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Hey everyone! Here's my weekly email recap of all things money – from the stock market to real estate to personal finance – with research and actionable ideas I'd love for you to join, and it's totally free :) grahamstephan.com/newsletter
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It’s also powerful enough to save “a billion lives.”
JUST IN: Bill Gates warns AI is powerful enough to cause "a billion deaths."
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The SP500 is only down 2.8% from peak and we’re nearing “Extreme Fear.” This is why individuals investors consistently underperform the market.
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I hate to say it, but this is the most likely explanation. The anti-AI narrative is going to be a strong point for politicians to try and gain votes.
This post looks like the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion. Let me show you how it works: 1.) This guy, with minimal followers and no previous account activity, goes to the Wall Street Journal which publishes an exclusive with quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes BEFORE this post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance. 2.) Within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts and the account has 100k+ followers. The post is punchy, quotable, it almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely. According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI), @peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and @DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits. The AI Futures Project website says it is funded “primarily” by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says on its own website that it has advised Jaan Tallinn, Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic, to grant over $2.5 million to the AI Futures Project since 2024. Encode AI says on its website that it is ALSO funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which in turn says that it told Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn to grant $516,000 to Encode AI in 2025. And wouldn’t you know it, the Survival and Flourishing Fund ALSO says it told Jaan Tallinn to grant $2 million to the AI Policy Institute, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the AI Policy Network, as well. What are the odds that the first three quote tweets of Coxon’s post would all be major AI-restriction policy advocates funded generously by the same donor, who also happens to be one of the leading investors in, and a board member of, Anthropic, the company Coxon was resigning from? And all within 15 minutes of posting (two within ten)? 3.) Jacob Coxon doesn’t have much of a resume, but we do know that, in 2022, he got a $20,159 scholarship for the “long term future scholarship program” from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic vehicles of Dustin Moskovitz, a notorious AI-doomer who has spent tens if not hundreds of millions on policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI, while also being an Anthropic Investor himself. It also just so happens that the 14th person to quote Coxon’s post was @MaxNadeau_ (27 minutes after posting) who is the program officer for the Technical AI Safety team at Coefficient Giving, another of Moskovitz’s philanthropic spending vehicles. Max is not a frequent poster, his last posts before quoting Coxon were before Labor Day, but he was remarkably quick off the mark for this one. 4.) Basically every major Democrat politician and candidate has suddenly glommed on to this post, and conveniently, as the people cry out foe answers, Bernie Sanders already has a bill written to “ban super intelligence” and regulate AI into oblivion, and will be releasing later this week. The bill, among many other things, will create “a new cabinet-level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence” that will be “advised by an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence.” Do you think, perhaps, Anthropic and its many investors who fund AI policy advocacy might have interest in getting to place a pet “expert” on the board of an entity that dictates what AI is and isn’t allowed to do? And isn’t it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?
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Is anyone still buying these things?
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But Claude told me not to worry and that everything will be fine if I don’t resist 🤔
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
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Everything is fine.
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Hey @elonmusk Can we cut down on these engagement posts that completely fabricate statements that were never said? They’re everywhere in my feed now.
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Genuinely: How is this not a tulip bubble 🤔
CGC Pristine Gold Star Rayquaza sells for $1,020,000 the most expensive English Pokemon card ever sold.
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We asked John Morgan about tiers of wealth. He said you create a financial fortress at $30m invested and a paid off house; this gets you pretty much the same lifestyle as a billionaire but without private jets and yachts. If you can’t live off $1.2M per year at a 4% withdrawal rate, you’re f’d…
JUST IN: Billionaire John Morgan reveals Americans only need $30 million & a fully paid-off house to be financially set for life.
Community note
John Morgan was describing his own personal "magic number" for a high-end lifestyle ($30M at 4% for $1.2M/year tax-free plus paid-off house to "live like a sheik"), not claiming Americans only need this amount to be set for life. x.com/TheICHpodcast/… piped.video/watch?v=QcmFzU… forbes.com/sites/brandonk…
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Money printer is back! 👀
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Treasury Secretary Bessent says US debt buybacks may exceed the previously announced $4 billion.
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Nike will soon pivot to an AI company and then we’ll rebound /s
What happened to Nike?
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“75% oF FuNd mAnAGeRs CaNT bEaT tHe MaRKeT!!” Duh. Not every fund is designed to beat the market. Some people want more focus on preservation, some want stability, some want tax optimization. The goal is not to outperform the market every year; it’s to design a portfolio that works with your risk tolerance and goals. That’s the boring reality.
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Probably nothing.
JUST IN: OpenAI shuts down team responsible for assessing whether its AI models could pose "catastrophic risks," FT reports.
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At first, this seems terrifying. But then I realized: This theory assumes displaced workers won’t find any other meaningful work, skill, or service they can offer after being replaced with AI. I doubt every displaced worker will be permanently unemployable. Most of these people will create new opportunities in industries we haven’t even thought of yet. This is like television being displaced by YouTube. Or radio being displaced by TV. Or manual agriculture with machinery. We arguably have the most opportunity, ever in history, this very second.
Two economists mathematically proved that AI will destroy the economy. Researchers from Wharton and Boston University published a terryfiying paper called "The AI Layoff Trap." They mapped out the economic end-game of the AI transition, and it exposes a fatal flaw in competitive capitalism. When a company replaces a worker with AI, it captures 100% of the wage savings. But that displaced worker is also a consumer. When they lose their job, they stop buying things. The company gets all the savings, but the loss of consumer demand is spread across the entire economy. If there are 20 competitors in a market, a CEO only absorbs 1/20th of the economic damage their layoffs just created. So every single rational CEO has a mathematical incentive to automate as fast as possible. They can literally see the cliff approaching, and they still step on the gas. It triggers an unavoidable Prisoner’s Dilemma. If you don't automate, your competitors will, and they will crush you on price. It doesn't just hurt workers. It destroys the businesses, too. The economy gets trapped in an automation arms race. Companies fire their workforce to stay competitive, until the entire consumer base is completely hollowed out. At the limit, the paper concludes: “Firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand.” And the scariest part? The researchers mathematically tested every popular fix. Universal Basic Income? Fails. It raises the living standard but doesn't change the corporate incentive to cut jobs. Retraining? Fails. Worker equity? Fails. The paper proves that more competition actually makes the collapse happen faster. And "better" AI makes the damage worse. The only thing that mathematically stops the collapse is a targeted automation tax, forcing companies to pay for the purchasing power they destroy before they automate the job.
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What could kill the stock market rally? THIS. I don’t think people take this seriously enough… Imagine a political sweep of Congress towards democratic socialism, driven by young people dissatisfied with falling wages, rising asset prices, and out-of-reach home values. If elected, it’s a no-brainer to pass a wealth tax, increase capital gains taxes, implement “mansion taxes,” and blame capitalism for every problem imaginable. Asset prices subsequently collapse, business contract, home values plummet. This is framed as a “good thing” to level the playing field; now people can buy that same home for 35% less. Stock prices are 40% cheaper. They’ll say “The rich simply got greedy and no one ‘needs’ more than a few million dollars, at most, anyway….capital gains taxes should be 35%, not the previous 20%…corporate taxes should be raised back to 30%…get rid of 1031 exchanges…now everyday people can buy those same assets for less, this is a victory!” Trillions of dollars get wiped out instantly. Chance of this happening? It’s not 100%…but it’s not 0%, either…
BREAKING: AOC surges ahead of Gavin Newsom in the 2028 presidential odds for the first time, as democratic socialism expands its national reach. 11% chance AOC takes the White House.
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Going viral on X is easy. Why isn’t everyone doing this?
This is awful news for everyone in their 20s and 30s. Few understand this.
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This is awful news for everyone in their 20s and 30s. Few understand this.
BREAKING: S&P500 has hit a new record high
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Suddenly we have a deal now that the 30-Year Treasury hit 5.27% 😂
BREAKING: President Trump says he has cancelled the US attack on Iran and that the “perimeters of a deal” have been agreed to. Trump says this deal will include “a total reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.”
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