knowledge of financing skills
new york
Joined October 2026
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Labriant retweeted
Eminem reportedly turned down $8,000,000 for 1 World Cup show, and the answer came back as a flat no.
The strongest part of this story is what's missing. Nobody asked for a better rate, a private jet, or a different date, and a counter-offer would have admitted that the price was the only issue. A bare no says the deal was never about price at all.
That is leverage most people never get to use. Walking away only works when you don't need the money, and you can't fake that, because the other side checks. Once a market knows you'll refuse a figure like this, every future offer to you starts higher.
There's a cost, too. Each refusal gives up real cash and a very large audience, and it only pays if your name keeps its scarcity. The skill is choosing which stages are worth the trip.
The real flex isn't taking the bag, it's being in a position where you don't need to.
Labriant retweeted
Matthew McConaughey turned down $14,500,000 and says he'd rather land 8 of 100 swings than 7 of 8.
Look at the math people skip. 7 of 8 is an 87% hit rate and 8 of 100 is 8%, yet the second path wins 1 more time. Most people optimize accuracy, but life pays out on total wins, so a safe bet feels good and quietly caps the result.
The catch is survivability. A big miss only helps if you can take it and swing again, which is why he waited out a dry stretch before saying no.
Settling for even money is the real loss.
Labriant retweeted
A doctor charged Matthew Perry $57,000 for ketamine worth about $300, and the sentence he got was 30 months and a $5,600 fine.
The price gap is the whole story. $2,850 a vial against about $15 is not a medical fee, it is what a seller charges when he thinks the buyer can't walk away. Perry had already spent about $9,000,000 on recovery, so his money and his desperation were both easy to see, and that is what got priced in.
The assistant shows the other side of the same incentive. He was paid to manage Perry's care, yet he also became a supplier, which put the person meant to protect him in the position of profiting from his habit. When the one guarding you earns from your use, nobody is guarding you.
The sentences look uneven because the roles were. The dealer took 15 years, while the doctor who joked about the price got 30 months. Courts weigh who sold, who supplied, and who knew, and the public weighs who exploited.
The fine of $5,600 against $57,000 in revenue means the penalty was a tenth of the take.
A sentence can end a case without matching the harm.
Labriant retweeted
Macaulay Culkin's father held a Home Alone sequel hostage and turned a $250,000 fee into $8,000,000 in 4 years.
The leverage came from timing, not talent. Once the studio had committed to the sequel, every week without the star's signature put a franchise worth hundreds of millions at risk. His father asked for the price after the other side could no longer walk away, which is the moment a hold-up works best.
The studio did the math and paid. The concession delayed another film by a year and added about $4,000,000 in costs, yet the sequel still became a hit. That suggests the studio judged the hold-out cheaper than losing its only irreplaceable input.
The cost fell on people outside the deal: about 60 workers lost jobs, and the father's reputation took the hit.
Whoever can't be replaced after the commitment sets the price.
Labriant retweeted
Jamie Foxx says he threw a party for $400 that Diddy's $1,500,000 version couldn't beat.
The story is built to be funny, but the mechanism underneath is real. A party isn't sold by the budget, it's sold by who walks in. Foxx called about 200 of the coolest people he knew, and that guest list did the work money normally buys. Scarce things like access and attention can't be bought at retail, so they're worth more than anything on the invoice.
The detail that makes it land is the food. Cheap chicken on nice plates and a pitcher of soda changes the framing, not the cost. Presentation told guests they were being treated well, and that is most of what a lavish party is trying to say anyway. Expensive and impressive overlap less than people assume.
Diddy's reaction is the real data point. He liked the party until he saw the total, which shows how much of his own spending was a signal to others. When the number dropped, the signal broke, and the annoyance came from learning that the thing he paid for could be done cheaply. Costly displays only work while people believe the cost.
Treat the figures with care. This is Foxx telling a story in his own comic voice, so $1,500,000 and $400 are his version, not audited numbers.
The cheapest party wins when the guest list does the spending.
Labriant retweeted
Michael Jackson said he didn't write Billie Jean, he just got out of its way, and Thriller still sold about 70,000,000 copies.
The claim sounds mystical, but it describes a real working method. He set 1 clear target, a song with a great bass hook, then stopped forcing it and let it arrive days later. That is deliberate preparation followed by deliberate absence, and it is how many creative people actually work. The goal is fixed in advance, and the solution is allowed to show up on its own.
His advice on dancing carries the same idea. Thinking is the mistake, so you drop the mind and become the sound. Skilled performers know that conscious control slows them down once the skill is trained. Practice is where you think, and the stage is where you stop.
Notice the shyness as well. When the interviewer pushed him to demonstrate, he deflected, called himself shy, and only then showed it. That fits the pattern: he is at ease inside the work and uneasy about explaining it, because explaining is a thinking task and the work is not.
There is a caution here. Saying the music wrote itself also removes the credit from the person and the years behind it. A hook found in a car on Ventura Boulevard came after a lifetime of training that made the idea recognizable when it appeared. Inspiration only lands on a prepared mind.
The skill is knowing when to stop trying.
Labriant retweeted
Beyoncé, who earned an estimated $87,000,000 in 2010, was offered total privacy for 1 price, going back to being poor, and she couldn't say yes.
What stands out is how early she had already worked out the price of fame. Most people learn that cost after years of it. She talks about it like a contract she signed on purpose, with a fee paid in privacy and a return collected in venues and income. A young star who thinks in terms and trade-offs has stopped being surprised by fame, and that is rare.
Her hesitation over the offer is the strongest signal. She believes she would have succeeded anyway, so the deal wasn't really about money. She says she would no longer be herself, which means she has fused her identity with the career. That is both her drive and her exposure, because when who you are depends on the work, you can't separate the two even for peace.
Her read on money is just as precise. It doesn't buy happiness, it removes worry, and she says it from having lived through the stressful years. Young people who have just made it tend to treat money as a prize. She treats it as a floor.
Fame is a bill you accept once and keep paying.
Labriant retweeted
Steve Jobs handed Steve Wozniak $350 for a job Atari paid him about $5,000 for, and Woz found out 10 years later.
The money was never the real transaction. Jobs was the only one talking to Atari, so he was the only one who knew the number, and whoever holds the client sets the price. The skill Woz brought was rare, but the information advantage belonged to Jobs, and he used it against his own partner.
The lie was also badly priced. Woz says he would have given up the whole payment if Jobs had just asked. Jobs paid about $4,650 of trust to avoid a conversation that would have cost him nothing.
That makes the Kottke story more than a coincidence. When the stakes grew from a $5,000 bonus to Apple stock, he made the same choice, and Woz had to fix it with his own shares. The pattern is that Jobs treats a friend's contribution as a cost to minimize, not a stake to honor.
The genius question is a false choice. Hard bargaining is a skill, but hiding the number from a partner is a decision.
You can win the deal and still lose the person.
Labriant retweeted
Mark Zuckerberg was worth $16,000,000,000 and still took a $5,950,000 mortgage at 1.05%.
Paying cash isn't free, because it pulls that money out of anything that could earn more. Buffett put about $30,000 into a $150,000 house in 1971 and kept the rest free for Berkshire shares.
At 1.05%, the bar for beating the loan sat near the floor.
A 30-year fixed rate works like an option: if rates rise, yours stays, and if they fall, you refinance. The catch is that payments come due even when investments drop.
Debt is cheap until the day your investments aren't.
Labriant retweeted
Tesla spent 9 years building a flying Roadster, and the only passenger on its first flight was nobody.
The demo used 10 nozzles and compressed air, and the car flew with nobody inside. That proves a controlled burst, not a ride.
The real product stays on the ground: 60 mph in 0.81 seconds, thanks to fans that press the car onto the road.
Production starts in 2028, the flying version has no road approval, yet shares rose the next morning. The demo paid before the car did.
Flight sells the dream. Grip sells the car.
Labriant retweeted
Eric Weinstein spoke to about 50 insiders about UFOs, and he still refuses to say aliens are real.
His claim is smaller than the headlines, and that is why it is harder to dismiss. He points to secret programs with almost no oversight, officially denied, that exist on paper. Proving that needs documents, not a spacecraft.
It splits into 2 questions. Do these programs exist? That can be checked. Are aliens behind them? Nobody has shown that. The bolder stories, like underwater bases or threats against a whistleblower, are testimony, not proof.
Even if there are no aliens, a program with no oversight and a budget nobody can see is a real problem.
The secrecy is the story, and the aliens are the distraction.
Labriant retweeted
Meta may spend up to $100,000,000,000 on AI, and the bill arrives long before any proof of payback.
The money goes into 5 things: computing power, data centers, custom chips, top talent, and new models. Meta is planning for several gigawatts of capacity, a long-term commitment with years of spending before the payoff is clear.
The return depends on products built on top: assistants that keep people in its apps, sharper ads, and easier shopping. The hurdle is steep. A simple 10-year payback on $100,000,000,000 means $10,000,000,000 a year before costs, and at $200,000,000,000 that doubles. These are illustrations, not forecasts.
The test is not how many chips Meta buys. It is whether revenue grows faster than the cost of compute.
Labriant retweeted
Alexandr Wang left MIT at 19 to sell the data layer every AI model would need and became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 24.
In 2016 a 19-year-old dropped out of MIT to co-found Scale AI. He skipped the contest to train the next famous model and aimed at the bottleneck no one else owned: turning raw human judgment into the labeled, ranked, and evaluated data that advanced systems require to improve.
Most founders chased the visible product. Wang built the invisible input. The loop compounded fast. Cleaner data produced stronger models, stronger models raised the cost of bad data, and every new competitor increased demand for the same scarce resource Scale already organized.
The advantage was not better algorithms. It was owning the scarce step everyone else treated as a commodity.
In June 2025 Meta committed $14,300,000,000 and valued Scale above $29,000,000,000. Wang joined Meta's AI team. The number attached to the company, not the founder.
Labriant retweeted
Alexandr Wang says first-time founders should do every job themselves, then learn to stop.
His advice for a first company: hold a strong view on how every detail should work. Scale AI was built that way, and it succeeded because of that control. The cost was becoming the bottleneck, since every decision ran through him.
At Meta he couldn't repeat it. He is not an AI researcher or a product designer, and the timeline was too short. So his job became hiring the best people in every field and giving them room to shape the work.
Control builds the first company. Hiring builds the second.
Labriant retweeted
SpaceX will capture an asteroid with more gold than Earth's crust and land Optimus robots carrying American flags on Mars within 8 years.
Starship parks Psyche in geosynchronous orbit over an American Pacific atoll. No humans within 50 miles. Optimus robots extract the metals. Delivery to Earth is free though some burns up on entry.
Bezos said 15 years ago Earth gets zoned residential as heavy industry moves to space. Vast distances make emissions irrelevant.
The same fleet lands on Mars in 8 years max. Optimus robots deploy solar panels, batteries, compute, and Starlinks for 4K video before humans arrive.
SpaceX moves the factories off the planet.
Labriant retweeted
Alexandr Wang's company paid American contributors about $500,000,000 last year to teach AI what it gets wrong.
Scale AI runs a platform called Outlier, which he describes as Uber for AI: algorithms need data, and a network of people across 9,000 US towns produce and correct it for pay. A nurse, for example, catches an AI telling someone to ignore stomach pain that could be appendicitis, and her correction feeds back into the model.
Spam is filtered through peer review and automated checks. Experts are wanted in anything, from medicine to train tracks.
AI is a race on 3 fronts: chips, data, and algorithms.
The cleanest data wins.
Labriant retweeted
Elon Musk says money may disappear entirely, and energy becomes the only currency left.
His logic: money exists as a database for allocating human labor. If AI and robots grow big enough to meet every human need, that database loses its purpose. Energy can't be legislated into existence, which is why he ties Bitcoin to it.
He measures civilization on the Kardashev scale: how much of a planet's, then a sun's, then a galaxy's energy gets turned into useful work.
The turning point comes when AI and robots mine, build chips, and make solar panels on their own. Once that cycle closes, the economy decouples from money.
Wealth only means something while humans are around to want it.
Labriant retweeted
Alexandr Wang says right now is the best moment in history to build a billion-dollar company.
He argues the bottleneck is no longer AI models but how fast the world adapts to them. Even if models stopped improving today, decades of economic upheaval would still follow, and that gap between technology and adoption is where new companies get built.
10 years ago, startups fought giants with cleverness and fewer resources. With AI agents, a small team can now compete head-on with incumbents, like a mecha Goliath against a traditional one.
He calls it a once-in-a-civilization window for anyone with a vision and ambition.
It won't stay open forever.
Labriant retweeted
Alexandr Wang dropped out of college and became a young billionaire anyway.
Both his parents are physicists with PhDs, and both older brothers followed the same path. His parents taught him physics and math at home, which fed his wins in math competitions.
When he left school, they were worried. He told them a white lie: he'd get the tech thing out of his system, then go back and finish. He never did.
Now they're proud.
He skipped the degree. He kept the education.
Labriant retweeted
People thought Zuckerberg's tuxedo was AI, then watched a fire-hose wipeout on a lake.
He skipped the octagon for wake surfing behind a boat. Every fall hits like a fire hose. Priscilla Chan's initiative targets health, science, and education with AI, the right problems, and a compute cluster.
For a few hundred years most people farmed to survive. Less labor can cover the basics.
The tuxedo was real. The wipeout proved it.