Nikos Moraitakis

We need a second amendment for AI

Agency capability at scale, built directly into your ATS.

Arguing that Elon Musk’s success is due to “narrative control”, luck, or riding others coattails is such an implausible claim that it functions as a useful litmus test for a persons analytical judgment. This isnt about whether you like Elon Musk. I don’t know him, and I am largely agnostic about him as a person. But I do know his record as a CEO, and studying management and business strategy has been a major part of my job for the past 20yrs. From that perspective I can tell you that Musk isn’t just a good CEO. He is one of the most effective CEOs of our generation. When I hear people write off Elon’s achievements bc someone else started these companies, it is a clear tell that they don’t understand business. Ideas are a dime a dozen. They are not what makes a great CEO. Execution is. And part of execution is recognizing a good idea when you see one and understanding how to build something around it that actually works. Tesla was months from bankruptcy when Musk took control. It’s now the company that forced every major automaker on earth to retool their entire product strategy. SpaceX was a startup that serious people in the aerospace industry dismissed as a fantasy. It now conducts more orbital launches than the rest of the world combined and has driven launch costs down by an order of magnitude. Starlink is on track to become one of the most consequential communications infrastructure projects in history. These aren’t narrative achievements. Theyre tangible businesses that work, at scale, in industries where failure is the default condition. And there’s a consistent pattern where Elon has repeatedly looked crazy, and then been right. The people who called reusable rockets a dream watched a booster fly back and land itself. The people who said a mainstream consumer EV company was impossible watched Tesla restructure the global auto industry. This is a person who has repeatedly seen something others cant see yet, absorbs the ridicule, and then builds toward it anyway. The PayPal criticism this author pushes is another perfect ex. Do you know how he became CEO? Elon identified the importance of network effects in the late 90s and realized he could take advantage of cheap capital during the internet bubble to pay users to join his network. He was labeled a lunatic. Losing money upfront to lock customers into your network is well understood now but it wasn’t back then. Confinity was forced to merge bc they couldn’t compete with it…and that’s based on Peter Thiel’s own account in Zero to One. Elon was considered reckless at the time. But he was right. And now we have people criticizing Musk’s Mars goal. But as Ben Thompson explained, Mars is the strategic North Star that forces you to radically confront the cost structure required to achieve it. Which leads you down the only path that actually scales, without settling for easier short-term solutions. If you’re serious about putting a city on Mars, full reusability is non-negotiable. And that engineering logic turns out to be what dramatically lowers launch costs. Which unlocks Starlink at scale. And Starlink creates the revenue flywheel that funds everything else. An Arianespace executive called reusability a dream in 2013 and said it was impossible. But the dream isnt the destination. It’s the constraint that forces you down the only engineering path that actually works. And it’s why SpaceX is a trillion company today. You can write off one company as luck. You can write off two as fortunate timing. But at some point the sheer weight of success across different industries and challenges stops looking like coincidence and starts looking like a big flashing signal. When someone executes repeatedly in industries where lack of execution destroys almost everyone else, the correct analytical move is to update your model. If you can’t see that Elon is a great CEO, then you’re just revealing the limits of your own analytical process.

800,000 human brain cells, floating in a dish, have never had a body. Never seen light. Never felt anything. And they just learned to play a video game. That's not a metaphor. That's literally what happened. These neurons are alive. They fire. They adapt. They get better at DOOM over time, which means something inside that petri dish is changing in response to failure. Scientists call it "goal-directed learning." There is no cleaner definition of that phrase than "it kept trying until it got better." The cells have no survival instinct, no reward system, no reason to improve. They just do. The part nobody's talking about: researchers have to convert the game's visuals into electrical pulses the neurons can interpret. Which means those cells are perceiving something. Not seeing it the way you do. But processing a version of a world that doesn't exist, inside a container that was never meant to think. The Turing Test was about machines fooling humans. Nobody wrote the test for this.

Overheard in Silicon Valley: “The current brainiac position is that AI *should* dictate war policy to the government but *should not* answer questions about your hangnail.”

Mises obliterated the entire socialist project in 1920 with one devastating insight: "Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation." The socialists spent the next century pretending this problem didn't exist while their economies collapsed around them. And yet here we are, watching politicians promise they can "fix" healthcare, housing, and energy markets through central planning. They can't even calculate the cost of their own programs correctly — how exactly are they going to allocate resources across an entire economy? Every Venezuelan breadline, every Soviet grain shortage, every Chinese famine was just Mises being proven right in the most brutal way possible. But sure, let's try democratic socialism this time. What could go wrong?

Pretty cool job title

Overheard in Silicon Valley: "Every single person who was in favor of government control of AI, is now opposed to government control of AI."

A remarkable repetition of history: HS Kimon, Hellenic Navy's new frigate now sent to Cyprus to protect it from Iranian drones with its missiles, is named after the Athenian general Kimon, son of Miltiades, who sailed to Cyprus in 450 b.C. with 200 triremes to fight the Persians.

I believe that. Consumer hardware, distribution, privacy, integrated to personal data, location, apps. When it comes to diffusion of AI to end users, only Google is comparable to them.

That’s not how you say “this is not a ponzi”

Same guy had 7k people to run twitter. Elon cut 80% and it worked better, before AI. Not an AI story. This is a story about yet another bastion of surplus elites making contact with financial reality.

The reaction to the Citrini article tells you that no one has a clue whats going on. You’re telling me that hedge fund PMs read it, panicked, and then billions of dollars shorted off the back of this? No one has any real takes right now because the world is changing so rapidly. Everyone is in short term trades. The only constant will be volatility.

My gut take is that takes like these wildly overestimate the economic collapse from AI while underplaying the social and political upheaval. Rapid job (and status) loss among the highly educated is fertile ground for extremist movements and revolutions. x.com/Citrini7/statu…

calling humans meat computers that eat too much food was a completely optional way to address the issue btw

So let me get this straight, aliens we can share, Epstein stuff has to remain secret. What the hell IS in the Epstein files?

turns out that all you need to do to make sure your vehicles are reliable is foster a 1000 year old culture in which anyone who does bad at their job has to kill themselves with a sword

Ray Dalio is Greta Thunberg for people who wear Patagonia vests

your gentle reminder… there are like zero economists or ppl in general who know how to reason about what happens when near zero cost >human level intelligence gets woven into the fabric of the economy at scale this fast. this scenario has never remotely been in the possibility space of econ textbooks or any theory. when cognition starts behaving like a commodity & the environment turns structurally deflationary no one actually knows what happens. kinda like no “expert” really understood a novel virus like covid.

- “no one will make money in ai” → we’re watching the fastest b2b revenue ramp in history & a new rent extraction layer getting stapled onto every workflow on earth. - “stochastic parrots” → turns out the parrot can write code, do math, negotiate contracts, generate design comps, tutor you, run support, diagnose your health, & replace half or more of the internet’s labor surface area. oops. - “it’ll never stop hallucinating” → it didn’t need to stop. it just needed to get good enough, + tools, + retrieval, + evals, + guardrails, + thinking. now it’s “hallucination” the way gps is “sometimes wrong.”