definitely harder days. There’s more uncertainty, more responsibility, and no guaranteed paycheck. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. The feeling of waking up every morning knowing you’re building your own future is hard to describe. Every win feels truly earned. Every setback teaches me something. And every day has purpose because I’m moving toward a dream that belongs to me. Yes, money matters, stability matters. But time, freedom, and having control over your own life matter much more imo. You only get one life. If you have a dream that won’t leave you alone, don’t ignore it forever. The biggest risk in life is looking back one day and wondering what could have happened if you had just bet on yourself.

You said Claude “cheated” last time by using code to turn the image into brush strokes. So this round, we banned that. Vision only. GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6 Sol, and Claude Opus 5.5 drew Sam and Dario through ego (lite). Turns out every model’s pretty good at drawing its own boss.

It’s 𝕏 payday. The day the world’s best creators get paid for doing what they love. I now make more $ than I did during my 8 years at Apple. But to be honest, the $ is only small part of it. Today, I’m not tied to a desk. I don’t have a boss watching over me. No one is telling me where to be, what to work on, what to say, or what my day/life should look like. I wake up, bet on myself everyday, create and share my thoughts on what I believe in, and am doing something that really belongs to me. There is a MASSIVE premium on that kind of freedom that $ can’t buy. Once you experience it, it’s impossible to go back. The fulfillment and ownership of my own time cannot be replaced. I still remember everyone who told me I was stupid for wasting my time on 𝕏. “Get a real job.” “Those aren’t your real friends.” “No one cares what you post.” “Social media isn’t a career.” “You’ll never make real $ doing that.” “You just ride Elon’s dick.” “What you do isn’t even exciting.” “It won’t last.” Now all of those same people ask me how they can do it too. It’s really funny how betting on yourself looks foolish right up until it finally works. I built this life by showing up every single day when nobody believed in me and refusing to quit when it would have been easier to go back to Apple. I’m my own boss now. And I’m never handing that freedom back. 𝕏 is the place to be.

It’s 𝕏 PAY DAY. The day creators around the world get paid for doing what they love. Never take that for granted. There are millions of people waking up every day, working for someone else, doing something they don’t even enjoy, just to collect a paycheck. I started on 𝕏 8 years ago. I had no idea where it would lead. I just kept posting, sharing my thoughts, and doing what I genuinely enjoyed. Today, I make more $ doing this than I did working at Apple for 8 yrs. Companies are willing to bet on me and pay me for something I spent years building. I’m my own boss. I control my time. I decide what I work on, who I work with, and where I do it. That freedom took years of consistency when there was no guarantee that any of this would work. So if you’re building something you believe in, keep going. You never know what one post can turn into. Never give up. 𝕏 is THE place to create.

I set the schedules at Walmart. 66% of the working adults on Medicaid in this country hold full-time jobs. I am one of the reasons that number stays where it is. I tune your hours until you are valuable enough to keep and cheap enough that the state pays your doctor. There is a narrow line between those two facts, and my whole job is standing on it. People think a schedule is about the store. How many registers on a Saturday. How many stockers before a truck lands. On the surface, it is about that. Underneath, it is about a threshold. Schedule you a little more and you become my full cost. Schedule you a little less and you walk out the door. So I find the hour in between, the hour where you stay, and where a second office in a different building quietly covers the part of your paycheck I chose not to pay. I do not cut wages. Cutting wages is a fight, and it looks terrible on a poster. I hold the wage. I hold it at the number where a full-time associate still clears the Medicaid line, and I let the line do the cutting for me. Everything I just told you is legal. Sit with that one. Not a single statute says I cannot do this. The public covers the gap, on purpose, by design, and every inch of it sits inside the rules. That is the part I am proudest of. Here is the sentence the company loves most. Starting pay at Walmart is up 93% since 2015. It is true. We say it every chance we get, and we should, because it is a beautiful sentence. Here is the other true sentence, the one that lives on a different slide. Over those same years, more of our people landed on Medicaid. A raise that leaves more of your workforce on public insurance is a raise you frame and hang on the wall. Some numbers, because I am proud of the numbers. The median Walmart associate made $30,520 last year. Our chief executive's disclosed pay was roughly $29 million. That is close to 1,000 of them for 1 of him, and every one of those 1,000 is a person I keep parked an hour under the line. We spent $37.6 billion buying back our own stock since 2020. Spread that across the payroll and it comes to about $23,550 for every associate in the building. We chose the buyback. The shareholders needed it more than the shelf-stockers did, because the shelf-stockers already had Medicaid, and the shareholders had only the shares. We even help you enroll. Onboarding keeps a person whose whole role is walking a nervous new hire through the Medicaid application. She is kind about it. She tells you there is no shame in it, and she is right, there is none. She is also cheaper than the raise that would make her job disappear. She is the most efficient hire in the building, and I mean that as the highest praise I have. The wage reaches a certain point, the state reaches the rest, and she is the bridge between them, smiling, so you cross it feeling helped. A worker who feels helped does not come to my office asking why the check is short. I will not let Walmart take all the credit. Amazon's count of workers on public aid nearly tripled in five years while the company cleared $77 billion in profit. Dollar General runs on the same line. So do McDonald's and FedEx, same year, same math. The single biggest group of workers on food assistance does not clock in at any store at all. They drive for an app that calls them their own boss, so there is no employer on the paperwork to hand the bill to. We all found the line. We all stand on it. Mine just has a smiley face over the door. You paid for this already. You paid once at the register, for the low price. You will pay again in April, on a different form, for the Medicaid that makes the low price possible. The rollback sign on the wall is a receipt for the half of the wage we routed back to you to cover. You got billed on the back end and thanked on the front, and you thanked us back, because it was still cheaper than the other store. There is one entry on my staffing model that holds about 340 million people, and it is my favorite employee. It never calls in sick. It never files a grievance. It does not want a badge, a break room, or a name tag. In every year I have done this job, it has never once asked me for a raise. I do not write a name in that box. I keep the hours landing where they land, so the box stays full and the second office keeps paying. The wage was always going to be a little too low. I built it that way, inside the law, on purpose, down to the hour. Monday through Sunday, we pay our half. The other half clears the following April, from an office that believes it runs a health program. It has never once noticed it is running my payroll.