All posts tagged: a billion to one

Ed Zitron Is Sounding the Alarm About the AI Bubble. The Media Is Finally Paying Attention.

Ed Zitron Is Sounding the Alarm About the AI Bubble. The Media Is Finally Paying Attention.

Published by Sam Flores

On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, AI’s foremost critic is flouting the dress code. This building is the Vatican of big business, and he’s there to appear on CNBC, where the suits deliver their sermons. But Ed Zitron has arrived at the broadcast desk in a charcoal gray T-shirt. Right off the top, host Leslie Picker tests him. For years now, Zitron has been pointing out that while AI industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic might have huge valuations—and might soon stage giant initial public offerings (IPOs)—they don’t actually make much money. “They wouldn’t be the first with bad financial profiles to go public,” Picker says, alluding to past young tech companies, like Uber, believed to have world-changing potential. “They’d be the first to be this bad, other than WeWork,” Zitron swiftly replies over the din of the trading floor, citing the super start-up of a decade ago that raised ungodly sums from venture capitalists before imploding after a failed attempt to go public. “And even then, this is so much worse than …

Google’s Sergey Brin and “MAGA Girlfriend” Gerelyn Soto Are Part of Silicon Valley’s Move to the Right

Google’s Sergey Brin and “MAGA Girlfriend” Gerelyn Soto Are Part of Silicon Valley’s Move to the Right

Published by Sam Flores

In the years that followed, Shanahan transformed her public image, emerging as a vocal supporter and wealthy booster for the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. She donated millions of dollars to the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a critic of vaccines, and joined his ticket as his vice presidential running mate. Soto is also a supporter of MAHA, a movement that has found currency with wellness influencers whose views overlap on issues around food, motherhood, and pharmaceuticals. “I support it because I feel like women are especially gaslit about their health,” Soto told The Free Press. On TikTok, Instagram, and X, Soto’s content mixes MAGA politics with wellness tips and photos of home gyms, lux vacations, and parties. She advocates for eating meat to stave off depression, taking magnesium over getting therapy, and ridding your home of things like scented candles and sunscreen, which, she claims, without evidence, cause cancer. It’s unclear who her posts are geared toward: She has low follower counts, by influencer standards, and recently made her Instagram and X …

Influencers Are Selling the Tradwife Fantasy to Teens—and It Looks Like It’s Working

Influencers Are Selling the Tradwife Fantasy to Teens—and It Looks Like It’s Working

Published by Sam Flores

The teen tradwives have wasted no time monetizing. Ava made a video pleading for brands to stop offering partnerships, since working is the “least sexy and feminine thing that I could do.” Last week she called that previous video satire and launched a website offering $50 sourdough starters. Another teen tradwife made her husband the star of an ad for robo-cooker Posha, filming him putting raw ingredients into a small machine. “I don’t cook. I don’t clean. I don’t do the laundry. That’s my wife’s job,” he said cheekily. “But that all changes today.” “Even though a lot of the rhetoric is sort of a rejection of neoliberalism and a rejection of feminism,” Rottenberg says, “we have to see [tradwives] as products of both of these movements and forces.” It doesn’t seem to matter, to either brands or viewers, that most of these teenagers don’t have children yet. “I am in training right now,” Samantha Kay, a 19-year-old stay-at-home wife, joked in one video. “How can I be a good stay-at-home mom when I can’t …

How Situational Awareness’s Leopold Aschenbrenner Lost Billion Just Before His Wedding to Anthropic’s Avital Balwit

How Situational Awareness’s Leopold Aschenbrenner Lost $30 Billion Just Before His Wedding to Anthropic’s Avital Balwit

Published by Sam Flores

Two months later, he published the 165-page essay “Situational Awareness,” which quickly became required reading in Silicon Valley. In it, he argued that artificial general intelligence would arrive much sooner than most investors expected, and that the real winners would not be consumer AI applications but the unglamorous pieces of infrastructure powering them: chips, memory, data centers, electricity, cooling, and networking. Software, by contrast, would become commoditized. By the end of 2024, at just 22 years old, he had launched a hedge fund named after the essay. That November, the firm raised $100 million, according to The New York Times. The thesis proved so profitable that by the end of May 2026, the San Francisco–based fund was reportedly up more than 1,000% after fees since its inception. Situational Awareness quickly attained cult status. Rival hedge funds and even retail traders began mimicking Aschenbrenner’s trades, piling up stocks after he bought them and dumping positions after he sold. But returns like that rarely come without extraordinary risk. According to CNBC, the fund operated with up to …

The 33-Year-Old Tesla Alum Begging His Fellow Tech Bros to Ditch Their Desks and Head Back to the Mines

The 33-Year-Old Tesla Alum Begging His Fellow Tech Bros to Ditch Their Desks and Head Back to the Mines

Published by Sam Flores

For the tech moguls who have invested fortunes in frontier AI labs, the lifestyle is romantic, but the work is practical. “Silicon Valley cares about this because data centers are made of metal. That’s it,” one executive at a mining start-up tells me. “They’re levered to the tits on a big bet that depends on the build-out of AI infrastructure.” Demand for copper, which is for wiring in data centers, will increase by 50% by 2040, according to the data company S&P Global. At the same time, America’s energy consumption is expected to skyrocket, prompting a scramble to build nuclear reactors, solar farms, and natural gas power plants, which will require even more critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper. Today, China has a “near-total dominance” over the critical-minerals market, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. There’s now a critical-mineral start-up for every preferred brand of cowboy. Want to explore the open ocean? Try Wetstone, which is pursuing deep-sea mining rights. More of a space cowboy? AstroForge has raised $55 million to mine …

A VC Firm Full of Former Navy SEALs Is Pumping Cash Into the High-Tech Weapons Industry

A VC Firm Full of Former Navy SEALs Is Pumping Cash Into the High-Tech Weapons Industry

Published by Sam Flores

Harpoon Ventures isn’t for “nerds.” This is one of the many selling points investor Clint Brown gives for the San Diego–based defense-tech venture capital firm, which recently closed a $155 million fundraising round. Another selling point? Half of the fund’s 10 employees are former Navy SEALs, including founder and former Olympic swimmer Larsen Jensen. “There’s Andrew Couillard,” Brown says, listing another investor. “He was EOD.” When I ask what that means, Brown hesitates. “He knows how to defuse nukes,” he finally says, laughing. “My head is like, You’re not supposed to tell people that.” Then, as if to make the résumé even more improbable: “He’s fluent in Mandarin, and he’s just the whitest guy you’ve ever met.” Another partner, Jake Windle, served with the famed SEAL Task Unit Bruiser during the Iraq War’s Battle of Ramadi in 2006, alongside commander Jocko Willink and sniper Chris Kyle, whose memoir later became the film American Sniper. Today, Brown insists, their lives are considerably less cinematic, filled with surfing, working out, and time spent with their kids. “We …

This CEO Spent the Equivalent of Million on an AI Agent to Run His Life

This CEO Spent the Equivalent of $4 Million on an AI Agent to Run His Life

Published by Sam Flores

The founder, who has mystified doctors by running on only about two hours of rest per night, built multiple companies, including messaging service onebox.com, which was acquired by phone.com for $850 million in 2000, and Lala, a music-streaming site bought by Apple for a reported $80 million in 2009. Over the last few years, as AI coding tools improved, Nguyen realized that anyone with a Claude Code account could’ve built “every single company I created in a weekend.” “What I did in Silicon Valley will not be special in 5, 10 years,” he said. “Everyone can do it.” Inspired to build his own AI company, he linked up, in 2025, with his son Jacob Nguyen, 22, who attended Georgia Tech with fellow founders McChesney and Drake Kelly. They also brought on Kuch, a longtime colleague of Nguyen’s who had run Lala’s communications. The team camped out in an Atlanta apartment, building an AI tool that they hoped would be more intuitive than a chatbot interface. The result was Olive, an AI model trained on transcripts …

Why Peter Thiel’s Secretive Dialog Society Won’t Be Gathering in Ireland This Summer

Why Peter Thiel’s Secretive Dialog Society Won’t Be Gathering in Ireland This Summer

Published by Sam Flores

Gordon-Levitt also shared about his own experiences with the organization in a post on Instagram, writing, “At the Dialog conferences I’ve been to, there were a wide variety of people, with a wide variety of opinions, some I agreed with, some I didn’t.” “13 years ago I was invited to speak—to an audience largely unfamiliar with the experiences of millions of Americans who grew up like me—about my book The Other Wes Moore,” the Maryland governor wrote on X. “That was my first and last appearance at Dialog. Never met Peter Thiel. Don’t plan to in the future!” But while the American press was interested in the list of invitees and the itinerary, the Irish media was more focused on its native host, the historic Powerscourt Estate in Dublin’s shadow. Members of the opposition in the Oireachtas, Ireland’s parliament, argued in statements to the press that the event should be canceled altogether and that the government should investigate which Irish citizens were planning to attend. Labour Party spokesperson Duncan Smith argued, “Given the prominence of …

Politico CEO Goli Sheikholeslami on Mathias Dopfner’s Vision, New AI Tools, and Her Plan

Politico CEO Goli Sheikholeslami on Mathias Dopfner’s Vision, New AI Tools, and Her Plan

Published by Sam Flores

Last summer, Politico employees wanted to send Goli Sheikholeslami a message. Their CEO had released a “groundbreaking” AI tool to subscribers that would generate custom reports drawn from Politico articles. But employees found that the tool would hallucinate false information: In one example, the AI did not know Roe v. Wade had been overturned, news Politico itself had broken when the decision was struck down in 2022. Ariel Wittenberg, a public health reporter and unit chair of Politico’s union, told me over email that these results were generated with “legitimate queries.” When she asked the tool about former president Joe Biden’s oil policies, it described actions taken by President Donald Trump’s administration. Employees printed out these reports and taped them around the Arlington, Virginia, office. Later, employees tested the tool further, asking it about fictitious lobbying groups, like the Basket Weavers Guild. The feature produced reports about these, too, citing Politico reporting. This May, Politico shut down the service, emphasizing that the product had always been in beta and that testing had concluded. When I …

Where Will Taylor Swift’s Wedding Be? And Who’s on the Guest List? Here’s What the Prediction Markets Say.

Where Will Taylor Swift’s Wedding Be? And Who’s on the Guest List? Here’s What the Prediction Markets Say.

Published by Sam Flores

The Guests Swift’s longtime friend and music producer Jack Antonoff is an easy yes, according to 96% of Kalshi voters, which means his wife, Margaret Qualley, will likely be in attendance too. Three years ago Swift reportedly gave a 15-minute toast at the couple’s New Jersey nuptials. Over 90% of voters say that Kelce’s longtime teammate Patrick Mahomes and his wife, Brittany, with whom Taylor has been spotted at several WAG dinners, are two other easy yeses. The Haim sisters, seen with Swift at MSG in matching punny Knicks shirts during Game 4 of the NBA finals, are obvious invites, as are Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco, according to around 90% of people on Kalshi, respectively. Just over 60% of voters on Kalshi expect Lana Del Rey to be in attendance, hopefully with her alligator tour guide husband, and they put the same odds on a sighting of Swedish music producer and longtime Swift collaborator Max Martin, who helped her transition from country to pop music. Swift protégés Gracie Abrams (79%), Sabrina Carpenter (76%), and …