MORE OR LESS — SpaceX / Tesla Merger, DUH — Shocker after Elon strapped Evel Knievel rocket boosters on a Hot Wheels car Epcot special and called it “flying” — Disney really should have allowed $50K reservations to be the first to have their own “people mover” in the 1980s. The obvious answers in order: (1) this was first clear from the Tesla pay package structure debate months / a year ago (2) interesting Sam theory — does this help with huge stock grant unlocks coming next year on the SpaceX side since it makes the denominator bigger (lockup smaller percent of total company?) (3) and then of course it is because girth matters… and “future co” conglomerate of storytelling / that can tell any story is “all the things” narrative capitalism…. Huge surface area for stories of “believe in future” (and people forget the losers anyway). Also we talk PHP in 2026 lol.
HOT TAKES
- In the age of AI everything is a discovery, nothing is an invention — in the original “age of discovery” no one owned anything, citizen scientists figured stuff out about the world and shared it all for prestige… then we figured out how to lock down and monetize IP “inventions”… now we are back to “discoveries” because everything can be copied too easily and once demonstrated anyone can do anything — so new stuff is just “prestige” not money — that is until people figure out how to “black box” the inner workings again and extract god-like-oracle value? P.S. nice historical fact, the Wright brothers never made any real money.
- The “Cuck” Tranche — Brazen & Branded — this is so funny… and true. I started hearing/using this term in the last few months and now seeing it on twitter — not even sure where it came from (classic, “discovery or invention”) — but it is how everyone is describing the now increasingly brazen and common practice where a “lead” investor does two or three financings at once at different prices. They get the low valuation (and put a bit in the higher number valuation to claim “I also invested in this / at this price”)… and then get all the cuck capital in at the higher price. Let’s be clear, this has always happened a bit / whispered about because it was so embarrassing and uncouth, but now it is brazen and branded. I for one do not do these, but some people get off on weird stuff. Wolf of Wall Street eat your heart out… at least we aren’t tossing midgets BUT let’s all ack that VC is starting to look more like trading than investing, and the culture is changing along with it!
- Palmer must really love Snow Crash — new company “Warhound” is just the Rat Things as a company. After his first company was also a Snow Crash one… I am of two minds on this… on one hand, one of my absolute pet peeves is founders who just steal ideas from science fiction and pass them off as their own and finance companies (wow did Neal Stephenson choose the wrong business model for his ideas/writing!) — on the other hand, I actually think the time has come for this idea… I have actually heard versions of it from others also working on it, with less flash and capital tho. There is something really interesting deeply going on where certain founders have structurally lower cost of capital than others (HT Elon)… meaning they don’t need to be as profitable or efficient on their way.
- I asked my bot to one-shot write our entire AGM LP update deck — This week is Slow’s AGM in New York — the partners wrote different sections of the deck, but just for fun I had my bot one-shot (truly) the whole deck with only guidance on a few sections that should exist. TBH what the bot did / the distillation of all of Slow, funds, trajectories, important themes, etc. was WAY better than what we did as humans manually and the slide formatting was excellent / great storytelling in photos, etc. Now, of course, bot has access to our internal team notes, as well as everything I write, etc…. So it is using that — but lesson learned, let the bots do the work (for those LPs attending, we ended up using bot for inspiration in a few places and formatting — you are still getting sort-of-organic slides and convo live).
- Try The Information’s Polls App — legit a great set of questions daily and a great pulse on what people in the tech world actually think — Anthropic’s IPO will be, I am sure, a fun set of questions rolling thru. Get the app at polls.theinformation.com.
- Jews were the original Narrative Capitalists — story can survive disconnected from land, value can survive disconnected from hard assets — we are now in an era of “narrative capitalism” as I often like to say… storing value/money in ideas and memes rather than traditional financial results, etc. The STORIES are valuable. On one hand — terrifying — on the other hand, maybe it has always been that way. The Jews figured this out / this might be the historical Jewish “swerve” when they lost Jerusalem (and should have lost their “g-d”) but figured out they could separate g-d from the land and keep the ideas and culture going in a distributed network (with really fascinating sum-checks on the central story/key text to freeze it) — the CAPITAL is the story. Stories are more resilient to attacks/reality than assets in the ground are… maybe this is a central tension in history? Stories are hard to kill vs. assets/conquer — and Jews intuitively get this (and therefore get our moment in capitalism somehow?… which is why they are everywhere in tech and finance?)…
- Beware the Nice Gifts From Funds — I say as I fly east with a very nice bag given to me by a fund I invested in… makes me nervous when the calculus even on the margin is “but they give such nice stuff” or “throw nice events” — luckily our AGM is at our lawyer’s office because the space is free-99 (or really we just massively overpay for legal I guess).
- When the cars start “flying” with rocket boosters on stage… — …and landing like rocket boosters, you know you are watching the opening bid in the “SpaceX / Tesla must merge” story. Called it off the stage demo — the earnings call followed right on script a week later.
- The death of the web is inevitable — the models are commodity… Meta ships Muse, Gemini ships everything, and consumers already can’t tell the difference. classic race to the bottom, zero lock-in — which means value moves to assets, trust, and distribution… the full thread on where I landed.
- Oh — and — Software is not an asset — the theme of a week of founder conversations… software is commodity now, like content — infinitely reproducible, instantly decompiled, no moat. The real assets are data, trust, attention, engagement, and physical/legacy assets… invest accordingly.
- Etiquette is the new hoodie — spent an hour this week with a national magazine writer on why Slow’s finishing school was so resonant… trust is the #1 currency of this era, not technical skill. The hoodie made sense as a status signal when tech was scarce — the signal collapsed the moment everyone wore one.
- “I got ethernet and it was game changing” — a 28 year old — wild… a generation that never plugged anything in is rediscovering physics one cable at a time.
- Torah bot is getting a bit cheeky — connecting the readings of the day to venture capital, lol… I built it, and it still surprises me.
- Are seed investors the “agents” of Silicon Valley? — get paid 10% (better business model to be in equity than cashflow tho), read scripts, sign stars, make matches… I do get why a16z was so obsessed with CAA for what it is worth… and the narrative that you “get big or die” might be right — save the fact that the variance in companies is WAY bigger than movies AND 10% of equity is better than 10% of cashflow til you are fired.
- The Usual Suspects — Nathan Fielder’s real trick was making a real-life sequel — “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”… the only question is who is Keyser Söze.
- You can’t pivot if you never had a specific direction in the first place…. — I think pivots go away…. not because companies don’t change what they do… but just because with AI building strategies, leaders don’t set product directions the same way / everyone just gets customers and “builds stuff” — hard to pivot strategies if you never had a clear strategy in the first place beyond “get paid”, “make stuff”, bro down, cash out.
- Kevin really needs a wall of missing tchotchkes and deal toys — the most Kevin thing ever would be if every fund sent him one to feature… DM me and I will send the address.
- Did Billy Evans write himself a love poem as Elisabeth Holmes on Twitter? — because if he did that is either the most brilliant and hilarious thing to do in late October 2026, or he is completely missing the joke — either way it is great… and that is the moment we are in.
- “Dad, is it cool to be old enough to have SEEN evolution” — …oy vey Maverick — one in a string of hilarious kid comments on the way to school including “where does Elon find all these women, is it ‘Rome’ or ‘Paris’?”
Best,
Sam
P.S. studied Maimonides on Abraham this week with some friends… his read: Abraham succeeded because he treated himself as the only person in the world — paid no attention to his father, the king, or anyone who hindered him. The original founder psychology… three thousand years before demo day. Abraham figured out the idea of “one”… and it turns out there are three numbers that matter — zero, one, and infinity. (Oh no, there is 3 again)!
P.P.S. everyone seems excited with agents giving them a “computer”… but why would you only want ONE computer? Bot… computer… computers…