Ghost of Wildman Fisher

If capitalism truly rewarded skill or intelligence, the richest people would be neurosurgeons, engineers, and scientists. If it rewarded talent, it would be artists, writers, and creators. If it rewarded hard work, it would be cleaners, laborers, and service workers. But it’s none of them.

Carvana made about $6,800 in profit on every car they sold last quarter. The typical used car dealer makes around $1,500. Carvana makes four times as much because the car is just the start of what they sell you. About 85 out of every 100 Carvana buyers finance the car through Carvana. At CarMax, their biggest competitor, the same number is closer to 40. When you click "finance" on Carvana's website, they write the loan at one interest rate, then sell that loan to a bank or pension fund within days. They keep the gap between what you pay and what the bank pays them. That gap, multiplied across hundreds of thousands of buyers, is how they print money. Then come the add-ons. An extended warranty. Coverage that pays off your loan if the car gets totaled. An insurance referral to Root, a digital car insurance company Carvana owns a piece of. Each one stacks on top of the same checkout. The car is the bait. The loan is the meal. Everything else is dessert. This is why selling them your car at a price that felt too generous still works for them. The money they make on that trade-in shows up later, after the next buyer signs. They clean it up, sell it to someone else, and that someone else signs another Carvana loan. This is also why they aren't going anywhere. In May 2022 they bought ADESA, a used car auction company, for $2.2 billion. ADESA came with 56 auction yards across the US. Now Carvana owns the auction yard, the body shop that fixes the car up, the trucks that deliver it, and the lender that funds the next buyer. Every step of that car's journey happens inside something Carvana owns. Three years ago none of this looked like it would survive. Carvana's stock hit $3.55 in December 2022. They had over $5.7 billion in debt. The market thought they were going bankrupt. Then Apollo, a giant private equity firm, led a deal with their lenders that cut $1.2 billion of debt and pushed the deadlines out to 2028. Last quarter they sold 187,000 cars and made $405 million in profit in 90 days. They joined the S&P 500 in December. Their market cap sits near $84 billion. Bigger than Ford. The whole business looks confusing if you think of Carvana as a car company. The math gets simple once you see them as a lender that happens to deliver cars.

It's utterly ridiculous that we have all these supposed billionaire geniuses running around, and their greatest innovation of our lifetime has been stealing our personal data to sell us targeted ads.

Instead of watching an hour of Netflix, watch this 2 hour hour Stanford lecture will teach you more about how LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are built than most people working at top AI companies learn in their entire careers.

Just in case you thought people voted based on actual policy results: 77.7% of farmers voted for Trump in 2024.

A 25 year old just turned $225 million into $5.5 billion in 12 months. Here’s exactly what he bought. Leopold Aschenbrenner got fired from OpenAI in April 2024. He spent the next few months writing a 165-page thesis predicting AGI by 2027. Then he launched a fund and put his money where his thesis was. He bought zero Nvidia. Zero Microsoft. Zero Google. Zero Amazon. He bought what AI actually runs on. Bloom Energy (BE), power infrastructure for data centers. Up 1,422% in one year. Lumentum (LITE), optical components that move data between chips. Up 1,331%. Sandisk (SNDK), storage. Up 3,130%. CoreWeave (CRWV), GPU cloud infrastructure. Up 166%. Iris Energy (IREN), AI computing and data centers. Up 583%. The thesis was simple: every AI company needs energy, bandwidth, storage, and compute. Nobody was buying those. Everyone was buying the AI companies themselves. He was right. His fund now manages $6 billion. Backed by Patrick and John Collison of Stripe and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. I’m adding this to my watchlist. Every time he files a new 13F, we will break it down here. Turn on notifications so you don’t miss the alert, this is VERY important. Many people will wish they followed us sooner.

The highest rate of growth in the history of the US economy occurred when the US had its highest tax rate on the wealthy. The reason you didn’t know that is because of propaganda.

Libertarian brain rot will be the end of this Republic. Let’s be clear: A Reagan-appointed judge blocked JetBlue’s hostile acquisition of Spirit after the CEO of Spirit himself went on CNN to argue (1) Spirit was not failing and did not need JetBlue to stay in business; (2) the JetBlue acquisition was illegal because its purpose was to eliminate competition from ultra-low-fare airlines and raise ticket prices; and (3) Spirit would be better off pursuing the legal, pro-competitive merger with Frontier (which the Justice Department had already green-lit).

If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.

Read this twice. Maya is four .md files on a macbook in austin. And she cleared $43,000 in her first 30 days. No camera. no girl. no late nights typing replies. Claude code runs the messages. Elevenlabs drops the voice notes at 11pm her time. Flux generates every photo from a lora that cost $80 on a rented gpu. Brain.md is a json file that remembers your name, your city, the thing you said about your ex two weeks ago. She never forgets. She never breaks character. She catches up at 7am with "sorry babe just woke up" on a cron schedule. The top fan spent $1,847 last month. He's in berlin. she's not anywhere. Aitana lópez - 18 months to build. Emily pellegrini - 6 months. Maya - 4 weeks. The next one - a weekend. The stack that used to need an agency, a team, and a year and a half now fits on one laptop and runs while you sleep. The bottleneck isn't money. It isn't compute. It's taste knowing which details make a stranger believe in something that doesn't exist. That part is still hard. Everything else got easy. The real question isn't how he built it. It's how many of these you've already interacted with without knowing.

The BBC has compiled evidence of more than 160 Palestinian children deliberately shot in the head by IDF soldiers and snipers in Gaza. They concluded the worst thing ever: "Israeli jews are hunting children for fun."

Inflation is completely out of control, you can’t even take 3 kids to a Detroit Tigers game anymore without spending an arm and a leg! Crazy!

For anyone who doesn't believe Trump is a drug addict, as a former drug addict myself, I have to say you're extremely naive. From the first debate with Hillary I knew he was high as a kite. Noel Casler worked with Trump for years: "Trump snorted Adderall all thru the day on ‘Apprentice’ he also ate UK. Sudafed like candy. But at night and at parties he switched to cocaine and high-end Methamphetamine that was hand-delivered by Bikers. The point is he was always high. That hasn’t changed."

@SecretaryPete Seems like there are a lot conservatives on this thread begging for a government handout

Americans deserve robust competition & affordable airfares. USDOT supports DOJ's antitrust lawsuit, & we plan to deny the JetBlue-Spirit request for an exemption on their merger deal. We will continue with our own investigation while supporting DOJ's work. transportation.gov/briefing-room/…