rolandsmartin

I just got a substack post from @JamalSimmons regarding this @washingtonpost article by @dylanewells @sarahellison washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/…. He asks the question why Wells, Ellison or their editors could do this piece and not mention ONE Black content creator/podcast host/owner.

🚨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.

Allow me to be the first to congratulate the MAGA morons, who spent years howling about the $1.7B that Obama returned to Iran. Your 4D chess master is handing Iran $300B, to open the Strait of Hormuz, that Obama kept open for free. Brilliant!

(Coach) “Caitlin! You’re giving ZERO effort on defense! You’re not even TRYING! You’re KILLING us!” (Caitlin) “Don’t try to Coach me! Do you know who I am?!! I’m carrying this league! Do you see these hands? These hands carry ticket sales. I’m really that DEAL!” (Coach) “You’re out. Raven, get in here for Caitlin. No one can tell her anything! She doesn’t listen!” It is sad……that Stephanie White is going to be fired from her job at the conclusion of this season because she has an arrogant, irresponsible, selfish, lazy, disrespectful, and entitled brat as her franchise player. A THIRD coach will come in. She too will fail. It is impossible to win with a mediocre player who refuses coaching, and thinks that she is God’s gift to the earth.

Sean's team declined/failed to comment for this story for a full day, both before and after publication. Then they posted this publicly today. Our story reports that: 1) UFC has long been popular with U.S. troops 2) There's an organized effort to find troops interested in attending 3) Troops must pay for their own travel, according to several messages from obtained by the Post 4) There are height and weight restrictions on troops attending. All of that is true and accurate. Have a good one.

Some folks clearly voted against their interests

Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core. The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old. It had fewer than 50 employees. And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it. Here is the part the administration tried to bury. Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast. One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done. Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion. A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son. This is public money. Your money. Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for. And there is more coming. A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review. This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer. propublica.org/article/donald…

FTrump Redistricting Defeat. NAACP Sports Boycott Expands. Clarence B. Jones Remembered. x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

La. GOP Kills Black District. Cleo Fields Fights Back. Karmelo Anthony Trial Looms x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Trump Mail-In-Voting Order. KSU Students Sue Over Takeover Threat. SCOTUS Tosses Death Sentence x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Judge Cannon has been sitting on the Jack Smith report for over a year. But the 11th Circuit looks like it's running out of patience. Here's what's happening and why it matters. open.substack.com/pub/joycevance…

NEW: Not since the Watergate era has a president worked so hard to shield documentary evidence of his administration’s inner workings from public view. 🎁link nytimes.com/2026/05/30/us/… via @NYTimes

A North Carolina police officer has been fired after viral doorbell camera video shows him repeatedly punching a woman during an arrest, sparking protests on Friday. abcnews.link/L7jY66j

We are extremely sad to pass on the news of the death of the great Ronald LaPread, co-founding member of The Commodores zurl.co/VttzI

🚨 Craig Long, a large MAGA influencer, has been arrested in a child predator and human trafficking sting in Florida. He offered an undercover detective posing as a prostitute $100 for "something quick." He is married.

Trump pardoned 77 people that stole from Medicare. This flew under the radar. I believe Trump is selling pardons which is enough to send Trump away.

There is no world in which this is okay.     Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito did not recuse himself from cases involving Trump’s Treasury Department while his own son was secretly working there as a political appointee and attorney.    His son's employment was hidden so thoroughly that his name appears nowhere on the Treasury Department website, he has no public resume, and his bar listings are outdated.    If Alito had recused himself, the secret would have come out. He didn’t recuse himself.    This is a clear conflict of interest, and the American people deserved to know about it.    The federal recusal standard is clear: a justice must step aside in any case where there is a reasonable basis to question whether he or she can be impartial. A justice ruling on cases involving the department where his son works fails that test. The Treasury Department sits at the center of some of the biggest legal fights of this administration, and challenges to Trump’s $1.776 billion January 6 slush fund could be headed to the Court next.    The Supreme Court is the only court in America with no binding code of conduct. That is completely unacceptable, and it has to change NOW.    Congress controls the Power of the Purse, and therefore the Court’s funding. If the Court will not adopt a binding code of conduct with real recusal review on their own, I support withholding their funding until they do.   notus.org/us-news/samuel…

@ChennedyCarter fellow Ag, leave this social media shit alone and just ball out. The @LVAces have given you a shot to show the @WNBA what you can do. JUST PLAY. Don’t talk. Don’t post. Let what you do on the court say everything. Always rooting for you. Make the best of this shot

La. GOP Kills Black District. Cleo Fields Fights Back. Karmelo Anthony Trial Looms (1) x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Clearly you aren’t a Paul Robeson