$IREN The board’s case for the $694M founder grant is that Dan & Will have a “proven ability” to secure power, build data centers, and monetize them. In reality ~100% of operating, revenue-generating capacity sits on bitcoin-era land they bought before power was scarce. The proof comes from a market that no longer exists. Credit where due, they’ve out-originated peers post-bottleneck with ~2.9GW added in H1 2026 alone. But securing land is the easy half now, and they’ve monetized $0 of those new assets. Oklahoma doesn’t even energize until 2028. Yes the Microsoft and NVIDIA deals are real, but both sit entirely on the 2022 legacy footprint. Meanwhile TeraWulf bought a brownfield site in Feb 2026 and signed a $19B, 20-year Anthropic lease on it by July. Actual competitive-era monetization of a new asset, no $694M retention grant required. So the claim that “the market for people like Dan and Will has never been more aggressive” falls flat. Aggressive relative to what? Peers are running the identical pivot playbook, some faster and at lower capex. And a softer hypothesis the board should sit with: their own letter admits the old performance hurdles failed to vest during macro headwinds. Arguably that’s when the incentive structure was working. Hungry founders with unvested equity made the early, aggressive pivot to AI. Now they hold a fixed grant that vests on employment alone. If macro turns against the AI buildout, what incentive do they have to fight through it? There are no hurdles to miss. Just show up, and at worst walk away with nine figures each for tenure. The board is paying $694M for a skill whose proof came from a market that no longer exists, through a structure that pays out even if the skill was never there.