Max Chafkin
@chafkin
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writer for @BW and @technology . Some podcasts. Author of THE CONTRARIAN. Worse half to @lagorio . Email: m at maxchafkin dot com.
Queens, NY
Joined October 2007
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Keep having conversations that are like, “who knew these tech guys would go all in on Trump,” and I’m like, “I did! I wrote a whole book about it!!!”
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Others have pointed this out, but this renaming is stepping on the exact same rake that got him ousted by PayPal. Wrote about this in my book
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wow: that 2016 tesla self-driving demo that essentially kicked off the entire industry-wide spending spree...it was fake
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one reason Germany has done so much better against Covid than the US: people actually listen to experts
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Zuck spent last night debating immigration hawks on his fb page
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this is rough. fb reduced to forcing employees to spend time in its flagship metaverse app
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Wikileaks was once a fiercely anti-establishment force. Now Assange essentially giving political advice to the White House
Contacted Trump Jr this morning on why he should publish his emails (i.e with us). Two hours later, does it himself:
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You gotta read this
@bw
story, about the mental health implications of lockdowns and the treatment of workers in the cruise ship industry by
@AustinCarr
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as a country, we all basically engaged in magical thinking, imagining that the virus couldn't hurt us, assuming that that self-confidence would offer protection. but the virus doesn't care what you think.
you gotta read
@shannongsims
in the new
@BW
on Houston's failed Covid response, and America's
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this week's
@bw
cover is an excerpt from my new book. It asks: What did Peter Thiel get out of his 2016 endorsement of Donald Trump? Answer: A lot!
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in her goodbye note, Sheryl Sandberg wrote that, in 2007, she thought the internet "was a largely anonymous place to search for funny pictures." This is some truly heroic, Davos-level BS. So I wrote about that for
@bw
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Idk, kind of seems like the dude who wrote the manifesto was the one "complaining to HR"
Dear
@Google
,
Stop teaching my girl that her path to financial freedom lies not in coding but in complaining to HR.
Thx in advance,
A dad
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all i can think about is how annoying it would be to be married to someone working on this product right now. are they, like, constantly saying, "lets do this in horizon!"
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if Chouinard really wanted to break with normal billionaire practices he could have just paid his taxes
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got to say: its wild hearing trump say "not everybody needs an EV" / "drill baby drill" and musk is just nodding along and saying "thank you"
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florida man in tactical gear tries to bring horse thieves to justice
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so much labor saving AI looks like this. you take an uber driver and a 30k Corolla and replace them with a team of phds, a call center full of "remote operators" and cars that cost 300k and call it efficient
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Musk managed to do something that no amount of advertising dollars, marketing consultants, former Obama campaign strategists, and pretend hobbies couldn’t do: Make Mark Zuckerberg look good
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Quite the scoop: Thiel was dumping bitcoin while he was pumping it
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tesla's progress in china, which has been CRAZY fast and has huge political implications, is the most underrated business story in the world right now
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the gap between what silicon valley billionaires think voters want and what they actually want is substantial
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Corporate marketers embraced BLM on social media, but have been underpaying the influencers they’re hiring to push their messages. Great piece by
@sarahfrier
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this is a holy shit story
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chatgpt is a calculator for writing, if your calculator just randomly made a bunch of errors all the time and with no warning or explanation
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This is sort of a chefs kiss detail. It’s amazing how similar EA is to the authoritarian technofuturism of Thiel. Both instances of Silicon Valley guys who think they know better than everyone else
One of the law students of Sam Bankman-Fried’s dad, Joe?
Peter Thiel!
Thiel told Joe Bankman that his tax law class was “his most valuable because he was able to put a lot of his Facebook stock in an IRA.”
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reminder: Peter Thiel (and Thiel protege JD Vance) are among Rumble's backers
❗️RT gets ready to... Rumble: After a multitude of platforms have moved to knock out our broadcast and limit social media...
... You can stay on top of our LIVE broadcast, any time, anywhere right here:
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there's lots more in the story (written with the great
@hgmiller29
and you can read it for FREE (🚨gift link alert🚨) here 6/6
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i met sheryl sandberg around this time. Her job was going around telling everyone how awesome data-driven internet advertising was. She is, for better or worse, one of the key architects of the hellscape that is the advertising driven internet
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the contempt for normal investors and the cynicism here is something. just some lights japes about ponzi schemes.
This 2021 video is notorious on crypto twitter and deserves wider viewership. Watch VCs David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya brag about buying huge amounts of Solana at a discount, planning to dump on retail. Solana has been called one of "Sam's coins" b/c SBF was a booster.
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Thiel-trump alliance is clearly back on. Trump just endorsed Thiel protege Blake Masters, after shunning him for months
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whatever facebook has been doing to deal with misinformation seems like its really, emphatically not working
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@SilvermanJacob
the thing that gets me is that he's made this huge brand pivot to the right, alienating an important (maybe even critical) customer demographic. Meanwhile on the right nobody really seems impressed
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Just pubbed to terminal: At the National Conservarism conference Peter Thiel just said the FBI and CIA should investigate whether Google has been infiltrated by Chinese intelligence
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one thing to keep in mind when asking, "how could vcs be so dumb as to start a run on their best banking partner"...these guys are OBSESSED with apocalyptic risk. they see it everywhere. 1/
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for
@bw
i wrote about the campaign to pin FTX on Gary Gensler, and the incredibly self-service line from crypto boosters that all they need is "regulatory clarity"
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we brought our son home from the NICU today. Hard to express how grateful we are to the doctors and nurses who risked their own health to care for him. Makes me feel optimistic about the skill and kindness of our health care workers--and about pretty much everything else
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Home news
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honestly so many overheated predictions are going to look so silly, in retrospect, when this is over.
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larry ellison is building a paradise where wealthy celebrities can total a car with no consequence whatsoever, and nobody else has a place to live
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whereas Silicon Valley known for charging everyone the same price and being totally upfront about it
I'm sorry but I'm w/Silicon Valley on this one. Bodegas notorious for price opacity & trying to screw customers at the register.
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to date, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried -- fixtures at Stanford with powerful friends in Silicon Valley and DC -- have mostly avoided scrutiny. But their in role the creation of FTX, especially in the case of Bankman, has been greater than previously reported 2/
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oh, did it seem a little funny that the Valley's top venture capital firm put ~$200m into weird derivatives exchange based in a tax haven? well its a little less weird when you find out that a former SEC commissioner, stanford prof (and friend of family, natch) told them to 5/
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This by
@jwherrman
is really good. Leave aside the apparent dishonesty in the scarjo thing, and you’re left with a company that working really hard to market a product of questionable value and utility
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I don’t think people have really grappled with how frequently these ai systems just make stuff up, nor with the problems this presents for search…and lots of other proposed applications
At Microsoft's demo last week, the "new Bing" incorrectly summarized a Gap financial statement and provided wrong info on pet vacuums and Mexico City nightlife (
@dkbrereton
/ DKB Blog)
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After years of research and hundreds of interviews, my book, The Contrarian, is out in the world! I'm proud of this thing and I think its important, and I hope you'll consider buying it. THREAD!
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ahem
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Sourcing super hedged, but sounds like some in the US gov think FB CEO might have lied to Congress. That a crime
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conventional wisdom said Thiel would be a moderating force on the White House. Turns out he was too extreme for Trump
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really interesting column on Thiel and Vance by
@ThePlumLineGS
I shared some thoughts on Thiel's relationship with democracy.
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Hi!
@danprimack
wrote about this this morning, so think I'm safe to share. My book, The Contrarian, is coming out in September! I've been working on it for years and now you can order it
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Wild stuff: coup leader regrets the coup, joins counter coup
I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.
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Really interesting and thorough piece by
@SilvermanJacob
on David Sacks who seems to be trying to set himself up as a mini Thiel and a (the?) key Musk whisperer
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wow Biden ripped Zuckerberg, called for a repeal of section 230 and referred to a nameless near-billionaire as "one of the little creeps"
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I'm sure the kids will just love Office 365 TikTok Edition By Walmart
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I’m reminded of Thiel’s mid aughts attempt to fight the culture war by way of…a NASCAR magazine called “American Thunder”
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remember that FTX super bowl ad -- the one that told you you were missing out if you didn't put money into an offshore crypto casino? Bankman was in it 3/
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Oh cool: backdoor defense of qanon
“I will take QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories any day over a ‘ministry of truth,’” Peter Thiel says at tonight’s
@JoinLincoln
event in Miami
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this piece by
@sarahfrier
is excellent and explains well why Musk and Zuck's efforts to prioritize engagement over all else have been so craven. We traded a "global town square" for "tiktok for text." The result is ugly.
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this is a great scoop from
@markgurman
and should be another data point in the argument that for all the hype around LLMs, there are real questions about how valuable they are, esp given the cost of running them
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musk's explanation of his free speech plans sounds, actually pretty limited. "if there are tweets that are wrong and bad those should be deleted or made invisible." Lotta editorial judgement there!
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nb: our epic cover this week was shot by a teenager.
I’m stoked to finally share this! :)
Here’s my image on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.
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@teddyschleifer
@DavidSacks
@RoKhanna
Otoh: Khanna is very industry friendly. And Thiel gave him money in 16
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Bankman has portrayed himself as basically working on philanthropy and has talked in vague terms about crypto as a tool for financial empowerment. Actually...4/
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a thing i've been thinking a lot about lately: why has Binance's CZ been so quick to imply that other large, reputable exchanges are insolvent?
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It’s weird that people who are up in arms about big tech and surveillance capitalism don’t really talk about gmail. So I wrote a thing about that
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New! An excerpt from my book in
@NYMag
@intelligencer
about the origins of Thielism, from Stanford to Facebook.
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wrote a column for
@bw
on why its bad to let mega billionaires toy with public companies for sport
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Lot of anxiety over will musk ruin twitter. Better question might be will twitter ruin musk?
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One big takeaway for me while reporting my book is that Thiel cares less about ideas and more about money than his fans (and enemies) realize. He’s done this kind of this many times in his career.
So let me get this straight - Thiel was calling Warren Buffett a “sociopathic Grandpa” for shunning Bitcoin he was dumping billions on his unwitting fans. This is what psychologists call”projection”
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it is very weird that this is how things work at one of america's critical defense contractors
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i know that this is prolly just proof that i'm an AI future murderer or whatever, but these dudes should really try reading some literature thats not Harry Potter
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