Josh Knowles

Lead investor of Suno confirming that people who use Suno stop listening to all music that they don't create themselves on-app. Commercial genAI creates cultural isolation, sold to consumers as "personalization."

The headline says “waterfront mansion.” The real story is $10 billion in tax avoidance. Zuckerberg is buying a $150-200M estate on Indian Creek Island from the founder of Jersey Mike’s Subs. That’s a 4-5x return for Cancro, who bought the lot for $37M in 2021 and built the mansion from scratch. Good trade. But zoom out. California just filed the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, a ballot initiative imposing a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of anyone worth over $1 billion who was a California resident on January 1, 2026. On Zuckerberg’s ~$212 billion fortune, that’s roughly $10.6 billion in state taxes. The residency test is binary: where were you domiciled on January 1, 2026? That date has already passed. So every billionaire who didn’t establish residency elsewhere before New Year’s Day is already locked in. The ones who moved before that date? They’re free. Now look at the timeline. Larry Page just spent $170M on two estates in Miami’s Coconut Grove. Sergey Brin bought a $42M mansion on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Peter Thiel opened a Miami office for Thiel Capital on December 31st. Zuckerberg bought a $23M D.C. mansion last March. This tells you everything about how Silicon Valley billionaires view California right now. They’re spending $150-200M on real estate to avoid $10B+ in tax liability. The ROI on that trade is roughly 50-70x. You will never see a better risk-adjusted return than buying a mansion to dodge a wealth tax. The math on Indian Creek specifically is worth understanding. It’s a 300-acre man-made island with its own municipal government and 13-person private police force. Single guarded bridge in, 24/7 armed marine patrol around the perimeter. Bezos already owns $234M worth of property there. Ivanka and Jared Kushner, Carl Icahn, Tom Brady. The island functions as a sovereign wealth district disguised as a neighborhood. California’s LAO estimates the tax would raise “tens of billions.” That estimate assumed the billionaires would stay. They didn’t. The state designed a tax with a January 1, 2026 trigger date and gave billionaires a full year of advance notice to relocate. Every mansion sale in Miami is California revenue that will never materialize. A $150M mansion that saves $10B. That’s the entire story behind every luxury real estate transaction in South Florida right now.

Remember: The richest 1% evade over $160 billion in taxes every year. That amount would fund SNAP for a year with money to spare. Ask yourself who the real freeloaders are.

I’m saddest of all for the kids who soon may not get vaccines to save their lives from preventable diseases.

Today in presidential politics