One thing I’ve noticed over the past couple of years is investors now put an insane emphasis on acceleration or deceleration. Historically absolute growth mattered, multi-year growth mattered, earnings and profits, mattered, now the only thing that matters is “are they accelerating or decelerating!?!” My guess is over time the market will shift back to valuing long term earnings and cash flows, and investors won’t be able to remember which quarter a particular stock had accelerated or decelerated its growth. I really like the direction all my holdings are going; all of them commanding higher intrinsic earnings power each year. Their moats are huge, and the future allows for a huge amount of verticals for them to expand into.

I said this elsewhere but reposting as people seem to be surprised that Zitron hasn't crawled back into his hole since the Anthropic S1 came out and invalidated everything he has ever said: He’s never going to stop, because he sells a valuable service (cope for the sidelined). There’s a lot of sidelined people and they require a huge amount of cope, so he will continue being a cope merchant. Being “wrong” is besides the point. Do people still need to cope with the fact that they missed the biggest investment theme of the last 100 years? Yes, so he’ll keep selling. He will eventually pivot to "AI is popular and makes money, but it's bad / exploitative / evil / dangerous," never once acknowledging that he was wrong on the bubble calling or the financial aspect. So when you see Zitron on Jon Stewart taking an un-earned victory lap post Ant S1, understand that nothing he's doing or saying has any tether to financial reality or the business environment. There's millions of people out there that desperately need someone to affirm their beliefs (that AI is fraudulent / invalid / a bubble). He will do that for them. It is of course useful to keep totting up his falsified predictions so that eventually the sheer weight of his idiocy becomes too much to resist, but I don't expect the sidelined will start reasoning rationally anytime soon; their objection is emotional, not empirical.

The anti-ai grift is highly profitable today. The media will have on anyone who hates AI. Doesn’t matter what their credentials are, how inaccurate their previous predictions have been, or if there’s any resemblance of truth to anything they say. If you hate AI and are willing to say it’s bad. You will get as much air time as you want.

Nobody has been more wrong than Zitron over the past year, but because he says anti big-business stuff, partisan leftists like Jon Stewart will hear him out anyway and believe every word he says without any scrutiny.

I can never quite tell if you're intentionally editorializing stuff like this, or if you genuinely believe things this misleading. About $72B of that $80B loss is a noncash accounting charge from convertible debt, Anthropic’s rising valuation made the debt more valuable to investors, so the increase was recorded as a loss, not money actually spent operating the business. So the very reason they "lost" all that money is *because* their valuation tripled.

The first time Netflix was failing it was losing -$3 billion in free cash flow. The second time Netflix was failing it had flat free cash flows. Now today, the third time Netflix is failing, it's making $12 billion in free cash flow. Maybe the next time Netflix is failing it will be making $30 billion in free cash flow.

The comments on this post make me realize more than ever that we live in our own bubbles. Everyone’s like “I don’t personally know anyone that uses such and such product, therefore even though the statistics show that a billion people used it a month, it must be wrong, incorrect, or fake or something” Most people can’t conceive of how huge the world is and how many people are on it.

If you’re on X, Threads doesn’t even exist. It’s pointless, useless, and you probably can’t conceive of the idea that it actually has more daily users on it than X does. Just like if you’re a daily YouTube user, you probably think Netflix is done, nobody uses it, and are confused of why anyone would want to be on it. I have never used WhatsApp. I don’t even have an account. So that practically doesn’t even exist in my world. It takes an extra step as an investor to detach yourself from your own POV and look at actual numbers and realize there are billions of people out there, multiple preferences. Some people like my wife literally never use YouTube and only use Instagram. There are hundreds of millions of people that do enjoy long format professionally produced episodic content. They don’t just want to watch podcasts. There are people that will continue to value high production movies and tv series that have long story arcs, character development, twists and turns. Yes, the latest daily consumable YouTube video will continue doing great and grow in watch time but I’m not convinced that will destroy other forms of content. I’m betting that it doesn’t.

AI really is not that useful. Like all it's good at is a few work applications. It's only really good at excel, spreadsheets, coding, design, animation, engineering, robotics, math, science, law, contract review, medical development, marketing, note-taking, taxes, accounting, shopping, financial preperation, inventory, reconciliation, etc. So I don't get the big deal with AI, it's only good at that type of stuff. For the average folk that just wants to go home and sit on the TV, what do they even need AI for.

All the banks are blocking AI agents. The next step is for them to build their own “trusted” agent that you access within the bank app. Security is the go-to excuse for moat protection for most digital business. It’s unsafe to use the other guys agent, the only agent that’s safe is our agent where we get the user data and retain customer control.

A number of AI bears really just hate successful business owners and try to just mask it with numbers and fake narratives. This is Ed Zitron. He hates Jensen, hates Zuck, hates all of them. Just realize when you’re following these people you’re not getting clear-sighted objective analysis. You’re getting personal enmity packaged as analysis.

Part of the reason I bought a bunch of Google when the stock was at a $2t market cap was because I assumed YouTube is worth over $1t and Google cloud is worth over $1t. So potential search disruption from ChatGPT didn't matter. It's looking like both of those assumptions will be correct. Nothing can stop YouTube.

It’s going to be hilarious when the market dips like 30% sometime in the future, which is a totally normal and expected thing it does every 5-7 years, and burry will claim it as some great prophecy he foretold.

Maybe the big collapse was delayed by 4 years. Or maybe burry really has no clue and just tweets dramatic stuff to get substack subscribers. I used to be a defender of burry. But he’s had so many terrible calls on so many companies over the past 5 years that it’s been impossible to defend.