stapeski

A few hours ago, I wrote: "They're going to pull it off. Jensen Huang is going to be pushed out of Nvidia." It's done. Officially, Jensen Huang resigned. In reality, the board was getting ready to throw him out. Effective immediately. He's also leaving the board. The CFO is stepping in as interim CEO. The board is even considering bringing in an outside CEO. Thirty-three years. A company born in a Denny's, saved from bankruptcy more than once, turned into the most important company of the AI era. Wiped away in a week. Whatever you think of his private life, look at the mechanics. A scandal breaks. Pressure builds in Washington. Columnists demand his head. The board, which never prepared a successor, panics. The founder is out. And the man who fought the restrictions, who defended open models, who stood up to Washington, is gone. The playbook worked. And when a playbook works, it gets used again. The next target is Elon. Why him? Because he's now the last builder of that scale who holds the entire chain. Rockets, satellites, energy, robots, AI, and soon chips with Terafab. He's the only one who can build both the superintelligence and the rocket that carries it into space. And he just said publicly that hiring Jensen would be an honor. For those who want to slow everything down, there's no bigger target. But they have a problem. You don't fire Elon Musk the way you fire Jensen Huang. He holds voting control at SpaceX. No board can throw him out overnight. So they'll come at him another way. Regulators. Courts. Investigative committees. Government contracts. Media campaigns. Every weakness will be exploited, every mistake amplified, every procedure dragged out. They don't need to fire him. They just need to wear him down, slow him down, make every project ten times more expensive. Open your eyes, because this is going to move very fast. What we're living through right now isn't news. It's History. In twenty years, this week will be taught in schools. The day America, in the middle of the race to superintelligence against China, took the man who made the chips for the entire planet out of the race. And people will ask what happened next. The answer depends on what happens to Elon. And on what Jensen decides to do with the rest of his life. I'm standing by my prediction. We are living through History with a capital H.

A huge share of young people now believe the problem is capitalism. In the US, 62% of 18 to 29 year olds have a favorable view of socialism. In France, far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon leads among 18 to 25 year olds in every 2027 scenario. They're right about one thing: something is broken. They just have the wrong culprit. The problem isn't the market. It's the State. And only the State. Let's go back to the two crises they've been fed since school as proof that "capitalism collapses on its own." Start with 1929. They're told about crazed speculators on Wall Street. What they're not told: the Federal Reserve tightened in 1928 and 1929 to cool the stock market. Then, as banks failed one after another from 1930 on, it watched. It did nothing. Between 1929 and 1933, the US money supply collapsed by a third. Nearly a third of all banks vanished. A crash didn't cause the Great Depression. A central bank strangling the money supply did. And that's not me saying it. It's the Fed itself. In 2002, Ben Bernanke, future Fed chairman, addressed Milton Friedman on his 90th birthday: "Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry." Then the State piled on. The Smoot-Hawley tariffs in 1930, which helped crater world trade. A top marginal tax rate hiked from 25% to 63% in 1932. Then Roosevelt, in 1933, banned Americans from owning gold, bought it from them at $20.67 an ounce, and revalued it at $35 a few months later. A 40% devaluation with the stroke of a pen. Now 2008. Same story: greedy bankers, deregulation. Look instead at who was pulling the levers. After 2001, Greenspan cut the Fed's rate to 1% in June 2003, the lowest since 1958, and left it there for a year. Free money is a policy decision. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giants of American mortgage lending, were creatures of the State, backed by an implicit taxpayer guarantee. Starting in 1992, Congress imposed "affordable housing" quotas on them. To meet them, they bought $700 billion in subprime securities between 1997 and 2007. In 2003, an internal Fannie memo admitted that because of those goals, it was taking risks it would never have taken otherwise. September 2008: both were placed under federal conservatorship. Then the State bailed out the banks with the money of people who had decided nothing. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses. That's not capitalism. It's the exact opposite. And behind all of it lies the original sin: they broke money. As long as the dollar was convertible into gold, the State couldn't print without limit. On August 15, 1971, Nixon closed the gold window. "Temporarily." Fifty-five years later, it has never reopened. Since then, the dollar has lost nearly 90% of its purchasing power. US federal debt went from about $400 billion to $40 trillion. A hundredfold. Mises and Hayek described all of this back in the 1920s: artificially cheap money creates booms that always end in busts. Hayek won the Nobel for it in 1974. Nobody listened. When you can print, you stop making trade-offs. You spend, you inflate bubbles, and when they burst, you print more to put out the fire. Every bailout sets up the next crisis. That's the real mechanism. A central bank setting the price of money the way Gosplan set the price of bread. Governments guaranteeing risk to buy votes. A currency diluted to pay for all of it. And every time it blows up, the same defendant: the market. Young people are right to be angry. Housing is out of reach, their savings are melting, their future is mortgaged by debts they never voted for. But capitalism didn't do this to them. What replaced it did. You don't cure poisoning by raising the dose.