le daron

People think the current fight is about AI, about Nvidia, about a few bills in Washington. No. The real fight is much simpler, and much more serious. We're heading toward a new kind of civilization. That part is settled. The only question is: will we go through 1984 before we get there? One: why superintelligence destroys the current system. The system we live in rests on one scarcity: the scarcity of intelligence. To understand a law, you need a lawyer. To read a balance sheet, you need an expert. To build a case, you need a firm. To access a market, you need a permit. To know what's true, you need a newspaper, an agency, an institution to tell you. Every layer of this system is a toll booth. And every toll booth is manned by someone who lives off your inability to do without them. Superintelligence makes intelligence abundant. Almost free. Available to everyone, every second. When intelligence becomes abundant, the toll booths become useless. And the people manning them know it. So they'll do everything to keep the system alive. Not necessarily out of malice. Upton Sinclair summed it up: it's hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Licenses, moratoriums, federal agencies, blown-up scandals: every tool will be used to slow down what makes them obsolete. Two: even if they win, they lose. Because you can't contain an abundant technology with normal means. An AI model is a file. It can be copied, sent, run on a machine in a basement. To stop it from spreading, you have to monitor every computer, every chip, every line of code, every exchange. There's no soft version of that control. There's only a total one. That's the trap. To keep their system alive, they'll be forced to become totalitarian. Not because they want to, but because it's the only way to hold back abundance. History has played this game before. The Ottoman Empire kept the printing press at bay for nearly three centuries. It preserved the established order, and watched Europe overtake it in every field. The USSR controlled photocopiers and kept watch over typewriters. It collapsed anyway. And a system that confiscates the leverage of the many to reserve it for the few is, by definition, unfair. An unfair system can last. It can't last forever. It always ends up imploding, under the weight of its own illegitimacy, or under pressure from those elsewhere who didn't hit the brakes. They can buy time. All they can do is push back the deadline. And the price of that delay is 1984. Three: Elon's project. Look at what he's building, piece by piece. Abundant energy, with solar and batteries. Abundant labor, with robots. Abundant intelligence, with AI. Free information, with Starlink and X, far harder for a regime to shut down. And access to space, with reusable rockets. This isn't a collection of companies. It's a machine for destroying scarcity. And the world of takers and financiers lives off scarcity. Organized scarcity of access, permissions, capital, information. A world that captured everything through coercion and lies, by standing between people and what they could build. Takers live off scarcity. Elon is industrializing abundance. When abundance wins, rent dies. The toll booth has no road left to block. The gatekeeper has no gate left to guard. That's why this fight is so violent. It's not a policy debate. It's one world fighting not to disappear, against another one being born. We can go through 1984. Or we can skip straight to what comes next. It's being decided now. What a time to be alive.

Alex Soros just thanked "my friend President Macron" for another great Paris Peace Forum. On the menu: making AI safe and protecting children. When the chairman of the Open Society Foundations and the Élysée Palace congratulate each other on regulating AI, you need to read the fine print. Here's a simple rule for the decade ahead: when a regulation is applauded by a foundation nobody elected, ask yourself who it really protects. Hint: not you. Economists have a name for this. In 1983, Bruce Yandle called it "Bootleggers and Baptists." During Prohibition, two groups campaigned to ban alcohol. The Baptists, in the name of morality. And the bootleggers, because the ban made them rich. The first supplied the speeches. The second cashed the checks. No regulation ever passes without its Baptists. "The common good." "Democracy." "The children." The words change. The mechanics never do. Look at what was signed this week. November 9, at the Élysée: the Paris Call for AI Safety and Security. Shared model evaluations, developer accountability, and a commitment to be able to restrict, pause or shut down a system. Non-binding, for now. It always starts with "non-binding." The next day: the Children First Declaration. The principle, in Macron's own words: no AI should be placed in the hands of children without first being tested, evaluated, and therefore authorized. Read that last word again. Authorized. By whom? Tested by whom, under what criteria, with what power to say no? Nobody says yet. But the principle is set: for an AI to exist anywhere near a child, it needs permission. Now ask yourself the real question: which AI doesn't end up, one day, in the hands of a child? It always starts with the children. Social media banned for under-15s. So age verification. So ID verification. For everyone. We've already seen this movie with Chat Control in Brussels: scanning the private messages of 450 million Europeans, in the name of child protection. Next question: who can afford evaluations, audits and authorization procedures in thirty countries? Microsoft, yes. A developer releasing an open model from his bedroom, no. A ten-person startup, no. Incumbents call it safety. Economists call it a barrier to entry. George Stigler won a Nobel partly for proving it: over time, the regulator ends up serving the very industry it's supposed to regulate. And around the table sits a third winner. The one everyone forgets: the caste itself. Foundations, forums, commissions, experts, evaluation institutes. Every new rule creates a new gate. Every gate creates jobs, budgets and power. And a technology that can no longer exist without their stamp. The Open Society isn't there by accident. It was already listed among the Forum's strategic partners in 2023, alongside the European Commission and Microsoft. Tens of billions poured over forty years into NGOs, media and political causes. No voter ever approved it. No citizen can revoke it. And that network now wants a seat at the table where it's decided which AI gets to exist. The children aren't the goal. They're the argument. Because nobody dares vote against "the children." That's exactly why they're put on the front line. Let's be clear: protecting kids is a real issue. That's the job of parents, schools, and the tools we give them. Not of a global authorization regime launched from the Élysée with the Open Society's blessing. The worst part is the timing. AI is the first technology that directly threatens the caste's power: it lets anyone verify, compare and build without asking anyone's permission. And that is precisely the technology they want to put behind a permission gate. That's not a coincidence. It's a survival reflex. In my last post, I wrote that the 9% never needed to win the argument. They just had to hold the gates. This week in Paris, they poured the foundation for the gate. It's on us to stop them from building it.

Prediction. Screenshot this post, we'll talk again in five years. They're going to pull it off. Jensen Huang is going to be pushed out of Nvidia. And here's what happens next. Elon hires Jensen and puts him in charge of Terafab. He's already said it publicly: hiring him would be an honor. And Terafab is the project made for him. A chip factory Musk wants to be the largest ever built, one terawatt of compute per year, from design to packaging under one roof. Terafab's challenge is to do in a few years what the industry took decades to build. There's only one man on Earth who knows every layer of that stack. They execute like absolute maniacs. Musk brings speed, capital and appetite for risk. Jensen brings thirty years of mastery of the stack: architecture, software, customers, supply chain. Musk builds factories faster than anyone alive. Jensen knows exactly what to put inside them. It's the only duo in the world capable of compressing a decade into three years. SpaceXAI merges with Tesla. This isn't even science fiction anymore: independent committees are already studying the merger. Rockets, satellites, AI, robots, self-driving cars, energy, and now chips. One single entity, integrated from silicon to orbit. The group climbs to $50 trillion. Today, SpaceX and Tesla are worth around $3.4 trillion combined. $50 trillion sounds insane. But remember: ten years ago, Nvidia was worth a few tens of billions. When you own superintelligence, the robots that do the work and the rockets that go to space, you don't capture a market. You capture the economy. Elon buys Nvidia. Meanwhile, Nvidia without Jensen does what every company does after losing its founder: it manages. It protects its margins. It loses ground to its own customers' in-house chips. And one day, it becomes a target. For a $50 trillion group, buying Nvidia is just one acquisition among others. Jensen becomes the chip boss again. He takes over the semiconductor division of the new entity. Pushed out of his own company, he gets it back from above, inside the largest industrial group in history. Sounds crazy? Steve Jobs did exactly that. Pushed out of Apple, he came back when Apple bought NeXT. You know the rest. Nvidia's board thinks it's getting rid of a problem. It's creating the biggest competitor in its history. See you in five years.

⚠️⚠️ If Nvidia fires Jensen Huang, America loses the AI race. And China wins it. ⚠️⚠️ I'm choosing my words carefully. Nvidia's board is deciding whether to remove its founder. Wall Street wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars in a single evening, and everyone is pretending you can replace a CEO like you change a light bulb. You can't replace Jensen Huang. This isn't about morality. It's about mechanics. Let's start from the beginning. Three engineers meet in a Denny's in San Jose. Jensen is 30. As a teenager, he washed dishes in that same kind of diner. The plan: chips for 3D graphics, in a market that doesn't exist yet. The first product flops. The Sega deal falls apart. Nvidia is weeks away from dying. Jensen goes to Sega, admits his chip won't work, and asks them for money anyway. Sega invests $5 million. That money saves the company. For years, he opens his meetings with the same line: we are 30 days from going out of business. Then comes the GeForce, the first GPU. Then CUDA. He decides to make his chips programmable for any kind of computation, not just video games. Billions burned for a decade on a bet nobody understands. Wall Street hates it. He holds. Then AlexNet, the neural network that kicks off the deep learning revolution, is trained on two Nvidia graphics cards. Jensen understands what it means before anyone else. He pivots the entire company to AI. He personally hand-delivers the first DGX-1 supercomputer to a small research lab called OpenAI. Today Nvidia is worth around $4 trillion. Almost all the AI on the planet runs on its chips. That's not luck. That's 33 years of tryhard. And here's what people don't understand about founders. A founder CEO isn't a job title. It's a nervous system. Jensen has around sixty direct reports. He knows every layer of the stack: transistor physics, chip architecture, software, data centers, TSMC, customers, governments. He sees the next bottleneck before it shows up. That kind of awareness isn't taught in an MBA. It doesn't transfer in a three-month handover. It's built over three decades of brutal decisions, made against everyone's advice. Right now, no one else on Earth has that level of awareness of the system. Even Dan Ives, one of the most followed analysts on Wall Street, says it: Jensen is not replaceable, and no one on the bench can step in seamlessly. The name floated for interim CEO is the CFO. An excellent CFO. But the question isn't who keeps the books. It's who decides the next architecture. We've seen this movie before. Twice. Steve Jobs. Apple's board pushes him out. Serious managers take over. Twelve years later, Apple is months from bankruptcy. Jobs comes back. iMac, iPod, iPhone. Apple becomes the most valuable company in the world. Travis Kalanick. Investors push him out. Uber becomes calmer, more profitable. And walks away from the most important bet of its generation: it sells its self-driving unit. Today Waymo runs robotaxis across American cities, and Uber signs partnerships with the people it could have beaten. A company that manages. No longer a company that conquers. The pattern is always the same. A board optimizes for reputational risk. A founder optimizes for the mission. Replace the second with the first, and the company doesn't die right away. It just stops making the bets that matter. And the further we go into AI, the truer this gets. When everything changes every six months, when a single architecture decision commits $100 billion, when thousands of agents execute what a handful of humans decide, value concentrates in one thing: the judgment of whoever holds the wheel. AI doesn't dilute the founder's role. It multiplies it. Should national security concerns be taken seriously? Of course. An independent investigation is normal. But the board itself said it had no reason to believe Nvidia's secrets or national security were compromised. And we're talking about removing the most strategic person in American tech before the findings are even in. So let's ask one question. If a Chinese intelligence operation really was targeting Nvidia, what would its best possible outcome be? Not a stolen secret. Jensen Huang's exit. Beijing doesn't need to beat Nvidia. The board can do it for them.

I don't know if you realize this, but Elon Musk buying X may well go down in human history as the act that put Western civilization back on track. October 2022. 44 billion dollars. Everyone laughed. Advertisers left. Columnists announced the death of the platform. Four years later, it's the only place on earth where the official narrative gets fact-checked in real time, by millions of people, without asking anyone's permission. To understand why that mattered so much, you have to understand one thing. Here's why legacy media has become extremely racist. Let's start from the beginning. In the 1930s, from his prison cell, Antonio Gramsci realized the revolution wouldn't come through the factories. It would come through culture. Whoever holds the schools, the universities, the press and the arts decides what people consider normal. He called it cultural hegemony. The Frankfurt School then supplied the lens: the world is split into oppressors and oppressed, and everything must be read through that filter. After the war, the West won the economic battle. And lost the battle of ideas. In France, the Communist Party took more than a quarter of the vote in 1946. Intellectuals fell in line. The saying of the time: better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron. A whole generation moved into the lecture halls, the newsrooms, the ministries. And never left. In 1989, the Wall fell. Economic communism was dead. But its ideas had already taken the institutions. Communism lost the Cold War. It won the culture war. The problem is that this project never produced anything good. Record debt. Deindustrialization. A state that swallows more than half the national wealth while public services collapse anyway. Add immigration that no government has managed to control, and you get the double cocktail: economic chaos and migration chaos. How do you get a population to accept that? You take care of the young. Schools and universities that teach kids less how to think and more how to distrust their own civilization. And around that system, you find everyone who needed status. Girard saw it: we want what others want. In that world, status no longer comes from what you build. It comes from the virtue you display. The people who lived off it took the newsrooms, and the money followed: state press subsidies, public broadcasting, outlets bought for influence far more than for profit. The result: dozens of outlets. One single line. And people noticed. In France, 61% of citizens now say they distrust the media. In the US, trust fell to 28% in 2025, the lowest Gallup has ever recorded since 1972. Even with this year's small bounce, two out of three Americans no longer trust them. When you can't convince anymore, you have one weapon left: the accusation. So everyone becomes a racist. The factory worker. The farmer. The voter who voted wrong. The father worried about his street. We see it in France. We see it in America. Same script, same words, same day. And that's when the mask falls. A system that claimed it wanted to abolish skin color now talks about nothing else. It sorts people by origin. It hands out guilt to some and innocence to others, at birth, without knowing a single thing they've done. Judging people by the color of their skin has a name. They use that name every day. Against everyone else. This isn't strength. It's the weapon of people who've run out of arguments. It's the sign of a world coming to an end. And that world is going to collapse. When it does, we'll need a Nuremberg 2.0. Not of individuals, but of a system of lies. Everything documented, everything on the record, so that never again can a handful of newsrooms decide on behalf of an entire people what they're allowed to see and think. Then comes the renaissance. People who build instead of shaming. Nations that reconnect with reality. A civilization that learns to love itself again. For seventy years, if you wanted to reach millions of people, you had to go through them. Not anymore. They had the newsrooms. We have reality. And reality always wins in the end.