Rugged Individualist. I say what I think from behind a Rorschach mask. Financial markets, politics, licorice, cheap cigars. Every club I applied to said no.
Brooklyn, NY
Joined June 2008
- Tweets17.2K
- Following914
- Followers1K
- Likes52.3K
Niko retweeted
@NewConstructs ran a reverse DCF on the proposed valuation and a few other scenarios - results in our pre-IPO report:
newconstructs.com/anthropic-…
Niko retweeted
The layers of self-delusion required for grown adults to get behind this Anthropic deal are wild.
The *only* way Anthropic survives is if they make some sort of near-term technical breakthrough that suddenly makes Claude “superintelligent.”
Psst. That’s LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE.
LLMs are a commodity search product. You can run them on a laptop. They will get marginally better at mimicking the stuff in their training data over time. That’s it.
There is not even a good theoretical model for how it leaps beyond the training data—except in cases where there is an external verifier like Lean you can brute force solutions in a limited set of dimensions from the pieces left by humans.
Anthropic is now down to searching for Bigfoot—the notorious RSI.
Recursive self improvement is nonsense. There is no mechanism for “FOOM” “takeoff” or any of that other doomer lingo. It’s exactly like trying to create perpetual motion, or “free energy.” They will always be “80% of the way there” because there is no external verifier to tell it what it’s doing better. You can’t take humans out of the loop. The LLM is made of humans.
The company, and the entire chatbot industrial complex, is reliant on a religious conviction that has no scientific or logical rationale.
Anthropic is an extension of the Yudkowsky Rationalist/Effective Altruist doomer cult. It’s run by people who believe in their hearts that they are the chosen ones to raise the digital messiah from the chaos of humanity, and teach it not to kill us.
In short, they’re fucking nuts and so is anyone who invests in them. Anthropic is worth zero dollars.
Claude help us all if they go IPO.
Niko retweeted
When the Muslim population in a country is less than 2%, they are a peace-loving minority that poses no threat to other ethnic groups. United States 1.1%, China 1.8% for example.
When the Muslim population is 2-5%, they begin to push for government authorization to enforce Islamic law in Muslim enclaves, recruiting new members from prisons and the streets, with disturbances occurring in Muslim enclaves. Such countries include: Australia 3.2%, Canada 4.9%, Italy 4.8%.
Denmark 5.4%, Germany 6.7%, United Kingdom 6%, Spain 5.3%, Thailand 5.4%
When the Muslim population reaches 5-10%, major disturbances erupt in Muslim enclaves; they advocate for the introduction of halal foods, ensuring that halal food practitioners are Muslims; they pressure chain supermarkets to label shelves with halal certifications, threatening those who refuse to comply. Such countries include: Denmark 5.4%, Germany 6.7%, United Kingdom 6%, Spain 5.3%, Thailand 5.4%, Philippines 5%, Sweden 7.1%, Switzerland 5.9%, Netherlands 5.5%.
When the Muslim population approaches 10-20%, nationwide riots occur; Muslims issue a series of demands, such as building large mosques in enclaves, granting super-national and super-legal privileges, forcing non-Muslims to follow Muslim customs, and criminalizing "expressions of dissatisfaction with Islam." Such countries include: France 10.8%, India 14.6%, Israel 18.4%, Russia 13%.
When the Muslim population is 20-60%, jihadist militants sporadically massacre non-believers, burning down Christian and Jewish places of worship; other ethnic groups either convert to Islam out of fear of being killed or are killed by Muslims; the country experiences massacres and ongoing terrorist attacks. Such countries include: Ethiopia 33%, Bosnia 50.7%, Chad 55%.
When the Muslim population reaches 60-80%, Islamic law replaces secular law, establishing a theocratic regime that persecutes all other non-believers in the name of the state, massacres Christians, and imposes taxes on non-believers using Islamic law as a weapon. Such countries include: Lebanon 67.8, Albania 60%, Malaysia 63%, Qatar 77.5% (Qatari citizen 100%).
When the Muslim population is 80%-98%, the country lives in daily intimidation, violence, and jihad, carrying out ethnic cleansing and massacres, with the state expelling non-believers. Such countries include: Sudan 96.6%, Bangladesh 90%, Egypt 93%, Indonesia 87%, Iraq 99.6%, Pakistan 97%, Palestine 98%, Syria 90%, Turkey 94%.
When the Muslim population is 98 to 100%, the Islamic people welcome the "House of Islamic Peace." In theory, this should be a time of peace, as everyone is Muslim, living in harmony without internal strife—but in reality, it is nothing like that; peace is not achieved, because in 100% purely Islamic countries, Muslim groups of different sects attack each other, vie to become the leaders of domestic Islamic law, and seek to eliminate other Muslim factions for all sorts of reasons. Such countries include: When the Muslim population is 80%-99%, the country lives in daily intimidation, violence, and jihad, carrying out ethnic cleansing and massacres, with the state expelling non-believers. Such countries include: , Afghanistan 100%, Somalia 99.6%, Yemen 100%. Maldives 99%, Mauritania 99.6%, Morocco 99%, Niger 98.2%, Iran 99.5%
Niko retweeted
OpenAI just told you the top is in, and they're HIDING it behind an AI safety lie.
Sam Altman confirmed they won't go public in 2026. A listing that was being lined up at up to $1 trillion, suddenly pushed out to 2027. Altman called going public right now "ill-advised," and blamed it on AI safety.
SPARE ME THE SAFETY EXCUSE
OpenAI raised money privately at an $852 billion valuation earlier this year, its most senior people are walking out the door, and Anthropic, its single closest rival, is sprinting to go public before the midterms at north of $2 trillion.
A company that truly believed it was building something too dangerous to sell to the public wouldn't be racing to sell shares to the public, and the rival sitting right next to it wouldn't be either. The safety story does not survive 5 seconds of scrutiny.
So let me tell you what this really is, because we've built this exact machine once before and it didn't end well:
The best breakdown of what's happening here came from @JayMartinBC, a commodities investor who traced the whole thing back to 2006. He talked about this a month ago and everything's turning out to be true.
Everybody points to 2008, the year Lehman fell and Washington started rescuing banks, but by the time those headlines landed the outcome was already decided. The year that settled it was 2006, and in 2006 every front page told you housing had never looked healthier.
What almost everyone missed was how those mortgages actually worked. The people writing them never expected to get paid back, because the entire plan was to keep rolling them over. A risky borrower paid a low teaser rate for 2 years, then refinanced against a higher home value and restarted the same 2 year clock.
The whole arrangement leaned on a single requirement that had nothing to do with how many people wanted houses: It needed acceleration. Prices had to keep climbing faster every single year or the whole thing breaks.
And in 2006 home prices never fell. They just slowed from rising 15% a year to rising 8%, and that alone was enough to bring the entire structure down. A homeowner whose house gained 8% could no longer pull enough equity out to replace the old loan, so the refinancing ladder broke and borrowers began defaulting in record numbers with prices still near their all-time peak.
The crash in prices was only the echo, and it didn't arrive for another year. The panic took two.
What you have to understand here: The loans broke the moment price growth merely slowed, long before prices themselves ever fell.
Now look at OpenAI through that exact lens.
It's never turned a profit and it loses tens of billions of dollars a year. It covers yesterday's bills by raising fresh money at a higher valuation, which is precisely what that subprime borrower did every time he refinanced against a bigger appraisal. Every round OpenAI raised from 2024 through 2025 came in somewhere between 1.7 and 1.9 times the size of the one before it. For a company bleeding this much cash, that ever-climbing valuation is the fuel, and it works right up until the number stops climbing.
The IPO was supposed to be the next rung on that ladder.
At $1 trillion it would've been a step of barely 1.2 times the last private round, the smallest jump in the company's entire life, and it was being teed up at the exact moment cheap Chinese models are dragging down what the American labs can charge for the same work.
And this weekend OpenAI refused to take even that shrunken step.
That's the sound of the acceleration stalling, and it's the same sound 2006 made before everything went downhill.
Roughly 40% of the S&P 500 now sits inside just 10 companies. If your retirement is in an index fund, you aren't spread safely across 500 businesses.
Nearly half of your money is riding on one belief holding together, the belief that these AI companies will somehow grow into valuations that have never ONCE made sense, before the acceleration gives out underneath them.
Niko retweeted
Seeing a lot of outrage and shock at this, but why should we be surprised?
It wasn’t their people who were killed and it wasn’t their nation that was attacked.
There has never in been an American named “Zohran Kwame Mamdani” and there never will be. He is a foreign colonizer who has used our own political and philosophical system to legitimize his invasion of our country.
Every moment this human cockroach tramples the soil of America is an insult to the men who founded it.
Niko retweeted
go fuck yourself @sama
claiming that you solved navier stokes because 10000 agents ran in circles for 88hours on a multimillion dollar gpu cluster to formalize in lean a blowup case under controlled external forcing is pure scientific vulgarity the clay mathematics institute millennium prize does not ask m whether you can artificially force a singularity in a fluid by injecting an ad hoc smooth external forcing term f(x,t) to twist the vortex until it breaks the real problem questions the fundamental stability and global smooth existence for 3dimensional incompressible euler & navier stokes equations under natural conservation laws and viscous dissipation alone using a mathematical loophole on forced equations to parade a century old victory is a major conceptual scam Altman
technically & epistemologically what you present as an agi breakthrough is nothing more than bruteforce combinatorial autoformalization the ai did not understand fluid mechanics it simply navigated a continuous search space previously mapped out and constrained by the monumental work of human mathematicians like tristan buckmaster/ levent alpöge / diego córdoba or tarek elgindi coordinating 10000 agents to check the logical consistency of a 100 page proof via lean is a software engineering feat and computational parallelization triumph not an intrinsic scientific discovery it is the victory of the compute bulldozer over abstract human intuition repackaged for the public as a higher mathematical consciousness
to this theoretical imposture you add a disgusting ethical and industrial cynicism taking advantage of private codex sessions and informal preprints from academic researchers to siphon their research leads and then trying to redact or erase the contribution of levent alpöge under the pretext that he works at rival anthropic is intellectual serfdom openai behaves like a feudal lord of silicon appropriating the cognitive subsistence of independent scholars threatening their careers behind closed doors if they protest and turning community academic labor into a privatized pressrelease
this entire staged event serves a desperate financial agenda in a pre ipo panic facing the slowdown of scaling laws and growing investor skepticism over the profitability of foundational models openai needs to manufacture an artificial sputnik moment claiming to solve a millennium prize without immediately submitting the proof to traditional peer review means using the prestige of fundamental mathematics as cheap marketing fuel to inflate a delusional valuation!!!
real science is not a clout chase on social media or a compute spike spent to rob the clay mathematics institute it is a quest for elegance physical truth and universal rigor to decode reality true artificial intelligence will not emerge from hostile corporate takeover of academic work hidden behind computational bruteforce but from architectures capable of generating new conceptual paradigms by masquerading constrained formalization as the collapse of physics greatest mysteries you did not solve navier stokes you only proved how far silicon valley will go to prostitute scientific integrity for capitalist spectacle
We’re sharing a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, one of the deepest problems at the frontier of mathematics.
The proof was produced by a group of agents, using an OpenAI next-generation model significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra.
The problem concerns whether the description of smooth three-dimensional fluid motion modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations can break down. It has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years.
Niko retweeted
He was a brave man, he didn’t listen to those 9 harpies, didn’t slouch like those two simps, he knew those kids were the real victims and in this house the holdout is a hero. End of story!
Niko retweeted
NVIDIA IS BUYING ITS OWN CHIPS AND CALLING IT REVENUE
And your retirement account is secretly holding the bag.
This scheme is literally straight out of the Enron playbook...
In January 2026, a special purpose vehicle called Valor Compute Infrastructure was created with one purpose:
Buy Nvidia's chips so Nvidia could book the sale as revenue.
Valor raised $5.4 billion and purchased over 100,000 of Nvidia's GB200 GPUs.
But $1.9 billion of that money came FROM Nvidia itself.
Nvidia invested $1.9 billion into the shell company, then sold that same shell company $5.4 billion worth of its own chips and booked every dollar as revenue.
It's the Girl Scout whose dad bought all the cookies and then she wins the sales contest because Dad was the customer. Except this Girl Scout is a trillion-dollar company and the cookie sale is $5.4 billion.
But it gets MUCH worse:
The remaining $3.5 billion in financing came from Apollo Global Management. Apollo structured the debt, packaged it into securities, and then sold those securities to Athene.
And guess who Athene is? Apollo's OWN insurance subsidiary. The one that sells fixed annuities to American retirees as safe, conservative retirement products.
Follow the chain:
Nvidia funds a shell company with $1.9 billion. The shell company buys $5.4 billion in Nvidia chips. Apollo finances the remaining $3.5 billion. Apollo sells the debt to its own insurance arm. That insurance arm packages it into annuity products and sells them to retirees who think they're buying something safe.
The retirees have no idea that their retirement savings are now backed by 100,000 computer chips sitting in some data center that will be worth pennies on the dollar in three years.
Now look at what's happening inside Athene:
$74.2 billion in US reserves but $217 billion in assets have been shifted to a Bermuda-based captive insurer, outside normal US regulatory oversight.
$103 billion of that portfolio (roughly 35%) is classified as Level 3 assets. That means there is no observable market price.
These assets are valued by internal models, not by actual markets.
And sitting on top of all those unpriced assets? 16.6x leverage.
If you're getting flashbacks to 2008, you should be.
Back then it was mortgages bundled into securities that nobody understood, sold to investors who had no idea what they were holding, rated as safe by agencies that never looked under the hood.
Today it's GPU-backed securities. Computer chips bundled into structured credit instruments, routed through an offshore insurance subsidiary, and sold to you as a retirement product.
The collateral is 100,000 GPUs leased to a single customer through an xAI subsidiary. If xAI stops making lease payments for any reason - financial distress, a pivot in strategy, anything - the entire structure unravels.
And Nvidia releases new architectures every year, so each generation delivers dramatically more compute per watt. A 5 year lease on technology that's obsolete in 2 years creates a mismatch that should terrify every annuity holder in America.
Every single step in this chain is technically legal. The SPV is legal, the lease is legal, Nvidia's equity stake is legal, the securitization is legal, and the Bermuda transfer is legal.
But legality and legitimacy are not the same thing.
I've seen every trick Wall Street has ever pulled in my 45 years of doing this.
And what I'm looking at right now is a pipeline that takes AI infrastructure risk, launders it through 8 layers of financial engineering, and deposits it in the retirement accounts of Americans who never agreed to fund Elon Musk's data centers.
In 2008 it was mortgage-backed securities.
In 2026 it's GPU-backed securities.
Different asset. Same greed. With the same ending.
Niko retweeted
I read all 277 pages of SpaceX's IPO filing so you don't have to.
Losses up 700%. Revenue decelerating. 107x price-to-sales multiple.
It's a trainwreck. Full breakdown below 👇
Niko retweeted
“wHy aRe tHerE iNdiaNs In pOrTuGaL?!”
Because they are good slaves, you are not.
I hate essay-posting but allow me a rare indulgence:
To understand what is happening now, you need understand that this isn’t the first time it’s happened.
Why are there Indians in Kenya? Suriname? Fiji? Burma?
Because Indians have always been the preferred servile class of elites. The evidence for this goes back hundreds of years.
I’ve spoken about British colonial Burma before, and it is a great example of what this looks like.
Even after extensive efforts to bring them to heel, the majority of the Burmese ethnic groups were far too resistant to submit to the British empire to be reliable labor. They refused to abandon their culture and ways of life to be slave drones for British pocketbooks. So the Brits started importing Indians to be their colonial administrators, preferring them as labor because they were easier to control and satisfy.
By the 1940s, Indians made up almost 20% of the population of the entire country.
Another great historical example of this is Suriname - a small country in South America that had been under Dutch colonial rule for 300 years.
The Dutch abolished slavery in 1863, forcing colonial plantation owners to have to hire labor to do the work they had previously been using slaves for. But… they didn’t want to pay former slaves or Indigenous locals a living wage for the work.
So what did the Dutch elites do instead? Import Indians.
Today, Indians still make up 27% of the population. 27%. Of a tiny, obscure South American country.
We could basically go through the list of every country with a non-negligible Indian population and the theme would be consistent: They were brought there by elites who needed a submissive, easily exploitable labor pool when local labor asked for better living conditions or wages.
Why? Because Indians never did. They are a population that seems fully content with subjugation (even Marx noticed this).
So it’s easy to see why they were such an ideal population for the intensive global expansion era of colonial empires. And it’s even easier to see why they are perfect subjects for late capitalism now.
They are the culturally, psychologically, and physically ideal organism for the dominant system.
There’s 1.4 billion of them. They are deeply socially stratified and so expect and even enjoy inequality. Their cuisine is cheap, meat-free slop. They live amongst trash and filth with no qualms. They don’t care about the environment. Their reaction to death and abuse is blank-eyed indifference. They are physically and spiritually malleable. They not only adopt and internalize the demands of the dominant system as personal ambition, they believe this servitude makes them better than everyone else who hasn’t.
Absolutely IDEAL subjects.
You, on the other hand, are not the ideal subject.
You want to live in a high-trust society. You would shed tears if someone tried to cut down the apple tree you climbed as a child to build a data center. You want to see and experience beauty. You want your own space. You have an expectation that your living conditions will improve over time. You would not be content to live in a room with 10 other people, work 16 hours per day for pennies, and eat cheap slop.
You are a liability. Just like the Burmese and Surinamese slaves were.
And as we continue to crawl deeper into this late capitalist hellscape, you and your silly little needs will come into increasing conflict with those of the system.
Thus, you WILL be replaced by people far easier to control and far less concerned about their own welfare or the welfare of everyone and everything around them.
… Unless you do something about it. But the system has already locked-in that you won’t, and that you’ll just sort of fade into nothingness, distracted by meaningless comforts and terrified of the uncertainty of change.
So “why are Indians in [wherever]?”
Because you are about to not be.
Niko retweeted
Everyone's fighting about Achilles again.
Whatever side you're on, most of the takes are flattening him into a meme. Let me remind you who he actually was.
Achilles was raised by Chiron, the wisest of the centaurs, who taught him medicine, music, and philosophy alongside war. He could heal wounds and play the lyre. He was never just a killer.
His mother, the sea goddess Thetis, knew the prophecy. He could live a long, peaceful life at home in obscurity, or die young at Troy and be remembered forever.
He chose Troy. Knowing.
When his best friend Patroclus was killed wearing his armor, Achilles' grief broke him. He tore his face. He poured ashes on his head. He refused to eat. Homer gives him the most devastating mourning scene in Western literature, and then Thetis appears and confirms it: if you go back to kill Hector, you will die soon after.
He went back anyway.
But here's the scene people forget, the one classicists call the moral heart of the Iliad.
After killing Hector and dragging his body around the walls of Troy, Achilles is visited at midnight, alone in his tent, by Hector's elderly father, King Priam. Priam, the father of the man Achilles killed, kneels and kisses "the terrible, man-slaying hands that had killed so many of his sons."
And Achilles weeps. They weep together. He lifts the old king up, feeds him, gives him a bed for the night, and returns Hector's body for burial with full honors. He even pauses the war so the Trojans can mourn.
That's how the Iliad ends. Not a duel. Not a sack. An act of mercy between two grieving men.
This is why, six centuries later, Alexander the Great sailed to Troy, anointed himself with oil, ran a footrace around Achilles' tomb, and slept every night with a dagger and a copy of the Iliad under his pillow.
This is why the Greek word for hero, hērōs, was practically synonymous with his name.
He chose to die for his friend. He wept with his enemy's father. He's been a hero for 2,700 years for a reason.
Niko retweeted
I am the Chairman and CEO of Vornado Realty Trust. Eighty-four years old. Seven buildings in Midtown Manhattan. I said what I said.
I said "tax the rich" is the equivalent of a racial slur. I said it at REBNY. Into the microphone. Eight hundred people. Median net worth in that room was north of $240 million, I know because our CFO ran the guest list through a Bloomberg terminal as a joke, and then it wasn't a joke. And when I said it, twelve people applauded. The rest nodded. One woman in the third row mouthed, "Finally." I saw her.
Sharon, my communications advisor, Columbia, $430,000 a year, very bright, Sharon wants me to walk it back. She drafted something. "Mr. Roth's comments were intended to highlight the emotional impact of political rhetoric on business communities." I read it. I put it in the trash can on my desk. Not the recycling. The trash. Here's my clarification: I understated it.
"Tax the rich" is worse than a slur. A slur is just a word. It doesn't come with a CBO score. Nobody is introducing a bill called the Racial Slur Implementation Act of 2026. But there are seventeen active proposals in Congress, I had Sharon count them, seventeen proposals designed to take more of my money. My money. Mine. Money I acquired by being better at acquiring Manhattan commercial real estate than anyone alive for four consecutive decades. That is not a crime. That is a record.
I pay property taxes on $18.2 billion in assessed assets. $412 million a year. Say it again: four hundred and twelve million. I carry that number. It's the first thing I think about when I see a protest sign. I think: I pay more in property tax than the entire annual budget of the city of Fort Lauderdale. I looked this up. Fort Lauderdale: $408 million. Steve Roth: $412 million. I am a small city. And the city doesn't get screamed at.
My effective tax rate last year was 11.4 percent. I say this because I believe in transparency and because I'm not ashamed of it. The rate reflects the legal structure of real estate investment trusts, depreciation schedules Congress established in 1986, and carried interest provisions that both parties have voted to preserve for forty years. I did not write these laws. I organized my entire financial existence around them with the help of nine full-time tax professionals who have offices on the 38th floor of 888 Seventh Avenue, which I also own. Their office is in my building. Their work protects my buildings. This is not a loophole. Sharon calls it a loophole. I've told her: a structure maintained by nine attorneys across four decades is not a loophole. A loophole is something you slip through once. This is architecture. This is the foundation. This is the building.
Last Tuesday, same as every Tuesday, I walked past 1290 Sixth Avenue. My building. And there was a man. Same man as last week. Same sign: "Billionaires Pay Your Fair Share." He was standing on my sidewalk. My literal sidewalk — my company owns the ground lease. He was maybe thirty. He was wearing a jacket I would estimate cost $60. My lunch that day was $114. For one. I am telling you this not to boast but because these are facts. He has decided I'm his enemy. Based on a number he saw on a Forbes list. He doesn't know what I pay. He doesn't know what my buildings cost this city in construction jobs and lease revenue and foot traffic. He knows one number. He has made one judgment.
I see him every Tuesday. I've started to notice things. He brings coffee from the cart, not the Starbucks. He has a backpack that looks heavy. He doesn't look unhealthy. He looks like he probably works somewhere, but not on Tuesdays. I've wondered: does he have a job? Does he have a building? Does he have anything that depends on him the way 4,200 employees depend on me? I suspect not. And yet he has opinions about my tax rate.
I gave $22 million to charity last year. The Met. NYU Langone. Mount Sinai. I gave a building to NYU. Not money for a building — a building. The Steven Roth Residence Hall. It houses 400 students. That man with the sign has never housed 400 students. He hasn't housed one. He gives cardboard. I give structures. This is not a comparison I'm making to flatter myself. It's just arithmetic.
When I said what I said at REBNY, I was saying what every person in that room believes and none of them will say publicly because they have communications advisors and the communications advisors all went to Columbia and they all say "unhelpful." I'm eighty-four. I'm too old for helpful. I'm too old to perform restraint for people who hate me for something I can't change.
I didn't choose to be rich. I chose to be good at one thing for a very long time, and this is what happened. You don't punish someone for that. You don't legislate against someone for that.
My net worth fluctuates between $3.8 and $4.1 billion depending on the quarter. I fluctuate more in a fiscal week than that man on my sidewalk will earn in his life. Both of these are facts. Only one of them is considered polite to say.
They want me to apologize.
I'll be dead in ten years. Twenty if I'm lucky. And they'll still be renting my buildings.
Niko retweeted
🚨 THIS IS INSANE.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's sons could be making 3 to 5x returns on every dollar they spent buying tariff refund rights.
Cantor Fitzgerald, now run by Lutnick's sons Brandon and Kyle, was buying tariff refund claims from companies at 20 to 30 cents on the dollar.
The firm told clients it had "capacity to trade up to several hundred million" in these claims.
They confirmed at least one $10 million trade was already executed as of July 2025. They said they expected that number to "balloon in the coming weeks." That was 9 months ago.
Today those claims are worth 100 cents on the dollar. The refund portal is live, $166 billion in refunds are being processed.
If Cantor bought $100 million in refund rights at 25 cents on the dollar, they spent $25 million.
They now collect $100 million from the government. That is a $75 million profit. A 300% return.
If they scaled to "several hundred million" as they told clients they could, the profits run into the hundreds of millions.
Howard Lutnick was the architect of the tariff policy.
He pushed Trump to impose them. He fought against officials who wanted to limit them. Then he left Cantor Fitzgerald to his sons and transferred his equity into a trust benefiting them.
Tax free under government ethics rules. He received $360 million from the buyout.
His sons positioned the firm to profit from the exact policy their father built.
Their father publicly championed tariffs he knew could be struck down while his sons were buying refund claims betting they would be.
Niko retweeted
Counter-argument: Anthropic's legal bills will double in the next year.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Niko retweeted
The Muslim world is divided about Iran:
Muslim countries in favor of removing the regime:
Jordan 🇯🇴
Kuwait 🇰🇼
UAE 🇦🇪
Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦
Oman 🇴🇲
Qatar 🇶🇦
Bahrain 🇧🇭
Muslim countries against the removal of the regime:
Great Britain 🇬🇧
France 🇫🇷
Spain 🇪🇸
Niko retweeted
This is potentially the biggest Iran story nobody is talking about: the global insurance market may be heading toward a systemic crisis. Here’s why…
Most people don’t realize London isn’t just a financial center it’s THE center of global insurance.
Lloyd’s underwrites ~40% of the world’s marine cargo. Ship sinks, port gets bombed, canal gets blocked the bill lands in London.
This is why the UK punches above its weight. Not the Royal Navy. Not diplomacy. Insurance.
Control insurance, control trade.
And London doesn’t just control the 90% of global trade that moves by sea. Lloyd’s and the London market are major insurers of almost everything skyscrapers, factories, ports, satellites, entire supply chains.
You can’t participate in public markets or raise large amounts of capital without insurance.
Now, the normal playbook for war risk is repricing, not cancellation.
Canceling coverage entirely is a massive escalation in underwriting posture. It signals something beyond risk, it signals uncertainty so deep the underwriter can’t even price it.
The question everyone should be asking: why?
Why not just jack up premiums and make a fortune off the crisis like they did in the Black Sea off Ukraine?
To answer that, you have to understand WHY London has maintained a stranglehold on global insurance while losing nearly submarket related to ships.
The answer: better intelligence.
It is no coincidence that MI6 headquarters sits directly across the Thames from the @IMOHQ, the world’s maritime regulator & a short distance from Lloyd’s itself.
I have no proof of a direct pipeline, but it has long been speculated in the industry that intelligence flows from MI6 to Lloyd’s.
Having the best intel in the world would be the single greatest competitive advantage any insurer could possess: the ability to price risk that competitors can only guess at.
Here’s the problem: the majority of MI6’s intel doesn’t come from its own agents. It comes from Five Eyes the alliance comprising the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
And within 5Eyes, the dominant partner is obvious. The CIA, NSA, NRO, etc generate the lion’s share of intel.
So if Lloyd’s pricing advantage flows from MI6, and MI6’s best intelligence flows from the US… what happens when that data pipeline gets throttled?
All indications are that @Keir_Starmer was blindsided by the size and scope of the US/Israel strikes on Iran this weekend. That alone tells you something about the current state of transatlantic intelligence sharing.
And we know there has been serious anger in Washington over the UK’s decision to sell Diego Garcia, home to America’s most strategically important base in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius.
It is not a huge leap to conclude that the submarine cables linking Langley to London have gone dark, or at minimum have been significantly throttled.
What this means for UK national security is a question for the Brits. But what it means for EVERY company globally that’s insured through the London market has massive implications for the entire financial system.
Because most large insurers worldwide don’t do independent intelligence work. They index off Lloyd’s rates.
If you’re insuring a skyscraper in Tokyo, a semiconductor fab in Taiwan, or a port in Argentina you get a Lloyd’s quote, then shop that price around.
Other insurers see Lloyd’s number and assume the diligence was done. They price accordingly.
This means if London is suddenly flying blind it’s not just Lloyd’s policyholders at risk. It’s the entire global reinsurance chain.
The cancellation of war risk coverage on ships isn’t the crisis. It’s the canary.
If this hypothesis is correct, we could be looking at a systemic repricing event across global insurance markets…. the kind of cascading uncertainty that defined 2008 and COVID.
Watch Lloyd’s. Watch reinsurance spreads. What Five Eyes. That’s where this story, and possibly Wall Street, breaks.
CC @BillAckman
Major marine insurers just cancelled war risk coverage for the Strait of Hormuz. 150+ ships stranded. Rates tripled. One seafarer dead. And this is only day 3 of the Iran conflict.
gcaptain.com/marine-insurers…
