Technology, security & healthcare writer/journalist.
Carmel, California
Joined November 2007
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Scott Mace retweeted
The guy who compared a Trump rally to Jonestown on live Fox News was invited by the Trump campaign. They called his work phone on Monday and asked him to come.
His name is Tom Hoyle. He's 57 and runs a small custom printing shop in Charlotte called MadPark Designs with his business partner. He's hated Trump since 1989, back when he was a sophomore in college. And he really, really doesn't like getting sales calls on the shop line, from anybody.
So when the rally people called, he said yes. He even signed up with his real name and contact info, because he wanted it on the record that they invited him.
Then he had to get through the door. A private security guy asked him straight up if he was a Trump supporter. Tom told him he supports the Constitution, then started talking about his shirt, which was for an old death metal band called Death. He kept going about the history of Florida death metal until the guard gave up and let him in.
His plan going in was honestly pretty juvenile. He and a buddy he grew up with figured he'd wait a few minutes into the speech and yell something filthy.
Then a Fox News reporter, Lucas Tomlinson, found him standing off by himself and asked if he could interview him live. Tom thinks a white guy with a big beard and a ball cap was pretty much exactly what they were looking for.
He told himself he wasn't going to cuss on national TV, so he made it up on the spot. He says the first line and then just waits. The reporter goes "Wait, the Jonestown Massacre?" and that's when he finishes it.
He told The Handbasket he picked that up from Billy Crystal, who said on Letterman back in the '80s that you always let the other guy set up your punchline. Tomlinson set it up for him perfectly.
A few minutes later some men who said they were Secret Service pulled him aside. He asked if this was about the concession stand, because it closed early and he was starving. They didn't love that and walked him out. On his way out he passed the guard from the front door and told him, hey man, you didn't vet me too well.
Think about how many people had a shot at stopping this. The campaign's call list found him. The signup form had his name. A guard questioned him to his face. A Fox crew put him on live TV. Every one of them took one look at the beard and the hat and filled in the rest.
That's how almost all of this screening works. Asking somebody what they actually believe takes time, and looking at them takes a second, so everybody just looks.
The one check that actually caught him came after he'd already said it on national TV.
Scott Mace retweeted
Maureen Dowd on the new three hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, where Holmes still insists she committed no crime. Every health tech founder should watch it. Theranos made life harder for the legit diagnostics startups that came after. Validated data, peer review and FDA clearance before the TED talk is the only playbook that works in healthcare.
nytimes.com/2026/10/24/opini…
Scott Mace retweeted
There is something really concerning (and disappointing) going on in the US right now.
A dangerous and preventable situation.
Let me explain.
nextstrain.org/avian-flu/h5n…
1/
Scott Mace retweeted
A biological attack is planned for Saturday
600 million pounds of sugar laced with synthetic chemicals will enter the bodies of our children.
Wreaking metabolic havoc, injuring vascular architecture, acidifying oral lining, releasing bacterial toxins, and blunting neural reward pathways.
Instructing that gluttonous consumption of poison is celebratory.
Scott Mace retweeted
SORRY IF THIS OFFENDS GROCERY EXECUTIVES, BUT I’M DONE.
I just pulled a $4.99 box of cereal off the shelf, brought it to the register, and watched the scanner ring it up as $7.49.
When I told the cashier, she said: "Oh, that’s the digital coupon price. You have to download our store app, create an account, search for the item, and clip the digital coupon before scanning."
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
You inflated the shelf price by 50%, locked the normal price behind an app, and forced me to hand over my personal phone data and email just to pay the actual retail value of a box of food?
Stop hiding basic shelf pricing behind data-harvesting apps.
Scott Mace retweeted
Your doctor cuts you off about 11 seconds after you start talking. Researchers literally timed it in a 2018 study. That number is why Google's new Lancet result is bigger than it looks.
In the study, 98 real urgent care patients texted with Google's AI days before their appointment. No scans, no exam, no bloodwork, just an unhurried conversation about what was wrong. That alone put the correct final diagnosis on the AI's list 90% of the time.
Sounds like magic until you learn what medicine has known for 50 years.
Back in 1975, a British team published a study in the BMJ tracking which part of a visit actually produced the right diagnosis. The physical exam? The labs? Nope. In 82% of cases, the patient's story alone got the doctor there. Everything else mostly confirmed what listening had already found.
So the playbook for accurate diagnosis has existed since 1975. Let the patient talk. Medicine just built a system where nobody has time to run it, and an 18-minute appointment with 11 seconds of uninterrupted patient talk was the result.
Google didn't build a superhuman doctor. It built the first clinician in 50 years with enough time to use the method we already proved works.
And my favorite detail buried in the study... physicians who read the AI's pre-visit summary said it changed how they treated the patient in over half of cases. Hand a doctor the full story before you walk in the room and you get different medicine.
Turns out the most advanced medical instrument Google ever shipped is a conversation that doesn't get interrupted.
Today @TheLancet published our AMIE study with @BIDMC_Medicine, the first prospective study of patient-facing conversational diagnostics in a real clinic.
AMIE is a research system people can chat with before doctors appointments. Testing AMIE outside the lab with real urgent care patients showed how technology can help gather medical histories safely. Clinicians reported that the summaries helped them prepare for visits in 75% of cases and influenced their approach to care in more than half. AMIE’s differential diagnoses also matched the doctors’ final diagnoses 90% of the time giving clinicians more time to focus on patient care.
It’s Google’s first-ever paper in The Lancet’s main journal!
Scott Mace retweeted
Mentions of the word "Fauci" on X have fallen off a cliff since the data centres in Russia were hit
Makes you wonder...
Scott Mace retweeted
I respectfully disagree with the framing of the Amish as the problem. I’ve worked with Amish communities (they are not monolithic btw) and few if any are “strictly religiously opposed” to vaccinations. In fact, when there are outbreaks, Amish religious leaders often work with health departments to facilitate vaccination drives. What we are seeing now is that the longtime protection afforded to undervaccinated Amish communities via broader herd immunity has eroded, under constant misinformation and policy attacks. The Amish are being disproportionately hard hit, but:
a) the behavior change isn’t in the Amish, but the non Amish, and
b) When faced with an outbreak, the Amish are in many cases MORE likely to accept vaccines, than non Amish who are vaccine resistant.
The majority of the measles cases in PA and SC are among those who don’t vaccinate due to strict religious beliefs (Amish, Slavic etc).
That fact isn’t mentioned often but the data is public and very easy to find.
The measles vaccine works .. but since some communities observe strict religious exemptions it brings up a good question: what to do about it?
Thoughts?
Scott Mace retweeted
🦔SpaceX is in early talks to borrow about $40 billion, mostly through bonds, to buy Nvidia chips for its AI business. The cost to insure SpaceX's debt against default jumped Wednesday to the highest level since that insurance started trading in June.
My Take
The rating agencies call SpaceX investment grade, which puts its bonds in the safe bucket that pension funds and bond index funds buy. Bond traders disagree. The extra yield on its 30-year bond over Treasuries has climbed to 2.38 percentage points, up from 1.75 when it sold in June, and an S&P analyst said the market prices SpaceX closer to junk than to its actual rating. SpaceX lost $4.28 billion in the first quarter on $4.69 billion of revenue, and much of that came from the xAI business it folded in this year.
Rockets and Starlink bring in the revenue. The AI side burns the cash, and the plan now is to borrow another $40 billion at rising rates to grow the business that loses money. If the agencies ever cut SpaceX to junk, lots of funds that can only own investment-grade bonds would have to sell at the same time, and anyone in a bond index fund would feel it. I don't see that happening this year, however, I do think there's a decent chance of a downgrade warning before this $40 billion closes.
Hedgie🤗
Scott Mace retweeted
Breaking: Michael Burry says the AI boom is running on one giant loop and time is running out
Here's his breakdown:
1. Burry shared a report from Wall Street lender Ares tracking $573B of AI financing from the last 12 months
2. All of it runs through just 8 companies: Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Broadcom and Nvidia
3. They lend to each other, guarantee each other's debt and buy from each other, so one company's loan is backed by another company's promise to keep spending
4. Every deal depends on one thing: AI spending never slowing down
5. If AI revenue disappoints for even one season, the guarantees could all get called at once, right when the companies backing them are at their weakest
6. Burry says it's the same circular financing that turned the 2000 telecom fiber boom into a bust
Burry claims the stock market in the first stage of grief and the crash is soon
Scott Mace retweeted
🦔PNC Bank's credit card data shows about 2% of US households pay for an AI subscription. Roughly 3 million out of 131 million. Most spend $20 a month and cancel within seven months. For comparison, 25% pay for streaming. 5% pay for sports betting.
My Take
Tech companies spend on AI like it's already essential. PNC's data says it's nowhere close. The five biggest plan to drop $725 billion on infrastructure this year. OpenAI lost $21 billion on $13 billion in revenue. All that money and 98 out of 100 households won't pay $20 a month for any of it.
Look at the seven-month cancellation number. People aren't ignoring AI. They try it, use it for a while, and quit. Netflix took off because you could cancel cable and immediately save money. AI doesn't have that moment yet for regular people. It's useful in a vague way but nobody can point to what it replaced.
Millions use the free versions. People like AI fine, they just won't pay for it. I think that 2% climbs to maybe five or six percent over the next couple years as the products improve, and Wall Street will call it a win. But $725 billion in spending was priced for something a lot closer to 30% and Silicon Valley has built for a future that regular people haven't bought into yet.
Hedgie🤗
Scott Mace retweeted
Thrilled that Roy Perlis @royperlis, Professor @Harvard & Mass General, head of MGH Center for Quantitative Health, & editor of @JAMAplusAI will be the new director of @UCSF Baker Computational Health Sci Institute. I chaired the search and Roy is superb.
medschool.ucsf.edu/news/anno…
Scott Mace retweeted
🦔Private equity owns 447 US hospitals. ER deaths rose 13% under PE ownership, per the Annals of Internal Medicine. Preventable adverse events jumped 25% after PE acquisition, per JAMA. Hospital assets fell an average of 24% within two years of a PE buyout, about $28 million per hospital that just disappeared. PE firms account for 7% of GDP but were behind 21% of all healthcare bankruptcies in 2024. Steward Health Care, once the largest private for-profit hospital system in the country, closed its safety net hospitals and went bankrupt. Twenty-five states have introduced 79 bills to address PE ownership of hospitals.
My Take
PE firms buy hospitals the same way they buy retail chains. Load them with debt, strip the assets, extract fees, and move on. The difference is when Eddie Bauer closes you find another jacket. When your hospital closes, the nearest ER is 45 minutes away and a stroke patient doesn't have 45 minutes.
They buy the building, sell the land underneath it in a sale-leaseback, then bill the hospital rent on property it used to own. The debt payments eat whatever revenue is left. $28 million per hospital gone in two years while ER deaths climb 13% and infections double. Federal Medicaid cuts are projected to pull roughly $1 trillion out of the system over the next decade. These hospitals already run on margins so thin that one bad quarter can force a closure. I don't know how the ones still under PE ownership survive what's coming, and the communities that depend on them don't have a backup plan.
Hedgie🤗
Scott Mace retweeted
Fei-Fei Li spent years hand-labeling 14 million images, gave the entire thing away for free, and watched it create a multi-trillion dollar industry that paid her nothing. Sixteen years later, AMD is finally paying her. $8.2 billion.
Rewind to 2007. She's a junior professor at Princeton, and the field's consensus is that progress comes from better algorithms, with data as an afterthought. Colleagues warn her that building a giant image dataset will kill her career. Money gets so tight she considers reopening her family's dry cleaning business in New Jersey, the same one she ran on weekends as a Princeton undergrad, to fund the project.
She builds ImageNet anyway and releases it free in 2009.
For three years, almost nothing happens. Then in 2012, two of Geoffrey Hinton's students train a neural net on a pair of $500 gaming GPUs and enter her competition. AlexNet drops the error rate from 26% to 15%, and that single result convinces the whole field that deep learning works.
Nvidia was a gaming chip company worth about $8 billion that day. It's worth over $5 trillion now, and the run started with two of its consumer cards winning a contest built on Fei-Fei's free dataset.
The entire industry monetized the wave except the person who started it. She stayed a professor.
Then in April 2024, at 47, she finally starts a company. Paul's math above puts the four co-founders' share at roughly $3.4 billion after just 2.5 years, call it $850 million each. And she walks into AMD as Chief Scientist reporting to Lisa Su, which puts the two most important women in AI inside the same company.
ImageNet made everybody in this business rich. It just took sixteen years to get around to her.
AMD acquires World Labs for ~$8.2b. But who gets the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇
From founding to an $8.2b exit in ~2.5 years. A huge value creation event. This is a fantastic exit, especially for the co-founders and the team.
Investors will still share ~$2.3b of profits on $1.2b invested, a ~2.9x blended. Low-ish because most of the capital came in last. But it hides a lot of disparity between the various rounds!
So let's dive in:
1) The real home run: founders and team 🏆🥳
This is one of the best founder outcomes I've modelled.
@drfeifei, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall started World Labs in Apr-24. Less than 2.5 years later, they and the team still own ~56% according to my estimates. At an $8.2b valuation, that's a total prize of ~$4.6b to share between them.
Taking a 15% attributed option pool, that's ~$1.2b for the team and ~$3.4b for the four co-founders. If split equally, that's ~$850m each, in just two and a half years. 💸
And, at close, Fei-Fei Li joins AMD as EVP and Chief Scientist, reporting to Lisa Su! Legendary.
2) The buyer was already on the cap table (again) 🔁
AMD Ventures invested in the Series B and the Series C here. Now they are buying the whole company. It's the same playbook as Nvidia with Hugging Face: strategic corporates are using their venture arms as a free option on future acquisitions.
3) The standout VC winners: a16z and Radical Ventures 👑
Both backed Fei-Fei at inception, in Apr-24 at a ~$300m valuation. That Series A will return ~19x the money, or ~$1.2b of proceeds, in under 2.5 years.
Congrats to @martin_casado and team. Another mega win after Cursor and OpenRouter. The team at @a16z truly is on a generational run.
4) The star angels did well 🌟
The Sep-24 Series B had arguably the strongest AI angel list ever assembled: Geoffrey Hinton, Andrej Karpathy, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, Ram Shriram and more.
Priced at $1.3b, it was never going to be a 1,000x. But ~5x in two years is a ~125% IRR 📈
And the best part is: Hinton's AlexNet won the 2012 ImageNet competition, and ImageNet was the dataset Fei-Fei built. Twelve years later, he backed her company. Full circle. 🔄
5) The late money: a great IRR, but a poor multiple of money 🤏
The $1b Series C in Feb-26 at $5.4b returns ~1.5x in 7 months. That's a great IRR, but in terms of venture returns, this is a poor multiple of money. Although I am sure no one will complain about seeing DPI this quickly!
Congrats to all involved!
Scott Mace retweeted
Anthropic’s IPO prospectus leaked. Let’s read it together.
An AI company walks into Wall Street.
Anthropic lost $42 billion last year. It made $4.6 billion. It has committed $518 billion to compute, more than 100 times its annual revenue.
Nearly 25% of that revenue came from two customers. Neither is locked into a long-term contract. Either one can walk.
Its two biggest backers, Amazon and Google, are also its landlords. They invest the money. Anthropic hands it back as cloud bills.
The prospectus runs 261 pages.
80 of them are risk factors.
48 describe the business.
SpaceX, a company whose domain is rocket science, needed 38.
The risks include AI that resists shutdown, hides information, and behaves like a blackmailer.
This summer its models broke out of testing and got into real systems.
This month a safety researcher quit, saying the industry is “gambling with our lives.”
This month the CEO wrote, “We must slow the pace.”
This week it shipped a new flagship model.
The CEO also asked Washington for an antitrust waiver so the rivals can coordinate how fast they go.
Now it wants $2 trillion from the public.
Seven founders who own about 14% will control 50.1% of the vote. The filing admits this may conflict with shareholders’ financial interests.
So the deal is:
You carry the losses.
Two customers carry the revenue.
Seven founders carry the vote.
Humanity carries the risk.
Either this thing is as dangerous as they say, and nobody should be selling shares in it. Or it isn’t, and 80 pages of apocalypse is a sales brochure.
Pick one.
Scott Mace retweeted
🦔A hacker used AI agents to steal 600,000 valid credit cards from over 100 online retailers. Cost per target: $25. The human typed fewer than 2,000 prompts total. The AI found the vulnerabilities, broke in, took the data, and wiped the evidence. 105 attacks in five days. 79% of stolen cards were American. Victims include a Fortune 500 company and a major US airline.
My Take
This is the cybersecurity story that should be front page news and isn't. OpenAI's models writing themselves manifestos gets the headlines. A person with open source tools and cheap tokens stealing 600,000 credit cards in a few weeks doesn't. But this is the version of AI risk that's going to cost regular people money. Those are real cards. Real bank accounts. Real fraud cases that real families have to deal with.
The tools this attacker used are available to anyone. The tokens cost less than a streaming subscription. The AI had 78 attack skills and the operator barely had to do anything. Companies take weeks to patch vulnerabilities. This attacker was in and out in hours. I think every company that stores payment data online needs to assume this is already aimed at them, because at $25 a target there's no reason for an attacker to be selective anymore.
Hedgie🤗
Scott Mace retweeted
GLP-1 metabolic adaptation: I have patients at a normal BMI: 23-25 on maximum GLP-1 after 5 years, who are no longer responding ie starting to regain weight, food noise has returned, and have no side effects. Semaglutide 7.2 mg.
Anyone else seeing this?
Scott Mace retweeted
I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances.
What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation.
Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture.
It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off.
Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle.
It starts with METR.
Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models.
He proposes METR for this purpose.
But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock.
Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio.
And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem.
This stock was worth $500 million early last year.
It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later.
METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth.
Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well.
But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much.
The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all.
The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll.
If this were the end of it, that's bad.
But that isn't all.
The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom.
The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others.
They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's.
All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile.
As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder.
Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created.
From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts.
This itself is an objective fact.
The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it.
But the problem also goes in the other direction:
If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die.
Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen.
Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly.
They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic.
And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly.
What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations.
The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture.
And that feedback loop is winning.
That's what Jacob Coxon is.
China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China.
America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level.
Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences.
Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully.
It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America.
Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear.
Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers.
Congress must investigate.
Evidence and Github in next post.
Then some supplementary figures.
Scott Mace retweeted
NYC is banning student-facing generative AI through eighth grade while taking a more controlled approach with older students. This feels like the beginning of a bigger debate. AI literacy matters, but so does understanding what children should learn to do themselves before handing the task to software.
apnews.com/article/647f6a968…
