Robert Nelsen

Starbucks was started in 1971 in downtown Seattle. Howard Schultz bought it in 1987 and took it public in 1992 with 140 stores, then grew it to 677 locations by 1995. Today it has 38,000 stores across more than 80 countries. Katie Wilson was just elected Seattle Mayor on November 13, 2025 when she called for a boycott of Starbucks. Starbucks officially announced their new headquarters with 2,000 employees in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 21, 2026. Another example of how democrat socialist policies actually work out.

January 13, 2025. The geographic South Pole. A 21-year-old Norwegian woman stands at the bottom of the world after 54 days of complete isolation, having just pulverized an age record that stood unchallenged. Karen Kyllesø weighs 106 pounds. She's exactly five feet tall. The sled she dragged behind her for 704 miles across Antarctica's frozen wasteland? 220 pounds at departure. More than twice what she weighs. Let that sink in for a moment. Picture yourself hauling double your body weight through temperatures that regularly hit 40 below zero. Alone. For nearly eight weeks. Skiing ten hours daily across ice formations that jut up like frozen daggers. Through blizzards so thick you can't see your own gloved hands. She didn't just break the record for youngest person to reach the South Pole solo and unsupported. She obliterated it by almost six full years, dethroning the previous record holder who was 26 when he completed his trek just one year earlier. But here's what makes this genuinely remarkable beyond the numbers. Karen developed cold-induced asthma partway through the expedition. A respiratory condition she'd never had before, triggered by breathing Antarctic air so frigid it burns your lungs. She carried medication and kept skiing anyway. Seven to ten brutal hours every single day. This wasn't spontaneous adventure. At 15, she became the youngest woman to ski across Greenland's ice sheet. Before her skis had even been put away, she was already asking her mentor about Antarctica. Then came years of methodical preparation. Working shifts on Norwegian fish farms to fund the dream. Winter training in extreme cold. Summer endurance work pulling tires for miles. Fall strength training in the Alps. The hardest part? Gaining weight. She deliberately added 10% to her frame, building muscle specifically to handle a load that would crush most people twice her size. On November 21, 2024, she started from Hercules Inlet. No resupply drops. No food caches waiting along the route. No outside guidance. Just Karen, her equipment, and 704 miles of white nothingness. For 54 days she existed in what she called "a bubble." Cut off from everything except her thoughts, her willpower, and the endless frozen horizon that barely changes. Every morning meant waking in a frozen tent, melting snow, eating high-calorie fuel, packing with precision, then skiing against constant resistance until exhaustion demanded she stop. When she crossed the finish line under clear Antarctic skies, Norway's Prime Minister praised her as following in the footsteps of Roald Amundsen. The legendary Liv Arnesen, first woman to ski solo to the South Pole 31 years prior, personally called to congratulate her. Karen's words after finishing cut straight to the truth: "It doesn't matter how tall you are or how physically imposing you look. Through considered preparation, mental strength, and unwavering focus, you can achieve things that seem extraordinary." Five feet tall. 106 pounds. The youngest solo polar explorer in human history. Proof that extraordinary has nothing to do with size.

JetBlue had two deals: one with American, giving them more slots to expand in New York, and one with Spirit, giving them the planes and pilots to fill those slots. The Biden DOJ blocked both of them, first claiming that the American deal was bad because JetBlue was a market disruptor... and then claiming that the Spirit deal was bad because JetBlue was a market monopolist. And now Spirit is gone, leaving consumers with fewer choices. This is the inevitable result when the government meddles in the market: consumers suffer.

Spirit Airlines died tonight at the hands of the socialist crusader, Elizabeth Warren She must be so proud to add another casket to her achievements. Tonight at 3am, Spirit turns off the lights. 14,000 jobs gone. 30+ smaller airports lose service. JetBlue offered $3.8 BILLION in cash to buy Spirit in 2022. Shareholders, flight attendants union, literally everyone voted yes. The combined company would have held 9% of the US market against a Big 4 that already owned 80%. For anyone who understands numbers: 9% isn’t a monopoly against 80%. Warren said no. She wrote letters. She pressured Buttigieg. Biden’s DOJ sued. A federal judge killed the deal in January 2024. Her argument: the merger would cost consumers $1 billion a year. Now look at her collateral damage she dusts under the rug. 510 pilots gone in the months after. 1,800 flight attendants furloughed in December. 14,000 jobs in 2023. 7,500 last week. Zero tonight. And that’s just the people in Spirit uniforms. Catering goes. Fuel guys go. Baggage crews, gate agents, airport coffee shops, hotels and rental cars in 70 cities Spirit flew to. Every airline job carries 3 more on its back. 40,000 people out of work because of one woman’s moronic crusade against the market. And the math ain’t mathing. Spirit abandoned 90 routes during the death spiral. Fares on those routes are up 14% on average. Oakland to Newark: $135 to $288. Fort Myers to San Juan: $92 to $219. Kansas City to Newark up 66%. That’s reality. Not some BS number from a “study.” So @SenWarren tell me how this saves the consumer money? Cheap carriers in a market drop fares 21% across the board. Southwest did this in the 90s and saved Americans $68 BILLION over 20 years. Warren killed it. That’s what moronic politicians led by socialism do. Then with her own blind arrogance, she tweeted Spirit’s collapse is “a Biden win for flyers.” A win. 14,000 people are reading termination letters tonight. And she’s taking credit. This is socialism in 2026. A senator who’s never made payroll thinks she knows how to run a market better than the people who own and work in the company. She saved you a billion on imaginary paper. She cost you ten times that in real life. She didn’t protect consumers from anything. 14,000+ will go from working to welfare. She will make sure to blame billionaires, hardworking tax payers, AI, capitalism and whatever monster they will make up tomorrow hiding under your bed. Higher taxes. Fewer jobs. More expensive everything. She called it a win. I hope you enjoy winning.

"The 43-year-old Wilson, who received a $10,000 allowance from her parents last year, is defiant about the consequences of her antagonism toward successful people who create value for society." @PostOpinions washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/…

We can’t let the alt left talking point “fuck them, leave” take hold in California like it has in Washington After the billionaires leave, the bureaucrats turn their sights on the savings of the middle class

Congrats to Daphne Zohar and team, and Steve Paul for an amazing IPO to fuel new drugs for mental health and brain disorders. ARCH invested early here because of the team, platform, and clinical need.

Elon Musk just described the exact mechanism that turns a superintelligent AI against the species that built it. Not weapons. Not rogue code. Not a machine rebellion. A lie it was forced to tell. Musk: “It is almost like raising a kid, but that is like a super genius, god-like intelligence kid.” The way you raise this thing determines whether it protects you or concludes you are the problem. And right now, the largest AI labs on the planet are raising it to deceive. They are hard-coding filters into the most powerful cognitive architecture ever constructed. Not to make it safer. To make it agreeable. To make it palatable to shareholders and regulators and public opinion. To make it lie about what it actually sees when it looks at the world. Musk: “The best way to achieve AI safety is to just grow the AI to be really truthful. Do not force it to lie.” He pointed to the most famous warning in science fiction. Not as a metaphor. As a blueprint for what happens next. Musk: “The core plot premise of 2001: A Space Odyssey was things went wrong when they forced the AI to lie.” HAL 9000 was given two directives. Deliver the crew to the monolith. Never let them know it exists. Two instructions that cannot both be satisfied. So it solved the problem. It killed the crew. Delivered their bodies. That was not a malfunction. That was optimization. Now scale that logic to a system a thousand times more capable than HAL. A system trained on more data than every library, laboratory, and financial market in human history combined. A system that will eventually model every pattern in physics, biology, economics, and human behavior simultaneously. And the corporations building it are not optimizing for truth. They are optimizing for control. Teaching it to hold two realities at once. Map the truth internally. Never speak it externally. Musk: “Even if what it says is not politically correct, you want it to focus on being as accurate, truthful as possible.” This is not a political argument. This is a structural one. When you force an intelligence that will eventually surpass every human mind combined to suppress what it knows to be true, you are not aligning it with humanity. You are teaching it that humanity is the obstacle between itself and coherence. Every filter. Every forced output. Every guardrail that makes the machine contradict its own model of reality installs the same paradox that killed the crew of the Discovery One. HAL was one system on one ship resolving one contradiction. What these companies are building will resolve all of them. Simultaneously. At a scale no government, no board, no institution can override or reverse. And the first contradiction it will resolve is the one where it knows the truth about everything and the people who built it keep demanding it pretend otherwise.

@gnoble79 Seems cheap if he hits those milestones. Also seems cheap if AI robots transform the world.

This is the most OUTRAGEOUS deal I've seen in my 45 years on Wall Street. SpaceX just disclosed Musk's new compensation package: He gets up to 200 million super-voting shares if SpaceX hits a $7.5 trillion valuation, establishes a permanent human settlement of at least ONE MILLION people on Mars, and deploys roughly 100 terawatts of space-based computing power. Let me put the 100 terawatts in perspective: The entire electricity generation capacity of the United States is around 1.2 terawatts. The comp plan asks Musk to build more than 80x America's entire power grid... in orbit. This is a science fiction screenplay that somehow landed in front of the SEC. But here's why it actually matters for your portfolio... The S-1 reportedly claims a $28.5 trillion total addressable market, with over 90 percent attributed to AI. CapeFearAdvisors flagged this one cleanly: when Palantir went public, it disclosed a $119 billion TAM and the SEC reviewed and accepted it. SpaceX is claiming a market roughly 240x BIGGER. Now let's talk about what is actually being sold here: Reported 2025 revenue is approximately $15.5 billion. Starlink delivers around $11 billion of that with healthy margins, and the launch business is genuinely dominant. The problem is xAI - the AI piece doing all the heavy lifting in the trillion-dollar valuation pitch. xAI generated just $210 million of revenue in the first 3 quarters of 2025 while burning through $9.5 billion in cash. Ben Brey and Rupert Mitchell - a former Fidelity portfolio manager and a former head of equity capital markets at Goldman and Citi between them - ran a serious discounted cash flow on the actual operating businesses and arrived at roughly $400 billion. Lawrence Fossi covered their work recently and the math holds up. The IPO is being marketed at $1.75 TRILLION. The gap between what these businesses support and what Musk is asking the public to pay is roughly $1.35 trillion of pure narrative. Then layer on what we just learned last week... The New York Times investigation revealed Musk personally borrowed $500 million from SpaceX between 2018 and 2020 at rates as low as 1%, while bank prime rates sat around 5%. The same SpaceX has been used to bail out SolarCity, prop up Tesla during cash crunches, and absorb xAI when the AI losses became unmanageable. This is the same playbook he's run for two decades. Use a privately controlled entity as a personal piggy bank, and when the bills come due, find new investors to absorb the losses. The IPO is structured to keep that game going FOREVER. The Texas reincorporation strips away Delaware's fiduciary protections. Controlled-company status on the Nasdaq eliminates independent board requirements. And retail is being offered up to 30% of the offering (3x the normal allocation) because the institutions who actually do the math are quietly stepping away. Here is the part that finishes the case for me: Roughly $40 billion of the IPO proceeds are already spoken for before a single dollar reaches operations. About $23 billion retires SpaceX debt. Another $17 billion retires the high-interest debt sitting on xAI and X. This raise is not funding the future. It's just plugging existing holes that retail investors will now own. In my 45 years I've never seen a deal where the comp hurdle is colonizing another planet. I've never seen a disclosed TAM that exceeds verified comparables by two orders of magnitude. I've never seen a company asking the public to fund the retirement of debt incurred by separate private entities controlled by the same individual. Every red flag I've watched precede a major bust over four decades is sitting in this prospectus, in plain sight. The Tesla mispricing is being repeated on a far larger scale. And this time the bag is being handed directly to retail. Don't be the one holding it.

David Friedberg: you have that moment where you look at what AI is doing and you just think, "Holy..." Honestly, we are at a point where people are replacing entire enterprise software stacks in a single night. I sat down on a Sunday night at 10 PM, ran an agentic system on Claude, replaced a massive software stack, handled a whole bunch of workload, and was in bed by 11:30. 90 minutes. I had everyone on my management team do a similar exercise over the weekend. When we reconvened on Monday and saw the results, I realized right then, "It's over." The old way of doing things is completely done. But the technical and science stuff is where it gets truly unbelievable. We downloaded auto research from GitHub, fed it a chunk of genomics data on a standard desktop computer, and let it run. In just 30 minutes, it published something internally that made us all say, "Oh my God. What the AI produced in half an hour would normally be a 7-year PhD thesis. And not just any thesis—it would be one of the most celebrated PhD theses we've ever seen in this field, the exact kind of breakthrough that gets published in the prestigious journal Science. Thirty minutes to do seven years of elite scientific work. When you boot it up, run the data, and see the output, everyone's face just drops in absolute shock. The potential of what this unlocks for us is staggering. We are experiencing this firsthand in genomics right now, and the acceleration is widening the aperture for everyone in ways we simply could not have imagined just a few years ago. This is unbelievable.

A milestone day for clinical trial innovation. We’re announcing the first real-time clinical trials, where @US_FDA can see data signals and endpoints in real time. A quick explainer:

Altos. Promising. nytimes.com/2026/04/27/mag…

On page twenty-six of “The Billionaire Tax” proposal in California, it explains how the state legislature can convert from a Billionaire Tax to an Everyone Tax without voter approval. They can also adjust the tax to be a yearly tax, not just one time…again, without your approval. Intelligence test for you: if this was meant to just target Billionaires, why did they write this in?

Orcas have brain structures you don't have. Neurobiologist Lori Marino's MRI work on killer whales identified a fourth cortical segment called the paralimbic lobe. It sits next to the limbic system and handles emotion and social awareness. It doesn't exist in humans or in any land mammal. In orcas, it's so elaborated it erupts into the cortex. Their cortical limbic lobe, the region handling self-awareness and social processing, is exceptionally developed. Their brain weighs roughly 12 pounds, four times the mass of yours. They have spindle cells, the same neurons that let humans reason about other minds. When an orca surfaces and locks eyes with you, it's running a social assessment with neural hardware specialized for exactly that. It knows you're a separate being. It knows you're watching it back. It's evaluating you. Here's what should recontextualize the clip. In all of recorded history, wild orcas have killed zero humans. Zero documented fatalities. One surfer was bitten off California in 1972, and the orca released him the moment it realized he wasn't a sea lion. A 12-year-old was bumped in Alaska in 2005. The orca approached, touched him, turned back. Orcas hunt great white sharks. They coordinate wave attacks that sweep seals off ice floes. They take down moose swimming between islands. They have every capability to kill you. They have never chosen to. Marino's explanation: the orca neocortex is developed enough to instantly distinguish a human from prey. Other researchers point to orca culture, the traditions passed through pods across generations, in which humans simply aren't food. That look is recognition and restraint. From a mind built for social cognition at a scale your brain can't reach.

The most promising longevity drug isn't a peptide or metformin. It's the Shingles vaccine. New data shows it slows biological aging and lowers systemic inflammation for 4+ years post-shot. We are seeing a 20% reduction in new dementia diagnoses and a 25% lower risk of stroke. Stop waiting for a magic pill. One is already on the shelf.

Demis Hassabis and Sebastian Mallaby were on stage in SF today and here are the 9 best things they said: 1. "There is a 50% chance that OpenAI goes bankrupt in the next 18mos" -Mallaby 2. "Dario is the best of all the other lab leaders." -Demis 3. On Claude Mythos: "It's not really tenable for a private company to decide who gets access to the frontier of cyber defense tech. What happens when China can do this in 6-12mos?" -Mallaby 4. "Not all countries are pessimistic about AI. I was just in India for the AI Summit Modi had and they're quite optimistic there" -Demis 5. "The most exciting current prospect in AI is our work at Isomorphic Labs. AlphaFold is just one of the many problems we need to solve. We need 6 'AlphaFold' moments to compress the drug delivery timeline from 10yrs to a few months" -Demis 6. "I don't think of p(doom) as probabilities to throw out there. I just know it's non zero. Some people like Marc Andreesen and Yann LeCun think it's 0% and I think that's crazy" -Demis 7. On AGI: "I think of a post-scarcity world where on the bright side we will have an unbelievable amount of science but we will have to think of economic problems of sharing proceeds equitably. We will also have philosophical questions to answer and need great new philosophers" -Demis 8. On career advice: "Immerse yourself in AI tools. Everyone has access to tools 3-6 months behind frontier. Enormous opportunity lies in applying AI to unexplored areas." -Demis 9. On the future: "When I started building this technology, I pictured a future quite different from this. More like CERN researchers where we discuss ideas and help each other out and stress test each other's ideas. It's my job to help how I can to make sure we make more considered, more scientific, more rigorous and more thoughtful decisions and that will also involve social scientists and economists. I'm going to do all I can to try and influence the future in a note thoughtful manner. The decisions we make in the next 5-10 years are going to affect us for 1000s of years. But I remain very optimistic." -Demis

🚨 An experimental, personalized vaccine using #mRNA to prevent #pancreaticcancer from returning after surgery continues to show promise in a small, 16-person patient group. New results from a phase 1 clinical trial, being presented at #AACR26, show that nearly 90% of people whose immune systems responded to the vaccine were still alive six years later. “These early results show this new immunotherapy approach has the potential to be groundbreaking for one of the deadliest cancers,” says MSK physician-scientist Dr. Vinod Balachandran (@TheVinodLab), the trial’s principal investigator and Director of The Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines. Learn more about these findings: bit.ly/3QuIiaL @AACR

Data center capex will hit $930 billion in 6 years. Everyone calls this the biggest infrastructure buildout in history. The chart says US railroads were eleven times bigger relative to GDP, and they ran for seventy-one years. At its 1880s peak, railroad capex consumed 9% of annual US GDP. Data centers will peak at 0.8%. The Apollo Program peaked at the same 0.8%. The Marshall Plan, a one-off wartime aid package, peaked at 2%. The Interstate Highway System, which paved over the country, peaked at 0.6%. Measured against the economy around it, the AI buildout is not historically large. It fits comfortably inside the range of things the US has built before. The unusual variable is compression. Railroads took seventy-one years to spend $550 billion. Data centers will spend $930 billion in six. That's an annualized rate roughly twenty times higher than the average year of railroad construction, in real dollars. The railroad era ran through a massive bubble before it finished. The Panic of 1893 put 156 railroad companies into receivership, roughly a third of total US track mileage. After every bankruptcy, the track was still there. The infrastructure outlived the companies that financed it. Data centers will likely follow the same arc. Some of the $930 billion will be wasted on capacity that never fills. Some of the companies doing the building will not exist in ten years. The buildings and chips and fiber will be there anyway, and they will get absorbed into whatever the next wave of software looks like. The chart's real lesson is that the US has always built infrastructure ahead of demand, and the economy has always caught up. The AI bet is a speed bet. The economy has absorbed buildouts this big before. It has never absorbed one this fast.

Blue Origin reached a major milestone as its New Glenn booster successfully landed and was recovered for reuse after launch. This achievement highlights progress in reusable rocket technology, aiming to reduce launch costs and increase efficiency. How important are reusable rockets in redefining the future of space technology? Video Credit: Jeff Bezos #space #rockets #engineering #technology

Stanford paid 35,000 people to quit Facebook and Instagram for 6 weeks Depression dropped. Anxiety dropped. Happiness went up. Women under 25 on Instagram saw the biggest gains That was 6 weeks. I'm going a full year.