Making sense of technology and business through the ideas of the people shaping the future.
Joined October 2026
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Jensen Huang loves working with Elon.
He says that Elon loves the intersection between computing and the physical build out.
“No one knows more about energy than he does”
This is insane. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just said: "Just as I can be fired, the next CEO has to be hired."
He described a culture of excellence at Nvidia where no one’s position is safe, not even his.
That makes the possibility of the board ousting him very real.
"We should create the conditions by which the company continues to thrive. And we should create the conditions by which the leaders of our company continues to grow and that the next leader of the company is already at Nvidia."
"That’s my job, is to create that condition."
"And just as I can be fired, the next CEO has to be hired. And, you know, I like it that way. I like that. I like that we can’t be overly complacent about our position inside the company and that we can’t take it for granted."
"And you’re always vulnerable. You’re always earning it. You’re always striving to be better. That’s a condition that’s good."
A year ago, Jason predicted that Apple’s strongest long-term AI position is local (on-device) language models that emphasize privacy and encryption, similar to how they handle iCloud.
"Ultimate manifestation of all this is going to be Apple will have local language models and they'll be pitching us on they're encrypted, they're private, your data is safe just like they do for iCloud. We can't get to your iCloud stuff. If the government comes and asks us to crack it open, we can't get there."
@Jason
The GME frenzy almost killed Robinhood.
In January 2021, Robinhood restricted GameStop trading to “position closing only”: customers could sell shares they owned, but couldn’t buy more.
CEO Vlad Tenev said the restrictions bought the company time to raise the capital needed to meet regulatory liquidity requirements.
As trading activity surged during the frenzy, Robinhood's capital requirements went from $100M to $3B. An amount they didn't have.
The leadership team split into three priorities: explain the restriction to customers, keep the systems running, and raise as much capital as possible.
Vlad Tenev (@vladtenev) is the co-founder and CEO of Robinhood.
In January 2021, in the middle of the meme stock frenzy, Robinhood's deposit requirement went from under $100 million to "something like $3 billion" almost overnight. The total capital the company had ever raised was about $700 million.
His first call was to @mickymalka:
"He's like, 'How much do you need?' I said, 'I don't know, 250 million, 500 million. I'm not sure.' He's like, 'I've got it.'"
Back in March 2020, the two of them had put a term sheet in place so the money could be "wired in your account same day." Once Micky was in, everyone else followed: "We probably had $10 billion of demand at the first term."
"It was a consequence of too much success, which is quite rare."
Vlad came to America from Bulgaria at 5, not knowing a word of English. His grandparents stored their wealth in copper cookware during hyperinflation. His dad told him he'd give him his SAT score in dollars to invest. He went on to study math under Terence Tao, then took a leave from his $18,000-a-year math PhD to take a shot at starting his own company.
This was an awesome conversation:
0:00 Why Ribbit passed on Robinhood's seed round
2:19 "You're going to want me on your board"
5:35 The day-long trading outage of March 2020
9:22 A term sheet for a crisis that hadn't happened yet
15:00 Crypto goes from zero to a top revenue stream
16:27 The $3 billion deposit requirement
18:35 "Vlad, you have to call work right away"
21:34 The first call: Micky Malka
24:31 "Time kills all deals"
25:33 Number one app in the App Store, ahead of Instagram and TikTok
27:01 $10 billion of demand
29:33 Hyperinflation and copper cookware in Bulgaria
35:34 "Manhattan just seemed like science fiction"
47:15 His SAT score in dollars to invest
50:53 Studying under Terence Tao
1:00:22 "You want to be businessman, huh?"
1:03:48 The best parts of math without the bullshit
1:05:56 Would I be proud of this in 50 years?
Includes paid partnerships.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev says their crypto business went from near zero to their largest revenue stream in a matter of quarters.
They launched crypto in January 2018, right at the start of a long crypto winter, and generated almost no revenue for years.
Then in Q3 2020 it jumped roughly 10x.
By Q4 it was already in the hundreds of millions, and by Q2 2021 crypto had become one of their biggest revenue lines, generating roughly $500–600 million in a single quarter.
Vlad Tenev (@vladtenev) is the co-founder and CEO of Robinhood.
In January 2021, in the middle of the meme stock frenzy, Robinhood's deposit requirement went from under $100 million to "something like $3 billion" almost overnight. The total capital the company had ever raised was about $700 million.
His first call was to @mickymalka:
"He's like, 'How much do you need?' I said, 'I don't know, 250 million, 500 million. I'm not sure.' He's like, 'I've got it.'"
Back in March 2020, the two of them had put a term sheet in place so the money could be "wired in your account same day." Once Micky was in, everyone else followed: "We probably had $10 billion of demand at the first term."
"It was a consequence of too much success, which is quite rare."
Vlad came to America from Bulgaria at 5, not knowing a word of English. His grandparents stored their wealth in copper cookware during hyperinflation. His dad told him he'd give him his SAT score in dollars to invest. He went on to study math under Terence Tao, then took a leave from his $18,000-a-year math PhD to take a shot at starting his own company.
This was an awesome conversation:
0:00 Why Ribbit passed on Robinhood's seed round
2:19 "You're going to want me on your board"
5:35 The day-long trading outage of March 2020
9:22 A term sheet for a crisis that hadn't happened yet
15:00 Crypto goes from zero to a top revenue stream
16:27 The $3 billion deposit requirement
18:35 "Vlad, you have to call work right away"
21:34 The first call: Micky Malka
24:31 "Time kills all deals"
25:33 Number one app in the App Store, ahead of Instagram and TikTok
27:01 $10 billion of demand
29:33 Hyperinflation and copper cookware in Bulgaria
35:34 "Manhattan just seemed like science fiction"
47:15 His SAT score in dollars to invest
50:53 Studying under Terence Tao
1:00:22 "You want to be businessman, huh?"
1:03:48 The best parts of math without the bullshit
1:05:56 Would I be proud of this in 50 years?
Includes paid partnerships.
“Elon is unconstrained by constraints.”
Ex-Tesla President Jon McNeill shares that Elon has a rare ability to shut off failure and refuses to let constraints limit his thinking.
"The way I describe his decision making is he's very rational. He's very unique in that he's unconstrained by by constraints."
He recalled sitting with Elon in 2017–2018 after SpaceX had suffered a long string of unsuccessful launches. Most people would have dwelled on the setbacks, gotten discouraged, or worried the company might run out of cash before succeeding.
“He was totally focused on the two things that had to be true for that not to happen again,” McNeill said. “So they could get a successful launch.”
“He’s just very unique in his ability to shut off the negative and focus on what has to be true and then achieve that. He’s one of the most unique people I’ve ever met. He can essentially shut off failure, and it just doesn’t impact him at all.”
“He’s uniquely wired that way. Given everything he’s been through, he typically isn’t affected by it. He just looks at things differently.”
My conversation with @jonmcneill, the former President of Tesla and the co-founder and CEO of DVx Ventures.
0:00 Introduction
0:57 How to Impress Elon Musk
4:07 What Happens When You Overstep Elon
8:49 Building Tesla’s Culture of Speed
9:46 The Power of Battlefield Promotions
10:24 Three-Sentence Emails
11:45 Sheryl Sandberg’s Weekly Meeting
16:40 Elon’s Approach to Capital Allocation
18:32 Why Tesla Ships Autopilot Updates Weekly
23:37 Cheat Sheet for Better Decision-Making
29:15 Shut Off Failure
30:44 Running a Product Meeting
39:23 The Framework Behind All Great Products
43:16 Why Steve Jobs Blew Off Elon
46:30 Building Tesla with 0 Marketing Budget
52:45 How a Toy Car Solved an Eng Problem
54:05 Neuralink Origin Story
56:36 The Algorithm
1:12:40 The “Fire Yourself” Leadership Exercise
1:16:33 Identifying World Class Talent
Enjoy!
Elon Musk once cornered Steve Jobs at a sushi restaurant to ask for his advice on product design.
Ex-Tesla President Jon McNeill says Musk took away a clear lesson: define what a product must do, then leave out anything that doesn’t help it do those things exceptionally well.
Elon Musk: Give me your design philosophy.
Steve Jobs: If the product is perfect, it will sell itself. You have to work on a perfect product.
McNeill says Apple started with a few essential requirements for the iPod: it had to hold 1,000 songs, let users find a song in four seconds or less, and be beautiful.
Those requirements drove the engineering. The team developed new storage, search, and interface technology to meet them.
When engineers suggested adding an FM radio, Jobs reportedly asked: “Is that a thousand songs or four seconds?”
If not, it didn’t belong in the product.
McNeill says Musk carried that principle into Tesla’s design approach: define what the product must do, then focus on doing those things exceptionally well.
FT: @jonmcneill @shaneparrish @TKPPodcast
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Masa turned down an investment in the greatest entrepreneur of all time to invest in one of the biggest flops of all time (WeWork’s story made for a great show tho).
That $12B would be worth $375B today (31.25x). Softbank is worth just $140B
I remember that time when Masa, instead of putting $12B into Tesla for a 1/4 of the company to help me take Tesla private, instead invested the money in WeWork.
That was dumb.
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No one understands just how many transactions AI agents could generate.
Binance co-founder and former CEO, @cz_binance guarantees those transactions will all be done on blockchains.
"Right now, AI agents are still kind of at the information stage or information software building stage. They're not really transacting with each other yet. They will. And then once the AI agents transact on our behalf, there will be many times more transactions, what we call microtransactions."
"They're going to require a very native digital cryptocurrency, which I guarantee is going to be blockchain. Whether it's Bitcoin or not, I cannot guarantee."
"It could be a new currency, one of the AI companies released. It could be a consortium that can converge on one, the public one. Who knows? But it's going to be a blockchain based currency if it has to be used by everyone in the world."
Honored to speak at the @OxfordUnion. Freedom of speech and freedom of money, two cornerstones of a healthy society.
Two (high quality) videos:
Fireside chat:
youtu.be/2WhyikBJmZ0?si=sRt9…
Q&A:
youtu.be/t6vv9eaPR_A?si=EGoZ…
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The idea for Neuralink began with Elon Musk’s frustration at how slowly we type on our phones.
Ex-Tesla President Jon McNeill recalls a conversation on a trip to China. Musk asked how fast McNeill could type with his thumbs.
They realized phone typing speed was a bottleneck for getting answers and making decisions.
Elon Musk: How fast can you type with your thumbs?
Jon McNeill: I have no idea. I’ve never timed it.
Elon Musk: The average human types about 18 words a minute. How fast can you type on a keyboard?
Jon McNeill: I think 60 or 70 words a minute—at least when I was in high school. Let’s call it 60.
Elon Musk: Exactly. You’re more than three times faster on a keyboard than on your phone. This device has slowed the input into the machine.
Jon McNeill: Yeah, it has—by three times.
Elon Musk: That’s a big deal, because you can’t get speed of answers and decision-making if you’re going three times slower. What if you could think into the machine?
Jon McNeill: That would remove the constraint. We wouldn’t have keyboards and thumbs in the way. You’d be thinking in real time into the machine.
Elon Musk: Exactly. That would remove the front-end constraint on computing for humans. That’s a big deal.
True to his focus on speed, Musk immediately asked his chief of staff, Sam Teller, to find leading brain-computer interface researchers and gather their papers.
He wanted to read them on the trip and meet the researchers the following week. As McNeill recalls, he moved from idea to action quickly.
FT: @jonmcneill @shaneparrish @TKPPodcast
This is how @BillAckman turns brutal market crashes into generational buying opportunities:
The research starts before the crash.
Even great companies can be a bad investments at the wrong price. Pershing Square studies the businesses it wants to own long before they get cheap. When the market sells off, the team already knows where to look.
"Typically, someone identifies an interesting idea. Hey, XYZ stock, a company we've followed for years is now available at a 40% discount. Let's update the file."
"We'll dig in again, update the work. So I'll read the annual reports, the proxy, the conference call transcripts, maybe some news articles."
"The team doing the deeper dive will speak to many industry experts."
They’re trying to answer one question: Has the business changed as much as the price?
If the business still looks strong and the price is right, the selloff is their opportunity to buy and let the business compound.
BREAKING: Nvidia, $NVDA, extends losses to its lowest level since March 31st as concerns mount around Jensen Huang’s future with the company.
The stock has now lost -$400 billion since Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy was reported.
This framework is how Tesla and SpaceX achieve the impossible.
Former Tesla President Jon McNeill shares "The Algorithm" @elonmusk uses to build trillion dollar empires:
1. Question every requirement to see if it's actually necessary.
2. Delete steps in the process that aren't adding value to the customer.
3. Simplify or optimize the remaining process manually.
4. Apply speed to reveal failure points.
5. Automate only at the end once the process is working optimally.
"We had made mistakes like automating first, we'd made mistakes like not questioning requirements and ended up in like multiple month loops on problems that wouldn't go away."
"And so this whole framework allows you to not only solve problems but innovate because you're eliminating requirements that your competitors think exist"
FT: @jonmcneill @shaneparrish @TKPPodcast
When asked about crypto's use cases, Binance co-founder and former CEO, @cz_binance admits that crypto payments haven’t taken off.
He goes on to point towards three other use cases:
1) Cross-border remittances
2) 24/7 markets with tokenization
3) Free global economy
"Payments haven't really taken off in crypto either, to be very frank. But there are special use cases, cross-border remittances. Some of those use cases are very, very useful and growing very quickly."
"Tokenizing everything, real world assets. There's no reason for markets to only trade between 9-3. Events could happen on weekends. Like there could be a war, there can be strikes, there can be other things. Price will move. People people need liquidity. There's no reason why the current technology couldn't handle it. But using blockchain is much better. It's much easier."
"We should have a free economy globally. Having a free economy globally means that you should have the same liquidity globally. That can be much easier done on the blockchain than through banking system today. I'm not against banks. I just think that I actually think the banks should adopt blockchain technologies to provide that, too."
Introducing @altaxyz, financial infrastructure for the tokenized and agentic era.
Alta announced $80M in total funding, including a Series A led by @IndexVentures, @GVteam, @blackbirdvc, @SquarePegCap and angels including @vladtenev, @skipcapital (@scottfarkas and @kimbjackson) and @HarryStebbings (@20vcfund).
Elon had two non-negotiables for communication at Tesla:
1. Be extremely concise
2. Deliver bad news immediately
Former Tesla President Jon McNeill reveals the system @elonmusk pushed:
Three-sentence emails.
1. Here’s the problem.
2. Here’s what I think the solution is.
3. Here’s my next step (and if I need resources or permission, ask here).
“It was really the key to communicating with him,” McNeill said, “because he likes that sort of concise, get-to-the-point style. Have you thoroughly thought about the problem? Have you really thought about the solution? And have you thought about the next steps?”
The second rule was just as strict:
“Don’t sit on bad news. Give me bad news as fast as you know about it,” Elon told people repeatedly.
“Because bad news only gets worse with time. The way you could get on his bad side was saving bad news.”
Those were the two keys: be concise, and be rapid with bad news.
FT: @jonmcneill @shaneparrish @TKPPodcast
You'd never understand the value of crypto if you live in established cities.
Binance co-founder and former CEO, @cz_binance says crypto’s utility is obvious where banking access is limited.
"Africa, Southeast Asia, you will feel that like Africa, only 11% of people have banks and you take them three days to pay a bill. So when you kind of in those kind of situations, financial access is actually really important."
"And now with crypto, one village has a one smartphone. But the entire village can now pay their bills within three seconds. And they don't have to spend three days walking to a different part of the village to do this. So this actually there's some real use cases here which are not obvious to some of the established financial centers."
He goes on to add that for established nations, a strong use case is fighting inflation.
"Too much inflation involuntarily means that you're just getting poor very quickly. People should have the tools to protect themselves from that. And blockchain crypto, cryptocurrencies is a tool. I'm not saying all cryptocurrencies are good for that, but there are certain cryptocurrencies that are."
Honored to speak at the @OxfordUnion. Freedom of speech and freedom of money, two cornerstones of a healthy society.
Two (high quality) videos:
Fireside chat:
youtu.be/2WhyikBJmZ0?si=sRt9…
Q&A:
youtu.be/t6vv9eaPR_A?si=EGoZ…
You're vastly underestimating the size of the clipping industry.
As attention becomes increasingly scarce, distribution only becomes more valuable.
Top tier streamers are already paying over $1.1M a month to clippers.
Clipping is here 🎬
Grab your favorite moment from any video, add your take, and post it without leaving X.
Creators: every clip credits your original video and links back to it, so new viewers can find your work and keep watching.
Clippers: you now have an easy, native way to share moments from your favorite creators directly on X.
The best part? Both the original creator and the clipper can earn from views on the clip through Original Content Rewards.
Everyone wins when great moments travel. Clipping is one more step toward making X the best place to create, grow and earn.
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Attack vectors have exploded as apps become more connected.
Palo Alto Networks CEO @nikesharora says cybersecurity becomes more valuable as technology connects more people, apps, and systems.
"More technology, more interconnectedness make cybersecurity companies more valuable. Cybersecurity didn't exist 25 years ago because there was no connectivity. You had a mainframe, you logged in, it was secure."
"Every door into the infrastructure is a potential cyber attack surface. You do that across the world. There must be trillions of interactions every day which are on a line that allows you to interact with some enterprise infrastructure."
"The more you do that, the more likely that you need security across all those vectors. The more technology changes, you need more capability on security."
"For example, the products that will secure AI don't exist fully yet because the AI is so new. So yes, it's good for our business. The more you connect things."
.@NikeshArora grew Palo Alto Networks from $18 billion to $250+ billion in market value. Before that, he spent 10 years helping grow Google’s revenue from $2 billion to $62 billion.
When he joined Palo Alto, he thought cybersecurity was two words. 8 years and 35 acquisitions later, the company has more than 70 products.
His approach: buy the winning team and put its founder in charge. If a startup beat his team with fewer resources, why make its founder report to the person who lost?
Nikesh explains why he makes founders agree to a product roadmap before signing a deal, why he wanted Google to buy Netflix, and how Egon Durban kept him bidding for a cricket team at 6 in the morning.
0:00 The Oculus deal he almost did with Egon Durban
8:45 "I thought cybersecurity was two words"
11:44 Why he buys instead of builds
14:33 Why the acquired founder becomes the boss
16:21 Why he only buys number one or number two
19:30 The 30-day test before every acquisition
33:38 Egon Durban and the 29-round cricket auction
42:32 Why nothing at work stresses him out
44:28 Selling Google ads without knowing the price
49:42 Coming to America with $200
51:58 Raising kids who didn't grow up poor
54:46 Why AI hacking has been good for Palo Alto
Includes paid partnerships.
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AI increases speculation in markets.
@BillAckman says that AI is making market participants increasingly shorter and shorter term.
"A 10-K gets published, and AI can read it instantly. There's a huge amount of capital invested in looking for a short-term edge. And AI, I think, enables that."
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We're entering the most competitive era for startup in history.
Binance co-founder and former CEO, @cz_binance says AI will make coding much easier, much like cloud services simplified the infrastructure needed to launch an internet startup.
"If we look at 20 years ago, if you want to do an internet startup, you have to set up your own servers. Now you've got AWS, you've got Microsoft Azure. So now that part is much easier. Now (with AI) coding will become much easier. "
"Everyone's going to be able to code. So now you really have to differentiate your idea. But overall, this is good."
"We will see a hundred more, a thousand times or maybe even a million times more startups, entrepreneurs, new ideas, innovations, et cetera. So this is good, very good in general."
Honored to speak at the @OxfordUnion. Freedom of speech and freedom of money, two cornerstones of a healthy society.
Two (high quality) videos:
Fireside chat:
youtu.be/2WhyikBJmZ0?si=sRt9…
Q&A:
youtu.be/t6vv9eaPR_A?si=EGoZ…
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This is insane. Former CEO of Binance @cz_binance says banks are getting hacked too. They just hide it better.
"In the past week, we're seeing like three or four hacks on different crypto platforms every day and not just crypto platforms. Banks as well. I can probably tell you that many banks are getting hacked, but we don't know. They're not public about it. You only hear about them six months later."
"Whereas with a blockchain, at least you see what's happening. You know, you see the $40 million leaving a Brazilian exchange."
He goes on to say that we will see more AI-powered hacks. But in the long run, AI is making our systems more secure.
"There's going to be more of this kind of instances. But what the truth is, AI is actually making our systems safer. By uncovering all of this security issues, we can now fix them."
"So yeah, so it's a short term. It's a double edged sword, but long term. I strongly believe that AI is actually going to make our systems much safer. Just the transition will be very painful."
Honored to speak at the @OxfordUnion. Freedom of speech and freedom of money, two cornerstones of a healthy society.
Two (high quality) videos:
Fireside chat:
youtu.be/2WhyikBJmZ0?si=sRt9…
Q&A:
youtu.be/t6vv9eaPR_A?si=EGoZ…
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