Pascal Busoni

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million. None of it was real. I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off. I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier." The frontier closed last week. It's a mobile app now. Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me. I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs. The avatars didn't have legs. I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis. I called myself a "digital land baron." I put it in my Twitter bio. I put it in my LinkedIn headline. I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts. My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment. My actual apartment has furniture. Location, location, location. My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court. I held. Diamond hands. That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait. A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users. He said I didn't understand the technology. I didn't. I still bought more. We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts. We voted to "acquire strategic parcels." The vote passed unanimously. I voted four times. My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY." The slide had a rocket emoji. That was my entire financial model. In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000. It's worth $14,000 now. I don't talk about the Ape. I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera. My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was. I said "digital art on the blockchain." She asked why it cost more than her car. I said "you don't understand Web3." She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment." She's not in my Discord. Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million. It's worth about $90,000 now. I felt better about mine after I heard that. That's community. WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero. We're all gonna make it. None of us made it. But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something. It doesn't. But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus. Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse. I need to say that again. $84 billion. More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines. They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets. It lives on as a mobile app. My beachfront villa is now a mobile app. Location, location, location. Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that." Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025. That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun. They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables." The pivot took four years and $84 billion. I pivoted too. I'm an AI real estate investor now. I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models." I don't know what that means. I gave him $40,000. He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan. The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank. Q4 is always blank. That's where the exit scam goes. My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes. I said $1.2 million. He said "current market value." I said $6,400. He stared at me for eleven seconds. I know because I counted. He asked if I had any other investments. I showed him my NFTs. He stared for longer. I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance." He asked if I'd considered a 401k. I told him a 401k was "legacy finance." He told me to leave his office. The metaverse is dead. I don't accept that. I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car. Location, location, location. The location is nowhere. But I'm early. I'm always early. That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

@Hedgeye "On the bright side, 30% of workers have no exposure to AI." Yes, but if other 70% impacted, these 30% will also be impacted indirectly

AI hasn't erased jobs...yet: But look at the gap between where it is and where it's going. Red = Current AI coverage Blue = Theoretical potential According to Anthropic's 2026 Economic Index report, AI currently covers just 33% of computer/math tasks, while the theoretical ceiling is 94%. The most exposed jobs are programmers (74.5%), customer service reps (70.1%), and data entry clerks (67.1%). On the bright side, 30% of workers have no exposure to AI. Think bartenders, mechanics, and lifeguards. No mass layoffs yet, just a -14% plunge in entry-level hires post-ChatGPT. The AI ripple effects over the next five years will be monumental.

@heygurisingh This is for amateurs. Just ask llms how to instruct them properly

Example time. Old-school prompt: “Write a LinkedIn post about AI productivity tools.” Context-engineered version: You’re a tech founder who writes practical, viral threads. Your tone is confident, a little provocative, and rooted in real use cases. Here are 3 examples of your past posts. Now, write a new thread about AI productivity tools. Notice the difference? You’re not prompting. You’re briefing.

Holy shit… I just found out why OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google engineers never worry about prompts. They use context stacks. Context engineering is the real meta. It’s what separates AI users from AI builders. Here's how to write prompts to get best results from LLMs:

@KonstantinKisin Can we have a LLM trained on common sense which labels articles in mainsteam media and posts in social media, as nonsense, hype, etc. That would be great achievement of AI

Unfortunately social media is trending in the wrong direction. As world events happen, I increasingly feel that what I see online is 99% junk (AI slop, ragebait, partisan talking points) and 1% useful info. There are things that can and should be done to deal with bot swarms, AI fakes and people who routinely peddle lies proven lies that are exposed via great tools like community notes. Right now, finding good information on social media feels like wading through a sea of manure to find a kernel of something valuable at the bottom. This is in spite of proactively muting, unfollowing and blocking liars, bot-boosted accounts etc. The failures of the mainstream media are now being replicated online. We need and deserve better.

@StuLoren @DKThomp @guypbenson Agreed, and this will happen. And politicians will have to react. Always late

@DKThomp @guypbenson I am very bullish AI and think longer-term it creates new jobs and unlocks productivity boom. Shorter-term, though, this is an economic prisoner’s dilemma. Individual firms are incentivized to drive efficiencies via AI. But if every firm does that, you end up blowing up economy.

I still don't think we have crystal-clear, I-will-hear-no-objections evidence of AI's effect on the macroeconomy. And yet. If you asked me "what would change your mind here?" I'd probably say, "emerging evidence of a productivity boom combined with a major slowdown in tech sector hiring and employment." This week, we got both.

@emollick It is not that simple. For example, professional services companies for example hold client not own data. So enterprise chatgpt, claude or gemini does not work for them. Someone come up with solution please. Otherwise I agree

The deciding factor is whether an executive is willing to assume risk. If the answer is no, then risk reduction forces in the organization (IT and Legal among them) have every incentive to avoid anything that might even be rumored to cause a problem. It is a leadership question.

It is amazing how many companies I talk to STILL have AI effectively blocked by IT & legal departments for out-of-date reasons when many companies in highly regulated industries have figured out ways to deploy enterprise ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini without any apparent problem.

@emollick So no model failure anymore? Everything works just fine?

Had early access to GPT-5.4 and Pro. They are very good. One fun illustration of progress, this is the same prompt I used in GPT-4 below (making a 3D space inspired by Piranesi) now in GPT-5.4 Pro. There were no errors, made in a single prompt plus one to "make it better."

@BrendanFoody @bradlightcap And which does not work in real life of consulting, investment bank and legal

GPT 5.4 is the best model we’ve ever tested on APEX-Agents. It’s also the first model to pass 50% mean score. A year ago, frontier models couldn’t even edit an Excel sheet and scored less than 5%. Now, in less than 3 months GPT 5.4 has improved by 15.7%. ChatGPT will imminently be better than the best consulting firm, better than the best investment bank, and better than the best law firm. Congrats @OpenAI on the release!

@zackbshapiro @SMB_Attorney None of reputable legal firms will use cowork due to client data confidiantiality. This will change of course when anthropic has workable solution

Good eye @SMB_Attorney! The deal (including rough timeline, the mechanics of how I used AI, and the dynamics between myself and opposing counsel) was entirely real, but indeed I did change details for client confidentiality (this being my first time writing about an actual client transaction on the internet). I used Claude (of course) to help anonymize the details, which is likely what introduced the imprecision you picked up on. But I'd really push back on the "over-exuberance" framing. This piece accurately describes how I run my entire practice on these workflows right now. You say Cowork will be powerful "with time," but I worry that this (perhaps not in your case, but in general) is a comfortable position for lawyers who haven't yet made the investment in figuring out all the ways to integrate the latest agentic tools into their practice. That's the whole point of the article. I think with a certain amount of effort and creativity, most legal practices could get to where mine is today.

@realEstateTrent AI is brilliant in demystifying buzzwords of AI consultants and then you realise they talk nonsense

AI in commercial real estate: Tools that claim to be a game-changer? Countless. Tools you can fully rely on that actually make a big difference for your business? Zero.

The most "intelligent" thing AI does today is explain - very convincingly - why it is still isn't.

@LawrenceLepard @RealJimChanos @PowerLunch I think he does undertand the thesis, or lack of, as he shorted the stock very successfully

@RealJimChanos @PowerLunch why are you misrepresenting what they said? the metric they care about is Bitcoin per share. period. do you even understand the thesis?

The $MSTR CEO, who along with Michael Saylor , tried to convince investors to capitalize their mark-to-market Bitcoin gains last spring, is now telling investors to ignore the “GAAP” mark-to-market losses! #Shameless @PowerLunch

@CryptoParadyme @Bluntz_Capital F eventually

@Bluntz_Capital what comes after C? do bears give us the D?

clear as day macro abc looks done, with 5 waves within the C on $MSTR aswell.

@Hedgeye What?!

The average U.S. worker has $955 saved for retirement, per CBS.

Build a system around price and price only. Because when ____ hits the fan and all the gurus disappear, you will have the most widely available information "price" to guide you "out" or "in".

BTC and ETH shorts in the money. Follow price action, not narratives

Silver today

@TechCharts Why 365 day EMA for crypto but 200 dma for individual stocks? (some of them might also have higher levels of volatility)

Longer-term view on $BTCUSD Red line is the year-long average which I use as 52 week or (on daily scale 365 day EMA).

@TechCharts RUT / VSS monthly chart is quite interesting

$VSS Small caps dominance is not only for #US equities.

@TechCharts I learned so much from you and @PeterLBrandt. You are doing a great job Aksel.

Many #TECHCHARTSMEMBERS skipped the first 2-3 years of back and forth in market analysis. The exploration phase of searching for the "holy grail". Many drop out around this time, jumping from one method to another, concluding that nothing works. I can see that several members have adopted the search for clean horizontal boundaries with several tests. Again many are exploring a wide range of instruments which results in "actually" finding a pattern rather than forcing your analysis on a specific chart. Note that above didn't even touch the classical chart patterns. We have achieved so much with the basic, basic principles of charting.