Valentina Izquierdo

You cannot buy a new gas turbine until 2030. Order books at GE, Siemens, and Mitsubishi stretch to 2029. Turbine prices have nearly tripled since 2019. Every AI data center needs power and every gas plant needs a turbine. And every turbine has one part that bottlenecks the entire industry: The blade. It has to survive in gas 500°C above the melting point of the metal it's made from and spin at up to 20,000 RPM under 10,000 g of centrifugal force. Each blade is grown as a single crystal of nickel superalloy, pulled through a vacuum furnace at 3 mm per minute. A set of blades costs $600,000 and takes 90 weeks to grow. The same metallurgy powers modern jet engines. Only 3 companies on Earth can build one. China spent $42 billion trying to catch up. They bought a Russian fighter engine, took it apart, and copied every part. Their copy ran 30 hours between overhauls versus 400 for the original. Modern Western engines run 4,000. You can reverse engineer the shape of a turbine blade. You cannot reverse engineer 60 years of metallurgy.

For nearly 7 years there have been no direct commercial flights between the U.S. and Venezuela. Under President Trump we're changing that today. Flights between Miami and Caracas restored.

Why did the UAE leave OPEC? The need to have greater autonomy over oil production levels The country wants to increase output capacity and actually use it, rather than keep production capped, especially after the war ends and Hormuz The UAE is positioning itself as a more flexible, market-responsive producer and wants to tap into the capacity it’s invested in without constraints.

Venezuela ya exportó a EEUU la mitad del petróleo que se envió en todo 2025 bancaynegocios.com/venezuela-ya-e…

In 2002, Elon Musk flew to Moscow three times to buy a refurbished missile. He couldn't close the deal. On the flight home, he asked himself: "When's the last time you bought something Russian that wasn't vodka?" He started SpaceX instead. 1 year later, he stood in front of Stanford students and spent 45 minutes explaining everything he'd learned about building companies: On starting Zip2: This was 1995. Most VCs on Sand Hill Road hadn't even heard of the internet. "I thought it would be a pretty huge thing. It was one of those things that only came along once in a very long while." He got a deferment from Stanford to start the company. "When I talked to my professor and told him this, he said, 'Well, I don't think you'll be coming back.' That was the last conversation I had with him." The problem: he had no money. "I couldn't afford a place to stay and an office. So I rented an office instead, because I got a cheaper office than I could get a place to stay." "I slept on the futon and showered at the YMCA on Page Mill and El Camino." "I was in the best shape I've ever been. Go to shower, work out, and you're good to go." There was an ISP on the floor below them. "We drilled a hole through the floor and connected a null modem cable. That gave us our internet connectivity for like 100 bucks a month." "We had an absurdly tiny burn rate. And we also had a really tiny revenue stream. But we actually had more revenue than we had expenses." They sold Zip2 to Compaq in early 1999 for over $300 million. "In cash. That's a currency I highly recommend." On starting PayPal: "I didn't really take any time off." He was looking for what remained in the internet. Financial services hadn't seen much innovation. "When you think about it, money is low bandwidth. You don't need some big infrastructure improvement. It's really just an entry in a database." They built a platform that combined banking, brokerage, and insurance in one place. That took enormous effort. Then they added a little feature that took one day: the ability to email money from one customer to another. "Whenever we demonstrated these two sets of features, we'd say, 'Look how you can see your bank statement and your mutual funds and insurance, all on one page. Look how convenient that is.'" "And people would go, 'Ho hum.'" "Then we'd say, 'And by the way, we have this feature where you can enter somebody's email address and transfer funds.'" "And they'd go, 'Wow.'" "So we focused the company's business on email payments." On viral growth: "PayPal is really a perfect case example of viral marketing." "One customer would essentially act as a salesperson for you. They would send money to a friend and essentially recruit that friend into the network." "So you had this exponential growth. The more customers you had, the faster it grew." "It was like bacteria in a Petri dish. It just goes like this S-curve." The results: "I ran PayPal for about the first two years of its existence. We launched after year one. By the end of year two, we had a million customers." "We didn't have a sales force. We didn't have a VP of sales. We didn't have a VP of marketing. And we didn't spend any money on advertising." On why product matters: "The essence of viral marketing is: do you have something where one customer is going to sell another customer without you having to do anything?" "Product matters incredibly. Because if you're going to recommend something to somebody, you've got to really love the product experience. Otherwise you're not going to recommend it." "You don't want to burn your friend." On company culture: "We had a pretty flat hierarchy. Everybody had a roughly similar cube. Anyone could talk to anyone." "We had a philosophy of best idea wins. As opposed to the person proposing the idea winning because they are who they are." "Even though there were times when I thought that should have been the way to go." On decision-making: "If there were two paths and one wasn't obviously better than the other, rather than spend a lot of time trying to figure out which one was slightly better, we would just pick one and do it." "Sometimes we'd be wrong and pick the suboptimal path. But often it's better to pick a path and do it than to just vacillate endlessly on a choice." On focus: "We didn't worry too much about intellectual property, paperwork, legal stuff." "We were very focused on building the best product we possibly could." "We were incredibly obsessive about how to build something that is really going to be the best possible customer experience." "That was a far more effective selling tool than having a giant sales force or thinking of marketing gimmicks or 12-step processes." On why he started SpaceX: "I was trying to figure out why we had not made more progress since Apollo." "In the 60s, we went from basically nothing to putting people on the moon. Yet in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, we've kind of gone sideways." "The computer you could have bought in the early 70s would have filled this room and had less computing power than your cell phone. Just about every sector of technology has improved. Why has this not improved?" He thought maybe public support was the problem. So he planned a privately funded Mars mission: put plants growing on Mars for $15-20 million. But the cheapest US rocket was $50 million. So he flew to Moscow. Three trips. Couldn't close the deal. "When I got back from the third trip, I thought: why is it the Russians can build these low-cost launch vehicles? It's not like we drive Russian cars, fly Russian planes, or have Russian kitchen appliances." "When's the last time you bought something Russian that wasn't vodka?" "I think the US is a pretty competitive place. We should be able to build a cost-efficient launch vehicle." On why rockets are expensive: "The energy and velocity required to get into orbit is so substantial that you have almost no margin to play with." "A launch vehicle will get about 2% of its liftoff mass to orbit." "If you're wrong by 2%, you're not going to get anything to orbit. It'll come crashing down in the Pacific somewhere." "That means all of your calculations have to be right. If you miscalculate something, it blows up." On how SpaceX got costs down: Their rocket: $6 million. Nearest competitor: $25 million for less capability. "There's no silver bullet. It's been really hundreds of small innovations and improvements." "We've done improvements in the propulsion system, the structure, the avionics, and the launch operations." "Our overhead in a 30-person company is an order of magnitude less than Lockheed or Boeing. Just for starters." "Every decision we've made has been with consideration to simplicity. Because simplicity both improves reliability and reduces cost." "If you've got fewer components, that's fewer components to go wrong and fewer components to buy." On being an entrepreneur: "I think really an obsessive nature with respect to the quality of the product is very important." "Being obsessive-compulsive is a good thing in this context." "Really liking what you do is important. If you don't like it, life is too short." "If you like what you're doing, you think about it even when you're not working. Your mind is drawn to it." "If you don't like it, you just really can't make it work." On parallelization: "Try not to serialize dependencies. Put as many elements in parallel as possible." "A lot of things have a gestation period. There's really nothing you can do to accelerate that gestation period." "If you can have all those things gestating in parallel, that is one way to substantially accelerate your timeline." "People tend to serialize things too much." On space as a business: Someone asked if SpaceX was a good first company to start. "No. I would not recommend it." "This is advanced entrepreneuring." "You know how many people have said: the fastest way to make a small fortune in the aerospace industry is to start with a large one." This 45 minute Stanford lecture will teach you more about building companies than every startup book combined. Bookmark & give it 45 minutes today, no matter what.

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page. It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection. Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do. Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades. The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water. It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left. The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero. When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

@Claudiashein @LulaOficial @petrogustavo @OrsiYamandu Les queda poco a todos!

¡Viva América Latina! @LulaOficial @petrogustavo @OrsiYamandu

So happy to add NY to my long list of socialist failures

@NYCMayor Idiot

Happy Tax Day, New York. We’re taxing the rich.

The victory tweet

Desde 2019, el compromiso diplomático de los Estados Unidos con Venezuela se ha llevado a cabo a través de la Oficina Externa de los EE.UU. para Venezuela (VAU) en Bogotá, Colombia. Hoy, estamos reanudando formalmente las operaciones en la Embajada de los Estados Unidos en Caracas.

No Kings explained for people who think they're fighting fascism. You're standing in a crowd on Saturday. You look around and think yeah. No Kings. This is what democracy looks like. Bro. You're holding a sign made by a communist billionaire who lives in Shanghai. You live in a constitutional republic. Elections. Term limits. A free press that spent four years calling the president a fascist without one journalist being arrested. The modern left's definition of fascism: You love your country? Fascist. You want to enforce the border? Racist. You think parents should raise their kids? Bigot. You want to know who's voting in your elections? Jim Crow. Being patriotic is fascism to the modern left. But every country has borders and enforces them. 176 countries require ID to vote. That's the definition of a country. But the Democratic establishment told you otherwise. And you believed them. Congress has a 15% approval rating. 80% of Americans disapprove. 97% of incumbents got re-elected. Chuck Schumer. 46 years. Longer than Stalin. Steny Hoyer. 45 years. Longer than Mao. Mitch McConnell. 42 years. 5x more than Napoleon. Nancy Pelosi. 39 years. Longer than Henry VIII. Maxine Waters. 35 years. Longer than Mussolini. Bernie Sanders. 35 years. Triple Hitler's entire reign. Trump. 5 years and 3 months. Won the popular vote and the electoral vote. But Trump is the king. Okay buddy. You don't hate kings. You hate kings that aren't yours. And Saturday they had you in the streets carrying their water. The Democratic Party installed a president without letting you vote. Biden quit on a Sunday. By Tuesday your queen was crowned. No primary. No debate. No ballot. First time since 1968. Three days before your march every Senate Democrat voted against photo ID to vote. During COVID you carried a vaccine card everywhere like a hall pass from the government just to eat at a restaurant. But getting a birth certificate or waiting two hours at the DMV to prove you're a citizen before you vote? That's oppression. The Democratic Party is pro illegal immigration. Counts non-citizens in the Census. Census determines congressional seats. More non-citizens means more seats means more power. No voter ID means no way to check. That's how you keep power without wearing a crown. Biden built a censorship machine. Pressured Facebook to suppress true information and admitted it in writing. Censored scientists. Censored doctors. Censored JOKES. The Biden White House told Facebook to remove "humor and satire." They literally went after people for making fun of them. UK does it better tho... Everything they censored turned out to be right. They just outsourced the silencing to Silicon Valley. And it doesn't stop at speech. The extreme left justifies taking children from families. Six thousand schools rewrite children's identities without telling parents. And the State has the right to intervene. The Hitler Youth did this. Mao's Red Guards did this. The Soviets built statues of a child who reported his own father. Same playbook. During Covid, your bakery got shut down. Church closed. You couldn't hold your dying mother's hand at the hospital. But thousands packed together during BLM to burn Minneapolis and THAT was essential civic engagement. Obviously. $2 billion in damage. 25 dead. 2,000 cops injured. 20 states burning. VP Kamala promoted a bail fund for the rioters. No investigation. No hearings. January 6. One building. Few hours. 1,000 prosecuted. Two years of televised hearings. Kings decide which violence counts. The left decided. Charlie Kirk spent his life walking onto campuses asking for honest debate. He was assassinated. CSIS terrorism database. 2025 is the first year in 30 years that left-wing attacks outnumber right-wing. Yet no one brings this up. 75% of liberal students say preventing a speaker from talking is justified. 27% say violence is acceptable. Liberals who went to Trump rallies: "I never felt unsafe." "The experience changed me." Conservatives who show up on liberal campuses get screamed at, blocked, and assassinated. One side talks. The other side screams. The Party for Socialism and Liberation marched with you Saturday. Their stated purpose in their own words: "Revolution." Not reform. Marxism. The system that killed a hundred million people last century. They had you holding their signs while they said it out loud. 500 groups. $3 billion in revenue. Pre-printed signs. The signs were ready before you were angry. The money leads to Neville Roy Singham. Billionaire in Shanghai. Attends CCP workshops. Funnels millions through shell companies at UPS mailboxes. Three Congressional committees have subpoenaed him as a suspected CCP foreign agent. You thought you were fighting for democracy. You were carrying water for Beijing. "Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind." Spoken by the ACLU lawyer who defended Nazis in court because it was their constitutional right. Bill Clinton put 100,000 cops on the street. Reformed welfare. Said illegal immigration is wrong to a standing ovation. Told America the era of big government is over. Today his own party would call him a fascist. The 1990s Democrat defended free speech for Nazis. Yours censors doctors for telling the truth. The 1990s Democrat held open primaries. Yours installed a nominee without a vote. The 1990s Democrat trusted parents. Yours takes their children. Historians measure fascism across eight traits. Here's who checks the boxes in 2026: Censorship of political opposition. Democrats. Contempt for democratic process. Democrats. Tolerance of political violence. Democrats. State ideology forced on families. Democrats. Corporate-state fusion. Democrats. Scapegoating and manufactured enemies. Both sides. Cult of personality. Both sides. Ultranationalism. Republicans. Five for the left. One for the right. Two shared. You marched against kings on Saturday. You marched FOR kings. You just didn't know which was which. Stop being gaslit. I hope you understand what's at stake.

La izquierda, en una país de derecha puede hacer su marcha hippie de "No Kings" y no pasa nada. Terminan, se van para la casa tranquilamente, prenden el aire y se piden una doble queso en Uber Eats. Ahora, si la derecha, en un país de izquierda hace una marcha "No Dictators", no se van para la casa, les caen a palo que que les saquen el aire y mientras, la izquierda se come la doble queso y mira para otro lado.

El socialismo tiene 5 fases: 1. Toman el poder (euforia, gastan como si no hubiese mañana) 2. Pico de bienestar (todo parece mejorar) 3. Choque de realidad (agotan los recursos) 4. Caída en miseria y activación de los aparatos de represión 5. Una dictadura para sostener el poder En mi libro "La reinvención ideológica de América Latina" más sobre este tema": a.co/d/0bx4PBfr

Capitalism creates so there’s more for everyone. Socialism is the weaponization of greed and envy making everyone worse off.

“What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.” —George Orwell

As a Cuban refugee and former political prisoner, I am appalled that you and your daughter are supporting the regime that has oppressed us for 67 years. The aid does not reach ordinary Cubans—it is sold in dollar stores—while you help whitewash a dictatorship. Shame on you, and shame on your daughter.

TIRED OF WINNING.

Donald J. Trump Truth Social Post 11:15 PM EST 03.16.26 Wow! Venezuela defeated Italy tonight, 4-2, in the WBC (Baseball!) Semifinal. They are looking really great. Good things are happening to Venezuela lately! I wonder what this magic is all about? STATEHOOD, #51, ANYONE? President DONALD J. TRUMP