Tsla investor since 2012, referral site https://xitter.cf/t.co/AEkXxMgLhd Travel Agent Extraordinaire
Atlanta
Joined November 2010
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SwissUncle retweeted
In 1957, a Russian immigrant published a novel of more than a thousand pages built around one question: what happens if the people who make the world run simply stop?
Its title is Atlas Shrugged. In France it's called La Grève, The Strike. It wasn't even translated into French until 2011. That tells you something.
This morning, I think Elon Musk wrote the sequel.
A. Where the book comes from.
Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg in 1905. As a teenager, she watched Bolshevik soldiers walk into her father's pharmacy and seize it in the name of the people. Her family lost everything. Not to a competitor. To a committee.
She fled to America in 1926 and spent the rest of her life writing about one distinction: those who create, and those who seize.
B. The story.
In Atlas Shrugged, America is sliding into decline. Not because of war. Because of rules. Year after year, a growing class of bureaucrats, regulators and planners decides that production must be controlled, shared "fairly," frozen. They never build anything. They issue directives. The worst one freezes every worker in his job and forces every inventor to hand over his patents for the public good.
And one by one, the people who make the country run start disappearing. The best engineers. The industrialists. The inventors. An oil man sets his own wells on fire before vanishing. The whole country keeps repeating a question it doesn't understand: "Who is John Galt?"
John Galt is the man behind the disappearances. He has convinced the creators to go on strike. They withdraw to a hidden valley in the Colorado mountains, where everyone keeps what they make and trades freely. And they let the world find out what it looks like without them.
The lights go out in New York. The grey men are left alone with their directives, and discover that a directive has never produced a single kilowatt.
C. The core idea.
The strike isn't about money. It's about consent.
Rand's insight is that the system that captures the creators runs on their cooperation. It needs them to keep producing so it has something to redistribute. The bureaucrat is a parasite who needs a host. Remove the host, and he's exposed as what he always was: useless.
D. What Musk just did.
This morning, Musk announced that next year he will give one of his own SpaceX shares to every kid in America. "The first of many."
Here's what's fascinating. It's the strike, run in reverse.
Rand's creators withdrew. Musk stays. He keeps building rockets, satellites, AI. But instead of walking away from the system, he walks around it. The value goes straight from the builder to the citizen. No ministry, no agency, no committee in the middle.
Rand had to make the creators disappear to prove the bureaucrats were useless. Musk doesn't need to disappear. He just needs to stop routing value through them. Same result. The grey men are left standing in the middle of a pipe nobody uses anymore.
E. The difference that changes everything.
Rand's strike has a flaw her critics never stopped pointing out: ordinary people are left behind. The creators retreat to their valley. The rest of the country sits in the dark.
Musk's version fixes that. He isn't taking the creators out of the world. He's bringing the world into the valley. Every kid in America becomes a shareholder in the machine. Not a spectator of the strike. A participant.
That's the alliance being formed right now: builders and citizens, directly, with nothing in between. And the only people who lose that deal are the ones who never built anything.
F. Why now, and not in 1957.
In Rand's time, the strike was a fantasy. You couldn't produce at scale without the state's permission, and you couldn't reach every citizen without its pipes.
In 2026, one founder can build rockets, run a global network from orbit, and pledge equity to 73 million children in a single post. AI will soon do in seconds what a ministry does in years. The tools of the strike finally exist. And they don't require anyone to leave.
G. The ending.
For seventy years, "Who is John Galt?" was a shrug. A way of saying nothing can be done.
In the book, the strike ends when the creators decide the road is clear and walk back into the world to rebuild it.
That's the scene we're watching. Not a man leaving. A man coming back, with a gift for every child.
The grey men are about to discover what Rand promised them seventy years ago: a world that no longer needs them.
I don't know if you realize what just happened.
Elon Musk is completely bypassing the State.
For 100 years, we've been told the problem is capital. That it must be captured, taxed, redistributed. With an army of intermediaries standing between those who create wealth and the people: ministries, agencies, commissions, bureaucrats.
Musk is doing the opposite. He's taking his capital and giving it directly to the people. One SpaceX share to every kid in America. Not a handout. Not a subsidy. A piece of the machine that's taking humanity to Mars.
And he says it himself: this is the first of many.
Mises understood this back in 1944: the bureaucrat creates nothing. He administers what others created, following rules that have no connection to the value produced. The day value flows directly from the one who creates it to the one who receives it, the bureaucrat has no function left.
That's what's being born right now. A new liberal world order, where the very concept of the State will make less and less sense.
The world we're entering is a world of abundance. AI, robots, energy, space. And that abundance won't come through the State, for one simple reason: we have a century of proof that it doesn't work.
Redistribution was version 1.0. Direct distribution of capital is 2.0.
While France is still debating how to tax builders even more, America is handing stock to its kids.
Pick your side.
SwissUncle retweeted
I’ve spent a few days thinking about the Tesla Roadster reveal and landed somewhere I haven’t seen much discussion. I’m neither a Tesla fanboy nor a Tesla hater. And I couldn’t care less whether what we saw technically qualifies as a flying car. Three takeaways: (1) The risk of that live demonstration going horribly wrong was real. Almost no CEO would willingly expose their company to that kind of public humiliation for a product with so little financial upside. Elon did. (2) That willingness to attempt the seemingly impossible is what makes Tesla special. It’s also arguably Elon’s greatest contribution to America. He’s helped bring back something we’ve lost. The American spirit of chasing big scary ideas that most people think are impossible. That mindset is spreading across a new generation of founders and its long term impact on America’s future could dwarf anything Tesla ever sells. I think this is deeply underappreciated. (3) Can we just acknowledge how insanely cool that moment was? We’ve reached a strange place culturally where even extraordinary feats of human ingenuity immediately become arguments about why they don’t count. Not everything needs to be a debate. Sometimes we should just be able to stand back together and marvel at what humans are capable of. I’ve been both bullish and critical of Tesla’s ambitions over the years. But watching Elon and his team push the boundaries of what’s possible reminds me why I’m glad we have him. Whether the Roadster ever makes Tesla a dollar or impacts $TSLA stock price is almost beside the point. We need more people willing to risk failure in pursuit of things the rest of us think are impossible. Because when they succeed we all win.
SwissUncle retweeted
J'ai vu une Tesla décoller. Et j'ai entendu beaucoup de bêtises.
« Ça ne sert à rien. » « Gadget de milliardaire. » « Qui a besoin d'une voiture qui vole ? »
Personne. Et c'est exactement pour ça que c'est important.
En 1978, Brabham a aligné en Formule 1 une voiture équipée d'un ventilateur géant à l'arrière. Il aspirait l'air sous le châssis et plaquait la voiture au sol. Elle a gagné sa première course avec une avance insolente. Elle a été interdite immédiatement.
Quarante-huit ans plus tard, on y revient. Un système de succion qui colle la voiture à la route et lui permet de passer sous la seconde au 0 à 100.
Personne n'a « besoin » de faire le 0 à 100 en moins d'une seconde. Comme personne n'a besoin d'une Formule 1. Et pourtant : les freins carbone de votre berline, l'hybridation de votre moteur, l'aérodynamique de votre SUV, les palettes au volant — tout ça vient de voitures de course que personne n'utilisera jamais pour aller au travail.
La Formule 1 ne sert à rien. Pourtant elle sert à tout.
En 1973, quand la France a lancé Ariane, l'Europe sortait de onze échecs consécutifs du programme Europa. La presse parlait d'argent jeté dans l'espace. Vingt ans plus tard, Ariane détenait la moitié du marché mondial des lancements commerciaux, et chaque satellite de télévision, de météo ou de GPS que vous utilisez a bénéficié de cette obstination.
Le progrès a toujours la même tête au début : un truc inutile, cher, ridicule, construit par des gens qu'on prend pour des fous.
Ce que j'ai vu à Dallas, ce n'est pas une voiture volante. C'est un châssis, une gestion de l'énergie et une maîtrise des flux d'air que l'industrie automobile mettra dix ans à digérer.
Les applications viendront : sécurité, freinage, stabilité, consommation. Elles finiront dans des voitures ordinaires conduites par des gens qui expliqueront, en 2036, que tout ça était évident.
La question n'est jamais « à quoi ça sert ».
La question est : qui ose encore construire des choses qui ne servent à rien ?
Il y a cinquante ans, c'était nous. La fusée, le TGV, le Concorde, le Minitel.
L'Europe construisait des choses absurdes et magnifiques.
Aujourd'hui, on commente depuis le siège arrière car nous sommes hors course.
Merci @elonmusk de nous faire rêver
SwissUncle retweeted
Cold gas thrusters on a production car is feral engineering. SpaceX tech in a roadster makes every other EV launch feel like a golf cart update
This is why Elon is a genius, his organization promotes real talent! – at Schwechat, Österreich
A woman who had been a chemical engineer in Venezuela moved to the United States and could not get her credentials recognized. She worked cleaning offices for 3 years. She applied to the Tesla Fremont factory as a production line worker.
She was assembling battery packs. The same battery chemistry she had studied in university. The same electrochemical principles she had written her thesis on. Except now she was on the line wearing safety goggles instead of in a lab wearing a lab coat.
She didn't tell anyone about her background for 6 months. She showed up. She assembled packs. She went home. She was grateful for the job because the cleaning job paid less and the factory job had health insurance for her daughter.
A line supervisor noticed she was solving problems before they were reported. Battery connections that would fail quality check in an hour were being caught by her in real time. He asked how she knew. She explained her background. The supervisor escalated it.
Within a year she was transferred to the battery engineering team. She is now part of the group designing the next generation of Tesla energy storage cells. The same discipline. The same science. The job that matched her training found her on a factory floor where she was too proud to complain and too hungry to wait.
Elon has spoken about Tesla as a company that promotes based on what you can do, not what your credentials say. This woman's story is what that policy looks like from the inside. A Venezuelan chemical engineer recognized not by her diploma but by a line supervisor who noticed she could see problems that shouldn't have been visible to a production worker.
The factory floor is full of people whose resumes don't match their minds. The companies that find them are the companies that change the world. The companies that don't are assembling battery packs with chemical engineers who never get asked what they studied.
SwissUncle retweeted
Researchers proved AI has deleted every reason universities exist.
Harvard University ran a controlled experiment pitting a custom AI against their own top-tier classrooms.
And the results are going to collapse the higher education bubble.
They took 194 undergraduates and split them up.
One group learned physics in one of Harvard’s best hands-on, active-learning physical classrooms. Group work. Instructor support. The premium university experience.
The other group went home and learned the exact same material with an AI tutor.
The AI didn't just win. It embarrassed the institution.
Students using the AI learned more than twice as much as the students in the elite Harvard classroom.
They scored 30% higher on the final assessment.
And they did it in less time.
Let that sink in.
A piece of software sitting on a laptop outperformed a world-class faculty in one of the most elite learning environments on Earth.
Universities have always justified their exorbitant tuition with two things: access to elite knowledge and the physical classroom experience.
This study just proved both of those moats are gone.
When software can teach you complex physics twice as well as a $60,000-a-year institution, the math of higher education breaks permanently.
The AI didn't just give the students answers. It used strict pedagogical guardrails. It guided. It questioned. It forced the students to do the cognitive work.
It offered perfect, one-to-one tutoring, personalized to the exact moment a student misunderstood a concept.
That level of attention is mathematically impossible to scale in a physical lecture hall.
For a thousand years, the university was the only place to get a premium education.
Now, it’s the bottleneck.
If AI can double your learning speed for a fraction of the cost, what exactly are students taking on decades of debt to pay for?
SwissUncle retweeted
A small country said the words Europe would not say from the UN podium. Slovenia stood on the right side of history.
Janez Janša stood at the UN and named Iran. Executions of political prisoners, young intellectuals and anyone who opposes the regime. A system that wants total control of social, political, and economic life. And then the sentence that should have come from Paris or Berlin: there is no sufficiently serious condemnation of this inside the United Nations.
That is the scandal. Not that Slovenia spoke. That it had to.
The rest of the European Union spent the week on the familiar choreography. Walkouts for the cameras. Statements about navigation and ceasefires. Kallas sitting down with Araghchi as if the man across the table were a counterpart and not a courier for a killing machine. They can find their voice for Israel in an afternoon. For the Iranian gallows they reach for process.
Janša called the thing by its name: inconsistency. Principles that apply when the corpse is fashionable and go quiet when the corpse is Iranian. January was a massacre. The hangings did not stop when the cameras left. Political prisoners are still being processed into statistics. If that does not “demand serious attention,” the phrase human rights has become a costume.
Credit Slovenia for doing the minimum the continent pretends is its brand. One prime minister from a country of two million said what the machinery of Brussels would not put in a plenary sentence. This is European abdication with a Slovenian footnote.
The EU has lost the moral high ground it keeps citing. You cannot lecture the world about values while the only precise accounting of Iranian executions in that hall comes from Slovenia. The cowards chose the softer file. Janša chose the dead. History will not confuse those two choices, and neither will the Iranian people.
🇩🇴 ¿Sabías que el primer barco de estilo europeo construido en América nació en tierras dominicanas? 🌊⚓
Ocurrió entre finales de 1495 y principios de 1496 en La Isabela, en la costa norte de lo que hoy es la República Dominicana.
Tras un devastador huracán que destruyó casi toda la flota española anclada en la bahía, los carpinteros de ribera tuvieron que ingeniárselas para no quedar varados. ¿La solución? Recuperar piezas de hierro, jarcias y maderas de los navíos naufragados y combinarlas con las resistentes maderas nativas de los bosques caribeños.
El resultado fue una carabela bautizada oficialmente como Santa Cruz, pero que los marineros apodaron cariñosamente «La India», por haber sido la primera nacida completamente en las Indias.
No solo resultó ser un barco fuerte y marinero, sino que en marzo de 1496 cruzó con éxito todo el océano Atlántico rumbo a Cádiz, España, inaugurando así la historia de la construcción naval en el Nuevo Mundo.
Una muestra más de la profunda e impresionante historia que guardan las costas de Quisqueya. 🇩🇴✨
#HistoriaDominicana #RepublicaDominicana #LaIsabela #HistoriaNaval #LaIndia #CulturaDominicana #DescubreRD
SwissUncle retweeted
I'm amazed people will skip an EV because they take a couple of long trips a year, then sit in Costco gas lines every week to save a buck, when they could just charge at home.
Add the time wasted on emissions inspections, oil changes, and the rest.
EVs don't have a range problem. People have a mindset problem. You almost never go from empty to full. You grab what you need and go. It's faster than most people think.
SwissUncle retweeted
Dear @Tesla
👉 Toyota hates you because you are far more reliable.
👉 VW hates you because of your superior software infrastructure.
👉 Mercedes hates you because they can no longer claim the luxury title.
👉 BMW hates you because they are no longer the ultimate driving machine.
👉 Waymo hates you because you outperform them in safety, cost-per-mile, and aesthetics.
👉 Gas stations hate you because you don’t need gas.
👉 Dealerships hate you because they can’t charge a markup.
👉 Unions hate you because you take away their power and return it to the workers through meritocracy and incentives.
👉 Big government hates you because you show all of us how incompetent, outdated, and inefficient they are.
But with all that said, you do you, Tesla. Because you are changing the world.
SwissUncle retweeted
The Tesla Cybercab launch was magical.
I’ve spent years talking about what autonomous transportation would become.
This week, I got to live it.
And what surprised me most was NOT that the Cybercab had no steering wheel.
It was NOT the butterfly doors.
It was NOT even how futuristic the car looked.
It was honestly how NORMAL it felt.
I just get in.
Sit down.
Put my seatbelt on.
Press one button.
And go on w/ my life.
No fear or anxiety at all.
At one point I literally forgot there wasn’t a driver in front of me.
The ride was unbelievably smooth.
And that’s when it really hit me… this is how transportation changes… when the technology becomes so seamless that you stop thinking about the technology at all.
The entire Cybercab experience is ridiculously simple:
1/ Order the Cybercab from your phone.
2/ It arrives, recognizes your phone, and can automatically open the door for you.
3/ Get in, buckle up, and the doors close.
4/ Press one button on the screen to begin the ride.
5/ You can work, talk, watch something, listen to music, enjoy the scenery… do whatever you want bc the car handles the entire driving.
6/ Arrive, get out, and payment is handled automatically via the app w/ no tipping.
That’s it.
Some people are probably still going to say:
“Elon was late.”
“FSD will never work.”
“Tesla is still just a car company.”
“Who would trust a car w/ no driver?”
“Who would ever get into a car w/ no steering wheel or pedals?”
“Cybercab/Robotaxis will never scale.”
I’ve heard versions of this stuff for years…
And yet here I was.
Sitting inside the product.
Paying for rides.
Driving around Austin w/ nobody behind the wheel.
After experiencing Cybercab myself, I understand what the Tesla team was building toward.
The car.
The autonomy.
The safety.
The software.
The app.
The pickup experience.
The doors.
The payment.
The entire experience had to feel like ONE product.
Bc if Tesla gets that experience right and then scales it across America, this becomes MUCH bigger than another Tesla vehicle.
It will change how people think about owning a car.
It changes ride-hailing.
It changes what we do with the time we currently spend driving.
It changes transportation.
And I think Tesla absolutely knocked this product out of the park.
What makes this even more personal for me is how grateful I am that I was invited to experience this moment.
As the only Korean in the world, being invited to the launch and getting the opportunity to be the first one to ride in a Cybercab is something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.
Seriously.
What a freaking life… hate me or love me, nothing honestly compares to this.
Austin…
Your food was incredible.
The people were unbelievably kind to me.
The city treated my family and me so well.
I loved almost everything about you, except the heat.
And Tesla and Elon…
Thank you.
You have genuinely changed the direction of my life.
You gave me something I am deeply passionate about.
The products.
The technology.
The people building them.
The crazy ideas that sound impossible right up until the day they’re sitting in front of you.
Today I head back to the Bay Area.
But my mind can’t stop thinking about what I just experienced.
There was a point when people started saying Tesla’s biggest growth days were behind it.
After this week… I feel the exact opposite.
Cybercab reignited that fire in me.
It feels like I just watched the first few minutes of the next chapter/book of Tesla.
And if what I experienced in Austin scales to cities around the country…
Transportation will NEVER be the same.
One day my kids will look back at human-driven cars the same way we look at an elevator operator today.
Something that once seemed completely normal… until technology made it unnecessary.
I came to Austin excited about Cybercab.
I’m leaving even more excited about what comes next.
The future is going to be so freaking amazing.
Till next time, Austin!
SwissUncle retweeted
Everyone is talking about what Cybercab and autonomous vehicles means for the future of transportation. I want to talk about what it means for real estate.
Here is a site plan of a 76 unit apartment project we just finished in Dallas. It is leasing up now. Look at the site plan. Half the land is surface parking.
That is how many small(ish) apartment buildings have been designed for decades.
Cities used to require it. Many, including Dallas, are now getting rid of parking minimums. But that does not change much on its own. We will keep building as much parking as our renters demand. So will every other developer. Renters bring cars (especially in Texas).
So the parking stays until the cars change.
Here is what we did differently. The building and the parking lot are two legally separate tax parcels. If the parking is no longer needed, we can build on the lot without touching the building. On this site that means another 70 to 80 apartments.
No new land. No acquisition cost. Same property, roughly double the units.
And you may not even need robotaxis to get there. You just need cars smart enough to park themselves. Door to door. Bumper to bumper. Drop me off under the porte cochere, then go park yourself in a parking structure in a cheaper part of town. Half the parking field disappears right there.
Now run that across a whole city.
Every surface lot. Every oversized parking field. Every empty corner of a multifamily site. Each one becomes a development opportunity if the need for parking change drastically.
More housing. Less asphalt. More housing where people want to live.
Waymo, Zoox, and Robotaxi arriving in Dallas matters more than most people think. Robot cars do not just change how people move. They may change what we build and where it is built.
Are you buying some engines from SpaceX
@PLD_Space ?
They might be quite reliable, or do you guys will license the technology – at Lawrenceville, GA
Just amazing.
spacex.com/sites/starbase-la – at Duluth, GA
Chills watching @TeslaBoomerMama’s latest analysis. The mechanics behind this upcoming S&P inclusion and short squeeze are going to make financial history. – at Duluth, GA
