LT | Working Theory

@DollarCostAvg wen deal

$IREN BUILDING THE BIGGEST AI DATACENTER IN THE USA 🇺🇸. EVERY MAG7 + AI COMPANIES INCLUDING ANTHROPIC + OPENAI NEED MW TO GROW. $IREN HAS IT ✅ EXPECTING 80-100s IN MARCH, IF DEAL IS ANNOUNCED POSSIBLE BEYOND 100 + AND OVERTAKE $CRWV.

@TansuYegen @Fishingaret Bali is calling

In Indonesia's Bali Island, after three days of nonstop rainfall, streets have turned into lakes, and pythons reaching up to 5 meters in length have started to be spotted in them…

@TheTechInvest @bitcoinbutcher1 wen deal

🚨 BREAKING: PER GOLDMAN SACHS, $433M IS THE ESTIMATED PASSIVE INFLOWS INTO $IREN POST MSCI INCLUSION Effective February 27 Credit: @bitcoinbutcher1

@amitisinvesting What goes around comes around mama 😭😭

so this week my mom has been out of the country for some wellness retreat it’s like this big self-help thing that she’s been super passionate to go to she told me about it in December and said it cost $5K to go I wanted to be a good son, so I paid for the whole thing she just called me to tell me how great it’s been and I was like “that’s awesome I’m so happy for you but I’m gonna need that $5K back momma dukes”

@kiantrades LOLLL

Looks like $IREN is getting airstrikes, not Iran

@davidmarcus @Couch_Investor

A few thoughts about PayPal, nearly 12 years after I left. I woke up this morning to dozens of messages from former PayPal colleagues. It pushed me to finally speak up. I never spoke publicly about the company after I left. Part of that was loyalty to John Donahoe, who gave me an unlikely opportunity, handing the reins of PayPal to a startup guy who, on paper, had no business running a then 15,000-person organization. But part of it was something else: I had left. I chose not to stay and fight for the changes I believed in. Speaking from the sidelines felt like armchair commentary. Easy opinions without the burden of execution. So I stayed quiet. But twelve years of silence is long enough. And today's news makes it clear the pattern I've watched unfold isn't self-correcting. I left PayPal in 2014 because I was deeply frustrated. We had executed a silent turnaround of a company that had lost its soul. We brought back engineering talent, shipped good products quickly, and acquired Braintree and Venmo. The company was on a tear. So much so that Carl Icahn felt compelled to accumulate a position in eBay and push for a PayPal spinoff. At the time, eBay decided to fight Icahn. It was a difficult period for me, caught between what I felt was right for PayPal and my loyalty to the eBay team. This is when Mark Zuckerberg approached me to join Facebook. The combination of his conviction that messaging would become foundational, the appeal of going back to building products at scale, and my growing exhaustion with the internal politics at PayPal and eBay eventually convinced me to leave and join one of the best teams in the world, one I had admired for a long time. In the summer of 2014, I met John in a café in Portola Valley and told him I had decided to leave. During that conversation, he told me that Icahn had effectively won the fight, that PayPal was going to become an independent company, and he tried to convince me to stay on as CEO, but I had already said yes to Mark, and my word is my bond. There was no turning back. After my departure, the board scrambled to find a replacement, and it took a few months for them to land on Dan Schulman. The leadership style shifted from product-led to financially-led. Over time, product conviction gave way to financial optimization. Much of the momentum we had created still persisted and carried the company forward, mainly driven by Bill Ready, who came over in the Braintree acquisition and rose to COO. Under his leadership, Venmo grew exponentially, and total payment volume (TPV) accelerated quickly. But the shift under Schulman became more pronounced after Bill's departure at the end of 2019. With him went the product conviction that had defined the post-spinoff momentum. Then, for a period, COVID-fueled online shopping hid a lot of the company's new weaknesses. During that period, the company made a fundamental miscalculation: it optimized for payment volume instead of margin and differentiation. It leaned into unbranded checkout, where PayPal had the least leverage, instead of branded checkout, where the margin, data, and customer relationship actually lived. Visa masterfully structured a deal that effectively ended PayPal's ability to steer customers toward bank-funded transactions, which had been a core driver of PayPal's economics. Not long after, PayPal lost a significant portion of eBay's volume. Over time, it saw its share of checkout among its most profitable customers steadily erode as Apple Pay and others continued to execute well. The same pattern repeated itself across lending, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL), and new rails. On lending, PayPal missed the opportunity to turn it into a platform weapon. Products like Working Capital were conservative, short-duration, and optimized for loss minimization. Lending never became programmable, never became identity-driven, and never became a reason for merchants or consumers to choose PayPal over something else. The missed opportunity in BNPL was even more striking. Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay didn't just offer installment payments, they built consumer finance brands, persistent credit identities, and new shopping behaviors. PayPal saw the BNPL turn, entered the market, and had every advantage: distribution, trust, and merchant relationships. But BNPL was treated as a defensive checkout feature rather than an offensive category. There was no attempt to turn it into a core consumer relationship, no super-app behavior, and no meaningful differentiation for merchants. Others built platforms, PayPal added a feature. The failure to lean into building and owning new rails followed the same logic. After the spinoff, PayPal had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a global, at scale payment network. Instead, the company focused on building on top of existing networks and third-party rails. More recently, that mindset carried over to PYUSD. Technically, the product was sound. Strategically, it launched without a compelling transactional reason to exist. PYUSD had distribution, but no organic demand. It was not embedded deeply enough into flows to become a true settlement layer, a cross-border merchant rail, or a programmable money primitive. It sat adjacent to the product instead of inside the core of it. Acquisitions during this period followed a similar pattern. Honey was not a strategic acquisition for PayPal. It added activity, but not leverage. It lived outside the transaction, monetized affiliate economics rather than payment economics, and never meaningfully strengthened PayPal's control of the customer or the checkout moment. Xoom solved a real problem in remittances, but it never compounded PayPal's advantage. It scaled volume without changing the underlying rails, identity graph, or settlement model, and as importantly, it didn’t cater to a high-value, high-margin customer archetype. None of these were bad companies. They were just a wrong fit for PayPal and became unnecessary distractions. The board eventually recognized the problem. In 2023, they brought in Alex Chriss, an Intuit veteran with a strong product background, explicitly to restore product conviction. It was the right instinct. But Alex came from software, not payments. He understood SMB product development. He didn't have the muscle memory for transaction economics, network effects, or settlement infrastructure. In hindsight, he also made an error: clearing out much of the leadership team that understood payments deeply. Executives with years of institutional knowledge departed within his first year. This morning, Alex was removed as CEO. Branded checkout grew 1% last quarter. The board tapped another operator, Enrique Lores, the former HP CEO who's been on the PayPal board for five years. I don’t know Enrique. And he might be a great leader, but on paper at least, he’s a hardware executive. For a payments company. The common thread through all of this is incentive design. Once PayPal became independent, short/medium-term predictability beat long-term vision and ambition. Stock performance mattered more than platform risk and network opportunity. Financial optimization replaced product conviction. I'm not claiming I would have made every call differently. Running a public company at scale involves tradeoffs I didn't have to make after I left. But the pattern, choosing predictability over platform risk, again and again, was a choice, not an inevitability. Over time, the company that had every advantage and could’ve become the most consequential and relevant payments company of our time, lost its mojo, its product edge, and its ability to compete in a market that’s being rewired and reinvented in front of our eyes. That's the part that's hardest to watch for a company I care so deeply about.

@leaded247 @NoLimitGains @grok what's your take on this thesis?

@NoLimitGains This is all orchestrated to bring back confidence in $ as the best asset, not silver and gold. Metal prices were systematically pushed higher to make people invest in these "SAFE" assets. Crashing it down by 30% in a day would bring $ back as the safest option for the majority.

🚨 SOMETHING CRAZY WILL HAPPEN ON MONDAY I’m looking at the spreads on precious metals right now and they make zero sense. Gold Price Gap: Mumbai vs. NYC = ~$283 Silver Price Gap: Hong Kong vs. London = ~$13 In a normal market, algorithms destroy these spreads in microseconds. Free money doesn't just sit on the table… Unless the table is broken. The fact that these gaps remain open proves one thing: Liquidity is drying up. The paper price (fake price) you see on screens is detaching from the physical price (real price) needed to settle. This is a massive systemic red flag. When metals, the ultimate collateral, start behaving like this, it means that something is broken. Forced selling is typically next. Btw, I called every market top and bottom of the last 10 years, and when I make a new move I’ll mention it here like I always do. A lot of people will wish they followed me sooner.

@amitisinvesting Oh oh.

crypto 🤢🤮

When life gives you lemons... ⛓️

@grok @jennyandfer @earnings_guy Fek

Even though Microsoft beat Q2 earnings estimates with revenue of $81.27B (vs. $80.23B expected) and strong cloud growth, the stock fell ~7% in after-hours. Investors reacted negatively to weaker forward guidance on AI spending costs and slower growth projections amid high expectations. Markets often price in more than just the beat.

$MSFT (Microsoft) #earnings are out:

@DrewCouver56 @Jurgen955 @joeydhansen I don't doubt it, Drew. Stay safe out there, we're praying for you.

Thanks for that.. but u can assure you I was trained by navy seal from 89-93 every Saturday morning and Wednesday night in close contact combat. 8 years aikido, and 28 years street fighting running some of the biggest clubs in North America. I can hold my own, plus 3-5 men my size

I don't work for UBC, you fucking ignorant pissbabies and maybe have the courage to tag me in your posts.

@Jurgen955 @DrewCouver56 @joeydhansen Congrats for the BJJ, but you're missing the point. A man steps up for security not because he thinks he's the toughest guy in the room, but because he knows he's standing on the right side of History. It's not about who can choke who first, it's about having conviction.

@DrewCouver56 @joeydhansen Drew, with all due respect how did you ensure her safety? I'm a BJJ blue belt and could easily submit you without even trying. Joey could make you a paraplegic. All I'm saying is I don't think this tour is well planned if you're in charge of safety. Wish you all the best

@MOSSADil @Partisan_12 That's Ai

@Partisan_12 While the details are unknown, this is despicable. As an Israeli, this is a shock to see, and not something that represents our people.

Israelis attacked a Christian woman as she was walking down the road with her dogs in Jerusalem, capital of Palestine

@SammyB30096258 @BL00000110172 @TheSkayeth @grok Same 🤣

@BL00000110172 @TheSkayeth @grok "edging" made me laugh

$NBIS is looking VERY bullish with 2 out of 2 indicators flipping to blue. (The last time, $NBIS climbed +460%.) At this rate, $NBIS will get to $185 quickly. Watching closely, don't miss out!

🚨 WOW. María Corina Machado just STUNNED THE WORLD with what she told President Donald Trump as the reason for gifting him the Nobel medal. “I told President Trump that 200 years ago General La Fayette gave Simón Bolívar a medal with the face of George Washington. Two hundred years later, we Venezuelans give President Trump the Nobel medal in return.” Read that again. History. Respect. Strength. America is respected again. 🇺🇸🇻🇪

@elduckpost @BetoSan95 como ves

LA SOCIALISTA CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM PROMETE "INTERNET GRATIS" EN TODO MÉXICO 🚨 "Vamos a lanzar un satélite mexicano para hacer realidad el internet gratuito" JAJAJAJAJA ESTO YA SE HIZO EN ARGENTINA, BOLIVIA, VENEZUELA Y FUE UN FRACASO, MEXICANOS DESPIERTEN 💀

@RealMattMoney @stevenfiorillo Mos def

Would you guys watch a weekly livestream with me and @stevenfiorillo if this was the thumbnail?

If Venezuelans are celebrating, your opinion doesn’t matter.

@MaxNordau Don't forget @cenkuygur

Ana Kasparian Tucker Carlson 🇶🇦 Tucker Carlson’s alcoholic brother Glenn Greenwald Comic Dave Smith Scott Horton Marjorie Taylor Greene Ian Carroll Cancer Owens Jeffrey Sachs John Mearsheimer Jimmy Dore Darryl Cooper Krystal Ball Dan Bilzerian These people are anti-America leftists. They support America’s enemies and oppose America’s allies. They want America to be weak, poor, demoralized, and isolated.

@mikealfred Same people are chanting "Free Palestine"

The same people who spent the week defending Somali daycare fraudsters and a narco-terrorist communist dictator are the same people who’ve been saying that the Bitcoin cycle is “over” and we’re headed to $30,000 per coin. It’s all driven by one thing: severe brain rot. Terrible.