Yann’s comment on the Roadster reminded me of another Stanford professor I interacted with years ago. Highly positioned and theoretically brilliant, they can’t turn numbers into coordinated atoms. Their manufacturing knowledge came from The Economist. Factory visits involved VIP treatment with executives as workers buzzed around. They don’t grasp how atoms move in production or the ingenuity of turning equations into reality through choreographed coordination. The most impressive manufacturing engineers I’ve worked with weren’t Ivy League graduates, yet they create things that catch your heart. They turn theoretical math into reality—the real magicians. A month at Tesla taught me more than the most prestigious school could.

Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.

🚨 NEW: Inside the Neocons’ Secret Plan to Take the Republican Party Back. A Republican organizing network backed by liberal foundation money held private meetings where participants discussed how to “retake the local party apparatus.” A former Soros foundation grantmaker helped advise the effort. The target was local Republican organizations. Their own report records one participant’s assessment that parties were: “strong enough to still matter, but weak enough to be taken over.” Participants in Kansas and Kentucky had already begun developing plans to rebuild local parties. Johns Hopkins’ SNF Agora Institute and the R Street Institute organized the meetings: private dinners followed by full-day, off-the-record sessions. Rules prevented participants’ statements from being attributed to them individually. Johns Hopkins named Brad Raffensperger among the project’s architects. The funding includes: • $1.85 MILLION from Hewlett for the Civic Right project. • $500,000 from Carnegie for the Conservative Agenda for Democracy program. These foundations’ support for conservative organizing fits a broader shift by liberal donors toward funding groups on the right. The Soros connection: adviser Mark de la Iglesia previously awarded grants at George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. He also served in the Obama administration. Freedom House confirms his advisory role in this specific initiative. By 2026, organizers reported Signal networks connecting statewide election officials and staff. Their next steps included state-by-state strategies and recruiting and preparing future candidates and public officials. The same report explains that participants feared publicly confronting the administration could cost them seats and credibility. Its wording: “The challenge is to take effective action while not drawing unwanted attention.”

Great explanation of why California gas prices are higher than in other states, in the @sfchronicle of all places. 26¢/gallon goes to "cap-and-invest" which funds high-speed rail. sfchronicle.com/california/a…

Between this and our prior commitments, roughly 20% of all Anthropic equity will be dedicated to the public good, and that commitment can grow as Anthropic grows. We plan to use these funds to ensure more people can share in the benefits of AI, and to increase our ability to provide funding to deal with its risks.

California AG Rob Bonta noted Nevada proved the Trump admin wrong on claims of non-citizens on that state's voter rolls. I asked him, why not check claims against California and prove them wrong? He was clear, state leaders don't think the federal govt is acting in good faith:

الست الفرنسية المزهولة دي .. عضوة في حزب اليسار الفرنسي وناشطة من اكبر دعاة فتح الهجرة لشعوب شمال افريقيا وبتدافع عنهم كل مايعملوا مصيبة وكارثة وتتهم الأخرين اللي عايزين يوقفوا طوفان الهمج دول بالعنصرية ... هي عندها محل شيك صغير في مكان راقي وقفت في محلها تحاول تنقذه من النهب والسرقة وعشان هي ناشطة مشهورة بتقولهم انا فلانة الناشطة بتاعة اللجوء انا معاكوا انا دافعت عنكم وعن دخولكم و بقائكم في فرنسا زقوها وقعوها وداسوا عليها بأقدامهم كويس انها لسه حية ونهبوا المحل كله الست بقت علي الحديدة خسرت كل كفاح وشغل عمرها في لحظة .. واقفة مذهولة مش مصدقة ان اللصوص الغوغاء المجرمين البرابرة دول هما اللي طول عمرها بتدافع عنهم وعن انهم يغزوا بلدها ويخربوه عشان شهرتها في الدفاع عن لاجئين شمال افريقيا كل الميديا الفرنسية امبارح جايبة قصتها وصورتها قدام محلها المنهوب شقي عمرها كله وهي مش مصدقة مدي غبائها اللي وصل فرنسا للخراب والدمار ده كله 😢

H-1B is the visa US employers use to hire skilled workers from abroad. Workers approved in the FY2021–24 lotteries were far more credentialed than the US workforce overall: 58 percent held a master's degree or higher, compared with 14 percent of US native-born and 15 percent of total foreign-born in the US. Most earned those degrees here — 71 percent of master's-and-higher petitions went to someone already in the US on a student visa. Hoover Policy Fellow Sarah Alla @Iagudaeva has the full analysis of what these workers studied and where they ended up working: hoover.org/research/h-1b-wor…

From the United States Election Assistance Commission's Best Practices for List Maintenance - "HAVA also clarified Congress’s intent in the NVRA that a voter cannot be removed from a voter registration list for the sole reason that they did not vote." -- eac.gov/sites/default/files/…