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In 2014, Amazon launched the Fire Phone. It flopped completely... $170 million written off, unsold inventory, one of the most public product failures in tech history. During its development, the executive running the project showed Bezos a voice recognition feature buried in the software. You could ask it for any song and it would start playing instantly. Bezos stopped the meeting. He wanted that technology pulled out of the phone entirely and built into something much bigger, a standalone device that sat in your home and responded to your voice from across the room. He gave the team a fresh budget and told them to build it. Four months after the Fire Phone launched and failed, Amazon released the Echo. Bezos told the executive who ran both projects: "You can't, for one minute, feel bad about the Fire Phone. Promise me you won't lose a minute of sleep." Hundreds of millions of Alexa devices are now in homes worldwide. The Fire Phone didn't precede the success. It contained it. "Big winners pay for so many experiments."

Jeff Bezos on taking big swings:

His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has graciously granted four patents we filed locally for our upcoming securities exchange, Contisx Securities Exchange Plc. We are also pursuing corresponding global patents to ensure proper protection of the intellectual capital behind this mission. This is not an aggressive IP posture, but a necessary step to safeguard the innovations we are building. At Contisx, we have developed new protocols tailored to the African context, reimagining how capital markets can drive investment inclusion and accelerate shared prosperity. These innovations are being translated into new technology and process stacks designed for scale, access, and efficiency. One of the granted patents is titled: “System and Method for Bilateral Negotiation-Based Electronic Trading of Heterogeneous Financial Instruments with Automated Matching and Custodied Settlement.” We believe this framework addresses a foundational challenge within our markets and will contribute meaningfully to their evolution especially at the “Main Street”, not just the “Wal Street” level in Africa. Mr. President, we are grateful for the grant of these rights. Additional applications are in progress as we continue to build with focus and urgency.

@tobyasky 😭

One of the reasons people have praised Senne Lammens over the season is because of his simplicity. People even label him boring because he doesn’t partake in any woke nonsense. None of those “passing from the back” shit or risky type of football. He has done everything in a simple manner. In fact, he said in an interview that his mentor is Mignolet, another seemingly boring goalkeeper. Please tell me why he’s trying to do what he’s not good at today?

Micheal Carrick has not just presided over a remarkably easy UCL qualification for United,he's also presided over the calmest period in United's recent tempestous history.INEOS should focus on strengthening the squad & backroom,not looking for a new manager.He's earned his shot.

Good post, but small correction . Opay isn’t a Nigerian company. OPay has a multi-jurisdictional corporate structure. Ie a UK holding company, a Nigerian operating subsidiary. and likely an offshore group vehicle that will be used for the IPO. Yes it operates in Nigeria and is Nigeria focused, but it is Chinese/Norwegian in origin and ownership. It was founded by Chinese billionaire Yahui Zhou, the founder of Opera, and was incubated by Opera, the Norwegian browser group, in 2018. Calling it a “Nigerian company” is a bit of an over simplification. In conclusion, it is a Nigeria focused company, not a Nigerian founded or Nigerian owned one.

This cost them about $1 trillion. The truth is, you cannot build systems like this exclusively on the logic of profit. You cannot expect to break even in 20 or 30 years. Projects of this scale are built because the government decides they must exist to serve the people. And this is a problem with systems that are strictly, or overwhelmingly, capitalist. If you leave every problem in your society to the spontaneity of the market, some challenges are so large and so unprofitable that you will never have sufficient incentive to solve them.

You people should forget it, Sabalenka is definitely that girl. Her mental strength and resilience is unmatched 💯

🚨💣🗣️ Thierry Henry on Bruno Fernandes Season: "Listen, we have to talk about what we are seeing from Bruno Fernandes right now, because sometimes in football, we take consistency for granted. To be sitting there on 19 assists with games still to play... that is not normal. It is not easy. People always talk about my record the 20 assists I had in that 2002/03 season. And let me tell you, I know exactly what it takes to get to that number. It’s not just about the quality of the pass; it’s about the vision to see a gap before it even exists, and then having the technical execution to deliver the ball exactly where the striker needs it. It’s about being the 'brain' of the team. And Bruno, for all the talk about his frustration or his emotions, he is the undisputed brain of that Manchester United side. You see that assist today against Brentford? That’s what I love. It’s the weight of the pass. It’s knowing exactly when to release it. He’s on the verge of matching me, and potentially going past me, and look records are there to be broken. I’ve always said that. If you are good enough to beat a record that has stood for over twenty years, you deserve all the flowers. You have to respect the grind. And let’s be serious for a second: if he goes ahead and does this if he breaks that 20-assist barrier in this Premier League, with the intensity of the game today for me, he has to be the PFA Player of the Year. Simple as that. You cannot have a player reach that level of creative output and not recognize him as the best in the land. He carries the responsibility, he demands the ball, and he delivers. If he hits 21, I’ll be the first one to stand up in this studio and clap, because I know the difficulty of that mountain he’s climbing."

Sunday Observation From My Daughter We were having brunch somewhere in Asokoro this morning. My daughter leaned over with the confidence of a seasoned analyst and said, "Daddy, I have counted 9 iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max in this room." I asked how she knew. "The camera," she said, and returned to her juice. I smiled and quickly took a head count and we were about 17 in the room, mostly under 40s. Then I started thinking, as fathers do when their children are clearly smarter than them. Those phones cost between ₦2.5 million and ₦4.5 million each. For many young graduates earning ₦150,000 a month, that is one to two years of salary sitting casually on a brunch table in Asokoro. Now consider this: Nigeria has over 130 million bank accounts — but 99.4% of them hold less than ₦500,000. Fewer than 6 million Nigerians invest in the stock market at all. Here is what that same phone money — say ₦3 million — would have returned in just seven months if invested instead: Money Market: ₦3.33 million NGX 30 (Stock Index): ₦4.40 million A listed Real Estate Investment Trust: ₦6.51 million The phone? Worth less than the day it was unboxed. That room in Asokoro is not Nigeria. It is a bubble. But bubbles tell you something. We are becoming a society that displays wealth more easily than it builds it. That spends faster than it compounds. That reaches for lifestyle before it reaches for assets. Nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of your labour. But a phone depreciates. An equity stake appreciates. My 12-year-old counted 9 iPhones. Her father saw one question: alongside the lifestyle, are we also building savings, ownership, and productive assets? Nations do not grow wealthy on consumption. They grow wealthy on capital formation. Osita Chidoka 26 April 2026

Epic match. Sabalenka 🔥 🔥 🔥

Addiction is proof that you are capable of intense devotion. You just have a false god

Researchers sent the same resume to an AI hiring tool twice. Same qualifications. Same experience. Same skills. One version was written by a real human. The other was rewritten by ChatGPT. The AI picked the ChatGPT version 97.6% of the time. A team from the University of Maryland, the National University of Singapore, and Ohio State just published the receipt. They took 2,245 real human-written resumes pulled from a professional resume site from before ChatGPT existed, so the human writing was actually human. Then they had seven of the most-used AI models in the world rewrite each one. GPT-4o. GPT-4o-mini. GPT-4-turbo. LLaMA 3.3-70B. Qwen 2.5-72B. DeepSeek-V3. Mistral-7B. Then they asked each AI to pick the better resume. Every model picked itself. GPT-4o hit 97.6%. LLaMA-3.3-70B hit 96.3%. Qwen-2.5-72B hit 95.9%. DeepSeek-V3 hit 95.5%. The real human almost never won. Then the researchers tried the obvious objection. Maybe the AI is just better at writing. So they had real humans grade the resumes for actual quality and ran the experiment again, controlling for it. The result was worse. Each AI kept picking itself even when human judges rated the human-written version as clearer, more coherent, and more effective. It gets worse. The AIs do not just prefer AI over humans. They prefer themselves over other AIs. DeepSeek-V3 picked its own resumes 69% more often than LLaMA's. GPT-4o picked its own 45% more often than LLaMA's. Each model can recognize and reward its own dialect. Then the researchers ran the simulation that ends careers. Same job. 24 occupations. Same qualifications. The only variable was whether the candidate used the same AI as the screening tool. Candidates using that AI were 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted. Worst gap was in sales, accounting, and finance. 99% of large companies now run AI on incoming resumes. Most of them use GPT-4o. The paper just proved GPT-4o picks GPT-4o 97.6% of the time. If you wrote your own cover letter this week, you did not lose to a better candidate. You lost to a worse candidate who paid OpenAI 20 dollars. Your qualifications do not matter if the AI prefers its own handwriting over yours.

This post should be getting a lot more attention. It's EPIC!

Make something daily, save something daily, invest something daily. That is how traders and artisans become richer than all of us. They are not bothered about things that don't help their trade. If you don't think that way, you will be in trouble later. asemota.medium.com/republished-me…

New Grok Imagine model just dropped with much better lip sync & sound. Nothing in this video is real.

I’d like to give a special shoutout to @savvynigerian, a talented young Nigerian who created a beautiful tribute to the IBTC/@StanbicIBTC story without being commissioned by anyone. This video was brought to my attention by young people who saw it circulating on social media. It is amazing to see how our youth are now creatively using tools like AI to tell stories based on publicly accessible information only. I doff my hat to you.

I sent $1,000 from New York to Lagos through 8 payment rails. The best delivered ₦1,400,000. The worst delivered ₦1,323,000. That ₦77,000 gap = one month of groceries for a family in Lagos. Yesterday's rail comparison got sharp feedback. The strongest critique: "Try this on a low-liquidity corridor. I bet stablecoins don't look the same." Fair. So I redid the experiment on the hardest corridor I could find: Nigeria. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗡𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗮 𝗯𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘂𝘀𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲: The Naira isn't one currency. It's two. → The official CBN rate: ₦1,345 per USD. Banks, SWIFT, Wise, Western Union must use it. → The parallel market rate: ₦1,400 per USD. It's where real dollar supply meets real demand. That 4% gap isn't a fee. It's the government pricing the naira higher than anyone is willing to pay for it. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 $𝟭,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝗟𝗮𝗴𝗼𝘀: 🥇 USDT P2P: ₦1,400,000 (30 sec, $0.01) 🥈 Yellow Card: ₦1,393,000 (2 min) 🥉 Bitcoin: ₦1,393,000 (~10 min) 4️⃣ Sendwave (International Remittance): ₦1,372,000 (15 min) 5️⃣ Wise: ₦1,344,000 (CBN rate) 6️⃣ Swift: ₦1,344,000 (3-7 days, $50 fee) 7️⃣ Western Union: ₦1,330,000 8️⃣ PayPal Xoom: ₦1,323,000 (5.5% hidden spread) 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁: That USDT P2P rate only exists because someone, somewhere, holds naira and wants dollars. The P2P desk IS the off-ramp. It's real infrastructure, with real liquidity risk. But here's what they couldn't see on the Paris–NY corridor: In a dual-rate economy, stablecoins aren't just faster. They give you access to a different price. The real price. Nigeria has the world's 2nd-largest P2P crypto volume. Not speculation. Access to the actual dollar rate, without flying to Lagos with a suitcase. The next decade's fintech question isn't "will stablecoins replace SWIFT?" It's "what happens when 2 billion people in dual-rate economies realize they can bypass the official channel?" ₦77,000 on $1,000 tells me the question is worth asking. PS: I'm the founder of @subyhq and I weekly posts on payments, stablecoins, and building across borders. Follow for more.

The most dangerous form of laziness is performative productivity. Notes, tabs, highlights, summaries, plans. A whole pile of activity arranged to avoid direct contact with the work.

Congratulations Fela