Jeremy Grantham: The Drapes Don't Match the Curtains. I watched Jeremy Grantham on Diary of a CEO and CNBC. Joe Kernen pushed back on a lot of it, but one thing Jeremy said caught my attention. He mentioned that he's given 90-95% of his wealth to the Grantham Foundation. So I thought, "Alright... let's see how Jeremy Grantham actually invests Jeremy Grantham's money." I pulled the Foundation's 990. This is where the story gets interesting. The Foundation has about $782 million in assets. Roughly: $536M in venture funds and private companies $115M in public equities $78M cash $32M other investments $20M receivables This isn't some sleepy index portfolio. It's a complicated institutional portfolio built around active manager selection, private markets and frontier technology. The venture managers alone are basically a who's who of elite VC: Thrive, Lux (five different funds), Founders Fund, Flagship, Foundation Capital, FirstMark, Lakestar, Formation8, Arch, Atlas, Threshold (DFJ), Greycroft, Lowercarbon, Technology Impact, Eclipse, The Engine, Owl, Susa, Accomplice, Rincon... and a lot more. These aren't vanilla managers. They're some of the best investors in AI, software, robotics, biotech, climate tech, semiconductors, defense tech and frontier technology anywhere in the world. Most people couldn't get an allocation if they tried. Several of them also have meaningful exposure to SpaceX or the broader space economy, which is pretty funny considering how dismissive Jeremy was of SpaceX in the interview. Then there are the direct investments: Fervo Energy. Zap Energy. QuantumScape. Oxide Computer. Via Separations. Lilac Solutions. Radiant. GreenLight Biosciences. InventWood. Carbon Ridge. Again... this doesn't exactly scream "hide under the bed." Even the public equity portfolio isn't exactly boring: Recursion Pharmaceuticals (AI drug discovery) Oscar Health Instacart Evolv Technologies ACV Auctions Sana Biotechnology Riskified Now compare that to the message he's selling: "Sell US tech." "Don't own US stocks." "AI is the biggest bubble in history." "SpaceX is a BS story." "Just buy index funds." Here's my issue. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the way he's investing. Honestly, I think it's a very thoughtful institutional portfolio and I'd happily own a lot of these managers myself. But the portfolio doesn't match the sales pitch. His own money isn't sitting in index funds or hiding in cash waiting for the apocalypse. It's invested with some of the best venture capital firms in the world whose entire job is finding the next generation of technology winners. That's a very different message than the one he's selling on TV. Top-down he's a permabear. Bottom-up he's paying elite venture investors to own frontier technology. Those two stories don't really line up.

I'd bet dollars to donuts that Kalshi and Polymarket eventually end up being donuts in a lot of VC portfolios. I'm not against prediction markets. I actually think they're fascinating. But let's not pretend they were invented yesterday. Prediction markets have been around for decades. People have experimented with them for elections, weather derivatives, corporate forecasting, and all sorts of other applications. The problem is taking an interesting forecasting tool, pouring hundreds of millions of venture dollars into it, and then applying the Silicon Valley "growth at all costs" playbook. That playbook works when you're building something with massive social utility. Uber connected riders and drivers. Airbnb unlocked housing inventory. You can argue they bent or even broke rules, but there was an obvious public benefit that justified the debate. What's the public benefit of turning every human event into something people can gamble on? How many dildos get thrown onto a WNBA court. Whether a war escalates. Whether a politician resigns. Whether a government contract gets awarded. Sports. Celebrity gossip. Every random event in life slowly becoming a ticker symbol. The more I look at these businesses, the less they look like forecasting tools and the more they look like consumer gambling products wrapped in the language of markets, information, and democratization. And because they're venture-backed, they don't just need customers. They need hypergrowth. That means aggressive marketing, regulatory arbitrage, influencer campaigns, and constantly finding new users to keep the flywheel spinning. Philip Tetlock and the superforecasters have spent years studying forecasting. The results are genuinely interesting. But forecasting tournaments never became a mass-market consumer product because most people don't actually want to forecast. They want to gamble.

Breaking: In today’s AMA, Charles offered what may be the most specific explanation yet for the fate of the 1,096 BTC (approx 70m USD today) held by the Isle of Man Foundation: that the BTC was used back in 2016/2017 to satisfy demands related to Michael Parsons and the original audit process. If that’s the explanation, then the next step is simple: publish the invoices, agreements, approvals, and payment records. The question was never whether audits cost money. The question was where 1,096 BTC went, who received it, and why. And if Foundation assets were used to resolve disputes involving Michael Parsons, it raises another obvious question: how did IOHK ultimately end up controlling roughly 95% of the BTC raised and receiving billions of ADA, while the Foundation received only a fraction of the economics? The AMA may have answered one question. It created several more. Discord, Governance, and Community Management via @YouTube