Ray DeSatya

@0xdoug Main flaw in your logic is the assumption that “some non engineers” can’t be spending a lot. I’m a non-engineer who uses it code various things and processes and I’ve been averaging $1.5-2k/month. And there are plenty of others at my firm doing same.

I’m really struggling to see how the back of the envelope math on this works out… There are generously 4 million characterized “software workers” in America. That’s pretty broad and includes a lot of people who aren’t really classical engineers don’t produce that much code. That comes out to nearly $1k per month of average Claude spend across every dev in America. Yes, there’s some international usage, but it can’t be that much. Yes there is some non software Cowork usage, but that doesn’t use that many tokens. Yes, some non engineers are using Claude to vibe code, but I really doubt many are spending hundreds per month on. Even if we assume 50% of all software workers are using Claude, that comes out to $2k spend per month per Claude user. Thats 10X more than the highest tier Max subscription. So almost all of Anthropics revenue has to be API billing So the only explanation is that something like 20%+ of software engineers are not only Claude users but on API billing and regularly spending thousands per month. At $5/m Opus tokens that means the average API user has to be going through something like 25 million tokens per day. *OR* the other possibility is API revenue is heavily power law dominated. Maybe there’s just something like 100k super users who are making up the majority of the revenue. For that to work the typical super user would have to be spending on the order of $50k/month and guzzling nearly 1 billion tokens per day.

@gothburz @V8_Aston Oh. So you bullshit for a living? Cool, cool…

I write in my free time outside of my day job. I use the first person as a rhetorical device around real events and numbers. My style is a combination of the greats like Hunter S. Thompson and Faulkner who famously said “The best fiction is far more true than any journalism”. The core truth and important numbers are true.

I am the personal financial advisor to the 47th President of the United States. I have made him $4.05 billion in one term. Let me say that again. Four point zero five. Billion. One term. The presidency of the United States, upon proper management, outperforms every asset class in recorded financial history, including venture capital, petroleum futures, and the sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi that manages $1.7 trillion and employs nine hundred analysts. I benchmarked it. We beat them with a staff of four and a leather binder. I keep a binder in the residence. I call it The Number. The Number was $3.4 billion in August. The Number is $4.05 billion now. The Number has never gone down. I update it every Friday at 6 AM, before the briefing, like a surgeon checking vitals on a patient who can only get healthier. The cover is leather. The tabs are color-coded by sector: Crypto, Finance, Hospitality, Media, Other. "Other" includes a Boeing 747-8 valued at $400 million, gifted to him by the Emir of Qatar while he was sitting President. There is no asset class for that. I invented one. I call it EAGLE-7. Crypto is seventy-five percent of the portfolio. $3.02 billion. I want you to sit with that figure. Three billion from digital tokens and stablecoins. From a man who in 2021 called Bitcoin "a scam against the dollar." His words. The flagship holding is Trump Media's bitcoin stockpile. He holds 42% of the company. The company sold shares to institutional investors. Used their capital to purchase bitcoin. His personal stake from that maneuver alone: $1.15 billion. He drafts national cryptocurrency regulation from the Resolute Desk. Signs executive orders on digital asset policy. Handpicks the SEC chair who will enforce them. His bitcoin goes up when he does these things. The investors' stock goes down. That's a conflict of interest. I'm kidding. I've never used those words in that order. That's the investment thesis. Then there is Alt5 Sigma. I need you to understand Alt5 Sigma. Alt5 Sigma was previously known as Appliance Recycling Centers of America. Founded in 1991. In Minnesota. It recycled dishwashers. Then it became a biotech. Then a digital payments company. Then Zach Witkoff, son of the President's special envoy, became chairman, and it became the primary vehicle for purchasing World Liberty Financial tokens. In 1991 it recycled dishwashers in Minnesota. In 2025 it funneled $562 million to the President's family through a Rwandan subsidiary convicted of money laundering. The CEO was removed. The CFO was fired. The auditor was replaced. Twice. The stock went from $8 to $2. We received $562 million from it. I put it in the binder. I logged it in the binder on a Thursday. I used Garamond. It felt appropriate for a company whose journey from kitchen appliances to international money laundering spanned exactly thirty-four years. The stablecoin is where the architecture gets beautiful. USD1. $136 million in projected interest over the remaining term. I will show you the math because the math is the point. $3 billion in circulation. Times 4% annual return. Times three years remaining in office. Times the family's 38% share. The UAE purchased $2 billion of USD1. Then Binance promoted it. Pumped circulation from $2 billion to $5 billion. Binance's founder had pleaded guilty to money laundering violations. He received a presidential pardon in October. I pardon you. You promote my stablecoin. My stablecoin generates $136 million. The pardon cost nothing. The coin cost nothing. The oath of office cost nothing. The entire apparatus of federal clemency was converted into a revenue instrument and nobody filed a complaint. That's yield. TRUMPcoin. $385 million. A memecoin with the President's face on it, launched days before inauguration. Every person who bought TRUMPcoin at launch and held it has lost 90 cents of every dollar. Every person who bought it made the President $385 million richer on the way in. That's the product. The product is not a coin. The product is belief. We are very long belief. His sons received a 13% equity stake in American Bitcoin. A New Yorker investigation determined they contributed, and I quote, "nothing else of obvious value." I would characterize their contribution differently. They contributed the single most valuable commodity in American commerce, worth more per ounce than lithium, more per gram than fentanyl, more per syllable than any word in the English language. Proximity to the man who pardons people. That's due diligence. Hospitality. $271 million. Mar-a-Lago now generates $50 million a year. It generated $10 million when he took office. Initiation fee: $1 million. You are paying $1 million to eat dinner in the same room as the man who controls the Department of Justice. I set that price. It is undervalued. Saudi Arabia. The Crown Prince visited the White House. Then Dar Al Arkan signed licensing deals estimated at $10 billion. Hotels in the Maldives. Golf clubs in Riyadh. A tower in Jeddah. He sat next to the man who ordered a journalist dismembered and said, quote, "He knew nothing about it." Then he signed the hotel deal. I have the term sheet. Our fee is 2-10% of revenue. We do not ask what happened to the journalist. That is not in our mandate. $106 million is in our mandate. That's client retention. Finance: $340 million, predominantly Persian Gulf sovereign wealth fund arrangements structured through intermediaries whose names I am not going to say in this format. Media: $116 million. Legal fee fundraising and branded merchandise: $128 million. The Qatari jet: $150 million. I have already mentioned the jet. I mention it again because a sitting foreign head of state gifted the sitting American President a $400 million flying palace with gold-plated fixtures and a master suite, and not a single member of Congress has asked a follow-up question. Not one. Not in committee. Not in writing. Not on camera. Five hundred and thirty-five legislators. Zero questions. Now. I am required by my own conscience, which is vestigial at this point, to disclose downstream performance. Every public-facing investment vehicle associated with this portfolio has collapsed for outside investors. I will read them. TRUMPcoin. Down 90%. American Bitcoin. Down 80%. Trump NFTs. Down 80%. Trump Media stock. Down 60% since inauguration. Alt5 Sigma. Down 75%. The family's positions were structured to extract value before these declines materialized. The retail investors' positions were structured to supply the value being extracted. There were approximately 600,000 retail wallets holding TRUMPcoin at peak. Retirees. Day traders. People who believed the branding. Their aggregate losses capitalized the portfolio. Their savings became his tab in the binder. That's liquidity. I want to address the competitive landscape. I am a financial professional. I benchmark everything. In 2016, the President stood at a podium and called Hillary Clinton "the most corrupt enterprise in political history." He said she "turned the State Department into her personal hedge fund." The accusation that ended her career was $153 million in speaking fees. Combined. With her husband. Over fifteen years. Goldman Sachs paid her $225,000 per speech. He said the word "crooked" so many times it became her legal name. $153 million. Fifteen years. Two people. I made him $4.05 billion. In one term. By himself. A 26-to-1 ratio. I wrote it on the whiteboard in the residence. Then there was the Biden family. "The Biden Crime Family," he called them. He held rallies about it. He got impeached over investigating it. The Republican House spent two years and $3.5 million in taxpayer funds to uncover, per their own final report, approximately $24 million in Biden family income over five years. Hunter Biden's Burisma salary was $1 million a year, later reduced to $500,000. The Chinese payments were $664,000. The House Oversight Committee called it "influence peddling at the highest level." $24 million. Five years. Ten family members. My client made that in two days. I have the math. $4.05 billion divided by 365 days is $11.1 million per day. The entire Biden investigation, the impeachment, the hearings, the Fox News segments, the "CRIME FAMILY" hats, all of it, for an amount my client earns before his Wednesday morning briefing. The ratio is 168 to 1. I put it on the whiteboard next to the Clinton number. The President saw it. He laughed. He did not ask me to take it down. "Drain the swamp," he said in 2016. I drained it. Into the binder. The swamp is now a portfolio. It is the highest-performing portfolio in the history of public office, and the man who built it ran for President on the promise that he would stop people from doing exactly what I help him do every single day. That's positioning. When the New Yorker published the full accounting, $4.05 billion across five sectors, and asked the President whether he saw a conflict of interest between the office and the fortune, between the pardons and the profits, between setting crypto policy and holding $3 billion in crypto, he told the New York Times six words. "I found out that nobody cared." He was right. He has been right about that singular fact since the beginning. Nobody cared when he launched the coin. Nobody cared when he pardoned the convicted money launderer who pumped his stablecoin. Nobody cared when a dishwasher recycling outfit in Minnesota became a $562 million pipeline to his family through a subsidiary that had been convicted on three continents. Nobody cared when 600,000 wallets evaporated so the leather binder in the residence could gain another tab. He found out nobody cared. Then he monetized the finding at a rate of $11.1 million per day, every day he has held office, including Sundays, including holidays, including the morning he sat next to the Crown Prince and said the murdered journalist had it coming. $4.05 billion. One presidential term. Zero indictments. Zero congressional hearings. Zero audits. Zero consequences of any kind for any person at any level of the operation. The chart goes up. It only counts his money. There is another chart. It has 600,000 wallets on it. Retirement accounts. People who believed a dishwasher recycling company in Minnesota was a sound vehicle for their savings. We do not publish that one. I filed it under EAGLE-7.

@s_florib @8090_Factory 🤣🤣🤣

@8090_Factory So then you guys charge 1 million a year to maintain it instead?

most enterprise software costs more to maintain per year than it cost to build. that's the entire business model of your current vendor. every modernization project in the last decade has one of two outcomes. it goes 2-3x over budget and ships late. or it gets cancelled and the legacy system stays. why? nobody can extract the business logic from the old system. it lives in vendor heads. in stack overflow threads. in a comment from 2014 that says "don't touch this." AI just broke that model. an insurer we worked with replaced an $8M/year legacy vendor with a purpose-built system. $21M saved over four years. the maintenance era is ending. the rewrite era is starting. and it's faster than your CFO's last modernization RFP. reach out to us sales@8090.ai to vent about your current vendor.

@johnjanuszczak @8090_Factory Right. And what’s to suggest that Software Facyory or 8090 or whatever the f it’s called wouldn’t do the same???

Software vendors are not the only ones that operate a high-margin "razor-and-blade" business model, selling the initial "out oft he box" software at lower margins (or discounts) to lock in years of high-profit, recurring maintenance and service agreements. This is the entire model of GE Aviation for example with airplane engines, and even hits the consumer market: the printer business (swap toner for maintenance and service agreements), and of course the actual "razor-and-blade" in the term "razor-and-blade" business model. There is no doubt that AI will impact software. Some fun questions to speculate on: 1. Will the cost of AI-coded software actually be less than the current model in the long run? 2. Will this cross over to atoms? Is GE or the printer market business model safe in the long run?

@MattRogish @8090_Factory There have always been *FAR* cheaper alternative software vendors in each category. They haven’t won. Just because there was ZohoCRM or SugarCRM or various others that were cheaper.. didn’t mean they won over Salesforce of Hubspot etc.

What feels more likely is SaaS vendors need to drop their prices dramatically. Nobody wants to build their own ERP, accounting software, inventory management; they'll happily buy if the price drops. It feels like it has to. That is the SaaS apocalypse that is coming.

@chamath And so information isn’t knowledge?

This is the way. The past 50 years of computing was about inventing form factors to interact with information. Retrieve information. Search for information. Edit information. Save information. AI is about interacting with knowledge. It's completely different. Agents and models are there to do the dirty work aka interact with information). We need a new layer - more executive function, less tactical tools. So instead of trying to jam AI into old form factors, its time to imagine a new form factor. From scratch. From first principles. It's probably not a phone tbh, but what it is, I have not a clue. That said, like most breakthroughs we'll know it when we see it though. Good luck to the teams building this.

@stoolpresidente Are you from Boston, bro? Go back up to Waltham or Needham or wherever the fk you Fromm

I’m not the biggest Ken Griffin fan from the GameStop saga days. But I’d love for him to give Zohran a big fuck you and pull his construction plans and pull the hundreds of millions he pays in taxes and charity. NYC officials are hilarious. All they do is say they hate rich peole and then beg them to stay and pay for all their useless shit. There was zero reason for Zohran to antagonize Griffin except to appease his yellow and purple haired communist base. He could have still initiated the tax without trying to be Mr Cool Guy Communist and rubbing people’s faces in it. Why would any rich person stay there? NYC wanted a communist mayor. They got a communist mayor.

@_ZachFoster @theallinpod @chamath @Jason @DavidSacks @friedberg Reality is most Valley insiders don’t respect 3 out of those 4 anyway.

The @theallinpod is the most influential podcast in the tech world. They are obsessed with talking about government grift & corruption. Utterly obsessed. All 4 of them: @chamath, @jason, @davidsacks & @friedberg Their blood boils talking about how California state employees abuse the state pension system. Hardly a show goes by without a rant on how corrupt California's and San Francisco's governments are. Yet they worship at the feet of the most corrupt president in US American history by an order of magnitude. Yet they are true Trump sycophants. How do they manage the cognitive dissonance?

@AnjneyMidha True. Especially on Sand Hill.

we are so conditioned to think in terms of systems analogies (layers, stacks, pipelines, networks, loops, verticals etc) that we forget these are all ultimately crutches it’s why independent thinking is truly hard to find those who have fluid mastery of both are very formidable

@AnjneyMidha @MarkMyTech Great point. Most are momentum followers and very few actually understand the underlying math and engineering.

@MarkMyTech one general property seems to be that the folks who miss repeatedly seem to lack any legible outlier curiosity for science, math or engineering whereas the ones who pick correctly seem obsessed with reading the papers - but it’s also just a vibe sometimes

it’s quite amazing literally the same ppl who missed the seed/A/B into Anthropic just passed on another team behind one of the generational frontier breakthroughs of the decade meanwhile, a bunch of other folks invested on the spot i don’t fully get why skill issue?

Indeed. The history of tech impact on labor is well-documented, including by those named. It's unpredictable, but usually improves productivity and leads to expansion. Law & white-collar workers aren't horse-buggy drivers or elevator operators. They will use AI and adapt.

@PatrickMoorhead Agreed. Also, it may actually be the opposite of what AI may potentially do: which is increase output and economic productivity. Which is what every piece of technology has done. It creates more jobs, not less.

I can’t help thinking that Dario doesn’t really believe this and is justifying valuation to support funding. The equation is something along the lines of current valuation plus market share of the jobs value they take. Problem is that it’s creating a sense of fear that will likely backfire with more regulation.

@rodriscoll (3/x) I want to see people justify SBC when and if these companies IPO.

@rodriscoll (1/x) Rory.. don’t agree (or disagree). But first question: what is really a “AI native” company other than one that is formed post-2022? The tech stacks will effectively look the same as these smaller companies build out infra & existing co’s build out LLM f(x).

The weird thing right now is the public markets don't have access to the growth side of software. Right now the trade is to sell SaaS and buy semis (the raw material of AI). What you don’t have yet in the public markets are the AI native software companies and therefore, you’re comparing the practical values of owning say a Salesforce vs the mythical value of owning a company that’s growing 10x (without having seen the actual financials). And everyone is always going to want the myth. These SaaS stocks aren’t going to trade in a sane fashion until the next generation of AI companies go public and investors can decide how to price a 10% revenue growth company with 30% cash flow vs 300% revenue growth company with negative 100% cash flow and SBC that will blow your mind. Until then, you’re walking hand in hand with your significant other looking over your shoulder. You know the meme.

@rodriscoll (2/x) Second: this is assuming this 10x continues which is absurd if you think about how software is sold. Trial pilots and greenfield opportunity etc is low hanging fruit. Try drilling that to enterprise customers. With huge incumbents.

@fred_pope @rodriscoll The UX is the UX, and that can change from browser to a chat-based interaction to CLI to voice to sign language. The value is in the logic behind the UX. Not sure if you saw salesforce’s Headless 360 initiative which is fully independent of the UX.

@rodriscoll A lot of SAAS is a UX. That value prop started dying a year ago. You just need storage and compute now.

@dee_bosa Hey @dee_bosa - this isn’t software disruption. If you can do it - be damn sure software products can do it with a lot more specificity. In other words, there is scale advantage of token utilization. If everyone develops it like you do… token burn would be costly. Vs pooling.

the software disruption I've been covering just showed up in my own workflow In Feb I vibecoded a tool to cut clips from my videos. Took 27 minutes. Couldn't do subtitles. On Friday (2 months later): same task took seconds

@TeslaBoomerMama You mean the same @chamath who said this a year ago? x.com/chamath/status…

Chamath is spot on. Downsizing and simplifying bring enormous value to your life. After owning multiple properties, we are now renting a simple home. After running companies with hundreds of employees, the current team is only five, incl. me. Liberating.

@chamath Such hypocrisy and BS… Literally a year ago, you said the following: x.com/chamath/status…

When your working life rewards you, it’s easy to ratchet up the complexity: homes, cars, travel, possessions etc. I have found that all that complexity comes at the sake of your most fleeting asset: your time. Instead of building things, all of a sudden you’re dealing with minutiae and logistics. Instead of talking mostly to engineers, you’re talking mostly to non-engineers. The building stops…the business of managing self inflicted complexity begins. It’s worth noting that the best players in the game (Buffett, Elon) have kept their life extremely basic, almost monastic/nomadic, as success ratcheted them ever higher. I think it’s the biggest secret hiding in plain sight: When the world upgrades your status, downgrade your complexity.

@DanielSLoeb1 Then move! As a native New Yorker, would totally love that.