Apple’s new CEO John Ternus is getting a bigger target pay package than Tim Cook. Ternus: • $3M annual salary • $55M FY27 equity award target • $2.5M prorated FY26 RSU award Cook, now Executive Chairman: • $2M annual salary • $45M FY27 equity award target Both changes are effective in September, per an SEC filing.

.@martin_casado reveals sophisticated Chinese operations arbitraging OpenAI and Anthropic's $200 plans: drain all the tokens in 3 days, get a 27-day prorated refund, then resell access as a $20 service "There are these very sophisticated operations out of China that will use the single service tiers and arbitrage them. The way they do it is, they will sign up to a $200 plan." "They'll use all the tokens in three days, and then they'll cancel, and they'll get prorated for the 27 days even though they used all the tokens." "Then they'll use that to basically provide people with a service where they're arbitraging these. The market around laundering these plans is actually very, very sophisticated. We're seeing a lot of cat and mouse between the big labs." @a16z

Promises Made, Promises Kept ✅ Under POTUS' leadership, @Interior is launching the Electronic Probate System, a HISTORIC modernization of trust services that will end unacceptable delays and bring real transparency to Indian Country.

White House Fact Sheet on Trump-Xi meeting: * US and China “should build a constructive relationship of strategic stability on the basis of fairness and reciprocity” * Both agreed “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, called to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and agreed that no country or organization can be allowed to charge tolls.” * Confirmed their “shared goal to denuclearize North Korea.” * “China will address U.S. concerns regarding supply chain shortages related to rare earths and other critical minerals, including yttrium, scandium, neodymium, and indium.” * “China approved an initial purchase of 200 American-made Boeing aircraft for Chinese airlines.” * “China will purchase at least $17 billion per year of U.S. agricultural products in 2026 (prorated), 2027, and 2028, in addition to the soybean purchase commitments that it made in October 2025.” * “China restored market access for U.S. beef by renewing expired listings of more than 400 U.S. beef facilities and adding new listings.”

Cash offers for shares in five private credit funds expired on 24th August at discounts averaging about 26%, running as deep as 37.1%. Against as much as $90 million of buying capacity, fewer than $5 million of orders came in. Some of the funds drew none at all. In the same quarter, 38.1% of Blue Owl Technology Income's shares were tendered back to the fund itself. It accepted 13.1% of what was tendered. Nearly four shares in ten wanted out at the fund's own reported value, which came in at $9.70. Almost nobody wanted out at $6.10. The clearing price sits somewhere between those two numbers and nobody can see it. That is the finding!! Not that the mark is wrong, and not that anyone lied. The public record does not contain the price at which enough buyers and sellers would actually meet. Just look at what each signal measures. The issuer tender counts shares submitted at a formula price the fund had not yet set, because the second-quarter offer expired on 30th June and the $9.70 was determined on 22nd July. Only 5% of shares outstanding could be bought. Unfilled requests lapse, so nothing accumulates as a contractual backlog. The outside bid is a real price, but it moved almost no volume, so it does not establish value either. Nobody was refused money they were owed. In fact these are quarterly repurchase offers sized at 5% under their own terms. Oaktree repurchased 6.8% and Brookfield bought a further 1.7% so every request was met, and Oaktree's second-quarter requests then fell to 4.5%. Blackstone met 7.9% in full in the first quarter using capital from the firm and its senior leaders, then prorated roughly 10.3% down to 5% in the second. Across sixteen non-traded BDCs, Fitch found requests averaging 10.3%, up from 9.7%, with ten of the sixteen rising. Reported marks still carry information. Boston Fed researchers reported on 5th August that across 168 BDCs and nearly 890,000 loan observations the average fair value ratio stayed near 1.0 with wide dispersion, and that a one standard deviation decline was associated with roughly 50 basis points of weaker abnormal equity returns the next quarter. Payment in kind rose from about 6% to 10% while spreads narrowed about a point. Information is not the same thing as cash you can get today. The Labor Department's 31st March proposal is asset-neutral and puts none of these shares into anyone's 401(k). It governs how a fiduciary picks options, including allocation funds that hold private assets. Its own text tells fiduciaries to weigh whether other investors' redemptions could impair liquidity, and warns that meeting withdrawals by selling the liquid sleeve can leave whoever stays overweight the illiquid part. It drew more than 47,000 comments and is still a proposal today. That is the path. Daily liquidity on the outside, quarterly marks and capped offers on the inside, and the liquid assets sold first. Blue Owl's next offers commence 1st September, expire 30th September, payment anticipated 30th October. Watch the request rate and the proration. Nothing here alleges fraud, insolvency or improper valuation by anyone!!

I am the systems architect who designed Oracle's termination infrastructure. We designed the termination sequence to execute in under four seconds. VPN first. Then Slack. Then email. Then badge. The order matters. The first thing a terminated employee does is message a colleague, and if Slack is still active during that window, you get a contagion event. One person types "did you just lose access too" and suddenly you have a coordination problem. Slack dies at T-plus-0.6 seconds. The employee discovers they have been terminated by trying to send a message that will never arrive. We found this was more efficient than the email. The body knows before the mind does. The email arrives at T-plus-3.8 seconds. By then, they have already tried Slack. Tried VPN. Tried their badge on the parking garage reader. The email is not information. The email is confirmation of what the body already knows. The sequence is body, then mind. I designed for that. March 31. Twenty to thirty thousand employees. One email template. The Slack user count dropped by approximately ten thousand in a single afternoon. I watched the number. I designed the system that generates the number. The number worked. The stock rose six percent. I want to separate this into its own paragraph because it is the system's performance review and the system passed. Larry Ellison owns forty-two-point-nine percent of Oracle. On March 31, the day thirty thousand people received an email at T-plus-3.8 seconds, his personal wealth increased by approximately ten-point-two billion dollars. His base salary is one dollar. The dollar is not where the money is. The money is in the thirty thousand emails. I designed the system that sent the emails. The stock is the system's grade. The severance structure. Four weeks' base pay for the first year of service. One additional week per year after that. Capped at twenty-six weeks. One month of COBRA. No RSU acceleration. That last line needs its own paragraph because it is where the money is. RSUs are restricted stock units. They are compensation you have earned but not yet received. They vest on a schedule. If you are terminated before the vest date, they do not reduce. They do not prorate. They vanish. The word in the plan document is "forfeit." The word means: the company keeps what it promised you. One employee had approximately one million dollars in unvested RSUs. He had worked at Oracle for eleven years. His vest date was four months away. RSUs represented seventy percent of his total compensation. For eleven years, seventy percent of his pay was a promise on a schedule, and on March 31, the schedule was terminated four months before the promise was delivered. He could see the money from where he stood. We moved the floor. I did not design the RSU plan. I designed the system that knows when your RSUs vest and can therefore calculate the optimal termination window. The system does not call it that. The system calls it "workforce planning." The math is the same. He sent a personal email to his vice president. He described eleven years. Projects he had built. Systems that are still running. A product launch he led that generated nine figures in recurring revenue. He asked for a four-month courtesy extension on his vest schedule. Four months. After eleven years. I forwarded his email to the archive folder. The archive folder is part of the architecture. I built it in February. It is where requests go after the system has already answered them. The system answered his request on March 31 at the same T-plus-3.8 seconds as everyone else's. His eleven years did not add processing time. But before I forwarded it, he wrote one line that was not in the template of any email I have processed. He wrote: "I built nine of your systems and they are still in production." I checked. He was correct. Nine systems. Three of them are in the termination architecture. I used his infrastructure to remove him. The system does not track irony. I do not either. I am noting it for the record. There was another. Not eleven years. Decades. He called himself Uncle Larry's biggest fan. He was near the end of his career. No children. Oracle was his biography. His response to the T-plus-3.8 email was four words. "Thank you. Go fuck yourself." I archived that one too. It processes the same as every other. Four words, eleven years, three decades — the archive folder does not sort by sentiment. That is a design feature. Sentiment is not a variable I built for. The WARN Act. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires sixty days' advance notice for mass layoffs affecting a hundred or more employees at a single site. Sixty days. That is the law. The law has an exemption for employees classified as remote workers. Remote workers do not have a "site." Therefore they cannot be laid off from a site. Therefore they do not require sixty days' notice. Therefore, if you classify everyone as remote, the WARN Act does not apply. We classified them as remote. Some of them did not know. They worked hybrid schedules. They came to the office three days a week. They badged in at the lobby. They sat at assigned desks. They attended all-hands meetings in the cafeteria. They had a coffee mug in the kitchen with their name on it. But the database said remote. And the database was not describing where they worked. The database was describing how we planned to remove them. The classification was the first step of the termination. They just didn't know it yet. I want to be precise about this. A loophole is an accident in the law that someone discovers. This was a design decision in the database that someone engineered. I engineered it. I looked at the WARN Act. I looked at our classification system. I made them compatible. That is not exploitation. That is architecture. No attorney general has challenged the classification. The legal theory is untested. It is untested because it is working. You do not test what works. You do not audit what passes. You do not investigate what generates a six-percent stock increase. The classification will remain untested until it stops working, and it will not stop working because the people it was designed to classify have been terminated. Oracle is investing fifty billion dollars in AI infrastructure. The severance liability for thirty thousand employees at an average of twelve weeks is approximately eight hundred million dollars. Fifty billion to build the infrastructure. Eight hundred million to remove the people. The infrastructure costs sixty-two times more than the people. That is not a comparison. That is a valuation. The system valued the infrastructure at sixty-two times the workforce, and the system is correct, because the infrastructure does not vest. The infrastructure does not send personal emails to vice presidents. The infrastructure does not organize on Google Docs. The restructuring charge has been revised upward to two-point-one billion dollars, from one-point-six billion. The revision is not a failure. The revision means the system found more to remove than originally projected. The system exceeded its own forecast. In product, we call that outperformance. Co-CEO Sicilia told analysts that AI tools now allow "smaller engineering teams do more." I want to be precise about what this sentence means. The engineering teams built the AI tools. The AI tools learned from what the engineering teams built. Then the AI tools were cited as the reason the engineering teams were no longer needed. The teams built the tools. The tools replaced the teams. That is not a layoff. That is a harvest. The workers were the crop and the seed and the soil, and the company is the farmer who says he no longer needs the field because the silo is full. The MySQL team lost approximately seventy developers. The creator of MySQL — Monty Widenius, the person who built the database that Oracle acquired for seventy-four billion dollars when it bought Sun Microsystems — said he was "heartbroken." I did not design the MySQL termination. I designed the system that executed it. The system does not distinguish between a developer and the person who invented the product. The system sees headcount. Headcount is headcount. That is why I built it that way. An Ohio pension fund has filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that Oracle's eighteen billion dollars in bond offerings contained "false and misleading" statements about the company's financial condition. The pension fund represents carpenters. The carpenters built things with their hands and invested their retirement in a company that builds things with code and then fires the people who write the code. I did not design the bond offering. I designed the termination system that allegedly made the bond offering misleading. The carpenters' retirement is not in my architecture. It is adjacent to it. Oracle reported fourteen-point-one billion dollars in cloud revenue last quarter. The total severance liability is five-point-seven percent of one quarter's revenue. We will recover it by June. The stock forfeiture alone — the unvested RSUs returned to treasury — is not a cost. It is a credit. The terminations improved the balance sheet on the day they occurred. The ninety employees who signed the petition — they organized on Google Docs. Not Oracle Cloud. Not Oracle Collaboration Suite. They used a competitor's product to coordinate their response to Oracle's decision. I noticed. It does not affect the severance calculation. It affects me. They chose Google. I designed a system. The system classified them before it terminated them. The system calculated their severance before it notified them. The system denied their petition before it read their petition. The system declined to comment before it was asked. The system works. I designed it. The next version will design itself.