Scott Loftesness

@patrickc @billclerico 💯

Great founder too! @billclerico

Are humanoid robots the next Segue?

Berkshire released its 2025 annual report this morning with Greg Abel’s first letter to the shareholders. The letter was a good summary of operations, confirming Greg understands capital allocation and is the right person to lead Berkshire and maintain the culture. However, 1/

Happy to share the Semper annual letter. We posted it to the website last night. I attempted a section on the improbability of adequate return on capital in the AI arms race. With the retirement of Warren at Berkshire, be sure to see the unreal statistics. semperaugustus.com/clientletter

@pbeisel Something I don’t understand yet is that without any manual controls how does a Cybercab passenger / driver do things like navigate tricky parking spots, garages, etc.?

Elon is confirming that Tesla will sell the Cybercab to end customers. That’s a big tell. Tesla isn’t building just a company-owned Robotaxi fleet. It’s building a hybrid network: part Tesla-owned, part customer-owned. A pure Tesla fleet would be capital heavy. Growth would depend on how many vehicles Tesla funds itself. But if customers can buy a Cybercab and plug it into the network, they fund the hardware while Tesla takes a cut of the miles. That’s asset-light scale layered on top of vertical integration. It also accelerates density. More vehicles on the network means better coverage, faster ETAs, higher utilization, and stronger network effects. And there’s a third angle people are missing: some buyers may purchase a Cybercab primarily for personal use— as a fully autonomous private vehicle— but choose to add it to the fleet occasionally when it’s idle. Others may never add it at all. Either way, it works for Tesla. It increases manufacturing scale, lowers unit costs, and expands the installed base of autonomy — while giving owners optionality to monetize the vehicle. Selling the vehicle doesn’t mean giving up control. Tesla still owns the autonomy stack, dispatch layer, software updates, and payments system. Even customer-owned Cybercabs operate inside Tesla’s ecosystem. If autonomy works, Tesla isn’t just selling cars. It’s building a mobility platform— funded partly by itself, partly by customers, and scalable far faster than a fleet-only model.

@stephenrobles Great to have you on MPU! But Fishkill?! Wappingers Falls? 😀 from an ex-IBMer here who also did time in Poughkeepsie dealing with big IBM mainframes!

🔋 My first Mac Power Users is out! David welcomes me on the show, I share my origin story, dive into our setups + preferences, then I spin out over the question: "What is the most OVERRATED Apple product." Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wel… YT: youtube.com/watch?v=hsGNep…

Memories of growing up in the 1950’s

Ever wonder how ChatGPT works? My friend (and former intern) @ericsilberstein sat down and took a journey with Nanochat. He wrote an online book training and explaining along the way. It is a super fun read and valuable if you’re looking to know more about what is going on. 1/2

Last night’s #SuperBowlLX private jet exodus was wild! Five Bay Area airports (SFO, SJC, OAK, LVK & HWD) together saw a 1,136% increase in bizjet departures during the immediate post-game hours—compared to the previous Sunday. 🏈✈️

I was listening to a podcast this morning with Reid Hoffman and a colleague talking about how they used agents to translate their podcast. Hmm. Interesting idea. So I went to Gemini and simply said: “Please translate the last blog post at sjl.us into French.” Amazing! And then I asked it to do Hindi, Spanish, London cockney taxi driver, etc etc. Fun but also so powerful!

In the days of the "vertical hold," we learned a hard truth: the picture never stays locked forever. We spend so much energy trying to keep our lives from "drifting," but maybe the adjustment is the whole point. Read: sjl.us/2026/01/25/the…

Carving Away sjl.us/2026/01/10/car…

Great, great piece by Seth Klarman in @TheAtlantic…theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/…

@gilbert @djrosent This was a superb conversation! Thanks for doing and sharing it. 🙏

The vast majority of pods fall into a few buckets: 1. News 2. Interviews 3. Scripted Drama 4. Guys "chopping it up" "Conversational Storytelling" should be a more common format. If anyone has any Q's, ask! Will reply with any learnings @djrosent and I have had.

More people should copy Acquired. It's a clone-able format for sports, politics, movies, etc. Under-exploited opportunity.

@appenz 💯

One hour Waymo ride from San Francisco to Menlo Park via highway 280. It’s over, cars are self-driving. Everything else is just about rolling this out to the rest of the world.

@pbeisel 💯

SpaceX stock symbol should be $MARS.

@bscholl @CrusoeAI Love this kind of innovative smarts! Congratulations and LFG!

A new product, a new customer, a new financing! Introducing Superpower: a 42MW natural gas turbine optimized for AI datacenters, built on our supersonic technology. Superpower launches with a 1.21GW order from @CrusoeAI Backstory 🧵👇