Dispatches from the Group Chats Vol 2

Open AI vs Elon, Elizabeth Warren vs Kamala Harris, New Appointments

Here was volume 1. Let me know if you have any feedback on the format.

Also, submit at least 3 nominations if you want to get a list of which products, people, and companies top founders and investors think deserve more spotlight.

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1. Open AI vs Elon

“I think I understand everyone’s point of view.

Elon feels (very reasonably) that he invested $100M+ at seed stage, took risk, and helped recruit Ilya, so he should be in control — and reap the lion’s share of the equity returns.

Sam thinks (probably correctly) that the company wouldn’t have been what it is if it had been a division of Tesla. He needed to CEO it.

If it was a normal company then there would be some kind of settlement where Elon gets like $XB or something, as consideration for his angel investment.

But it’s AI, and xAI is a competitor, and also Sam was trying to use the US government to ban *his* competition, so it’s extremely messy.

At the same time OpenAI is under assault from decentralized models, executive defections, and copyright lawsuits. Tough business.”

“It really is back to the future. The heads of network all slugging it out against each other and raw nature, sometimes in alliance with the old regime, sometimes in opposition to it, and in various combinations versus each other.

2. GM dropping Cruise

3. Brad Gerstner’s Invest America Proposal

“Idea is permanent and structural line of defense for free market capitalism by making every child capitalist from birth - 3.7 M private investment accts per year - tiny seed from treasury (total cost $3 B) and then 401k where parents and companies can contribute.

Looking ahead at AI displacement - the calls for UBI and other socialist creep will get louder - particularly if 70% feel left out and like the system is rigged against them - so make them all owners. Very very cheap out of the money insurance policy w hugely positive NPV.

Zero gov’t account - Treasury dep’t merely coordinates the private providers opening the private labeled “America First” accounts. 🇺🇸”

4. Elizabeth Warren vs Kamala Harris

“Harris team was planning to kick out a decent number of Warrenites. Doesn’t mean they’d be gone but their power would be have been reduced. Now those same Warrenites like Stoller are cozying up to Trump with possibly some success.

Warren democrats will have more purchase in this administration than a Kamala Harris one — they’re already bragging that Andrew Ferguson has made promises in private. It’s why Warren is attacking Trump less than in 17.

Warren thinks she can make deals with Trump and Vance that align the right and left against companies in tech. She is (hopefully) more wrong than right, but her team was very down about Harris and more upbeat now. It’s also why Rohit Chopra is saying he’s on side of right individuals not getting debanked (but eliding over debanking of companies).”

5. Why the Dockworkers have so much leverage

“The problem with the longshoreman situation is they are going to win almost no matter what. We don't have a BATNA. If they strike, it is unequivocally bad for everybody involved. Automation is obviously great, and important, and we should be doing it. But it can't happen quickly. This round of the game is already written. It's pretty distasteful that they have this much leverage, but they quite literally do and I haven't heard any viable way to break it from anybody.

The president could denounce it... but he can't actually *stop* it. You can't bring in scab labor to run those cranes. And the people competent enough to run them from elsewhere absolutely won't.”

6. Murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO

“It's a hypothetical, but deep down, I believe most of us know that the reaction to the CEO murder would be much the same if he was an oil executive, social media company founder, or defense contractor with links to Israel. There's a lot of media instruction to understand where this deeply felt pro-murder sentiment is coming from re: healthcare. But it's not about the healthcare. It's mostly about the outgroup murder

Social media is a big part of elevating once darkly personal feelings to broader discourse. If this murder happened in 2002, media would depict it as a local True Crime story of an ivy leaguer gone mad. There'd be no national conversation about how health industry sinfulness had inspired millions of celebrants

…[sarcastic]: Democrats anchoring in on pro socialism and pro murder is an interesting path for '26 and '28….The pro murder movement is ripping through the press, academia, D activist circles, "comedians", et al at precisely the moment the D party is in full civil war over their electoral path forward. It's the idea they need to really gel the party post the big loss. Watch Obama and Clinton give half hearted opposition speeches before wearily signing onboard.”

7. Follow-up debate about the murder

Person A: “Why wouldn’t it be okay to shoot bank executives for not granting loans? Or hedge fund managers for buying companies and relocating them? Or oil executives for carbon emissions?

There’s no limiting principle for these people and there isn’t meant to be. It’s just Baader-Meinhof evil radicalism.

Person B: “True, but to be fair at this point that’s a bipartisan impulse. I’m totally opposed to violence, including war, abortion and murdering health care executives, and I strongly agree with Ben that this is Baader-Meinhof shit. On the other hand, when your middle class withers and it starts to feel like billionaires control everything, people get radical. That should be obvious, and it’s hardly anti-market to point it out….It’s not just freaks and Antifa who are celebrating that guy’s murder. Sorry. As noted I’m obviously not endorsing it, only noting that American society is way more lopsided than it was in 1968 and that has some scary effects. Best not to lie about it.

Person C: “And although it's a boring explanation, I truly think this non-freak, non-antifa response arises in part from the movielike aesthetics of the whole thing. You get a cool competent handsome white assassin taking down a VIP in the middle of Manhattan, then making a getaway. You get a poetic gesture at some kind of populist vendetta. And you get all of this in a hyperreal media environment where people get to smirk at narratives and symbols, not the real death of a real guy.”

Person A: “The notion that America writ large is more unequal in 2024 than 1968 is wrong, I think. In 1968 black America was literally four years out from the Civil Rights Act. Our healthcare system is a massive clusterfuck, but life expectancy in 1968 was 66 for men and 74 for women. Today it is 75 and 80 respectively. The support for Baader-Meinhof violence today springs from boredom and post-religious nihilism - supplemented by the institutional failure, which is real - not some sort of justified opposition to inequality.

Institutional failure should justify institutional change. But the nihilistic use it to justify individual violence.”

Person B: “Trying to understand why people do ugly things is not the same as justifying those things, and I worry that dismissing evil behavior as the product of some mysterious mind virus blinds us to cause and effect. The revolutionary mindset isn’t something you catch from a toilet seat, or even from the internet. It’s usually the predictable result of circumstances. That’s why some societies are more stable than others, because they’re ordered in a way that produces stability. In our case, America has had pretty much the same system of government for 250 years because Americans generally believed they controlled it. We’ve had some form of market capitalism for just as long because most Americans thought they benefited from it. But what happens when all of a sudden huge numbers young people don’t believe that and for good reason: because they don’t own anything and don’t have any prospect of owning anything, and instead are deeply in debt at high interest rates to what seems like a tiny group of super rich people who appear to get richer every year even as they get more indebted? And then, to make it even more poisonously insulting and dark, at the very same time this is happening to them, the thwarted young aren’t afforded even the language to complain about it, but are instead encouraged by the same rich people in charge to hate each other along lines of race, sex and sexuality? At that point it seems obvious that some of them are apt to get pretty radical, if not nihilistic, and I fully understand why. The main goal of any society has to be to help young people to thrive sufficient to have their own thriving children. If a system isn’t doing that, it’s basically disgusting and needs to be reordered.”

…Anyone who’s content with the fact the next generation of Americans will likely rent rather than own homes is part of the problem as far as I’m concerned.”

Person A: “Inequality exists in all societies - ours far less than others. Obstacles to generational progress exist in all societies - ours far less than others. The theory that circumstance dictates the revolutionary mindset in the West is a materialist explanation of a spiritual phenomenon. The kids who are most radical are upper class white kids at top notch schools who cosplay the revolution because of the God-shaped, church-shaped hole in their hearts.”

.. ISIS radicalism isn’t driven by lack of theism or poverty. It’s driven by radical Islam. Rich Western kids shooting executives, by contrast, is driven by lack of purpose. Those who cheer them are often being misled by people who suggest that life’s large problems (like the healthcare system) are solved easily without tradeoffs, and that failure to solve them comes from a lack of empathy or willpower on the part of a conspiratorial coterie of evildoers. That’s nearly always a cheap demagogic parlor trick.

Person D: “Yes, and this is why home ownership has nothing to do with it. Just as it has nothing to do with population decline.

Buy a house in order to do what?

Worth noting that Israel, the only high-GDP country to escape the low birth-rate curse of modernity, also has a major housing problem due to spiraling real estate costs (Tel Aviv the most expensive city in the world these days, or close). While yes market realities and policy choices might impact this very important measure of societal health at the margin, there's some deeper malaise going on here. The Israeli counter-example being the dying Nordics who have a level of child-rearing support we could only dream of. But it doesn't change the trendline.

As a relevant footnote on this, the bulk of the 'settlers' in the 'West Bank' aren't religious zealots...it's people who need family housing. A slow-burning annexation is going on because Tel Aviv prices are too high (and Israelis are so hellbent on having families, they'll maintain a geopolitical conflagration in order to do so). But of course that's the hardest thing to fix: the 'why?' of kids and families rather than the 'how?'

8. Andrew Ferguson appointment to FTC

“He’s an A-list legal talent. And he’s good at finding impactful stuff at the margin, and he’s pro-growth without being reflexively deferential to corporations in the old “Chamber of Commerce” style.

The group chats also rejoice at having another member in the administration in Jacob Helberg.

9. Would BLM revolt in response to Daniel Penny verdict?

"I'm with Rufo. And it's my dead horse of, "Elon runs Twitter now, therefore no riots at scale". It's not that BLM is exhausted. It's that they've no Twitter support for ruining society. It's truly staggering how much damage the old Twitter regime did absent much retrospective anger/blame. Those of us who value free speech aren't quite sure how to approach a situation where speech was curated to harm public order.

Old Twitter was run by people who saw police as racist villains. They made a fist emoji out of the BLM hashtag to further promote it. End result was tens of thousands more murders over the baseline. A lot of people got killed because the indoor cats running journalism's favorite platform operated under a false sense of how society works.

10. Effective altruism critiques

    “It’s evil. It was not until my encounter with EA at Oxford that I really internalized how communism seemed to its aspirants before the Russian revolution..

    The combination of a sophisticated philosophical system that appeals to overeducated but spiritually adrift young people and tells them normal human society thinks about morality all wrong and a utopian vision of the future with romantic scope, that justifies great sacrifice”

11. More Luigi Memes

“It's been a couple hours and we suddenly know more about the CEO shooter than I know about my own cousins. How come this is possible and yet we know almost nothing about the Trump shooter?”

And what’s going on in New Jersey with the drones?