Good Parts Only

The best way to build conviction in an investment? Find the smartest person betting against it says @BillAckman "Find the best short seller in something that you own and hear their arguments. If you can rebut each of their arguments, then you can feel more confident in your investment." "And the same thing should be true for your other views. Find the person who makes the best case for why you're wrong, and then either they convince you and you're wrong or you can carefully rebut each of the various arguments." "So it enables you to get to, I think it enables, the best hope we have to get to the truth is hearing from all sides and then sorting through who's got the better argument."

Elon Musks says by that by 2029, the cheapest place to put AI will be in space. "Harder to scale on ground than it is to scale in space. But also, you're going to get about five times the effectiveness of solar panels in space versus the ground, and you don't need batteries." "It’s always sunny in space. So because you don't have a night cycle or seasonality, clouds, or an atmosphere in space. Because the atmosphere alone, we're still at about a 30% loss of energy, so any given solar panels can do about five times more power in space than on the ground." "And you avoid the cost of having batteries to carry you through the night. So it's actually much cheaper to do in space." "And my prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI will be space in 36 months or less, maybe 30, 36 months." @collision @dwarkesh_sp

David Sacks says the midterms won’t be the bloodbath Polymarket’s odds predict. "Polymarket is just a reflection of public sentiment or public sentiment that's willing to place a bet. Yeah, that can be totally wrong. So they were totally wrong about those two national elections." "By the way, I'm not I'm not predicting some sort of, you know, miraculous Republican win here. It would be very unusual for the Republicans to win a midterm election when they're in the White House." "So it's quite customary for the out of power party to do very well in the midterms. I'm just saying that the media is really portraying this as a tsunami or a bloodbath. And I think it might be a more normal midterm result." "That's all I'm saying. So I in any event, I think you'll just go out and vote, not get depressed or psyched out by whatever the media is telling them because the media has a long track record of being wrong and biased." @theallinpod @DavidSacks @friedberg @chamath

If Democrats sweep, @Jason predicts Trump will be impeached again. "If you look at impeachment, you know, that process from what I understand is a house and then Senate and it's a legal proceeding. I think we're going to go right back to Trump being impeached." "And then both houses are going to do that. It's gonna be absolute chaos. And then the Dems are going to start putting legislation out there and force the Republicans to vote against it in order to scuttle J .D. Vance's chances." "So this is obviously going to be a chaotic two years. So what's going to happen is gonna be a chaotic two years. And I think what will come out of that ultimately is we're going to need some new candidates on the Republican side." "they're going to need a new champion that is more populous and actually executes on the populist agenda, which they feel Trump represented, but didn't execute on. That's my and that's not my personal belief. That's just my analysis." @theallinpod @chamath @friedberg @DavidSacks

What makes a great company, according to @BillAckman? "A great company is a business you can buy today. The markets could shut for 20 years and you know with an enormous degree of certainty that you'll own something that's enormously valuable 10 or 20 years from now." "There are amazing businesses in many different sectors. We love businesses that look like royalty collecting companies like annuities. Where you can be very confident that the annuity will grow at a high rate over a very long period of time and the cash that generated from the business doesn't need to be reinvested in the business."

Bill Ackman won't invest in businesses with no predictable cashflows. "One, it's a business we can predict with a very high degree of confidence. The value of a financial asset at the present value of the cash will generate over its life. If you can't build a model of the next reasonable period of time of a business, 10, 15, 20 years, I don't think you can come up with the value for it." "A lot of money is managed based on people believing a stock will go up or down based on a new piece of information coming out. But it's inherently a short term. A huge amount of money is moved on that basis. We kind of ignore that." "There are many businesses that we have no idea what they're worth. We just don't even look at them. I think predictability is important. And obviously, to have predictable cash flows and revenues over time, the business has to have the proverbial moat around it." "Business quality durability, I would say, critically important. We want companies that are not exposed to what we call extrinsic factors we can't control. So we don't really invest in commodity-sensitive businesses, interest rate-sensitive businesses, regulatory-sensitive businesses. So we keep it simple." @BillAckman @NicolaiTang1

Chamath says capital markets today remind him of the great financial crisis. "I've not seen in the last 15 or 20 years, the last time we came close to this was in the GFC, where you have a narrow part of the economy represent basically all of everything that's happening in the capital markets." "And all that means is that everybody has to pay a lot more attention. It doesn't matter what side of the AI trade you're on, whether you're long it, whether you're short it, that's not I don't think that's important." "I'm saying something more structural, which is about 10 companies collectively to fund one thing will be competitive with global governments on borrowing. I don't know what the implications of that is." @Jason @chamath @friedberg @DavidSacks

Jason Calacanis predicts token usage could 500x from here. "And people are going to look back on this moment and say, why didn't you build more compute? Why didn't you spend more on CapEx?" "The fact that only 1 or 2% of people in corporate America are even using these tools. We are greatly underestimating the uptick here. Claude hasn't even launched a bot yet." "and it's in like a small use case when 100 million or 200 million white collar workers subscribe to say the office suite. Everybody's got five agents running. I think the utilization of these things is going 500x." "The token usage is 500x. That means we're going to have not enough compute. And everybody's got the build out completely wrong. There won't be enough." @Jason @chamath @friedberg @DavidSacks

Creativity is what's left for humans when intelligence becomes cheap says @BillAckman "I make the argument that what's left when everyone has access to low-cost superintelligence is creativity. What LLMs can do is they can read everything they can before and be incredibly knowledgeable about that. But it's not clear to me that AI can be creative yet." "Einstein's light bulb moments, E equals MC squared or theory relativity, I don't think that anything that came before Einstein, that AI would have read, would have come out with that formula, if you will." "And so I think the space that's left for human beings is, but I do think it could lead to abundance as, I think there's going to be an explosion of entrepreneurship. And I think there can be an explosion in overall GDP or global growth."