Matt Powell retweeted
FT comments never miss.
I don’t think I’ve read such a rational analysis of the situation we’re in for a long time.
I've been in France since 2002 and have never seen the streets so violent nor the politics so extreme. From the sacking of the supermarket on my street to the prospect of Présidente Le Pen, here's me @FT including thoughts from 2 French Nobel laureates as.ft.com/r/addcad57-0f9d-4e…
Matt Powell retweeted
Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure.
- Recycling mid-tier plastics (like plastic bottles or butter tubs) costs thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 saved. It's cheaper to do direct air CO2 capture than that! And there is no shortage of plastic, nor any problem with sequestering it in the ground once we're done with it.
- Modern landfills are extraordinarily secure and are *much* more than just big piles of trash. They capture 75%–95% of methane gas. Groundwater contamination is doesn't really happen with landfills built since 1990. A study of 31 landfills built since 1988 in NY found no adverse effect at all on local groundwater quality.
- The crusade against single-use plastics has driven us to products that use far more materials and energy and would need to be used an absurd number of times to actually be an improvement. A steel straw needs to be used 150 times to be worth using. A ceramic mug needs to be used 1,000 times to beat a polystyrene cup. A cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times to beat single-use.
- Some things ARE worth recycling. Recycling metal saves a huge amount of energy and material – recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy spent on making fresh stuff. So we do a lot of it already: about 30% of steel worldwide is recycled.
Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space for them – less than 0.01% of the US is used for landfill and only about 0.02% of Germany. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently.
New in @WorksInProgMag, @robertwiblin and @chalmermagne on why it's usually best to just bury your trash. worksinprogress.co/issue/jus…
Matt Powell retweeted
Introducing Omanta (YC S26) the personalized research lab for each patient.
Omanta integrates a patient's full medical record, personal genomics, and the latest scientific evidence to understand the molecular drivers of their disease. It maps existing and emerging therapies against their biology. And when the right treatment doesn't exist yet, it launches a personalized campaign to build it.
Even the hardest cases rarely have a team dedicated to solving them. Physicians make high-stakes calls with limited time, while data and therapies emerge every week. Science moves fast, but reaching the patient can take years.
That's the gap Omanta was built to close.
Founders Alfredo Gonzalez, PhD and Ranad Humeidi, PhD spent years on some of the most difficult cancer cases. Alfredo led the personalized therapeutic campaign behind Sid Sijbrandij's complete remission. Together they've worked with leading institutions on personalized vaccines, CAR-T, drug repurposing, expanded access, and continuous molecular monitoring. They've seen what becomes possible when the full force of modern science is organized around one person.
They met eight years ago doing early CRISPR cancer research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Alfredo Gonzalez (CEO) has a PhD in bioinformatics from UCLA and led research projects across the Broad Institute, UCLA, and Harvard. Ranad Humeidi (CSO) has a PhD in chemical biology from Harvard, and has built and run rare-cancer programs for individual patients when standard options ran out.
omanta.com
A research lab, for one.
Linked-in: bit.ly/omanta-linkedin
YC Launch: bit.ly/omanta-yc
Matt Powell retweeted
ok this might be the most aggressively american startup i’ve ever seen 🇺🇸
> they’re trying to build nuclear reactors 100x faster than the nuclear industry ever has
> the founder isaiah taylor grew up on food stamps + dropped out of high school at 16
> his great-grandfather literally worked on the manhattan project
> generations later isaiah built a working nuclear reactor before turning 28 and named it “ward” after him
> the pentagon used 3 military c-17s to airlift the reactor 700 miles from california to utah in a first-of-its-kind mission
> the company culture is hardcore americana
> they hold bible studies, offer raw milk, love fast cars + have a cigar lounge
> plus 4 gigantic patriotic paintings of columbus discovering america, the pilgrims arriving on the mayflower, the signing of the declaration + the constitutional convention
> they sued the nuclear regulatory commission for slowing them down
> valar's end goal is to build the same reactor thousands of times across nuclear “gigasites” to make energy 10x cheaper
> then they'll use that energy to pull carbon out of thin air and turn it into oil and gas for supreme energy abundance
> just raised $1b at a $6b valuation to scale it
> if valar pulls it off, isaiah’s family will have helped usher in both of america’s atomic ages
yeah this gets my vote for most badass startup of the year
Matt Powell retweeted
Capitalism is just so beautiful.
$8 trillion worth of market cap coming out in support of open-weight models because it's good for their business and makes them look good...
and, totally coincidentally, it also happens to be better for us consumers and practically every business except for a couple of labs. we just get that benefit for free with MSFT and NVDA's self-interest.
it brings a tear to the eye 🥲
Matt Powell retweeted
I’m calling BS on these 120 millionaires calling to be taxed more.
Look closely at who signed. A retired footballer whose been paid millions by taxpayers. A retired trader who’s net worth is well under $5M. Retired musicians, film directors and some heirs. People who finished building years ago - half of them aren’t worth the $10M threshold they think needs the wealth tax. Their wealth sits in liquid portfolios. The tax they propose either doesn’t apply to them or they have liquidity to pay it.
Now picture a founder with a £50m biotech firm. Her wealth isn't in a bank account. It's based on a speculative VC round. To pay 2% she has to rip £800k a year out of her business or sell it down piece by piece until someone else owns it.
Or imagine the restauranteur whose chain is finally having a profitable year after a decade of losses. A PE deal to expand gives him a paper worth of £60M and he now has to find £1M a year, every year personally if he wants to grow.
Imagine the property developer couple who made a lifetime of delayed gratification and good decisions. Their portfolio makes £4M profit which is barely enough to cover the £2M in wealth taxes per year after they draw it from their company and pay the corporation tax - 100% essentially goes to tax.
The signatories aren't offering to pay a tax. They're volunteering someone else to. Someone who is still building, investing, growing, hiring.
HMRC already accepts voluntary payments. Any of these self-aggrandising millionaires could send extra money tomorrow. ALL of them benefited from lower tax rates and should pay the difference if they want to make a start. None of them will. They don't want to give more. They want a law that forces others to.
The wealth tax they propose won't work. It will backfire.
We don't need to guess. In 1990, twelve OECD countries had a wealth tax. Today it's three.
Sweden scrapped theirs. Germany suspended theirs. France tried it for decades, watched tens of thousands of wealthy families leave, collected a fraction of what was promised, and Macron repealed it because the country was losing more than it raised.
The £24bn projection assumes nobody changes their behaviour. Nobody has ever designed a tax where nobody changes their behaviour. Liquid wealth leaves. Illiquid wealth, the businesses and farms and employers, stays behind and gets squeezed.
The tax doesn't catch the guy with the yacht. It catches the guy with the factory.
It will end up hitting normal people.
Every tax "on the very richest" drifts downwards. Income tax started in 1799 as a temporary 3% levy on the richest 3% to fight Napoleon. Now workers are paying a 45% marginal rate. Inheritance tax was designed for stately homes and now catches three-bed semis in Surrey. VAT launched at 8%. It's now 20%.
When the wealth tax raises a fraction of what was promised, and it will, no Chancellor repeals it. They lower the threshold. £10m becomes £5m becomes £2m becomes your parents' house.
Here's what I'd say to the 120…
If you want your capital serving Britain, I'm with you. The best way is to back founders. Fund the startups and scale-ups on great terms like they do in the USA. Help build companies that scale here instead of selling early to America. Growing businesses already pour money into the Treasury through corporation tax, employer's NI and PAYE on every job they create. Back success and productivity. Stop rewarding fiscal deficits with good money after bad.
That's harder than signing a letter. You don’t get to look like a socialist super-hero. It's also the only version of "proud to pay" that's ever made a country richer.
Don't pretend to ask the government to tax you… or people twice as rich as you.
Invest in real growth and success.
Matt Powell retweeted
Believing the stuff coming out of Burnham's mouth is effectively an intelligence test.
Matt Powell retweeted
It becomes extremely obvious as you get older that most efforts are wasted:
people spend months traveling everywhere until they realize that building a real home requires the courage to make a choice and commit to it,
they spend years working diligently until they realize that they were in the wrong industry,
they spend decades building a family until they realize that they were married to the wrong person;
in other words, your most important asset is your mental clarity:
if you can simply apply and compound better judgment to your daily life,
if you can simply maintain enough humility to question and improve your vision of the future,
if you can simply avoid the mistakes that the vast majority of the people somehow keeps making generation after generation,
then you are already on your way to experience a meaningful life that will be aligned with your core values,
and walking that journey itself is where you will "accidentally" find your definition of success, wealth, and peace of mind.
Matt Powell retweeted
The England football team lost for the same reason the country is losing: the people in charge fear taking a risk and try to hold on to what they have instead of being ambitious about the future.
This attitude permeates everything and it needs to change.
Matt Powell retweeted
It was the middle of the night, at about 1.30am, when Norway lost to England.
Yet thousands of Norwegians went to the Palace in Oslo and celebrated with one final Viking row.
They did not riot. They did not burn cars. They did not smash bus stops or glass windows of shops.
They smiled. The laughed. They saw the positive in their performance. They celebrated their heritage. They were proud of who they have been in the past and who they are today.
Norway might be out of the World Cup 2026 but they are in our hearts.
In the last three weeks, I think we have all fallen a little bit in love with Norwegians.
Matt Powell retweeted
It is a very satisfying video, and I implore everyone to watch it. But what is really fascinating is not that @DanNeidle and Gary disagree over wealth taxes. It's that they approach public policy from completely different *mindsets*.
Dan is fairly ruthless in separating morally appealing policies ('vibes') from their real-world effects. He asks: 'Will this do what it says on the tin?' 'What are the unintended consequences?' 'What does the evidence say?' and 'Could this be counterproductive?'
Gary asks none of those questions because, in my view, he fails to distinguish between good intentions and real-world outcomes. If something feels good and righteous, then the evidence must support it and nothing can possibly go wrong.
To me, that is a big problem with much of the Left's approach to economics. There is an assumption that moral feelings and good intentions naturally translate into good outcomes in the real world. THEY DON'T.
Matt Powell retweeted
This ‘Proud of Us’ video on slavery is well worth your time.
They have many other videos telling historical truths that are often kept from us
This is not just for kids!
All of us should watch them! 👍
🇬🇧 THEY TOLD YOU A STORY. 🇬🇧
Colonisers. Slavers. Oppressors. And you were supposed to feel ashamed.
Not for what you done... But for WHO YOU ARE. 🇬🇧
So we tested it. Britain wrote everything down, so we opened the books. 📖
Turns out fewer than 1 man in 10 could vote in the year Britain banned the slave trade. No woman could. Your ancestors could hang for stealing a sheep, get shipped across the world for petty theft, or go down a mine at 8 years old. In Manchester, the average age of death in a labouring family was 17.
They weren't running the slave trade. They were underneath it too.
Which is what makes what happened next worth knowing.
In 1772 an enslaved man named James Somerset walked free from an English court, because English law couldn't hold a slave.
In 1791, 300,000 families just stopped buying slave sugar. No march, no riot, just a decision made at 300,000 kitchen tables.
In 1792, 519 petitions carrying 390,000 names hit Parliament, most signed by people who couldn't vote themselves.
In 1807, Britain banned the trade.
Then the slave owners sent Britain a bill for the 800,000 people they still held. 💷 £20 million. About 40% of the entire government budget at the time.
The Treasury says it wasn't paid off until 2015. So if your family paid British tax before then, they helped buy 800,000 people their freedom.
From 1808 the Royal Navy spent 60 years hunting slave ships at sea: 1,600 stopped, 150,000 people freed, and 1,600 British sailors dead, mostly of disease, buried thousands of miles from home. ⚓
In 1816 they ended two centuries of Barbary corsairs enslaving Europeans.
In 1896 a war that lasted 38 minutes ended slavery in Zanzibar. 🇹🇿
Almost every country on Earth outlaws slavery today.
That fight was paid for largely at British expense, by British hands.🇬🇧
So why haven't you heard any of this?
Because within living memory, someone rewrote the story. You got taught the crime. Not the cure.
The powerful exploited the world. They exploited their own people first. It was those people who ended slavery. 🇬🇧
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
History got rewritten once, in living memory, by no one who was ever named or held to account.
We are ordinary people doing what ordinary people have always done. Opening the books. Refusing to look away.
This is how we fight back. Fact by fact. Story by story. Name by name.
We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it.
If you can afford to support what we do: proudofus.co.uk/support
Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Matt Powell retweeted
Lee Kuan Yew:
“Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency."
Matt Powell retweeted
I asked Claude about the air conditioning debate in Europe, and it really didn’t pull any punches.
Matt Powell retweeted
History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet.
Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years.
And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor.
You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.
Matt Powell retweeted
.@BernieSanders , it is a time to celebrate. @elonmusk has created enormous value for society by building @SpaceX, driving down the cost of rocket launches and creating a global satellite communication network that has brought high speed, low-cost internet and communication access to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people along with critical advantages for our military and our nation’s defense.
SpaceX and its technologies will cause an acceleration in the growth of wages and wealth creation globally, including in some of the poorest communities in the U.S. and around the world.
Access to low-cost, high speed communications everywhere will allow children around the world to be educated, families to build businesses, and life-saving medical knowledge and care to be available everywhere.
SpaceX will materially bring down the cost of compute, advancing AI and humanity.
Meanwhile, 4,000 SpaceX employees yesterday became millionaires, including hourly wage employees who you claim you are trying to help.
The Elon Musks of the world drive growth, global GDP, and provide access to goods and services at lower cost that would otherwise not exist.
Elon’s nominal trillionaire status is due to his ownership of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, the Boring Company and his other initiatives that have brought new technologies that improve our everyday lives.
Elon is not sitting on a trillion dollar pile of cash, jewelry and gold. He is using his controlling stakes in his companies to advance mankind. Elon’s companies don’t pay dividends. They reinvest all of their capital to accelerate innovation and value creation.
Elon is working 24/7 for all of us. He deserves respect and appreciation, not smears.
Bernie, your socialism would never allow a SpaceX to be built. Socialism has only proven to impoverish mankind and lead to death and destruction.
We need to create the conditions for more SpaceXs to be built, not attack the great entrepreneurs who are helping to advance our country.
Matt Powell retweeted
A lot of people seem angry that Elon is now a trillionaire, so it’s worth reminding them that he didn’t achieve this by making anyone else poorer. Wealth isn't zero-sum. Paul Graham explained it well:
paulgraham.com/wealth.html
Matt Powell retweeted
Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day.
400 of them are now worth over $100 million.
These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries.
Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000.
Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous."
The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before.
Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.