Founder of GatherTip https://xitter.cf/t.co/gZocOpJgfG 30+ yrs tech & media startups.
San Francisco, CA
Joined November 2016
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JimFox retweeted
This is a touchdown. The 49ers got cheated outright by the NFL because they were trying to make sure the points spread would go against Vegas because the Niners should’ve never lost this game.
This was a touchdown
It’s incredible the cheating
What really get's me the commentators get on and start gas lighting including the rules expert @FOXSports
JimFox retweeted
This makes me want to quit watching football @nfl
JimFox retweeted
Social engineers pretending to be Google Support keep calling me, so I took the opportunity to create this educational video showcasing their tactics.
I’m sure it’s just a quinky dink that the shelves at Trader Joe’s are empty started to notice this last week. They said they switched warehouses. Gotta to say the timing is a little suspect though 🧐 @chrismartenson
JimFox retweeted
So Meta (Facebook) is selling $30 billion in stock to fund AI. Key takeaways for me from below are:
✅Suppliers AMD, Nvidia & Broadcom are buying $5 billion so more circle jerk financing
✅Bond markets getting expensive so expect others in this space to sell equity to finance AI
With expected IPO’s of Anthropic and OpenAI plus mag 7 going from stock buybacks to equity issuance the supply demand equation for equities is changing on the margin.
🦔Meta is selling about $35 billion of new stock to pay for AI, and it plans up to $60 billion more starting in 2027 through a new class of shares with no vote. Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom, which all sell Meta its AI hardware, said they may buy up to $5 billion of it. Meta’s stock dipped at the open and was up about 0.5% by late morning.
My Take
So Meta spent about $148.6 billion buying back its own stock from 2021 through 2025, and now it wants new buyers to hand some of that money back. That’s a rough trade for long-term shareholders. This sale comes days after Meta’s free cash flow went negative and the cost of insuring its debt hit a record, so borrowing more got expensive and shareholders pick up the bill instead. (Zuckerberg keeps about 60% of the vote either way.)
Chipmakers buying stock in their own customer is the same loop Anthropic’s filing laid out this morning, where Google, Amazon, Broadcom and AMD fund the company that buys their compute. It keeps their sales strong, and it ties all of them to AI spending holding up. More of the big spenders will sell stock over the next few quarters, since the bond market has gotten pricey for them, and plenty of those new shares will end up in ordinary people’s index funds.
Hedgie🤗
I’ve been saying this ever since DeepSeek came out.
"My biggest fear is cheap Chinese compute."
Academy Securities' Peter Tchir warns China could take over AI compute like it did telecom chips and manufacturing, putting valuations at risk
"We still really have no idea what this market will look like in 2 to 3 years. We're going through this transformational change. We're spending boatloads of money without any surety that this boatloads of money will actually truly work."
"I just see China doing the same thing they did with telecom chips. Huawei went from nowhere to being one of the biggest leaders around."
"They did it with rare earths and critical minerals, the processing, refining. They did it with manufacturing, and I've seen them take a lot of the same steps with this cheap Chinese compute."
"And I'm not sure how we keep our valuations if that turns out to be the path."
"They come in at 1/20th the price in some cases. And it feels like the rate of improvement with the top quality models that we have is marginal versus how easy it is to get just below them."
JimFox retweeted
This paper answers why confident idiots run the world.
Cornell University published a psychological paper that explains every terrible boss, every loud influencer, and every broken corporate hierarchy.
It’s called “Unskilled and Unaware of It.”
they tested participants across logic, grammar, and humor to measure the gap between actual performance and self-perception.
And the results are wild.
participants scoring in the bottom 12th percentile consistently believed they were operating in the 62nd percentile.
they were not lying. they were literally incapable of recognizing their own incompetence.
the paper revealed a brutal paradox:
the exact skills required to master a domain are the exact same skills required to accurately evaluate your own competence in that domain.
if you lack the skill, you inherently lack the cognitive capacity to realize you are failing.
this creates a dangerous systemic loop.
the incompetent are blessed with absolute, blinding certainty. their brain protects them from their own ignorance, allowing them to speak first, demand authority, and never second-guess their decisions.
meanwhile, the actual experts suffer the exact inverse.
top performers in the study consistently underestimated their rank. because a task was easy for them, they falsely assumed it was easy for everyone else.
they hesitate. they obsess over nuance. they assume they have nothing unique to add.
we are biologically wired to confuse confidence with competence.
the loudest person in the room gets promoted, gets funded, and gets the microphone, not because they know what they are doing, but because they are physically incapable of seeing what they don't.
the only defense mechanism is building systems that stop rewarding absolute certainty and start demanding proof of work.
JimFox retweeted
New BIP published:
BIP139: Wallet Metadata Export Format
github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob…
JimFox retweeted
Getty Images spent over 30 years selling permission. It owned more than 400 million photographs, and anyone who wanted to use one had to pay for the right.
The business worked because good images were scarce and Getty controlled the supply.
AI made images abundant. Anyone can now produce a professional-looking photograph in seconds for almost nothing, and a company built on rationing something struggles once that thing stops being rare.
Getty is another famous early example of what happens when AI turns something scarce into something free.
There will be many more!
JimFox retweeted
I spent the last week in San Francisco meeting founders, CEOs, and people at the frontier of AI.
Some observations I thought were worth sharing:
1. There’s a massive AI gold rush, and everyone knows. I met founders from London, Berlin, Croatia, and a dozen other countries who flew in to raise money and find customers.
2. Founders are raising venture capital to build personal brands on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. If the product fails, they can promote other products or become full-time creators. Career insurance.
3. AI influencers are PRINTING money. I heard of creators with 100,000 followers making $1M a year. AI companies have more cash than channels, and nearly every tech and career influencer I know has pivoted to AI.
4. AI companies are sponsoring billboards, buses, cafes, and crazy parties. AI marketing spend is insane right now.
5. But standing out has never been harder. There are 100 CRMs, 100 event planning tools, and 100 AI SDRs. When anyone can build the product, branding and storytelling decide the winner.
6. B2A (business to agents) is the new B2B. Marketers now create content and design products to sell to agents. Have you ever read a blog post meant for agents? It’s a little dystopian.
7. Many founders have a doomer AI mindset: pessimistic about the future, optimistic about their company. The people closest to the technology are often the most paranoid.
8. Company “aura” is a hot topic. CEOs are obsessed with making their companies sexy enough to attract top talent. With more missionaries than mercenaries, the founder’s vision matters more than ever.
9. I met so many people stuck in the abyss: wealthy enough to be choosy about their careers, not wealthy enough to stop working. Most are figuring out what’s next in the AI world.
10. Everyone is selling data. It’s not unusual to hear of a founder selling their company’s Slack data for half a million dollars.
11. Startup creation is becoming a factory: Y Combinator, HF0, Founders Inc. I visited a Founders Inc demo day that felt like a high school science fair, but with companies instead of volcanoes. Some founders were 16 and had already raised venture money.
12. Hacker houses are booming because founders want to compress time. At one, founders gave themselves six months to hit product-market fit. They eat, sleep, and work in the same house.
13. The gap between SF and everywhere else keeps widening. People here are more AI-pilled than ever, yet most people outside tech hubs have never heard of Instinct.
14. SF might be the only place where saying you work at Google makes people question your judgment. As in, why aren’t you building something?
15. The new flex is tiny teams. Gamma does $100M+ in revenue with 50 employees ($2M per employee). Five years ago, headcount was the flex.
I love my trips to SF. Thank you to everyone who welcomed me and showed me around.
Happy to be back home.
See you soon!
JimFox retweeted
The rest of the world is waking up to the realization that all software is broken.
The Bitcoin ecosystem has run so many drills in the last 3 months that it doesn’t phase us anymore.
JimFox retweeted
Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10.
Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years.
Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.
JimFox retweeted
So far in the Great Information Freakout of October 22, we have:
The entire internet and every user is at risk to a massive cyberattack,
Quantum computing will soon break bitcoin and send it to zero,
A company has devised a way to create pure and unlimited gold through fusion,
There will never be a resolution to the war in Iran,
And Democrats are on track to sweep the midterm elections and turn the United States into a communist country.
Did I miss anything?
JimFox retweeted
Internet is in shambles, websites coming down after PHP disaster, AI exploiting everything, Chinese and Asian stocks crashing, oil at cycle highs, war escalating, French yields parabolic etc…
And Bitcoin is just kinda hanging out in the 80s, doing its own thing...
JimFox retweeted
There is always the question of why people are losing patience with the old politics around the world.
In the United States, in Europe, in Latin America, no one can stand the maintainers of the status quo anymore.
And in Europe, the problem is hidden in cowardice.
German Chancellor Merz recently said:
“My biggest concern right now is not our economy, not the European Union, not America, not China.
My biggest concern is the impact of Russia on our society and how they are managing to destabilize our societies.”
This is the greatest synthesis of what I have been saying for a long time. Europe has clung to the excuse of a Russian threat so it does not have to discuss what really matters.
Every month some European intelligence service claims that the Russians are planning an invasion.
Instead of carrying out the reforms society actually wants, they perpetuate insecurity and fear. Fortunately, few people in Europe believe this narrative.
Where is the German leader’s speech about a major plan to make energy cheaper and bring companies back? There is none.
Where is the speech on replacing Russian gas cheaply? There is none.
Where is the speech about building new relationships with the supply chains that Europe has lacked, and lacked badly? There is none.
Where and when will this European cowardice give way to serious and independent policies?
And this does not apply only to German leadership. I could give several other examples.
When there is no Russian invasion planned for next week, they talk about Chinese sabotage. It is never them, always the others.
Let us hope the new European generations are able to take back the reins and build a future with seriousness.