Anders Axelson 🇦🇺

@StuartM1827017 @johnkonrad He remained demoted long after he left the SAS!

@AndersAxelson1 @johnkonrad That tells us he wanted to stay with the best unit in the army, and a lot of soldiers take a demotion to get into that regiment. Rank matters little, only ability. Had he stayed regular or transferred to regular from SAS, he likely would have been above staff sergeant.

Something is really bothering me about the Ben Roberts-Smith case. Nobody likes being a hypocrite. Unlike most, I actually go for a walk when I suspect myself of being one. On one hand, this prosecution stinks of liberal bias. Out of thousands of potential war crimes cases the social justice warrior police chief could have pursued, she picked THE most decorated soldier on the entire continent. That isn’t justice. That’s a public humiliation ritual. On the other hand, I do believe actual war criminals should stand trial regardless of rank or honors. And I know what’s coming: “John, Roberts-Smith already lost the 2023 defamation case. Justice Besanko found he committed the murders.” Yes. On the balance of probabilities. 51 percent. That’s the civil standard. Criminal conviction requires 99 percent. The same fragile evidence that barely cleared a coin flip is now supposed to send a man to prison for life. Here’s why my post is not hypocrisy. When the school got hit in Iran weeks ago, I said mistakes aren’t war crimes, but if it was intentional or grossly negligent, someone should be court-martialed. That strike is recent. Physical. Investigable. The Roberts-Smith allegations are 20 years old. And here’s what the Brereton Inquiry, for all its 510 witnesses & four years of work, could never get: No crime scene access. The Taliban didn’t let investigators into Uruzgan. No Afghan witnesses interviewed. No secured scene. No blood-spatter analysis. No DNA No autopsies. No recovered bodies. No weapons tied to victims. The investigators themselves admitted they “lacked access to Afghan crime scenes and were missing the physical evidence that would normally anchor a murder prosecution.” So what’s left? Memory. Twenty-year-old memory from men in the fog of war. The science is unambiguous. Countless research studies confirms memory is reconstructive: later suggestion, media exposure, and repeated questioning distort it. This is the textbook misinformation effect. Confidence and accuracy decouple within months, let alone decades. Studies on soldiers who suffer PTSD show the gaps get even larger. I admittedly don’t know 🇦🇺 law but US courts admit decades-old testimony but warn juries it is inherently fragile, not scientific proof. Australia is treating it as load-bearing concrete. The media says “20 former soldiers testified against him.” Fine. Was all their testimony actually against him? How clear was it? Did 20 people watch him murder a civilian in broad daylight? And even if they did, you still have to prove the dead man wasn’t Taliban. In Uruzgan. In 2009. Without a body. Some will say I’m being pedantic. Yes. I. Am. Because Ben Roberts-Smith was charged with murder, and under war-crimes law the same act can be framed as murder, willful killing, or killing a person hors de combat depending on the framing. How it gets framed sets precedent for every future war. And here’s the question nobody in Canberra wants asked: Why is the trigger-puller in the dock while the officers who wrote the rules of engagement, approved the missions, and signed the after-action reports keep their pensions? The Victoria Cross winner hangs. The chain of command walks. Past “War crime” cases with more hard evidence remain “unsolved” That isn’t accountability. That’s a scapegoat ritual. You do not get a Victoria Cross just for killing. You get it for extraordinary gallantry, valour, self-sacrifice & devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy. And here is what Australia just told every soldier watching: the reward for a VC is fame which will make you a target for future show trials built on 20-year-old memories, prosecuted by a police chief with no combat but more ribbons on her uniform than you. If murder can be proven without hard evidence decades later. That isn’t justice even if he is guilty. Proof of guilt matters. That’s a Marxist humiliation ceremony leading to national strategic disarmament by lawfare.

@gavinblaine83 @johnkonrad He remained demoted long after he left the SAS!

@AndersAxelson1 @johnkonrad Lol you clearly never served. SAS squads are made up of trooper and corporal.....

@NadezhdaBliss @johnkonrad You do realize that this guy has already been found by the Federal Court to be a mass murderer (albeit to a civil standard of proof)?!

@AndersAxelson1 @johnkonrad No. It’s not. But I have to say, you look like a bit of a psychopath yourself. Or a serial killer.

@VoodooLarceny @johnkonrad Having the psyche of a warrior is not a good thing in this day and age!

@AndersAxelson1 @johnkonrad A weak and brittle man calling strong men who fight psychopaths because you could never understand the psyche of a warrior

@njalbertini @johnkonrad No. This is all about the law, facts, and evidence. It's not about emotions such as "hate", lol!

@AndersAxelson1 @johnkonrad Boy you really hate the people who make your life fucking possible don't you.

@blarg59117052 @johnkonrad No we don't. It's by no means identical, but very similar and very comparable!

@AndersAxelson1 @johnkonrad he's an E4 staff sergeant you retard. Aussies have a very different rank structure from the US

@DrewPavlou The evidence is circumstantial rather than direct. But it's mutually corroborating. Mutually corroborating circumstantial evidence is still capable of rising to meet the criminal standard of proof!

Bookmark this tweet: Ben Roberts-Smith will win in court and then run for One Nation at the next election. Australian Office of Special Investigations director Ross Barnett on the Ben Roberts-Smith allegations: “We don’t have access to the crime scenes. We don’t have photographs, site plans, measurements, the recovery of projectiles, blood spatter. We don’t have access to the deceased. There’s no post-mortem report, there’s no official cause of death, there’s no recovery of projectiles to link to weapons that might have been carried by members of the ADF.” Tell me how you prove beyond reasonable doubt that he committed war crimes when that's the dog shit evidence brief. He's going to be acquitted, it's obvious.

@RMChew @johnkonrad Who's the world's best bricklayer?

@AndersAxelson1 @johnkonrad The world’s best bricklayer doesn’t need to know their way around the office bookwork champ.

@steph_johnsen @johnkonrad No.

@AndersAxelson1 @johnkonrad Is that the best you could come up with?

@johnkonrad Wanting to stay at the tip of the spear is consistent with being a psychopath!

@AndersAxelson1 Yes, it tells me he wanted to stay at the tip of the spear

@DrewPavlou There are about sixteen ranks in the army, yet BRS never managed to make it past the second-bottom one, Corporal. That speaks volumes!

Ben Roberts-Smith isn’t just a good person, he’s an Australian hero. A war hero that we should look up to and respect.

@theblackeffect7 @AusFedPolice @AustralianLabor There are about sixteen ranks in the army. Roberts-Smith never made it past the second-bottom one, corporal. That should tell you something!

On your left. You have a real soldier who actually earned his medal for combat. On your right. You have a useless pathetic cvnt. Who's medals are participation awards. Fvck you @AusFedPolice and @AustralianLabor

@DrewPavlou There are about sixteen or so ranks in the Army, yet the Army never trusted Roberts-Smith to take a rank higher than corporal, second from the bottom. That should tell us something!

The Australian government just arrested our most decorated veteran from the Afghanistan War for alleged war crimes. Ben Roberts-Smith was awarded the Victoria Cross for Australia after singlehandedly storming two Taliban machine gun positions by himself in order to save his own SAS team. And this is how we repay him. I spoke to an Australian Afghan war veteran who told me that the Australian government literally paid for billboards in Afghanistan offering to pay random Afghans to come forward with war crime allegations. What country on Earth would do this to itself? Tell me: When does the Taliban plan on holding war crimes tribunals into their own people? When do the Taliban plan on holding themselves accountable for terrorism? Absolutely retarded to purge your own men when fighting a brutal barbaric enemy that respects no rules whatsoever. We are a cucked nation. Free Ben Roberts-Smith.

@BenMcCombe @taipan168 @glengyron The Christian Porter trial should also not be forgotten!

@taipan168 @glengyron The BRS defamation case came first.

When Bruce Lehrmann lost his defamation case with the judgement stating that on the balance of probabilities, he raped Brittany Higgins, I thought that there couldn't be a bigger own goal from launching a defo case. Ben Roberts-Smith: hold my beer (served in a prosthetic leg).

@DrewPavlou Murder is murder, regardless of the geopolitical optics!

@Ronycoder Whatever happened to good old-fashioned knowledge acquisition by way of reading?!

Instead of watching an hour of Netflix, watch this 2-hour Stanford lecture on AI careers. It will teach you more about winning in the AI race than all the AI content you’ve scrolled past this year.

@BowesChay No. Rules are rules.

Magnus Carlsen is a Norwegian chess grandmaster, and also a massive jerk. When Kazakhstani chess player Alua Nurman asked for a selfie, Carlsen cheerfully agreed, smiled for the camera, and then promptly reported his opponent for "Phone use" What a w☆nker

@taipan168 The Dutch were unbelievably short-sighted and lacking in curiosity not to claim Australia as their own when they had the chance!

When I was in primary school, whilst Dirk Hartog was mentioned, the focus was squarely on Captain Cook as the European who "discovered" Australia. Never mind that the Dutch East India Company (VOC) visited what is now WA dozens of times well before 1770.

@BillAckman @X Fight it. She is taking you to the cleaners enough as it is by being paid a 7-figure salary for an easy job. You don't deserve to be taken to the cleaners even more! (P.S. I don't think Bremont works as a brand: if I'm going to pay that much for a watch, I want it to be Swiss!)

I am reaching out to the @X community for advice with the likely risk of sharing TMI. I have been sufficiently upset about the whole matter that I have lost sleep thinking about it and I am hoping that this post will enable me to get this matter off my chest. By way of background, I started a family office called TABLE about 15 years ago and hired a friend who had previously managed a family office, and years earlier, had been my personal accountant. She is someone that I trusted implicitly and consider to be a good person. The office started small, but over the last decade, the number of personnel and the cost of the office grew massively. The growth was entirely on the operational side as the investment team has remained tiny. While my investment portfolio grew substantially, the investments I had made were almost entirely passive and TABLE simply needed to account for them and meet capital calls as they came in. While TABLE purchased additional software and other systems that were supposed to improve productivity, the team kept increasing in size at a rapid rate, and the expenses continued to grow even faster. While I would periodically question the growing expenses and high staff turnover, I stayed uninvolved with the office other than a once-a-year meeting when I briefly reviewed the operations and the financials and determined bonus compensation for the President and the CFO. I spent no time with any of the other employees or the operations. The whole idea behind TABLE was that it would handle everything other than my day job so that I would have more time for my job and my family. Over the last six years, expenses ballooned even further, employee turnover accelerated, and I became concerned that all was not well at TABLE. It was time for me to take a look at what was going on. Nearly four years ago, I recruited my nephew who had recently graduated from Harvard and put him to work at Bremont, a British watchmaker, one of my only active personal investments to figure out the issues at the company and ultimately assist in executing a turnaround. He did a superb job. When he returned from the UK late last year after a few years at Bremont, I asked him to help me figure out what was going on with TABLE. When I explained to TABLE’s president what he would be doing, she became incredibly defensive, which naturally made me more concerned. My nephew went to work by first meeting with each employee to understand their roles at the company and to learn from them what ideas they had on how things could be improved. He got an earful. Our first step in helping to turn around TABLE was a reduction in force including the president and about a third of the team, retaining excellent talent that had been desperate for new leadership. Now here is where I need your advice. All but one of the employees who were terminated acted professionally and were gracious on the way out (excluding the president who had a notice period in her contract, is currently still being paid, and with whom I have not yet had a discussion). The highest compensated terminated employee other than the president, an in-house lawyer (let’s call her Ronda), told us that three months of severance was not enough and demanded two years’ severance despite having worked at the company for only two and one half years. When I learned of Ronda's request for severance, I offered to speak with her to understand what she was thinking, but she refused to do so. A few days ago, we received a threatening letter from a Silicon Valley law firm. In the letter, Ronda’s counsel suggests that her termination is part of longstanding issues of ‘harassment and gender discrimination’ – an interesting claim in light of the fact that Ronda was in charge of workplace compliance – and that her termination was due to: “unlawful, retaliatory, and harmful conduct directed towards her. Both [Ronda] and I [Ronda’s lawyer] have spoken with you about [Ronda’s] view of what a reasonable resolution would include given the circumstances. Thus far, TABLE has refused to provide any substantive response. This letter provides the last opportunity to reach a satisfactory agreement. If we cannot do so, [Ronda] will seek all appropriate relief in a court of competent jurisdiction.” The letter goes on to explain the basis for the “unsafe work environment” claim at TABLE: “In early 2026, Pershing Square’s founder Bill Ackman installed his nephew in an unidentified role at TABLE, Ackman’s family office. [His nephew]—whose only work experience had been for TABLE where he was seconded abroad for the last four years to a UK watch company held by Ackman—began appearing at TABLE’s offices and conducting interviews of employees without a clear explanation of his role or the purposes of these interviews. During this period, he made a series of inappropriate and genderbased [sic] comments to multiple employees that created an unsafe work environment. Among other things, [his nephew] made remarks about female employees’ ages (“Tell me you are nowhere near 40”), physical appearance (“Your body does not look like you have kids”), as well as intrusive questions about family planning and sexual orientation (“Who carried your son? Who will carry your next child?”). These incidents were reported to senior leadership at TABLE and Pershing Square. Rather than being addressed appropriately, the response from senior management reflected, at best, willful blindness to the inappropriateness of [his nephew]’s remarks and, at worst, tacit endorsement.” The above allegations about my nephew had previously been brought to my attention by TABLE’s president when they occurred. When I learned of them, I told the president that I would speak to him directly and encouraged her to arrange for him to get workplace sensitivity training. The president assured me that she would do so. When I spoke to my nephew, he explained what he actually had said and how his actual remarks had been received, not at all as alleged in the legal letter from Ronda’s counsel. I have also spoken to others at the lunch table who confirmed his description of the facts. In any case, he meant no harm, was simply trying to build rapport with other employees, and no one, as far as I understand, was offended. Ironically, Ronda claims in her legal letter that TABLE didn’t take HR compliance seriously, yet Ronda was in charge of HR compliance at TABLE and the person who gave my nephew his workplace sensitivity training after the alleged incidents. In any case, Ronda, as head of compliance, should have kept a record or raised an alarm if indeed there was pervasive harassment or other such problems at the company, and there is no evidence whatsoever that this is true. So why does Ronda believe she can get me to pay her nearly $2 million, i.e., two years of severance, nearly one year of severance for each of her years at the company? Well, here is where some more background would be helpful. Over the last two months, I have been consumed with a major family medical issue – one of my older daughters had a massive brain hemorrhage on February 5th and has since been making progress on her recovery – and I am in the midst of a major transaction for my company which I am executing from a hospital room office next to her . While the latter business matter is publicly known, the details of my daughter’s situation are only known to Ronda because of her role at our family office. Now, let’s get back to the subject at hand. Unfortunately, while New York and many other states have employment-at-will, there has emerged an industry of lawyers who make a living from bringing fake gender, race, LGBTQ and other discrimination employment claims in order to extract larger severance payments for terminated employees, and it needs to stop. The fake claim system succeeds because it costs little to have a lawyer send a threatening letter and nearly all of the lawyers in this field work on contingency so there is no or minimal cash cost to bring a claim. And inevitably, nearly 100% of these claims are settled because the public relations and legal costs of defending them exceed the dollar cost of the settlement. The claims are nearly always settled with a confidentiality agreement where the employee who asserts the fake claims remains anonymous and as a result, there is no reputational cost to bringing false claims. The consequences of this sleazy system (let’s call it ‘the System’) are the increased costs of doing business which is a tax on the economy and society. There are other more serious problems due to the System. Unfortunately, the existence of an industry of plaintiff firms and terminated employees willing to make these claims makes it riskier for companies to hire employees from a protected class, i.e., LGBTQ, seniors, women, people of color etc. because it is that much more reputationally damaging and expensive to be accused of racism, sexism, and/or intolerance for sexual diversity than for firing a white male as juries generally have less sympathy for white males. The System therefore increases the risk of discrimination rather than reducing it, and the people bringing these fake claims are thereby causing enormous harm to the other members of these protected classes. So what happened here? Ronda was vastly overpaid and overqualified for the job that she did at TABLE. She was paid $1.05 million plus benefits last year for her work which was largely comprised of filling out subscription agreements and overseeing an outside law firm on closing passive investments in funds and in private and venture stage companies, some compliance work, and managing the office move from one office to another. She had a very good gig as she was highly paid, only had to go into the office three days a week, and could work from anywhere during the summer. Once my nephew showed up and started to investigate what was going on, she likely concluded that there was a reasonable possibility she would be terminated, as her job was in the too-easy-and-to-good-to-be-true category. The problem was that she was not in a protected class due to her race, age or sexual identity so she had to construct the basis for a claim. While she is female and could in theory bring a gender-based discrimination claim, she reported to the president who is female and to whom she is very close, which makes it difficult for her to bring a harassment claim against her former boss. When my nephew complimented a TABLE employee at lunch about how young she looked – in response to saying she was going to her 40-year-old sister’s birthday party, he said ‘she must be your older sister’ – Ronda immediately reported it to our external HR lawyer. She thereby began building her case. The other problem for Ronda bringing a claim is that she was terminated alongside 30% of other TABLE employees as part of a restructuring so it is very difficult for her to say that she was targeted in her termination or was retaliated against. TABLE is now hiring an external fractional general counsel as that is all the company needs to process the relatively limited amount of legal work we do internally. In short, Ronda was eminently qualified and capable and did her job. She was just too much horsepower for what is largely an administrative legal role so she had to come up with something else to bring a claim. Now Ronda knew I was a good target and it was a good time to bring a claim against me. She also knew that I was under a lot of pressure because on March 4th when Ronda was terminated, my daughter had not yet emerged from consciousness, she was not yet breathing on her own, and my daughter and we were fighting for her life. I was and remain deeply engaged in her recovery while at the same time I was working on finishing the closing for the private placement round for my upcoming IPO. Ronda also knew that publicity about supposed gender discrimination and a “hostile and unsafe work environment” are not things that a CEO of a company about to go public wants to have released into the media. And she may have thought that the nearly $2 million she was asking for would be considered small in the context of the reputational damage a lawsuit could cause, regardless of the fact that two years of severance was an absurd amount for an employee who had only worked at TABLE for 30 months. She also likely considered that I wouldn’t want to embarrass my nephew by dragging him into the klieg lights when her claims emerged publicly. So, in summary, game theory would say that I would certainly settle this case, for why would I risk negative publicity at a time when I was preparing our company to go public and also risk embarrassing my nephew. Notably, she hired a Silicon Valley law firm, rather than a typical NY employment firm. This struck me as interesting as her husband works for one of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture firms whose CEO, I am sure, has no tolerance for these kinds of fake claims that sadly many venture-backed companies also have to deal with. I mention this as I suspect her husband likely has been working with her on the strategy for squeezing me as, in addition to being a computer scientist, he is a game theorist. My only advice for him is to understand more about your opponent before you launch your first move. All of the above said, gender, race, LGBTQ and other such discrimination is a real thing. Many people have been harmed and deserve compensation for this discrimination, and these companies and individuals should be punished for engaging in such behavior. Which brings me to the advice I am seeking from the X community. I am not planning to follow the typical path and settle this ‘claim.’ Rather, I am going to fight this nonsense to the end of the earth in the hope that it inspires other CEOs to do the same so we shut down this despicable behavior that is a large tax on society, employment, and the economy and contributes to workplace discrimination rather than reducing it. Do you agree or disagree that this is the right approach?