I'm always amused when people are shocked by people doing exactly what they said they’d do. Everything that has happened over the past week was publicly announced months ago. Stephen Miran, widely viewed as the architect of Trump's trade policy, published a paper "A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System" in November of 2024, laying out everything that has happened (as well as many things that are yet to come).

tldr: 1) they’re not insolvent yet 2) numbers improving 3) compute procurement most critical risk

Apparently Dario gets to handpick five people who then handpick the majority of Anthropic’s board, forever. While this shadow board may seem sketchy, it’s important to remember that, thanks to super voting shares, no one besides the cofounders has any real say in governance anyway.

Skimmed Anthropic’s S-1 and it looks surprisingly strong. Revenue went from $41M in 2023 to $16.3B in the first half of this year. Operating loss is basically gone and adjusted operating income is already positive. They’re getting way more revenue out of the same compute, NRR is ~900%, and they’ve got $132B in cash. The absolute size of the spend is still the elephant in the room. Non-cancelable compute commitments run deep into the next decade and the raw numbers are massive even if the GAAP losses are mostly mark-to-market noise. There’s also a circular piece to the revenue. A lot of it still runs through Amazon and Google’s marketplaces same companies that are investors, suppliers, and competitors. It’s unclear how much of the revenue is just ai companies buying ai.

worth checking the comment section here before it gets cleaned up great place to find out who has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about

Lula's victory... may save CoreWeave? EMEA have had a rough October. Paris is in flames, French sovereign yields are approaching 5%, Indonesia has lost $65B in market value amid threats of an MSCI downgrade w/ a rapidly escalating spat with Singapore. Taiwan, Iran, Yemen, and Ukraine all remain sources of geopolitical uncertainty. Meanwhile, the American AI buildout is running into a credit crunch. CoreWeave's bonds are yielding around 15% as the markets assess the viability of their business model in a volatile rates environment. The dollar remains the world's default refuge, less because America is particularly stable than because everything else looks much worse. During the 2008 financial crisis, foreign investors bought $335B in Treasuries over three months. During the 2011 European debt crisis, they bought another $147B. The more the global markets deteriorate, the more money flows into American bonds, the lower rates fall. A recent Federal Reserve study found a 9 bp impact for every 300b of inflows. This would offer CoreWeave and the other eeoclouds immediate relief. But the most troubling implication is Washington's incentives: it's pretty easy to argue that it's easier for Trump to destabilize foreign markets than force the federal reserve to cut rates.

interesting

we're at the helicopter money stage of the recession

power has no memory of whom it was intended to serve, nor whom it was meant to subdue

Almost every investing blowup can be traced back to confusing luck with skill. Consistent returns require the humility to recognize when something worked for the wrong reasons and the discipline not to repeat it.

LPs will be choosing between: -A16Z gaming fund VII (10b, fund VI underperformed S&P) -“Mykonos Capital” (300m, ex Goldman Sachs Harvard grad whose relevant experience is 6 years as a principal at NEA) -“Paperclip” (100m, ex Anthropic engineer anchoring with 20m of his own capital made through backing Cursor’s A) I don’t think this is a hard decision

Brutal winters: totalitarianism Mild winters: liberal democracy No winters: kleptocracy

Palmer Luckey has gone too far