Jackson Rhodes

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” - Winston Churchill

@WolfpackReports How’s that going for you?

We're short $POET Technologies. And not just because it's a stock promote that has jumped on every hot topic and then pulled away the football. We believe US investors who bought in are exposed to an IRS tax nightmare because it appears to qualify as a Passive Foreign Investment Company (PFIC) — those who fail to timely file special forms BY TOMORROW could pay the highest marginal rates and punitive compounding interest. Management knows this and hasn't been straight with US holders.

@paulswaney3 Insurance captives (pooled or solo) should have been the play from the beginning.

Keep getting asked why I hate home services business 1. If gas goes up 1$, you get 50-150bps of margin compression. Fuel is c. 3-9% of revenue 2. Motor vehicle liability is brutal. Personally know of 2 companies that lost 8 figure law suits (rightfully) due to techs under the influence One of them has to self insure now Give me 7 plants with hazardous chemicals. Much easier to manage

@newstart_2024 In the context of high-level baseball, the chewing tobacco variable is vitally important for colon, stomach, mouth, and esophageal cancers.

37 years old. Healthy runner. Dad of two. Stage 4 colon cancer. That was the devastating call former Boston College baseball player Christopher Kowalski received out of nowhere. He had only subtle signs — a little fatigue and upper rib pain. Then came the news: colon cancer that had already spread to his liver. His wife told him they had 48 hours to cry, feel everything… then fight. Now he’s turning his battle into a wake-up call. Doctors are seeing colorectal cancer rising sharply in people in their 20s and 30s. Warning signs can be easy to miss (blood in stool, bowel changes, unexplained weight loss, abdominal pain), but catching it early saves lives — up to 90% of cases are preventable with screening. Chris’s simple message: “Life is precious.” If something feels off — no matter your age — don’t wait. Get checked. What symptom or change made you finally go see a doctor?

@Restructuring__ Where did the extra ~$1.7b of debt come from...? Add-ons?

Private Equity is Back, Baby - KKR just returned a fund in one deal, let's break down the deal Mid-2023, no one is talking about AI or data centers and KKR acquired CoolIT for a very fair 16.5x EBITDA multiple So what does the company do? They are a pioneer in direct liquid cooling technology for data centers, this removes heat from data centers enabling more energy-efficient and higher-performance operations than traditional air cooling Fast forward 3 years, and the company has exploded, coolant distribution unit capacity grew 25 times. 25 times! CoolIT's technology ended up deployed in over 300 data centers globally. Today, KKR agreed to sell CoolIT to Ecolab, a Minnesota-based industrial water treatment and hygiene giant, for $4.75 billion in cash, representing 29x NTM EBITDA of $164M. Read that again. 10x increase in EBITDA and 12x of multiple expansion. So good. The result, a nice 15x MOIC and 150%+ IRR. What I think is even more fascinating is that this comes from the Impact Fund which is $2.8bn of total commitments, so I estimate that this deal just returned the entire fund. Sooo good. Genius or luck? In my opinion, genius. Chapeau to KKR.

@anishmoonka What are the strike prices for each tranche?

No company in history has ever been worth $9 trillion. Nvidia, the most valuable company on Earth, sits at around $4.3 trillion. Meta just told six of its top executives they could each earn hundreds of millions of dollars, but only if Meta gets there first. The SEC filings dropped yesterday. CTO Andrew Bosworth, CFO Susan Li, CPO Chris Cox, and COO Javier Olivan all got stock options with price targets starting at $1,116 per share and climbing to $3,727. Meta closed at $593 yesterday. The lowest rung alone requires an 88% stock gain. The full payout needs more than a 6x jump. These are the first stock options Meta has ever given its top leadership since going public in 2012. Fourteen years of just RSUs (shares you receive over time no matter what the stock does), and now suddenly, options, which pay nothing unless the stock clears a specific price bar. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t part of this. His net worth already tops $200 billion. This is about keeping his operators in their seats while Meta pours up to $135 billion into AI infrastructure this year alone. That’s nearly double the $72 billion it spent in 2025. Meta’s total 2025 revenue was $201 billion. The company is spending roughly two-thirds of its annual revenue on building out AI. The structure echoes Tesla’s $1 trillion pay package for Elon Musk, which shareholders approved last November. That deal ties to Tesla reaching $8.5 trillion over 10 years. Meta’s window is tighter. The performance deadline is February 14, 2028, less than two years from now. If the stock doesn’t hit those targets by then, the options shift to a slower payout schedule through 2030 and expire entirely in March 2031. And the gap between ambition and reality is wide. META stock is down about 4% over the past year. Alphabet is up 73%. CNBC reported that Meta has struggled to find a consistent AI strategy even as its spending accelerates. The $9 trillion number is a retention price tag. Meta is paying whatever it costs to keep its leadership from walking out the door during a $135 billion bet on AI.

@WSJ That’s a near-death blow to their high-growth enterprise segment, wow. They had OpenAI beat and gave up a go-ahead grand slam.

The Defense Department has officially told Anthropic it is a supply-chain risk and will be cut off from partners who work with the Pentagon. on.wsj.com/4rcNay0

I learned today that the reason, beyond training on older literature, LLMs use em dashes is that they frequently misinterpret commas as em dashes throughout their training. Kind of an odd, but harmless, quirk.

@TheSalonDon Assuming all else stays the same, they’re the same as long as you mean 10% increase moves the EBITDA margin from 20% to 30%.

Private Equity Interview Question If a business is at 20% EBITDA margin What increases EBITDA more? 50% increase in revenue Or 10% increase in margin

@TMTLongShort Bringing this around to Bessent is a work of art.

The problem with new generation drug dealers is unlike their predecessors they fail to think about things at a system level or understand chess and so they burn brightly but inevitably self-destruct. Everything you do should be with one eye firmly on the court of popular opinion and political end-states. Something Bessent understands viscerally.

@sullivan @will__ye Haha, need to know the response rate versus other formats

@will__ye why do people keep sending this to me??

VCs are getting funnier

@ItoWindsor This can’t be real.

Still a banger

@rohit4verse Are you working on something with hardware at the moment?

in the era of aspiring ai engineer. chose hardware, software will come and go. hardware stays.

Slid into the Top 200 for the @AnthropicAI kernel optimization challenge. Still have more optimizing to go! kerneloptimization.fun

@hthieblot I’m a 3x @MLBTheShow Top 250 player and agree. Mental models and skills built during high-level, global comp are underrated.

if you ever meet someone who at one point was globally ranked in a video game hire them immediately

I'm 15 years into my career in tech. I've realized that the people I started with who are doing the best are: - They're actually pretty boring. They genuinely love technology and wake up every day with an optimistic view on what's happening around them. - They've mastered one thing people know them for. Product, design, engineering, it doesn't matter. They've built deep expertise in something and they're recognized for it. - They're financially motivated, but not money-obsessed. They don't waste time at dead-end startups. Not because they're optimizing for cash, but because they want interesting problems at companies that matter. - They take care of themselves. We don't talk about this enough, but tech is a grind. I've watched so many talented people burn out. A huge part of long-term success is just endurance, showing up at a high level, day after day. - They got a win early. Call it luck, call it good judgment. I don't mean to be discouraging if you haven't had your break yet, but winning matters. Use your 20s and 30s to chase a big win. You don't have an agent. No one is managing your career but you. Go get one. Good luck out there.

"I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model," - Sam Altman, October 2024

@SECNetwork @VandyFootball This graphic is insane, A+ work.

Diego Pavia's numbers speak for themselves 🤩

@therealmkr @MartinShkreli Unless true disaster strikes, there is too much money tied up that needs to be passed off to the public in my opinion. Martin is coping because his wife works there, and he sees massive liquidity on the other side of the (theoretical) lockup.

wHy dO tHeY kEeP gEtTiNg FuNdeD?

@MartinShkreli $POET is the winner here by the way.

photonic > quantum