Michael Hunter

The goal is not just to reach the Moon, but to stay. 🌘

@MarkDiStef Qantas, before you do this, please add Wifi to international flights

Qantas do this please

@tlop444 Prison Mike was born for this

the idea of michael scott in a lobby with carti and goku is funnier than the show itself

My take on California’s “One-Time” Billionaire Tax. It’s much worse than it looks. 📉 Will it pass? Yes, likely. It only needs 50%+1 voter approval. SEIU + CTA have done this before—Prop 55 won 63% in 2016. ⚖️ Will it get tied up in litigation? Almost certainly. Retroactive wealth tax on a tax type CA has never had = due process challenges. Billionaires have the legal budgets for years of fights. 👋 But it’s clearly … only the start. The goal is an annual tax, not one-time. And the target is $25m-50m net worth folks, including illiquid foldings (early stage founders raising a Series B). The “one-time” framing is strategic, not terminal. The same coalition (CTA, CFT, SEIU) already has AB 259 written—an >annual< 1% wealth tax at a >$50M threshold<, with plans to go to $25M. It’s been introduced 3 years running. The one-time tax removes the constitutional barrier. Once that’s gone, the annual version becomes a much easier ballot measure. 🔃 CA Policy Center said: “If SEIU hopes to keep Medi-Cal spending growing, it may need to place repeated wealth taxes on the ballot—potentially lowering the threshold as billionaires flee.” The real risk for founders: At $1B, you’re taxing ~200 people. At $50M, you’re taxing 23,000 households—including most successful founders on paper before any liquidity event. The rational move isn’t to leave when you hit the threshold. It’s to leave—or never incorporate in CA—before you get anywhere close. ✈️ Net net: it will make sense to leave before the Series B. Vinod Khosla nailed it: “Even people who don’t expect this initiative to pass are still planning to leave because there will be another one.” The one-time tax is the constitutional Trojan horse. The annual tax — at a much lower threshold — is already waiting inside.

Happy NY!

why not just raise income tax rates? because your real intent is not to just “provide healthcare”. you’re masking that you are proposing the creation of, for the first time in the 250 years of this American republic, an organized government seizure of private property from citizens. you’re calling it a “wealth tax” or a “billionaires tax” or “millionaires tax” or whatever nom du jour polls well. but at the end of the day, it’s the seizure of private property from citizens by the government. citizens that earned money, paid their fair taxes on those earnings (53% if they live in California) and are now being told they need to hand over after-tax assets because the government has failed to provide promised services with the revenue it’s collected, and are now re-casting their own failure to be a socio-economic inequity that must be justly resolved... a slippery slope that has never gone anywhere good (see economic effects in USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, France and Norway wealth tax etc.) the American founders fled tyranny in Europe and this amazing nation was populated by immigrants (myself and your parents) from around the world not just looking for a “better life” but for a place where they could have freedom from tyrannical governments that can take what they want from private citizens. a great nation borne of property rights, the rule of law, and endowed freedoms to believe, speak, or act. these principles led to the greatest run of innovations, successes, and widespread increase in prosperity, for all citizens, ever seen. the citizens, the individuals, not the institutions, delivered this progress. those who invented, who toiled, who bled, who sacrificed, who took risk and persevered, who led, and who changed the world, are not charlatans, kleptocrats, or oligarchs. they’re what made us all better off. prosperity is a measure of america’s success, not its failure. it is your principle that is so offensive, as evidenced by the broad disdain for your flippant flirtation with the darkest of human fantasy - socialism. you and other neo-socialists have led so many of us to reflect on America’s history and what it is becoming. that now leads so many to consider, so unnecessarily, leaving their homes for a place where everyone stands up to shout down the principle you suggest. because if your ideas are now considered moderate, it’s clear this titanic is sinking. that a “simple tax” of taking assets that have been earned, through toil and tribulation, rightly taxed, and preserved, should now be unjustly seized, is your solution to a problem of obvious government mismanagement and outright fraud, tells us that your true motivation lies not in giving people healthcare but in cutting down success and deleting the system of prosperity and opportunity for all. i don’t care, and neither should anyone else, what the sum total market value of a private citizens private assets might be. it is none of my business and should be none of yours. because, again, once you open that pandora’s box, we might as well study Lord of the Flies … there is literally nothing stopping 51% of citizens demanding that their government go out and seize 100% of the private property of the 49%. want to give healthcare to people in need? do your job and fix healthcare. make it affordable. want to be lazy about it? then do your job lazily and raise income taxes. want to take private property from private citizens who have paid their fair share of taxes and legally earned their property, then honestly declare that it is envy, not inequity, that you strive to resolve…

RT @chamath: It’s not 1% a year for 5 years. It’s a one time 5% tax on all assets and it will kill entrepreneurship in California. Here…

Taken Sep 1, 2016 when @JonathanRoss321 convinced me we could take on the giants, build new silicon and that AI was coming. In typical SV fashion, we didn’t even have a company yet - just a term sheet from me to invest and the three of us. I spent the next month recruiting as many of the TPU team from Google Wisconsin as I could. “Welcome to chips”, I thought. The company, as with all important companies, went through its own trials and tribulations including promoting Jonathan from CTO to CEO and the inevitable falling out and repair of his and my relationship. Anyways, it all happened for a reason. Today we close this almost decade chapter and Jonathan starts a new one with nVidia. I can’t thank him enough. Sometimes it’s simply better to be lucky than good and be fortunate enough to work with great people and follow them into battle. That is me here. Jonathan was not only the father of TPU when he was at Google but he is a technical genius of biblical proportions. He also assembled a great team with folks like @sundeep and @GavinSherry to back him up. They will also do incredible things at nvidia. Separately, whenever something I’m involved in either crashes or wins, I reread my thoughts when I first did it. Was it luck? Was it skill? What did I learn? What do I do now? YMMV, but I am attaching the original investment memo I wrote a decade ago. I’ll do a more substantive view on why this deal matters and what my guess is about the future of AI silicon from here on an upcoming episode of the pod. In the meantime, Merry Christmas. I am very thankful. So thank you Jonathan, Sunny, Gavin and the entire Groq team. 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽

This is the verified link for the Bondi hero. I am told by @gofundme that the funds will only be released directly to the hero. gofund.me/9489e516b

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

lpu's go brrrr in Sydney

The high point of Australian US relations

@ilyasu This is very cool

It’s happening

FIRST PLACE ✅

@GroqInc very cool

Europe. We have arrived.

Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter above the Sydney Opera House

This week, our portfolio company @Gilmour_Space is set to make history—launching its first Eris rocket into space this week. It’s a big moment for Australian #spacetech, and the whole ecosystem will be watching.

Running a startup is basically alternating between “it’s so over” and “we are so back”. There is no in-between.