So proud to be an American right now 🇺🇸🫡

Peter Thiel on the difference between American and German wealth: “In the US, nine out of 12 of those people made their own money.” “In Germany, all 20 of those 20 inherited it.” “Not a single person did something new.”

BREAKING: President Trump announced a anti-fraud program that would pay people who expose fraud 1% of the money recovered. “If you find $1 billion, we are giving a commission to that person of 1%,” he said.

Let me explain reality… if you have but sixty seconds: They were targeting Elon They were targeting him with fake charges because the socialist-industrial complex is terrified that he would expose their long grift. They came after him for the Model 3 and Elon’s claims around its potential. That potential was realized, and it became, along with the Model Y, the best-selling electric vehicle ever created. These were fake charges to try to stop somebody from building the best category-defining product. Let that sink in: that's how evil these motherfuckers are. The loooooong grift has been exposed: socialist grifters are stealing our tax dollars to fund fringe lunacy, NGOs and government programs without oversight or audits. They’re parasites incapable of creating any product or service that has to compete in the open market. Elon creates a couple of cutting-edge products each year, and half of them succeed. Some of them actually change the world. Some of them fail brutally. It's called capitalism. It's called creation. This is what moves the human condition forward: trying things. Trying really hard things. Socialists come for the people building valuable products and services — that’s the tell Keep your eye out for the people who've created nothing and risked nothing, but who are attacking the people who risk everything to create Something. That's the tell.

Never going to get over that the AT-AT walkers in Star Wars were originally conceived by U.S. Steel.

As Thatcher said, the problem with socialism is that eventually they run out of other people’s money to take and they come for you

Please retweet. @Wise has blindsided us and put our business at risk. This is insane. We’ve been a Wise customer for years, using their USD bank account to accept payments from our US clients. Today, I discovered that Wise has capped how much we can send or withdraw from our account at roughly 40% of our usual monthly volume. No advance notice. No explanation. We’re suddenly at risk of being unable to make payments on time. Luckily, we have other accounts. Some clients also pay us in Bitcoin. But most of our money comes into Wise. How can @Wise do this after we’ve been a customer for years and processed millions of dollars through it? Customer support can’t help us. We’ve filed a complaint, but who knows if it will go anywhere. In the meantime, we can’t get our money out. We’re being held hostage.

The people in the streets should be screaming for more capitalism to fix this.

The riots in France and the anti-Israel protests in the U.S. are part of the same movement. @WSJFreeEx:

I enjoyed this conversation between Avik Roy (@Avik) of Strive and Danny Knowles on What Bitcoin Did. We don't hear from Avik often enough. He is precise, and the last 45 minutes go into the thinking behind Strive's structure. A few things that stood out: Why no debt. The 2025 cohort copied the old convert playbook, borrowed, and got margin called when bitcoin turned in October. Strive watched Saylor carefully when he turned sour on converts (hedge funds buying the notes and shorting the stock) and skipped to the more durable structure: one instrument, SATA, zero debt. The banker gate. A $100–200M preferred only gets built if you are near $1B of market cap, because below that the fees aren't worth the bankers' time. Comp. They hired Mercer, then wrote their own rules because Mercer's playbook doesn't know what a treasury company is. Two misalignments to design out: getting richer by diluting a falling stock, and beating the S&P while trailing bitcoin. So bitcoin per share is the KPI, bitcoin is the hurdle, and if Strive misses a dividend or any credit obligation, nobody on the executive team gets a bonus. He says this was designed 18 months ago, before the sector's comp issues came under scrutiny. The par rule. SATA only raises at $100 or above. That's the real constraint on BTC yield in a bear market. His final one-sentence pitch: a carry trade plus structured finance. Sell USD preferred, buy bitcoin, split it into amplified common ($ASST) and a $100 instrument paying 13%. Worth a listen. Link below.

Why did Amazon, Nvidia, and Walmart create so much value for decades? Bart Madden explains it in “Value Creation Thinking,” his new video course. And he’ll be speaking at the Principled Business Summit, October 28-30 in Austin. Enroll and secure your ticket, link in bio.

Empowering your team changes everything. When you delegate with trust and clarity, you free yourself to focus on what truly matters: big-picture strategy, culture, and growth.

Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.

“In the early 1960s, when Draper was one of the few people offering early funding to tech startups on the West Coast, he frequently had to start his meetings with entrepreneurs by explaining what venture capital was.” What a legend. RIP. No way these early practitioners could predict what VC could do in this world. But they blazed the trail.

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders. And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap. I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece. A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable. Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000. At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation. At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product. Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved. At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper. B. The mechanism: why it's systematic. When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient. In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work. The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in. C. Suffering demands a culprit. A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second. But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat. And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world? D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain. Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem. Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit? No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time. E. One lens, a thousand causes. And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them. F. The perfect inversion. Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second. It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene. G. The ballot box confirms it. In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease. In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state. H. The way out. These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target. The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture. That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

Dior had no faith in the French police to protect their store so they brought in their own security team to protect the flagship store in Paris tonight