Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission

I miss the days when everyone posted this guy

Musicians should not be allowed to drop out of this event. It's for freedom!

🚨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.

Members of Congress, including myself, have access to inside information. It is simply wrong to use our positions in public service for personal gain. That’s even more true with the President, who has the ability to move markets with a single decision. We need to ban Members of Congress and Presidents from trading stocks!

If you have ornamental grass in your yard, it's almost certainly non-native and supports almost no insects or wildlife. Swap it for little bluestem. Little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) is a native bunchgrass across most of North America. It grows 2-4 feet, turns copper-red in fall, and holds the color through winter, tolerates drought, and needs no fertilizer. Ornamental grasses from Asia and South America support almost no native insects. Little bluestem hosts caterpillars of at least nine skipper butterflies, shelters overwintering insects in its dense base, and feeds sparrows and juncos through winter with its seed heads. One clump fits anywhere a fountain grass would. The roots reach 5-8 feet deep, which means once it's established, you likely don't need to water it again.

AMERICA IS BACK. We’re so lucky to live in the most powerful nation in the history of the world.

A few years ago my Ukrainian cameraman asked me when I though the war would end. I was naive enough to believe at the time that Biden would wait till his last year in office and throw everything into helping Ukraine win because he could claim credit ahead of the election.