▶ SK Hynix flooded with unprecedented offers from Big Tech to secure chip supplies - SK Hynix is reportedly receiving aggressive proposals from global Big Tech firms to fund new production line investments and the purchase of expensive semiconductor manufacturing equipment. - These offers are highly unusual in the global memory industry, coming as demand for memory chips — essential for AI data centers, smartphones, and PCs — has surged beyond what chipmakers can supply. - According to multiple sources, SK Hynix's customers have proposed directly investing in dedicated memory production lines. - Other proposals involve customers funding the purchase of ASML's EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography equipment. EUV tools, which etch circuit patterns onto silicon wafers, cost several hundred million dollars per unit. - However, with ample cash on hand, SK Hynix is taking a cautious stance toward accepting customer financing. - The concern is that such arrangements could lock the company into specific customers and potentially require it to supply memory at lower prices in exchange for guaranteed long-term supply. - An SK Hynix official said, "Regardless of the form of the proposal, our currently available production capacity is essentially 'zero,'" adding that "we don't even have small volumes that could be allocated to specific customers." - The official also noted that investment proposals have been made targeting the Phase 1 production line of the large-scale fab currently under construction at the Yongin cluster. - This pattern departs from the memory industry's traditional boom-bust cycle, with the industry increasingly viewing the current AI-driven demand growth as long-term structural growth rather than a short-term cycle. - The development underscores the intensifying competition to secure memory chips amid the AI boom.

Product-Market Fit Happens at Different Speeds Everyone talks about PMF like it’s the finish line, but it’s really just the point where the market gives you permission to keep going. A lot of founders assume fast PMF automatically means a better company, but history doesn’t really support that. Roblox took almost 10 years to become Roblox. Airbnb looked fragile and uncertain for years before it became inevitable in hindsight. Most startups don’t actually die because the market is too small or the idea is terrible. A lot of them die because the founders lose conviction before the insight has enough time to compound. When you’re in the middle of it, it’s very hard to tell the difference between “this isn’t working” and “this just needs more time.” Another thing people miss is that PMF looks completely different depending on the market. Consumer #AI# companies often show PMF through explosive growth, virality, and rapid adoption. Security companies can look almost slow from the outside, but their PMF shows up through renewals, large contracts, and deep customer dependence. That’s why comparing PMF timelines across industries is dangerous. Wiz got to $100M ARR with only a few hundred customers because each customer had enormous pain and very high willingness to pay. That signal is just as real as a product growing through millions of users. In the end, the speed of #PMF# mostly depends on two things: how quickly customers understand the value, and how long their organization takes to actually act on it. A consumer can make a decision in 30 seconds. A large enterprise might take 9 months, multiple approvals, and procurement reviews. Sometimes slow traction means weak demand. But sometimes you’re just building in a market where trust and buying behavior naturally move slower. The hardest part is that you usually can’t tell which situation you’re in until years later. #ai# #security# #PMF# #investment#

A retired plumber in Nebraska beat the CIA at predicting foreign elections in 2013. A 22 year old college dropout beat every pollster in America in 2024. A 9 billion dollar prediction market called Polymarket is now telling you whether the AI bubble bursts this year, whether the US enters a recession, and whether Anthropic overtakes OpenAI before December. They are all using the same 4-step technique a Berkeley professor proved actually works in a 20 year experiment that should have ended the careers of half the experts on television. His name is Philip Tetlock. In the late 1980s he started collecting predictions from 284 experts. Political scientists. Economists. CIA-adjacent analysts. People paid their entire careers to forecast geopolitics. Over 20 years he gathered 28,000 predictions. Then he scored them. The result destroyed an entire profession. The average expert was barely better than chance. The famous ones, the ones with the most media appearances and the loudest voices, were the worst of the group. The more confident the voice, the worse the score. Buried in his data was something nobody else had emphasized. Fewer than 2% of forecasters were dramatically better than the rest. Year after year. Across domains they had no training in. In 2011 the US intelligence community gave him his chance to prove it at scale. Still bruised from missing Iraq, IARPA ran a 4 year tournament on 500 geopolitical questions. Will North Korea launch a missile. Will Russia invade. The intelligence analysts had classified intercepts. Tetlock's team had retired plumbers and ballroom dancers. Tetlock's team won by 35 to 72 percent against the other academic teams. His top forecasters scored 30 percent better than the CIA reading classified data. A retired pipe installer in Nebraska was outpredicting the intelligence community using only the newspaper. The technique sits in his book in plain language and almost nobody applies it. It starts with a method invented by Enrico Fermi during the Manhattan Project. Fermi handed students problems that looked impossible. How many piano tuners are there in Chicago. He did not want a guess. He wanted them to break the question into smaller questions they could actually estimate. Each sub-estimate was rough. Multiplied together, they landed remarkably close to the truth. Superforecasters Fermi-ize everything. They never try to predict a complex event directly. They shatter it into smaller questions where base rates are knowable, then reassemble the pieces. The second move is the outside view. Most people, asked whether a startup will survive or a war will end by a date, dive into the specific details. Story details feel useful. They are not. Superforecasters first ask how often events of this general type happen across history. The story comes last, not first. The third move is what most people refuse to do. Superforecasters update their predictions constantly, in tiny increments. Not dramatic reversals. Small honest nudges. They move like a Bayesian. Most people move like a teenager defending a position. The fourth move is the one that hits closest. Superforecasters express predictions as actual numbers. Not "likely" or "probably." 62 percent. 18 percent. Vague language is unfalsifiable. A number forces accountability, and accountability is the engine of accuracy. Polymarket is the same idea scaled to a hundred thousand strangers with real money on the line. In the final weeks of the 2024 US presidential election, every major pollster called the race a coin flip. FiveThirtyEight had Harris at 50 to 49. Nate Silver had her at 48.6 to 47.6. Polymarket had Trump at 58 to 42 the morning of the election. By midnight, while networks still refused to call swing states, Polymarket was at 97 percent. In late 2025 the New York Stock Exchange invested 2 billion dollars in the platform. Polymarket is now valued at 9 billion. The largest stock exchange in the world is integrating prediction prices directly into the data feed traders use to make decisions. The plumber did not have classified intercepts. The college dropout did not have a polling model. Polymarket does not have an algorithm nobody else can see. They all have the same thing. A method that forces you to write a number on paper, attach a date, and let the world watch you be wrong. In 2026 the gap between people who price the future and people who narrate it is going to be the most expensive gap in the world to be on the wrong side of.

I am a Senior Partner at a compensation advisory firm and I have spent eleven years helping boards understand that performance-based pay was never meant to measure performance. It was meant to measure justification. Those are different disciplines. When a board hires my firm, we build what I call "intent-aligned metric frameworks." The intent being: the CEO gets paid. The framework being: whatever math produces that outcome. We do not rig anything. We select. There are always forty metrics available. We recommend the six that, given current market conditions, will most reliably trigger a payout. If conditions change mid-year, we recommend adjustments. If the adjustments aren't enough, we recommend exclusions. If the exclusions aren't enough, we recommend a committee-level override with disclosure language we draft ourselves. We have never failed to pay a CEO. Eleven years. Four hundred and thirty-seven engagements. Not once. The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio is 290 to 1. In 1965 it was 21 to 1. That is not inflation. That is not productivity. That is my profession. We did that. My industry exists because of the gap between what a CEO produces and what a CEO receives, and our job is to ensure nobody measures the first number with any precision. CEO pay has risen 1,085% since 1978. Worker pay has risen 24%. Same economy. Same companies. Same tariffs hitting both. Different consultants. RTX brought us in last January, three months before Liberation Day, and the committee pre-authorized tariff exclusions at that very meeting. Before any tariff was announced. Before any financial impact was quantified. They were buying insurance against their CEO's compensation being affected by policy he couldn't control. Christopher Calio's bonus went up 85% to $5.1 million. His total comp hit $27.7 million. The board minutes use our language exactly: tariffs are "externally imposed, unpredictable and unrelated to operational execution." We workshopped that sentence for nine billable hours across two partners, three associates, and a forensic linguist we keep on retainer for proxy season. Nine hours to make a bonus look like an act of God. The forensic linguist is named Margaret. She has a PhD in rhetoric from Berkeley and a $340 hourly rate and her entire job is to ensure that proxy statements technically say what happened while functionally saying nothing at all. She taught me that the word "despite" is the most dangerous word in a compensation disclosure. "Despite missing targets, the CEO received..." — that sentence has triggered four shareholder lawsuits in the last two years. We never use "despite." We use "after adjusting for factors outside management's control." Same meaning. Zero lawsuits. Margaret earns her rate. Yeti was my favorite project this cycle. Their actual operating income came in $13.4 million below the threshold for any payout at all. Zero. Nothing. The CEO had failed by every metric the board selected twelve months earlier, metrics we recommended, metrics designed to be achievable. He missed all of them. So the board added $38 million in tariff costs back into the calculation and the bonus lifted 42.6%. Failed became exceptional with one line item. I keep the before-and-after spreadsheet in a leather portfolio my wife gave me for our anniversary, hand-stitched, Italian, $4,200 from the Brunello Cucinelli on Madison. Because it is the cleanest piece of governance work I have ever done. A number that meant "you did not earn this" became a number that meant "the world was unfair to you" with one adjustment. Like watching water run uphill because someone tilted the table and called it hydrology. Ross Stores did the same thing. Gap did the same thing. The pattern is so consistent we have a template now. I save it as "tariff_exclusion_framework_v3.docx" on our shared drive. Version one was from COVID. That was our proof of concept. In 2020 we helped nineteen companies exclude pandemic-related costs from executive compensation calculations while simultaneously using those same costs to justify freezing worker wages. Nobody audits both filings. The CEO's proxy statement lives in one database. The employee communications about frozen raises live in another. We verified this. The two documents contradict each other and they will never be read by the same person. That is not a flaw. It is a feature we designed for. Becton Dickinson raised their performance factor from 74% to 85%. Ten of the eleven percentage points came from our tariff methodology alone. Integra Life Sciences would have paid out nothing without our adjustment. Their board chair called our work "essential governance." We saved four executive careers that quarter. The factory workers at those same companies absorbed the tariff costs directly. Their grocery bills went up 22%. Their gas went up. Their bonuses did not exist in the first place. Nobody called us about their performance factors. Nobody has a performance factor. That is not a thing that exists for people who make $22 an hour. The concept was invented for people who make $22 million. Stock-based compensation now constitutes 77.6% of the average CEO's total package. That number is important because stock is not adjusted for tariffs. It does not need to be. Stock is adjusted by stock buybacks. The same companies paying us to exclude tariff costs from bonus calculations spent $1.1 trillion on buybacks last year. Buybacks inflate the stock price. The stock price determines the vesting value of the CEO's equity grants. The tariff exclusion protects the cash bonus. The buyback protects the equity. We protect the disclosure language. Three separate mechanisms, three separate consultants, one outcome: the number goes up. Always. Regardless. The worker's 401(k) holds 0.003% of the same stock and receives none of these protections. Nobody schedules a committee meeting about that. Of twenty-two companies we reviewed this cycle, eight protected executive compensation from tariff impact. Four did not even disclose the dollar amount to shareholders. One disclosed but used a footnote so dense it required a CPA to parse. I wrote that footnote. It references three cross-linked exhibits and uses the phrase "partially offsetting macro-economic headwinds" in a subordinate clause nested inside a parenthetical that itself modifies a defined term from page 47 of the proxy. The median adjustment was 13%. Our range ran from 6% to 43%, depending on how exposed the business was, how aggressive the committee felt, and how recently their last shareholder lawsuit had settled. We bill for this at $2,100 per hour per partner. The total advisory fees across our eight tariff clients this cycle ran just under $4 million. The total executive compensation we preserved ran just over $180 million. Our clients paid $4 million to keep $180 million. I present that ratio at our own firm's compensation committee meeting each December. We always laugh. Not at the math. At the fact that nobody has ever once described us as overpaid. Meanwhile the median worker at these same companies received a 3.1% raise this year. Cost of living rose 4.8%. Their real compensation declined. Ours preserved $180 million for twenty-two people. The math is beautiful in its honesty if you are willing to look at it from the correct altitude. Someone at a governance conference in March asked why we don't build the same adjustments for hourly workers whose grocery costs went up 22% from the same tariffs. I explained that workers don't have performance-based compensation, so there's nothing to adjust. The system is elegant in a way I genuinely admire. Executives have metrics tied to outcomes they cannot control, which gives us the flexibility to remove outcomes they cannot control. Workers have fixed wages tied to hours, which gives us nothing to work with. Even if we wanted to. Which we do not. Want to. I said this into a microphone in a ballroom at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay and three hundred people nodded and nobody wrote it down. The valet outside was making $17 an hour plus tips. His grocery costs went up 22% from the same tariffs. He does not have a compensation committee. He has a shift schedule taped to the break room wall next to a poster that says "You Are Valued." There is a moment in every engagement when the committee asks us if the adjustments are "defensible." Not ethical. Not fair. Not proportionate. Defensible. The question contains its own answer. A thing is defensible if no one with standing challenges it and no court with jurisdiction examines it. Shareholders vote on compensation packages with approximately 3% participation rates for non-institutional holders. The institutions — Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street — vote in favor 94% of the time because their own executive compensation is structured identically and they do not set precedents against themselves. We have never lost a say-on-pay vote for a client. Not once. In eleven years. The system is not defended. It is unattacked. Those are different kinds of invulnerable. My youngest associate asked me last week whether we'd ever considered what would happen if workers unionized and demanded the same tariff adjustments we provide to executives. I told her the answer is on page 3 of every engagement letter we sign: "This advisory relationship pertains exclusively to Section 16 officers and board-designated executives." The exclusion is not implied. It is contractual. We could not help workers even if a board asked us to, because our retainer specifically prohibits it. We wrote it that way. In 2019. After a client's board member made a similar suggestion and our managing partner decided to foreclose the question permanently. The retainer language was reviewed by three attorneys. It took four hours. We billed for it. Ford absorbed two billion in tariff costs and did not touch executive pay. I sent their proxy filing to three clients as an example of what happens when you don't retain a compensation consultant. Two of them called back within the hour. The third called the next morning and asked if we could backdate the engagement letter to January. I said no. Margaret said yes, technically, with the right language. We backdated it. The fee was $180,000. The CEO's bonus was $14.2 million. I keep a running document of these ratios. Not for the clients. For myself. To remember what we are worth. To remember that the distance between failing and exceptional is always exactly one phone call to my office.

I have never been an FBI agent. Never conducted an investigation. Never worn a wire or served a warrant or spent a winter in a field office where the heating runs four hours behind the interrogation schedule. I was a congressional staffer. Then a political appointee. Then a different kind of political appointee. Then the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is also a kind of political appointee, except the furniture is nicer and the jet is mine. I run the building. I would like to tell you about the jet. It seats fourteen. It costs sixty million dollars. The interior was refurbished during the Bush administration and the procurement file describes the upholstery as "heritage cognac." I know this because I requested the file. Not for oversight purposes. I wanted to know the name of the color so I could describe it at dinner. Heritage cognac. It smells like a law firm that has never lost. I spend a lot of time in that smell now. I think it is the smell of having arrived somewhere that was never meant for you, and noticing that nobody has asked you to leave. Washington to Philadelphia is a hundred and forty miles. Amtrak runs it for forty-nine dollars. I flew the Gulfstream on May 10th because Alexis wanted to see George Strait. The suite was thirty-five thousand. Maybe fifty. I don't track numbers below six figures. The flight crew stayed on past eleven. Overtime. Security too. Someone will calculate the cost per mile of flying a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most Uber rides. That someone will not be me. I was in the suite. The suite didn't have a calculator. It had George Strait. The Bureau told reporters Alexis was "an invited guest of the performers." Representatives for George Strait and Chris Stapleton did not confirm this. They were never going to. But the FBI said it, and under my leadership, when the FBI says something, that is the evidentiary standard. I run the building. The building said it. It's true. Her protection detail is where the budget gets interesting. Twenty-four-seven coverage. SWAT-certified agents. Field officers drawn from multiple Bureau offices nationwide. Two armored SUVs at minimum. Hair appointments. Musical appearances. A blowout in Nashville required four agents in a parking lot for ninety minutes. The annual cost is roughly one million dollars before overtime, vehicle maintenance, and incidentals. The Bureau cites "hundreds of credible violent death threats" as justification. One person has been arrested. His name is Alden Welch Ruml, twenty-six, from Massachusetts. He sent emails. He faces five years. One emailer. One million dollars a year. Four SWAT agents per errand. A quarter of a million dollars in federal protection per verified threat. For context: the average FBI field office spends less annually on its entire confidential human source program. Informants embedded inside drug cartels, counterterrorism cells, organized crime families — the people whose testimony sends other people to prison — cost the Bureau less to keep alive than it costs me to ensure my girlfriend arrives at a salon escorted by men trained to rappel from helicopters. One of my officials suggested we conduct a formal threat assessment. A review. The kind of paperwork the Bureau has generated for seventy years whenever a protection decision requires justification. He had been with the Bureau for nineteen years. He asked in the hallway, in front of staff. I berated him. Not quietly. He stopped asking. He stopped asking. That phrase is going to recur in this document. I want you to notice it each time. Now. Alexis Wilkins is a country singer. I should mention this. She has released eight singles and one EP titled *Grit*. She has zero chart appearances. Her most-streamed song has five hundred and two thousand lifetime plays on Spotify. Taylor Swift accumulates that figure in approximately eleven minutes. A full-time country music journalist at the industry's leading independent publication stated that he had never heard of Alexis Wilkins before I started dating her. She has no active tour. She has never headlined a festival. Rolling Stone cited a forty-eight percent increase in her streaming numbers after we became public, which the same journalist clarified was "a forty-eight percent increase from virtually nothing." This is the person for whom the FBI fields a million-dollar annual protective detail. I want you to hold those two facts together — the streaming numbers and the security budget — and understand that they do not represent a miscalculation. They represent a value system. Her protection is not proportional to the threat. Her protection is proportional to her proximity to me. That is the formula. Proximity to the Director equals resources from the Bureau. I have applied it consistently. I have applied it to everyone. Which brings me to the people who are no longer here. I have removed over fifty career officials since January. Twelve have filed suit. Marshall Yates — my Congressional liaison, formerly the director of something called the Election Integrity Network, which existed to challenge the 2020 results — personally called field offices to compile names. Everyone who worked a case involving the President. Six thousand names were requested by the White House. The acting director before me was asked who he voted for. When he started supporting the President. Whether the FBI had tried to "put the president in jail." He was told the President hasn't forgotten. Three hundred counterterrorism and counterintelligence agents have been reassigned to immigration enforcement. The unit monitoring Iran — Iran, which operates proxy militias across four countries and maintains an active assassination program targeting American officials on American soil — was gutted. Six federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have resigned or been pushed out rather than participate in the prosecution of the previous FBI Director, James Comey, whose crime was investigating the President and whose punishment is being investigated by the institution the President gave me as a gift. I am prosecuting the last Director for doing his job. I am doing this from a fifty-thousand-dollar suite while a sixty-million-dollar aircraft idles on the tarmac outside. Nobody in the building finds this ironic. The ones who would have found it ironic are gone. They stopped asking. My Deputy Director is Dan Bongino. He has never worked a federal case. His career before this was conservative talk radio. He receives the President's Daily Brief every morning — CIA product, NSA intercepts, the full intelligence take of the United States government — and he obtained his SCI clearance after I waived his polygraph. The FBI's own guidelines state that polygraphs are a "preliminary employment requirement." My lawyers reclassified him as a Schedule C political appointee. Experts said that's not how the statute works. The experts are career officials. Career officials are the previous administration's furniture. I am redecorating. Nikole Rucker is my personal assistant. She arrived at the Bureau on January 20th without a security clearance of any kind. She was physically escorted into the Director's suite because the door requires a clearance she did not possess. By February she was in London, seated across from a Western allied intelligence service, notebook open, pen moving. She used to work for Stephen Miller. The White House says she does not share operational details with him. I am told this is technically accurate in the way that most technically accurate statements are technically accurate. The polygraphs are still running. Just not for my people. We administer them now to career staff. The questions have changed. We ask whether they've criticized me. Whether they've spoken to a reporter. Whether they've expressed doubt about the direction of the Bureau. The machine measures stress. Under my leadership, stress has been reclassified as disloyalty. Disloyalty as a security risk. A security risk as grounds for termination. Fifty people have traveled this chain. Twelve are suing. The rest stopped asking. I run the building. In February a New York Times reporter named Elizabeth Williamson published details about the protective detail. I opened a preliminary inquiry. Federal stalking charges. We searched our databases for her information. The Department of Justice reviewed the file, found no legal basis, and terminated the inquiry. Called it retaliation. The Times' executive editor called it "a blatant violation of Elizabeth's First Amendment rights." I do not retaliate. I respond to threats. A journalist publishing accurate reporting about my personal use of public resources is, by my definition, a threat to operational security. My definitions are the ones that govern inside this building. I wrote the organizational chart. There is a framed copy on my wall. It has one name at the top. The Atlantic published a separate story. Excessive drinking. Frequent absences. Staff forcing entry into my home because I could not be reached. I filed a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar defamation lawsuit. At my budget hearing, Senator Van Hollen cited the allegations under oath. I told him the only person slinging margaritas on the taxpayer dollar was him — in El Salvador, with a convicted gang-banging rapist. Fox News subsequently noted that public records do not support either characterization. But the line worked. That is the difference between evidence and performance. I have always understood which one this building rewards. In 2023, before any of this, I said the following on national television: "Chris Wray doesn't need a government-funded G5 jet to go to vacation. Maybe we ground that plane." I meant every word. We should have grounded his plane. So mine wouldn't invite the comparison. I sell merchandise. "Fight with Kash." T-shirts, hats, a children's book. The profits go to a foundation I started. The brand benefits from my position as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is not a conflict of interest. A conflict requires two competing interests. I have one interest. It has never been healthier. I told the Senate that the FBI cannot meet its mission with a five-hundred-million-dollar cut. I requested twelve billion. Two billion more than last year. In the same period I spent a million on my girlfriend's security detail, fifty thousand on a concert suite, flew a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most commutes, waived background checks for three political appointees with no law enforcement experience, reassigned three hundred counterterrorism agents to check green cards, gutted the unit tracking Iran's assassination program, and opened a federal investigation into a newspaper reporter for the crime of publishing a newspaper. I told Hannity: "We are going to protect not only me and my loved ones but every American that is threatened." I meant the first seven words. The rest was institutional boilerplate. The kind of thing you say when the camera is on and the sentence needs to land somewhere that sounds like it includes other people. I run the building. Now I want to tell you about the water. The week before the concert I went to Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona. A VIP snorkel. Nine hundred sailors and Marines are entombed in that hull. They have been there since 1941. The oil still leaks. It rises to the surface in small dark rainbows that break apart when you swim through them. The water was warm. Very clear. I could see the outline of the ship's superstructure below me, the geometry of a vessel that sank with its crew inside, and I remember the water temperature was perfect and the sun was on my back and my detail was on the shore and nobody in the water asked me to justify my presence above nine hundred dead. Recreational swimming at the Arizona is prohibited. The National Park Service said they were not involved. The Navy could not identify who authorized the outing. The logistics were coordinated by military email. A former government diver spoke to reporters anonymously. He said the access was unusual. He said it raised safety and security concerns. He spoke anonymously, the article noted, "for fear of retribution." A man who dives for the government is afraid to describe, on the record, how I swim. That is the climate. That is the building I run. A nineteen-year veteran stopped asking. Fifty career officials stopped working here. Three hundred counterterrorism agents stopped tracking the people who want to kill Americans. Six prosecutors stopped prosecuting. A government diver stopped talking. A reporter found her name in a database. And the oil keeps leaking from the Arizona, eighty-four years after the hull settled, surfacing in thin iridescent films that nobody is assigned to monitor because I reassigned them. I have never been an FBI agent. I have never conducted a federal investigation. I have never built a case or flipped a witness or spent a night in a surveillance van waiting for someone dangerous to make a mistake. But I have flown a sixty-million-dollar jet to a George Strait concert. I have watched the show from a suite that cost more than most Americans earn in a year. I have swum above nine hundred dead sailors in water so clear I could see their ship. And I have ensured, through the systematic removal of everyone who might object, that no one in the building will tell you any of this is wrong. The oil surfaces. It always surfaces. It has for eighty-four years. I run the building. The building doesn't ask questions anymore.

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.

Day 1 of @consensus2026 🇺🇸 What a great start to the event. We had the chance to meet hundreds of attendees who came by our booth to learn about POSX and what we are building. Great energy all around. We’ve got merch lined up for everyone, so don’t miss us on Day 2 and Day 3 at the POSX booth. 📍

Scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery: enormous deposits of naturally occurring hydrogen buried deep beneath the Earth’s surface. Early estimates suggest these reserves could contain trillions of tons of hydrogen — enough to potentially power the entire planet for hundreds to more than 1,000 years, depending on global demand and extraction rates. Known as “gold hydrogen,” this clean fuel is formed naturally through geological processes and trapped in underground rock formations and fault lines. Significant deposits have already been identified in countries including Mali, France, and the United States. Unlike manufactured hydrogen, which is energy-intensive to produce, natural hydrogen offers a potentially abundant and low-cost source of clean energy. When used, its only byproduct is water, making it an extremely attractive option for decarbonizing the global energy system. While the discovery has generated tremendous excitement, experts caution that turning these reserves into a practical energy source will require major advances in drilling technology, infrastructure development, and economic feasibility. Nevertheless, this finding could mark a significant turning point in the transition away from fossil fuels.

🚨 ALL-IN INTERVIEW! Friedberg sits down with Charles & Chase Koch: How they built a $150B private empire (0:00) David Friedberg welcomes Charles & Chase Koch (1:04) Koch Industries Overview: Scale, Business Lines & History (2:21) Building the Business: Early Days & Charles Koch Joins (1961) (11:31) Failures, Creative Destruction & Learning from Mistakes (19:22) Culture & Principle-Based Management (33:53) Georgia-Pacific Acquisition & Culture Transformation (56:17) Stand Together: Education Reform & Social Change (1:12:37) AI, Economic Challenges & the Future of Capitalism -------------------------------------- Thanks to our partner for making this possible Most advertisers have never heard of the platform with an $11B annual run rate in ad spend. by AppLovin — 1B+ daily active users, full-screen video ads watched for a median of 35 seconds, and businesses are profitably spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on it. Advertiser access is in closed beta. The window is open at @AxonAdsManager

Jensen Huang just told you where to invest in 2026: Sustainable energy. His argument is simple: For decades, building solar farms and nuclear plants required government subsidies. The economics didn't work on their own. That era is over. AI data centers have created a power demand so massive that the market will now pay you to build clean energy infrastructure. No subsidies needed. The economics work without them. "Back in the old days you needed government subsidies to go build solar farms, to build nuclear plants. Now the market will pay you to do it." This is a structural shift, not a policy bet. America's energy grid was built for a different era. It is archaic. It was not designed to handle hundreds of gigawatts of new AI compute demand coming online in a compressed timeframe. That grid needs to be upgraded. The transmission lines, the substations, the generation capacity, all of it. Huang is saying that for the first time in history, the economic incentives to fix all of that are fully aligned with the technology incentives. The companies building that infrastructure, whether it's nuclear power, utility-scale solar, grid modernization, or energy transmission, are sitting at the intersection of two of the most powerful demand curves in the world right now. AI and the clean energy transition. That is not a two-year trade. That is a decade-long buildout. Our analysts are already positioned in the names at the center of this shift. They called $AMD, $MU, $CRDO and $NBIS before the big runs. Don’t miss their call, come join us for just a $1. (link in bio)