Nick Masi

SpaceX Starship Heat Shield Comparison Between Flights 10-13. It’s getting better every time. This is what progress looks like. 🦾

Saw a seed VC post their actual 2025 backing criteria publicly this week: 18 pre-seed checks, 14 pre-revenue, 10 first-time relationships, 10 rounds they led, median check $500-750K, median valuation $7.5-10M, all highly technical teams, all US-based or actively relocating. That's not a vibe. That's a targeting brief, sitting in public view. If you're blasting 200 investors with the same deck, you're ignoring data like this that would take 10 minutes to read and could double your reply odds. Read the fund's actual portfolio and stated criteria before you email them. Same point I made last week on cold email reply rates: targeted outreach beats volume outreach by 3-5x. Specificity is the whole game -- for the investor's criteria AND for your ask.

If you're an investor who has lost faith in $TSLA, I can't blame you. This is a company that used to see record sales every year, 50%, 80%, 100% year over year growth. That's a distant memory for investors now, with the last year of record deliveries being 2023. You gritted your teeth and bit your tongue as you listened to your fellow investors cope. "Well, vehicle deliveries don't actually matter. Autonomy does" they said as the sales decline accelerated. "Amazing abundance!" they tweeted as Tesla posted its worst year of sales growth in the history of the company. So I can't blame you, I really can't, for having doubts about whether this company is headed for explosive growth. Some people who still want to believe may be rude to you as you exit, or call you a moron. I called people who can't see the potential morons yesterday. But I'm sorry about that, and would like to apologize and wish my former Tesla bulls off with love. You're not insane for feeling something is off. I'm probably the insane one for still buying. Maybe I'm just retarded, but I want to own more of this company. It could be blind hope, but based on everything I'm seeing it really looks like they're turning a corner and returning to growth. I mentioned that we haven't seen year over year sales growth since 2023. Last year, in 2025, Tesla delivered 153,097 units less than in 2024. For 2026, they've already delivered 117,346 more cars than they did in the first half of 2025. It looks likely that Tesla will post sales growth this year for the first time since 2023, and they've got a shot at 2026 being a new record sales year if they can deliver an average of ~485,000 cars in the second half of 2026 — just a bit more than what they delivered in the second quarter. My car is driving me around like a work of art. It's smooth and precise, sophisticated and refined, and the safety is off the charts. It can react faster than I can and spot things that I missed. They have the best self-driving system in the world with the best unit economics. The world has not woken up to this at all, but they will increasingly with each new Robotaxi city and each new FSD drive. Self-driving is finally starting to take off. For the first time, the majority (55%) of Tesla orders in North America ordered with the $99 a month self-driving option selected. 45% of paid self-driving users are now on the monthly subscription (as opposed to the legacy option of paying up front) and as more people move to the monthly subscription Tesla is about to cross $1 billion ARR from self-driving subscriptions. Self-driving is already a billion dollar business for them, and it's going to be a trillion dollar business. Then there's the driverless Robotaxi service. I just tried it in Austin. It's really hard to not get excited about the future Tesla is building when you can call a driverless Tesla and have it drive you around Austin for an hour while you watch Netflix or play games on the front screen. Then there's the Cybercab... the way they've hyper optimized this thing to be the lowest cost transportation option possible is absolutely refreshing in a world where the average marketed price of a new car is well north of $50,000. I think this is going to hit the market like a glass of ice water in hell. A $25,000 - $30,000 autonomous electric vehicles with no controls, that doesn't require any insurance — just a self-driving subscription. Optimus and digital Optimus could be much bigger than the entire transportation segment for the company. We've seen frontier models get proficient in controlling our computers. Why couldn't they control a humanoid robot too? I think it's very obvious to everyone that they will inevitably be able to. As that happens, a general purpose robot will be in every home and every business. Sometimes several robots. Tesla is designing everything from the chips to the manufacturing to the models to work together like an Apple product. If they can take even a small % of this market and I think they will do extremely well, because it's a massive market. But really, when you invest you're investing in the team. A lackluster team can take a great business and turn it into a struggling one, and a great team can take a struggling business and turn it into an incredible one (see: Apple). So the team is really the single most important thing to look at when buying any company. I believe in Elon and his team. They have been executing like crazy lately. I can't be the only one who has seen it. Elon didn't become the richest guy in the world by losing his investors money. When SolarCity had liquidity challenges and nobody was left to help, he made a deal with Tesla. When he was forced to pay $44 billion for Twitter despite his claim that the actual number of human users had been wildly inflated inflated, people thought investors were toast. Those shares are now publicly traded as part of SpaceX. I think Elon has a new plan to build a physical and digital AI giant to rival OpenAI and Anthropic in the race for superintelligence. So I don't know, maybe I'm just an idiot. But I love these products, and they make my life so much better everyday. I just can't shake the belief that the world is going to want them too. Everyone needs autonomous transport, and everyone needs a robot to help them sometimes. so the more $TSLA dips the more I'll buy. Maybe I'll lose all my money, but that's part of the fun. I just want the future this company is building. to all the other idiots who are still holding like me, we'll get through this together

Most people are picking sides on open vs closed AI models. I’m not. I’m a BOTH/AND guy. We need the U.S. to lead with the best closed-source frontier models and we need world-class open models available to everyone. And we should aim to win on both fronts. 🏗️

Most people are picking sides on open vs closed AI models. I’m not. I’m a BOTH/AND guy. We need the U.S. to lead with the best closed-source frontier models and we need world-class open models available to everyone. And we should aim to win on both fronts. 🏗️

I’m significantly older than you. I started coding in the late 60s. My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents. That’s the only way I can take advantage of their productivity. What I do instead is to surround the agents with extreme constraints. Unit tests, gherkin tests, QA procedures, quality metrics, mutation testing, test coverage, and a plethora of others. In the end, I have very high confidence in the code they produce because they’ve had to run the gauntlet of all of my constraints and tests.