Brij Singh

Someone is selling a manor estate in Burgundy with a private river, waterfalls and a natural swimming pond. 2 hours from Paris. Two buildings arranged around a courtyard, 1,700m² (18,298 sq ft) in total, 12 bedrooms, an artist's studio, stables and 7 hectares (17 acres) of land. Inside there's a music room with a piano, a library in the tower, a writing room, and a dining room built around a fireplace large enough to roast a whole animal. Herons and wild ducks live on the property year round. The river has a depth of 3 metres and you can swim in it all summer. Near Vézelay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Asking price: €1.39M ($1.6M). The French sure do know about living well. A river on your grounds, your own land to walk, swimming in summer, dinner outside. What's the French word for this kind of life?

Given that several companies make advanced chips, but no companies have ever made fully reusable rockets or achieved SpaceX scale, I think Starship is harder, but we shall see. Terafab will technically be two fabs, each making only one chip design. This greatly simplifies process flow and allows more linear, adjacent movement of the FOUP. A super high production rate allows us to test very quickly what steps can be deleted, simplified or sped up, even after the design is fixed. Current fabs are extremely conservative, operating on rigid historical heuristics, which are mostly, but not all, correct. Anything that is a rate limiter at the machine level means that machine will be redesigned, unless already at limit of physics. Having new iterations of a chip design be produced every day in the research fab (with <7 day lag) means being able to try out many high risk, high return ideas. Etc In any event, there is no other way to reach extreme scale, so either we make Terafab or we will be stuck at the ~20% chip/memory output growth per year of the current industry.

Everyone is covering Terafab as a chip factory. It is not a chip factory. Last night in Austin, Elon unveiled a facility that makes masks, fabricates chips, and tests them inside a single building with a nine-month recursive improvement cadence. No such loop exists anywhere else on Earth. Then he told you 80% of the output goes to space. Then he showed you a 100-kilowatt AI satellite with solar panels and radiators, scaling to megawatt range. Then he said Optimus plus photovoltaics will be the first von Neumann probe, a machine capable of replicating itself from raw materials found in space. Nobody connected the sequence. Terafab produces 1 terawatt per year of compute. The entire United States consumes 0.5 terawatts of electricity. Musk is building a single factory whose output in AI silicon exceeds twice the power consumption of the country it sits in. And he is sending 80% of it off-planet because Earth literally cannot power what he is building. Follow the mechanism. Terafab seeds the chips. Starship launches Optimus robots and solar arrays at 100 million tons per year. The robots mine lunar and asteroid regolith for silicon, iron, and nickel. They 3D-print more robots. They fabricate more solar panels. They assemble more AI satellites. Each satellite runs hotter-burning D3 chips designed specifically for vacuum, where free radiative cooling eliminates the thermal constraints that strangle every terrestrial data center on the planet. The nodes replicate. The replication is exponential. This is a Dyson Swarm bootstrap hidden inside a semiconductor announcement. The math is public. The Sun outputs 3.828 times 10 to the 26th watts. A 2022 paper in Physica Scripta calculated that 5.5 billion satellites at 290 kilograms each, robotically manufactured from Mars resources, capture enough solar energy to meet all of Earth’s power needs within 50 years. A 2025 paper in Solar Energy Materials calculated a partial swarm capturing 4% of solar output yields 15.6 yottawatts, roughly a billion times current human civilization’s total energy budget. Musk just announced the factory that builds the chips that go inside the satellites that replicate themselves forever. 92% of advanced logic chips are fabricated in Taiwan. One factory in Austin does not fix that. But one self-replicating system seeded by that factory, launched by the only company with reusable heavy-lift rockets, assembled by the only humanoid robot in mass production, and powered by the only star within reach, does not fix a supply chain. It obsoletes the concept of supply chains entirely. The market priced this as a $20 billion capex story about semiconductor independence. The actual announcement was the engineering blueprint for Kardashev Type II. Humanity sits at 0.73 on the Kardashev scale. 18 terawatts. The distance between here and harnessing a star is not a technology gap. It is a recursion gap. And recursion is exactly what a single building in Austin that makes its own masks, builds its own chips, tests its own chips, and launches the output into orbit on its own rockets was designed to close. Every civilization that makes it past this point never looks back.

Me when my accountant tells me I have to show up at the local startup event to prove my new tax residence

Iran is the head of the snake for global terrorism, and through President Trump’s Operation Epic Fury, we are winning this critical fight at an even faster pace than anticipated. In response to Iran’s terrorist attacks against global energy infrastructure, the Trump Administration will continue to deploy America’s economic and military might to maximize the flow of energy to the world, strengthen global supply, and seek to ensure market stability. Today, the Department of the Treasury is issuing a narrowly tailored, short-term authorization permitting the sale of Iranian oil currently stranded at sea. At present, sanctioned Iranian oil is being hoarded by China on the cheap. By temporarily unlocking this existing supply for the world, the United States will quickly bring approximately 140 million barrels of oil to global markets, expanding the amount of worldwide energy and helping to relieve the temporary pressures on supply caused by Iran. In essence, we will be using the Iranian barrels against Tehran to keep the price down as we continue Operation Epic Fury. This temporary, short-term authorization is strictly limited to oil that is already in transit and does not allow new purchases or production. Further, Iran will have difficulty accessing any revenue generated and the United States will continue to maintain maximum pressure on Iran and its ability to access the international financial system. So far, the Trump Administration has been working to bring around 440 million additional barrels of oil to the global market, undercutting Iran’s ability to leverage its disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump’s pro-energy agenda has driven U.S. oil and gas production to record levels, strengthening energy security and lowering fuel costs. Any short-term disruption now will ultimately translate into longer-term economic gains for Americans – because there is no prosperity without security.

The Delve scandal is the perfect excuse for me to write my long-simmering rant about SOC-2 and InfoSec. 1. 90% of SOC-2 is security theater. We couldn't pass audit until we had completed an annual performance review (absurd requirement for a team of 4). It is mind-boggling to me that we collectively decided to adopt an accounting framework (and accounting firms) to validate infosec. 2. SOC-2 startups are (at least in part) culpable for this mess, thanks to Jevon's Paradox. It's now "easier" to get it, so getting the certification is table stakes for an enterprise contract. "But Hari, startups can now sell to enterprise more easily" — nope. 3. I would argue that the approach for selling to enterprise was *better* prior to 2017: — Enterprises were more open to doing pilots without SOC-2, because it was harder to do and not table stakes. This is, obviously, a more efficient way to transact and explore ad hoc relationships. — You'd simply have to do actually useful things like pentesting, security questionnaires, etc. to show you were serious about security... which you have to do today anyway, because SOC-2 is a terrible proxy for real security. And enterprises have gotten easier to sell into, because they realized they need to be more tech forward. Correlation, not causation. SOC-2-as-table-stakes killed a more pragmatic, trust-based sales motion. All in all, the introduction of SOC-2 as an industry standard introduced *more* friction into the process, racked up *higher* costs for their customers, for ultimately the *same or worse* security outcomes. We would all be better off if we threw the standard in the trash, because then we might actually come up with something sensible. 4. Perhaps the Delve takedown was penned by a competitor, but — if the facts hold up — that doesn't make it any less valid. This is a wildly competitive space, and I've seen some truly nasty stuff happen, from an observer's seat. But people are using that to discredit the piece, even though the facts so far are pretty damning (regardless of the biases of the speaker). 5. All of the SOC-2 companies are roughly equivalent (no matter what they tell you), and you should optimize for a good service at a reasonable price and grit your teeth and get it done when you think you have enough PMF where enterprises might want it. 6. Don't even get me started on GDPR and CCPA. Cookie banners take quality-adjusted years off peoples' lives, just like cigarettes and the DMV. And just like SOC-2 is security theater, they are privacy theater. 7. Most importantly: getting dinged because you didn't pass security reviews has nothing to do with security. It means your buyer / champion didn't care enough to push it through. If you're sorely lacking, it might be an actual issue. You should (obviously) do the important stuff (vulnerability scans, pentests, 2FA, be careful with phishing), but after that... Spend your time building something that buyers want to rip out of your hands. Your security problems will start disappearing.

Many tech incumbents are guilty of two sins in the AI era: 1. stack fallacy - assumption they have all the “ingredients” so we can compete (but system sucks) 2. too slow to realize talent they have != talent they need, until they’ve lost market cap necessary to make acquisitions/hires