FUNBAGz

The new Paris 🇫🇷

Poverty elimination reduces crime. The reasons so called nice neighborhoods have lower crime rates is simply because people’s basic needs are being met. It is not because of the police, alarm systems, or neighborhood associations. Poverty creates crime.

🇯🇵 Last week was the 19th Nipponbashi Street Festival in Osaka. One parade featured maids from Nipponbashi's maid cafes. While most people know of the maid cafes in Akihabara, Osaka also has many of them in the Nipponbashi area.

🚨Michael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbers. Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake. He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing. Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor. Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale. Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models. But here is what Burry is flagging. Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory. They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies. Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle. Now here is where American retirees enter the picture. Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit. Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene. Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans. When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center. The numbers inside Athene are most alarming. Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight. Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets. Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth. The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times. Burry's says: Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing. - Nvidia books the revenue. - Apollo collects the fees. - xAI gets the computing power. - And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.

Hassett: "People are spending more on gas, but they're also spending more on everything else -- not just groceries, but restaurants and so on. I think that's a sign you see when people are optimistic about the future."