Mark Cranney retweeted
Joe Lonsdale on why capitalism works:
"When you create new things, the business usually captures only a very small part of the wealth it creates.
For example, if homes are going to cost way less because of [innovation], you get to make money from that but everyone gets a much, much cheaper home.
The money captured by businesses is much less than the amount captured by the general society, which is why capitalism works so well."
@JTLonsdale
Mark Cranney retweeted
🚨NEW: @FAANews has granted a first of its kind certification for eVTOLs
@BETA_aircraft is officially CLEARED to fly potential customers in their aircrafts
Under @POTUS, we are unleashing innovation and bringing incredible upgrades to the American people 🇺🇸
Reich is a sawed off POS
Mark Cranney retweeted
The U.S. has a trillion dollar defense budget
It also has dudes like this, just in case
Writer: Michael
Mark Cranney retweeted
Lefties: “Elon Musk should be in prison!”
Normies: “For what?”
Lefties: “We’re not sure but we’ll find something! Vote for us and we’ll show you.”
Normies: “You are insane.”
Lefties: “Elon is a fascist. We’re anti-fascist. You must also be a fascist.”
vote her out
"Absolutely not."… that is what Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson told KUTV when she was asked if she would ever hand the Justice Department the voter rolls, and now she is taking a victory lap because Judge David Barlow tossed the DOJ case Friday with prejudice so it cannot even be refiled.
Let me explain what this is actually about. The DOJ asked for the complete, unredacted voter registration list, the kind of data you need to match a name on the roll to a real driver's license number, a real Social Security number and a real date of birth, and the argument was simple… the Civil Rights Act of 1960 gives the attorney general the authority to inspect voter registration records to make sure states are actually maintaining their rolls. She offered the public list instead, the same list any campaign can get its hands on, and when they said that does not do the job she dug in and said absolutely not.
So ask yourself a simple question. If your rolls are clean, why fight this hard to make sure nobody outside your office can check them? Why is the chief election officer of one of the reddest states in the country celebrating the fact that nobody gets to verify the list her own office keeps? How is this even a thing?
I am all for privacy, and yet this is not some hacker or some marketing firm asking, it is the federal government asking whether the people on the rolls are real, alive and eligible, which is the entire point of having a roll in the first place. Privacy is the shield they always grab when someone wants to look under the hood, and it works every time because nobody wants to be the guy who argues against privacy.
And make no mistake, this is a Republican. Not Jena Griswold, not some blue state secretary of state, a Republican lieutenant governor in Utah doing the exact thing the left would do and calling it a win for fair and secure elections. Meanwhile the DOJ is sending about six lawyers and paralegals to watch Utah polling places in November, and Harmeet Dhillon says that has nothing to do with Henderson. Fine… watch closely anyway.
Deidre… if the rolls are clean, prove it and hand them over.
@realDonaldTrump take this one to the Tenth Circuit.
Mark Cranney retweeted
Remember in 2013 when he said families would get good healthcare for less than the cost of their cable bills and then the cost of insurance skyrocketed? That was awesome.
Mark Cranney retweeted
The world is devolving into two sides.
Joyful creators and producers,
And hateful takers and destroyers.
Choose wisely.
Mark Cranney retweeted
Andreessen's framework for why Elon is essentially unbeatable:
You have to go back to the late 1800s and early 1900s — Ford, Carnegie — to find founders who operated this way.
Carnegie didn't just build steel. He owned the iron ore mines, the railroads, the coke ovens. By 1900 he controlled ~25% of US steel output. Ford didn't just build cars — he owned rubber plantations, glass factories, and 16 million acres of timberland by the 1920s.
The pattern Andreessen identifies is the same one playing out now: a single leader who simultaneously runs multiple capital-intensive industries, where each company becomes infrastructure for the next.
Tesla needs batteries → Elon builds the battery supply chain. SpaceX needs avionics → Elon builds the avionics. X needs satellite internet → Starlink already exists.
Most conglomerates are financial portfolios. This is vertical integration at civilizational scale.
The reason quarterly-driven rivals can't respond: they'd have to spin up entire industries from scratch to match capabilities Elon has been compounding for 20 years.
Carnegie's advantage took decades and the Sherman Antitrust Act to slow down. The historical parallel isn't flattering to competitors.
Mark Cranney retweeted
David Friedberg: France’s Crisis Is a Warning for America
“France is a bellwether for the West.
So take a look at this chart. This chart is a measure of public spending as a percent of GDP.
And you can see the comparison of France's public spending as a % of GDP to the peak public spending as a % of GDP of major communist nations.”
@Chamath:
“So do you think France is a communist state? They spend like it.”
@Jason:
“Well, it's certainly been a socialist state, right?”
Chamath:
“Is it working?”
@Friedberg:
“That's my point. And I think this is such a prescient lesson for the West to look at.
We all think that there's some political problem with Macron or whoever it was.
The more the government spends, the worse the conditions get for its people, not the opposite, and then the people riot and revolt.
Take a guess where the US is today. US public spending is roughly 36% of GDP. France today is operating its national government spending deficit is 5.4% of GDP. The US is actually 6.2% of GDP.
France is, I think, probably the first to go because they're only growing their economy at half a percent while the US is growing at 2.3%.
So we're still kind of hanging on because we have some degree of economic growth that's allowing us to kind of hold things together.
But I would argue that we are facing the same sort of fiscal cliff which leads to this extraordinary social unrest as France.
All the economic measures are aligned, we're at the same rate, we're at the same set of problems, and we're starting to see the cracks in the system.
There's probably a multi-year solution.”
👀🤭
NEW: The Pentagon has granted the Department of Homeland Security permission to test a heat ray weapon at the southern border.
The military-grade heat ray can shoot an invisible beam of electromagnetic waves at potential intruders.
The weapon can reach people more than half a mile away, according to the United States military.
According to the Pentagon, the heat ray weapon is non-lethal but causes a burning sensation on the skin that can last between 10 and 15 minutes.
The weapon sends an uncomfortable tingling effect on a potential intruder, generating "an instinctive and irresistible urge to run from the effect."
Officials say the feeling is similar to the blast of heat you receive when you open up a hot oven.
Marc Andreessen says the gap between what AI-native startups and incumbents think AI can do is the widest he’s ever seen:
"The AI-native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than the typical incumbents in almost any industry, almost without exception."
"AI is just racing ahead in capability even week by week... There are going to be a lot of industries that are really up for grabs in a fundamentally more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past."
"The founders are gonna have a level of superpowers coming from the use of these tools and these technologies that they just simply haven't had in the past... Had I had Astra and Netscape in 1994, like, oh my God. Like, Ben, what would you and I have been able to do at Netscape?"
"Those entrepreneurs are gonna color way outside the lines. We already see this. They're not gonna think of themselves as like, 'I'm just a software company,' or, 'I'm just a hardware company,' or even, 'I'm just an AI company.'"
@pmarca @bhorowitz
Today, a16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier.
Since joining a16z in 2013, @cdixon has focused on technologies that look futuristic well before they reach the mainstream. Those themes led to investments in Oculus, Skydio, Zipline, Coinbase, Solana, and Uniswap.
Frontier expands that mandate beyond crypto to back "outer planet" founders who are building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop.
Chris joins @pmarca, @bhorowitz, and @eriktorenberg to discuss why crypto has become part of the broader tech landscape, why Frontier fills a hole in the firm's architecture, and why they'd rather be too early than too late.
They also get into why the gap between AI-native startups and incumbents is the widest Marc has ever seen, how AI could pull forward 20 years of frontier technology, why stablecoins may become the way AI agents pay each other, how AI is breaking the internet's business model, and why today's 18-year-olds are about to become superhumans.
0:50 Introducing a16z Frontier
2:49 Smartphone parts to drones and VR
4:47 Backing the "outer planets"
7:11 Good ideas that look like bad ideas
10:43 The JP Morgan photo in Marc's office
15:13 Good tech ideas eventually work
16:53 AI may pull tech 20 years forward
18:18 The widest AI gap Marc's ever seen
22:06 Workers adopt AI before companies do
26:32 Old use cases vs. AI-native ones
30:08 Beyond "product manager brain"
34:45 AI can reverse engineer any hardware
38:23 The case for open source AI
46:36 How AI breaks the internet's model
49:11 VR, homebrew hacking, multiplayer AI
54:00 If you're 18, study "modern alchemy"
YouTube: youtu.be/-9XQMHhpypc
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at a16z.com/portfolio.



























