Peter Kazanjy

@Kazanjy

Oct 23

skepticalifornia

@skepticaliblog

Oct 23

> Airport shuttle
> 2.2-mile route
> Original price tag: $1.9 billion
> Original target opening: 2023

> $1.4 billion cost overrun
> 4 years late (so far)
> “Maybe next year?” 🤷‍♂️
> uh-oh, electrical arc blasts (will set shuttle on fire)

Chris McGuire

@ChrisRMcGuire

Oct 23

Gregory C. Allen

@Gregory_C_Allen

Oct 23

Here's @elonmusk complaining on the latest earnings call about how utterly and totally unavailable additional AI compute is. Not only can't @SpaceXSI find additional Nvidia GB300s to rent, they can't even find Nvidia H100s.

If we had complete and total AI chip export controls Nvidia's revenue would be one penny lower. Instead, we're selling them H200s that could be supporting American companies. Absurd.

Veeral Patel

@vral

Oct 23

Devon Tivona

@devontivona

Oct 23

Yesterday I had five hours on a flight with Wi-Fi that barely worked. “Has Wi-Fi” is a pretty low bar. So I added a @Starlink filter to @tryramp travel. Now you can check the odds of getting Starlink before you book. 🚀

Keith Rabois

@rabois

Oct 21

james hong

@jhong

Oct 21

Lots of VCs kindof sound like this: "Your basketball team doesn't have a moat, any healthy human can throw the ball into the basket thingy. "

People who have not run companies before don't understand how much the team matters more than some imagined structural moat.

Keith Rabois

@rabois

Oct 20

nic carter

@nic_carter

Oct 20

this California wealth tax thing is just incredible.

so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a ed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time).

polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it).

there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate.

supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right?

well as it turns out, they did.

a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative.

proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave.

just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues.

but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion.

so when you add it all up you get:

+ $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated)
- $69b in present value of lost future income taxes
= - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax

of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time.

and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes.

[1]: nber.org/system/files/w…

Bob McGrew

@bobmcgrewai

Oct 20

Hari Arul@hari_arul

Oct 20

thrilled to co-lead this round with @vkhosla @SStrohband @khoslaventures . @bobmcgrewai is a singular leader, and we in the US could not be more fortunate he’s applying his energy to improving American manufacturing. congratulations!