also, apex clearing is gonna send you an angry letter asking you to change the name pretty soon.
5,630 karma · joined February 5, 2010
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also, apex clearing is gonna send you an angry letter asking you to change the name pretty soon.
In retrospect this quote comes across as way more foreboding given what we've learned about the scale of his ambitions and his willingness to lie and bend reality to gain power.
Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era. I hope he remains strong in the face of the regime.
Tether made 4.5bn net income in Q1 2024 w/ probably <50 employees.
1) Skin in the game - GPs of YC / a16z / Sequoia / Founders Fund / etc put in some equity in to a joint venture to acquire SVB's assets and make depositors whole. Government will backstop some portion of it.
2) YC / a16z / Sequoia / Founders Fund / etc agree to support ending the carried interest tax exemption
So in the case that say Meta's metaverse initiatives suddenly start taking off with the general population, it will take active investors to invest more in FB to increase FB's marketcap relative to the other stocks in the index so that passive investors are "correctly" allocating to stocks in proportion to their earnings potential.
Obviously there are some caveats here. Passive investors still have to choose an index to invest in, and inflows in to one narrow index (i.e. QQQ) will affect the weights of particular stocks in broader indexes. But the point stands that the relative marketcap ranking between stocks in the index is not affected much by in/outflows in to a particular index, and in some sense indexes are outsourcing their stock picking to active investors that actually try to accurately value individual stocks on an absolute and relative basis.
On the other hand - now we have a situation where most investment savings by individual investors are tracking passive indexes. But if everyone is indexing - what determines the relative weight of each stock in the index?
The answer is active investors. But with an increasingly smaller field of increasingly skilled investors (with more discretionary capital), we end up with the valuations of companies (and thus how societal time is allocated) competitively determined by a fierce prediction competition between the top active managers (Renaissance, DE Shaw, Citadel, etc).
I'm not spiteful of KG and the other people who are making the real money off all the crowds at the option casino, if anything I respect their shrewdness - Citadel prints insane money on these option premiums, and as a bonus KG gets to invest in Melvin at firesale prices and probably gets to extract insane terms.
As far as 'jealous fucks working miserable engineering jobs' - I think you might be projecting a bit there :)
Google scrapes info and displays it in widgets above links to the actual content. Google charges trademark holders AdWords ransom to protect searches for their own brands.
Amazon kills OSS business models by offering managed OSS services on AWS at an unbeatable cost. Amazon picks off the best performing market place categories with Amazon Basics ‘recommended’ competitors.
The list goes on and on.
Tech is an industry defined on building scale and then collecting rents. Apple IAP is just the current outrage but the entire industry is working towards building the next ‘platform’ for others to sharecrop on.
The problem is that they already ARE making decisions on what is newsworthy. It is not possible for them to be neutral.
Today the FB News Feed algorithm optimizes for user engagement. That is an editorial decision! It just so happens that it results in having the entire population get their news through a skinner box that reinforces and worsens their most harmful biases.
Like it or not, demagogues around the world (not just the US) are exploiting this mechanic to gain power in ways that are harmful to society. Should Facebook be the arbiter of truth? That's the wrong question. They already are. At this point all we can hope is that they choose to arbitrate the truth in a less damaging way.