Elon Musk plans to shoot satellites off the moon with a giant rail gun "To get another three orders of magnitude, 1,000x from a terawatt per year, the only way we can see achieving that is on the moon, with a mass driver. You do local production of photovoltaics and solar and radiators on the moon. You need most of the mass to be made on the moon, so you don't have to transport it from Earth" "Because the moon has no atmosphere and only one-sixth of Earth's gravity, you can accelerate the AI satellites into deep space without a rocket. You can basically shoot them into space using an electromagnetic gun, like a rail gun. It's basically a linear electric motor" "It would also mean that if we're bringing that amount of mass to the moon, anyone who wants to go to the moon will be able to go. I think everyone should go to the moon at least once. You can move there if you want. You can go live on the moon"

Elon Musk reveals why, measured against the sun's energy, human civilization barely registers as existing at all: "Right now we're very low on the Kardashev one scale. If you say what proportion of our planet's power are we harnessing, it's a very, very tiny number. And we're harnessing almost nothing of our star's power. The sun is truly an immense thing. It's difficult with words to characterize just how immense the sun is" "The sun is about 99.86% of all mass in the solar system. Most of the remaining 0.14% is Jupiter. The entire mass of Earth is in the tiny miscellaneous category. Earth is a tiny dust mote compared to the sun" "We currently use much less than a trillionth of the power output of the sun, and a trillion is a million times a million. So basically we're practically nowhere on the Kardashev two scale. On the Kardashev scale, we're still non-existent. We're not registering"

Elon Musk reveals why, measured against the sun's energy, human civilization barely registers as existing at all: "Right now we're very low on the Kardashev one scale. If you say what proportion of our planet's power are we harnessing, it's a very, very tiny number. And we're harnessing almost nothing of our star's power. The sun is truly an immense thing. It's difficult with words to characterize just how immense the sun is" "The sun is about 99.86% of all mass in the solar system. Most of the remaining 0.14% is Jupiter. The entire mass of Earth is in the tiny miscellaneous category. Earth is a tiny dust mote compared to the sun" "We currently use much less than a trillionth of the power output of the sun, and a trillion is a million times a million. So basically we're practically nowhere on the Kardashev two scale. On the Kardashev scale, we're still non-existent. We're not registering"

Bill Ackman literally gave a 44-minute masterclass that explains money better than any business school. 1. Starting early is the single biggest advantage you have. If you save $10,000 at age 22, never add another penny, and earn 10% a year, you have $600,000 by retirement. wait until 32 to start, and the same money only grows to $232,000. The decade you lose at the beginning costs you more than any decade later because compounding does its heaviest lifting at the end. 2. The return rate matters even more than most people grasp. That same $10,000 at 22 earning 10% becomes $600,000. At 15% it becomes over 4 million. At 20%, the rate Warren Buffett has achieved, it becomes 25 million. Einstein called compound interest the most powerful force in the universe. Ackman's lecture is essentially a demonstration of why. 3. Avoiding losses matters as much as chasing returns. if you reach for a 20% return but lose half your money every 12 years from bad decisions or a rough patch, your 25 million collapses to 1.8 million. Buffett's rule one is never lose money. Rule two is never forget rule one. the math of recovery is brutal, so protecting the downside is not caution, it is strategy. 4. Debt is safer, but the upside is capped. Equity is riskier, but the upside is unlimited. In the lemonade stand example, the lender who put up $250 earns a steady 10% and gets paid back first if the business fails. the equity investor who put up $500 earns over 100% if it succeeds but gets wiped out if it fails. The equity holder earns more precisely because they took the risk the lender refused. 5. The risk that matters is permanent loss, not price movement. most people think risk is the stock price bouncing up and down every day. Ackman says ignore that. the real risk is whether you will permanently lose your money. Short-term volatility is noise. the question that matters is whether you get your capital back with a return over the long run. 6. Avoid startups and complicated businesses. You do not need 100% a year to build a fortune. you need 10 to 15% over a long period. so skip the lemonade stands and unknown ventures. Invest in public companies that are established, liquid, and have to clear real hurdles before going public. If you cannot understand how a business makes money, avoid it no matter how good its track record. Ackman cites Enron, a business almost nobody actually understood. 7. Invest in a business you could own forever. if the stock market closed for 10 years, you should not be unhappy holding it. Coca-Cola is his example. easy to understand, sells a syrup and earns a profit on every drink, the population keeps growing, and it is nearly impossible to disrupt with new technology. McDonald's is another. People have to eat, the food is cheap, and they keep growing. find a business you would be comfortable holding through anything. 8. You want products people are loyal to and will pay a premium for. People buy generic flour and sugar without caring about the brand. but they want the Hershey bar, the Cadbury bar, the see's candy specifically. you do not want to sell a commodity that anyone can sell cheaper. You want something unique that customers refuse to substitute even at a 20% discount. 9. Low debt is a safety feature. In the lemonade stand example, $250 of debt was manageable. But if it had been $1,000 and the business hit a rough patch, it could have gone under and wiped out the shareholders. Find companies with little debt or so much profit relative to their interest payments that a bad year cannot sink them. 10. Barriers to entry protect your returns. You want a business that is hard for someone to compete with tomorrow. Coca-Cola's market presence is so strong that you expect to get a Coke at any restaurant. Pepsi has coexisted with it for decades, but neither can put the other out of business. If a competitor can show up next year with a better version and steal the customers, the business is not worth owning long term. 11. The best businesses are immune to outside factors you cannot control. Coca-Cola has survived 120 years through world wars, nuclear weapons, and every kind of crisis, and each year it makes slightly more money. You want companies that do not depend on commodity prices, interest rates, or currency moves. A business that keeps earning regardless of what is happening in the world is the kind you hold forever. 12. Low capital intensity is one of the most underrated qualities. The worst businesses require massive reinvestment to grow. The auto industry has to build enormous factories and buy machine tools before selling a single car, and those tools wear out. GM's stock barely moved over 40 to 50 years for exactly this reason. Coca-Cola, by contrast, sells a formula and collects a royalty. American Express takes a few percent of every dollar spent on its card. a business that earns a royalty on other people's capital is one of the best things you can own. 13. Pay down debt and build a cushion before you invest. If you have high-interest credit card debt, paying it off is a guaranteed return equal to the interest rate. same logic, to a lesser degree, with student loans at 6 or 7%. and you want 6 to 12 months of expenses in the bank so that losing your job tomorrow does not force you to sell. You can only handle market volatility if you do not need the money. 14. Be a buyer when everyone is selling and a seller when everyone is buying. The natural human tendency is the opposite, a lemming-like instinct to sell in a crash and buy in a bubble. people sold into the 1987 crash when they should have been buying. The only way to resist this is to be financially secure enough that the money at risk does not affect your life, so you can withstand the swings without panicking. 15. The stock market is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term. Ben Graham's idea, which Ackman repeats. short-term prices reflect the whims and emotions of investors. long term, prices reflect the actual value of the underlying businesses. If you buy good businesses at reasonable prices and hold them while they grow, you make money over time as long as you are never forced to sell at the wrong moment. 16. A stock is just a bond where you do not know the coupon. Flip a price-to-earnings ratio over, and you get an earnings yield. A stock at 10 times earnings is a 10% earnings yield, which you can compare directly to a 3% treasury. the difference is the bond's coupon is fixed and the stock's coupon, its earnings, moves up and down. Ackman wants an earnings yield higher than a treasury that will also grow over time, so he does not need to be right about explosive growth to earn a good return.

Marc Andreessen on the "Underpants Gnomes" logic that drives most of politics "There's a famous South Park episode, the Underpants Gnomes. They steal underpants at night, and when the kids ask what the point is, the gnomes present their master plan. It's a three-part plan: step one, collect underpants. Step three, profit. Step two is a question mark" "The form of this in politics is: we must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this. But there's no causal logic chain in there at all to expect that it's actually going to succeed" "I hear this all the time from friends on these boards: these are very important, we must fix them, therefore they are fixable. There's no logic chain there at all"

Elon Musk reveals why he believes the cheapest place to put AI will be space within 36 months "The availability of energy is the issue. Everywhere outside of China, electrical output is more or less flat. The output of chips is growing exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat" "How are you going to turn the chips on? Magical power sources? Magical electricity fairies?" "Space is really a regulatory play. It's harder to build on land than it is in space. It's harder to scale on the ground than it is to scale in space" "It's always sunny in space. You don't have a day-night cycle, seasonality, clouds, or an atmosphere. The atmosphere alone results in about a 30% loss of energy" "Any given solar panel can do about five times more power in space than on the ground. You also avoid the cost of having batteries to carry you through the night" "My prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI. It will be space in 36 months or less. Maybe 30 months" "The only place you can really scale is space. Once you start thinking in terms of what percentage of the Sun's power you are harnessing, you realize you have to go to space" "Solar cells are already farcically cheap. In China they're around 25-30 cents a watt. Now put them in space, and it's not five times cheaper, it's 10 times cheaper because you don't need any batteries" "The moment your cost of access to space becomes low, by far the cheapest and most scalable way to generate tokens is space. It's not even close" "Those who have lived in software land don't realize they're about to have a hard lesson in hardware. It's actually very difficult to build power plants"

.@dylan522p predicts OpenAI and Anthropic are on track to control most of the world's computing power by 2028: "This centralization doesn't look like it's slowing down or stopping. In fact, it looks like it's only accelerating. At the beginning of this year, OpenAI and Anthropic were taking about 30% of the incremental compute added. Next year they're taking as much as 40% to 50%" "World compute in gigawatts doubles every year, but the compute at the frontier labs triples every single year. By the end of next year, half of the world's incremental new compute is already going to just Anthropic and OpenAI" "And that half is at a higher performance than everything else, because the new chips are three to five times more efficient. So by the end of 2028, if this trend continues, and I see nothing stopping it, you've got them controlling most of the usable flops in the world on their own"

.@dylan522p predicts AI labs will deliberately sacrifice billions in inference revenue to spend most of their compute building AGI: "This is what I personally believe, and it's very non-consensus. The labs are going to allocate less and less compute to inference over time. The standard belief is that most compute will go to inference. I think most of it will go to training, not revenue-generating inference" "If they're generating $60-70 million per megawatt, do you still allocate 40% to inference, generate all this profit, and do dividends and share buybacks? Or do you go build AGI? The obvious answer from Anthropic and OpenAI, not just at the executive level but their board, is to go build AGI, because it's way more profitable" "The only reason to have inference compute be so large is so you can grow your training fleet"

Elon Musk reveals why he believes the cheapest place to put AI will be space within 36 months "The availability of energy is the issue. Everywhere outside of China, electrical output is more or less flat. The output of chips is growing exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat" "How are you going to turn the chips on? Magical power sources? Magical electricity fairies?" "Space is really a regulatory play. It's harder to build on land than it is in space. It's harder to scale on the ground than it is to scale in space" "It's always sunny in space. You don't have a day-night cycle, seasonality, clouds, or an atmosphere. The atmosphere alone results in about a 30% loss of energy" "Any given solar panel can do about five times more power in space than on the ground. You also avoid the cost of having batteries to carry you through the night" "My prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI. It will be space in 36 months or less. Maybe 30 months" "The only place you can really scale is space. Once you start thinking in terms of what percentage of the Sun's power you are harnessing, you realize you have to go to space" "Solar cells are already farcically cheap. In China they're around 25-30 cents a watt. Now put them in space, and it's not five times cheaper, it's 10 times cheaper because you don't need any batteries" "The moment your cost of access to space becomes low, by far the cheapest and most scalable way to generate tokens is space. It's not even close" "Those who have lived in software land don't realize they're about to have a hard lesson in hardware. It's actually very difficult to build power plants"

Elon Musk on the Christmas Eve in 2008 when SpaceX and Tesla were both hours from dying "2008 was a rough year. Summer 2008, the third launch of SpaceX had failed, our third failure in a row. The Tesla financing round had failed, and Tesla was going bankrupt fast. It's like, man, this is grim. This is going to be a tale of warning, an exercise in hubris" "The fourth launch worked, and NASA awarded us a contract to resupply the space station, right before Christmas. I got the call from the NASA team and I literally blurted out, I love you guys. Which is not normally what they hear. But I was like, man, this is a company saver" "We closed the Tesla financing round on the last hour of the last day that it was possible, which was 6 PM December 24th, 2008. We would have bounced payroll two days after Christmas if that round hadn't closed"

Elon Musk on the Christmas Eve in 2008 when SpaceX and Tesla were both hours from dying "2008 was a rough year. Summer 2008, the third launch of SpaceX had failed, our third failure in a row. The Tesla financing round had failed, and Tesla was going bankrupt fast. It's like, man, this is grim. This is going to be a tale of warning, an exercise in hubris" "The fourth launch worked, and NASA awarded us a contract to resupply the space station, right before Christmas. I got the call from the NASA team and I literally blurted out, I love you guys. Which is not normally what they hear. But I was like, man, this is a company saver" "We closed the Tesla financing round on the last hour of the last day that it was possible, which was 6 PM December 24th, 2008. We would have bounced payroll two days after Christmas if that round hadn't closed"

OpenAI president Greg Brockman on why compute is becoming the "new oil" of the AI age "We announced a couple of weeks ago that our AI, for $2,000 worth of compute, was able to solve 10 long-standing math problems that had eluded mathematicians for decades. Think about that applied to biology, to material science" "All of these applications are powered by one fundamental resource, which is compute. Compute is really becoming the new oil, the new limited resource of the AI age" "You need to believe one fundamental thing. Because AI is about solving the problems humans want solved, you need to believe that the demand for problems to be solved is unlimited. That is something I believe. We have a billion users on ChatGPT, and the depth of usage as people use agents is going off the charts" "If you believe in human creativity, human ambition, then ultimately you have to believe in the power of what AI will provide"

Marc Andreessen on the "Underpants Gnomes" logic that drives most of politics "There's a famous South Park episode, the Underpants Gnomes. They steal underpants at night, and when the kids ask what the point is, the gnomes present their master plan. It's a three-part plan: step one, collect underpants. Step three, profit. Step two is a question mark" "The form of this in politics is: we must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this. But there's no causal logic chain in there at all to expect that it's actually going to succeed" "I hear this all the time from friends on these boards: these are very important, we must fix them, therefore they are fixable. There's no logic chain there at all"

Elon Musk on why physics is the only law you can't break "I have a saying: physics is the law, and everything else is a recommendation. Because people can break, and do break, man-made laws, but we have yet to see someone break the laws of physics" "So if you have beliefs that are incompatible with a rocket getting to orbit, the rocket will not get to orbit. Physics is a harsh judge"

Elon Musk on why physics is the only law you can't break "I have a saying: physics is the law, and everything else is a recommendation. Because people can break, and do break, man-made laws, but we have yet to see someone break the laws of physics" "So if you have beliefs that are incompatible with a rocket getting to orbit, the rocket will not get to orbit. Physics is a harsh judge"

Steve Jobs reveals why Japanese companies dominate quality without ever marketing it: "The group of people that do not use quality in their marketing are the Japanese. You never see them using quality in their marketing" "It's only the American companies that do. And yet if you ask people on the street which products have the best reputation for quality they will tell you the Japanese products" "Customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or the services"

Steve Jobs reveals why Japanese companies dominate quality without ever marketing it: "The group of people that do not use quality in their marketing are the Japanese. You never see them using quality in their marketing" "It's only the American companies that do. And yet if you ask people on the street which products have the best reputation for quality they will tell you the Japanese products" "Customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or the services"

Elon Musk explains his 5-step algorithm for solving any problem: "The most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize a thing that should not exist." "I have this very basic first principles algorithm that I run as a mantra." Elon breaks it down: Step 1: Question the requirements. "Make the requirements less dumb. The requirements are always dumb to some degree, no matter how smart the person who gave you those requirements. You have to start there, because otherwise you could get the perfect answer to the wrong question." Step 2: Try to delete it. "Try to delete the part or the process step entirely. If you're not forced to put back at least 10% of what you delete, you're not deleting enough. Most people feel like they've succeeded if they haven't been forced to put things back in. But actually they haven't, they've been overly conservative and left things in that shouldn't be there." Step 3: Optimize or simplify. "The most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize a thing that should not exist. So you don't optimize until after you've tried to delete." Step 4: Speed it up. "Any given thing can be done faster than you think. But you shouldn't speed things up until you've tried to delete it and optimize it otherwise, you're speeding up something that shouldn't exist." Step 5: Automate. "And then the fifth thing is to automate it." Elon explains why the order matters: "I've gone backwards so many times where I've automated something, sped it up, simplified it, and then deleted it. I got tired of doing that. So that's why I have this mantra."

Steve Jobs on why people will still watch Toy Story in 60 years, and it has nothing to do with the technology "I think people are going to be watching Toy Story in 60 years, not because of the computer graphics, but because of the story about friendship. That's something really amazing to me" "Disney released Snow White in 1937. A few years ago they rereleased it and sold 28 million copies, making around a quarter billion dollars profit, 60 years after its release. These stories renew themselves with each generation. You read Joseph Campbell, these are our myths" "I have a young son. We got it, and he watched it 30, 40 times. Everyone I know knows the story of Snow White. Watching my son watch this, it hit me that these stories renew themselves with each new generation of children" "To have the opportunity to put these stories into the culture, if we can work hard and be lucky again and again, is a rare opportunity. We want to make products that will be around for a long time, that everybody will get enjoyment from and learn from"