Pivot

Kara Swisher Calls It Now: the Paramount Merger Won’t Go Through | Pivot

Investors understand something executives often don't, and that is winning in court can still mean losing economically.

TBPN

Leopold is Back! Big Tech Earnings, Beautiful Debt, Defense Tech Deep Dive

But our fund must always be structured such that we can take a loss and fight another day.

Diet TBPN

Leopold Stays in the Game, Big Tech Earnings, OpenAI Slashes GPT-5.6 Prices | Diet TBPN

When AI stocks draw down dramatically while AI technical business fundamentals are improving, you should expect our fund to be down a lot. We embrace volatility, but it should never jeopardize the fund.

The Week

The Week: The Hidden Debt Behind the AI Boom

When you're hiding a bigger number than what you're reporting, that's not accounting, it's concealment. And Meta's off-balance debt is $420 billion, which is 3x what they report. That's not a rounding error, that's a second company hiding liabilities inside of the first company.

TBPN

Martin Shkreli Breaks Down the Collapse of Situational Awareness

The 80 or 90% of the assets shareholders don't change hands. It's that 5% of the margin that's deciding the price. And if that 5% is in the state where they're they're levered up 3x or 4x as we heard uh SALP is uh was a 4x levered fund, which is that's a lot of leverage. You know, a 25% draw down takes you out of business.

Diet TBPN

The Collapse of Situational Awareness, Ferrari Luce Stays on Track for 2026 | Diet TBPN

When leverage is involved, things just move so so so fast, right? You remember with FTX, there's kind of some rumblings, a couple couple posts from SPF saying like we're fine, it's all good, and then it was over. And then the same thing with SVB, like couple rumblings, maybe like a a couple weeks, a week beforehand, few posts here and there, and then it just moves so so fast, right? quite a bit different than traditional venture world where when a company's dying it dies over two, three years often sometimes more.

The Prof G Pod

The Simple Math That Tells You When You're Rich Enough | Office Hours

The whole point of wealth at the end of the day is somebody has to spend it on something. Whether it's you, your kids, you give it away to like a philanthropic organization to spend. And having like a scarcity mindset where you're constantly worried about not having enough even when you objectively have enough is just depriving yourself of things you could spend money on to enjoy.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

The US is entering a period where natural gas demand is set to explode — driven by AI data centers, LNG export terminals, and industrial reshoring — but the pipeline infrastructure to move that gas simply hasn't been built. The bottleneck isn't the gas itself; it's the ability to get it from where it's produced to where it's needed.

Pivot

Andrew Tate and Brother Charged with New Sex Crimes. "It's Epstein in Real Time" | Pivot

Trump came in and said you guys are amateurs. I'm going to make millions not thousands... she had access to material non-public information but she didn't start a wire service selling her inside information right to others.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

The U.S. is facing a situation where natural gas has become the critical bottleneck for economic growth — not oil, not renewables, but gas. The buildout of data centers, the reshoring of manufacturing, and the electrification of everything are all converging on the same fuel at the same time, and the infrastructure to deliver it simply isn't there yet.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

The US is going to be consuming a lot more natural gas going forward, and the infrastructure to deliver that gas is going to be a bottleneck. You're going to need more pipelines, more LNG export terminals, more storage. The question is whether the capital investment can keep up with the demand growth.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

The United States is in the middle of an energy transformation, and natural gas sits at the center of it. The same fuel that was supposed to be a bridge to renewables is now being called upon to power the AI revolution, sustain manufacturing reshoring, and keep the lights on as coal retires faster than alternatives can replace it.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

The United States is on the verge of a natural gas shortage so severe that it could undermine the AI boom, strain the electric grid, and trigger the kind of energy crisis that Americans haven't experienced in decades.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

The issue is that the natural gas pipeline system wasn't built for what we're now asking it to do. You've got LNG export facilities pulling massive volumes to the Gulf Coast, data centers and AI infrastructure demanding firm power in places that never needed it before, and a renewables buildout that paradoxically increases gas demand by requiring backup generation for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

Starting in 2028, AI data centers and LNG exports will need more gas than the country can produce and deliver. By his math, the US could exhaust its working natural gas storage by 2030. In his words, the upside risk to prices becomes unbounded and convex.

Pivot

Andrew Tate and Brother Charged with New Sex Crimes. "It's Epstein in Real Time" | Pivot

When you have this much money wagered on matches, they're no longer it's no longer a gambling story. It's a capital market story.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

The bottleneck isn't in the production of natural gas — there's plenty of gas in the ground. The bottleneck is in the infrastructure to move it, process it, and export it. And that infrastructure takes years to permit, finance, and build.

China Decode

China Just Passed America in Global Popularity. Here's Why It Matters. | China Decode

I remember, you know, back in 2023 and hot on off the heels of of the CO outbreak and uh China being blamed for it that people were saying, you know, China's never going to come back from this. Everyone's hating on China. The world is anti-China. But fast forward 3, four years, what a world, you know, what a difference those years have made.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Matthew Smith — How America Runs Out of Natural Gas by 2030 - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

The fundamental problem is that America has been extraordinarily successful at producing natural gas, but the infrastructure to move it, store it, and export it has not kept pace with demand growth. We are essentially running a system that was designed for a different era, and the consequences of that mismatch are going to become very apparent very soon.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

The best fundraisers I've seen don't pitch — they teach. They walk into a room and they make you smarter about the space they're operating in, and the ask almost becomes secondary because you're so compelled by what you've just learned.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.481]

The nice thing about buying things in private markets is you can buy a business at eight times earnings that a public market might price at 20 times earnings, and that gap represents the opportunity. The issue is the information set you're working with is much worse, the liquidity is much worse, and the alignment between you and the people running the business is often much worse.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

The biggest thing I've learned is that in venture, your reputation is everything. You can't hide from your track record. Every investment you make, every founder you back, every check you write — it's all public information, and LPs are going to do their homework.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.481]

The most counterintuitive thing about private markets is that the biggest source of alpha isn't picking the right companies — it's getting access to them in the first place. Most of the best private companies never need to raise money from you, and if they do, they have more than enough interest from investors they already know and trust.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

The number one thing I've learned is that investors invest in people, not ideas. You can have the best idea in the world, but if people don't trust you, don't believe in you, and don't think you can execute, they're not going to give you money.

Diet TBPN

Stripe’s $53B PayPal Offer, OpenAI’s First Device, TBPN’s New Business Ideas | Diet TBPN

You have a $50 billion company printing 5.5 billion in free cash flow. You can use a lot to finance debt, obviously, which is what's proposed here. Uh 400 million uh consumer accounts. So, lots of consumers have PayPal accounts, have Venmo accounts. Maybe they're not fully active, but they're ready to be engaged. It's a huge footprint and huge distribution mechanism. Uh, and they have bank info attached. That's difficult. You can't get that from many other consumer applications.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that's really interesting about transformers is that the model architecture is essentially fixed. The operations that transformers do are the same whether you're running GPT-4 or any other large language model — it's always matrix multiplications and attention. And if you build a chip that only does those operations, you can make it much faster and much cheaper than a general-purpose GPU.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

The number one thing I've learned is that investors invest in people, not in strategies. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if they don't trust you, if they don't believe in you, if they don't think you have the capability to execute, they're not going to give you capital.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

The vast majority of the best investors who I've ever met, they have some sort of an edge, right? And when you think about that edge, it usually comes from a very specific life experience or a very specific type of intellectual curiosity that they've developed over decades. And that is very hard to replicate.

The Prof G Pod

The AI IPO Wave Is Coming — Here's What It Does to Your Portfolio | Office Hours

Basically, your IPO is a branding event. once in a lifetime branding event. All people care about was that it was up. That gets enormous news. And essentially JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are now really not bankers, they're engineers. And that is they engineer scarcity and manufacturer scarcity such that these things get 20%.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

The number one thing LPs want to know is: can you actually get into deals? Because there are plenty of smart people who can analyze a company, but if you can't get allocation, it doesn't matter. So the access question is really the first filter.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

The thing that makes a great investor is this idea that they're able to hold conflicting ideas simultaneously. They can be a bull and a bear on the same company. They can be optimistic and pessimistic at the same time. And they're able to weigh those things and come to a conclusion that they can act on.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.481]

The way I think about it is that private markets are just a giant PDF. There's no ticker, there's no price discovery, there's no market. And so the question is: who has the best PDF? Who has the most information? Who has done the most work?

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that's really interesting about transformers specifically is that it's not obvious that the architecture is going to change. Usually in the history of chip design, you build a chip for a specific algorithm and then the algorithm changes and your chip is worthless. But transformers have been around for seven years and they've just gotten bigger and bigger and more and more capable, and there's no real sign that they're going to go away.

The Prof G Pod

The AI IPO Wave Is Coming — Here's What It Does to Your Portfolio | Office Hours

JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are now really not bankers, they're engineers. And that is they engineer scarcity and manufacture scarcity such that these things get 20%.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.481]

The brilliant insight of the PDF was, nobody cares about the operating history of a company, they care about the story of the company. And the story of the company is best told in a document that you control, that you craft, that has beautiful graphics and beautiful fonts and compelling narrative.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.481]

The thing that's hard to communicate and I think why private markets are interesting is you can buy things that are actually cheap. In public markets, true mispricings are rare and fleeting. In private markets, you can find things that are just structurally mispriced because the market is less efficient, the information is worse, and the buyer pool is smaller.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.481]

The whole world runs on documents that no one reads. Every corporation, every government, every institution has stacks of documents that theoretically govern how things work, but in practice, the actual power comes from whoever controls the interpretation of those documents.

Prof G Markets

The Week | Is the Market Rigged for Insiders?

The best way to increase your stock price in America today isn't to improve your product or to sell more goods and services. It is to have your stock anointed by the high priest of American markets, aka the president. If you can do that, great things will occur.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.481]

The thing that's so interesting about private markets is that the fundamental informational advantage is not that you have better data — it's that you have access to data at all. In public markets, everyone has the same 10-K. In private markets, whether you get the information memo is itself a function of your network and reputation.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The bet that Etched is making is that transformers are here to stay, and that by building a chip that only runs transformers, they can be so much more efficient than a general purpose chip that it's worth the trade-off of only being able to run one type of model.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.481]

The most interesting businesses and the most interesting investments are the ones where the value of the business and the price of the business have radically disconnected, and private markets are full of that right now because there's been no price discovery.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The key insight is that transformers, which underpin all modern AI, have a fixed mathematical structure — and if you build a chip that does nothing but transformers, you can eliminate the overhead that makes GPUs so inefficient at inference. A transformer supercomputer, etched in silicon, could be 10 to 20 times faster and cheaper than the GPU alternative.

Diet TBPN

China Considers AI Export Controls, SK Hynix $28B IPO, Banks Target Payment Business | Diet TBPN

By summer of 2026, it will be as though the digital world is going through some kind of fast evolution with some parts of it emitting a huge amount of heat and light and moving with counterintuitive speed relative to everything else. Great fortunes will be won and lost here and the powerful engines of our silicon creation will be put to work further accelerating this economy and further changing things.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that I find most stunning about this is that transformers were invented in 2017, and the reason that they've taken over everything is that they're extremely good at using parallel compute. And so the question is, are transformers the last great neural network architecture? And our bet is yes, or at least that they will be dominant for the foreseeable future, which means that if you build a chip that is perfect for transformers, you will have a chip that is perfect for AI.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that's really special about Sohu is that it's an ASIC, meaning it can only run transformers. It cannot run anything else. And that might sound like a huge limitation, but we think it's actually the killer feature because by hardcoding the transformer architecture into silicon, we're able to get massive gains in efficiency over a GPU, which has to be flexible enough to run any workload.

Diet TBPN

The Meta Compute Debate | Diet TBPN

Up until now there's been no obvious place that it's going to come from. Right. Had the Manis deal that's being unwound.

The Prof G Pod

How to Be Poor: Building Wealth on Less Than $60K a Year | Office Hours

Every dollar you pay off your credit card debt, you're basically earning an 18 to 24% guaranteed return. There's no place you're going to get a guaranteed return of 18 to 24%.

The Prof G Pod

Is Wall Street Rigging the Game for SpaceX? | Office Hours

The IPO market has in fact become sort of the last stop on the chump train and that is when Google went public I think it was an $80 billion market cap it's up you know 500 fold retail investors have had a chance to garner a tremendous you know 500x return if you to get that from SpaceX after it goes public what would that be two trillion

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Vlad Barbalat - Investing $120 Billion in Permanent Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.479]

The beauty of permanent capital is that you can say no to a lot of things. You don't have a fundraising cycle, you don't have to worry about returning capital to LPs, you can take a very long view. And that long view is actually a massive competitive advantage because most of the investment world is driven by relatively short-term incentives.