Champions behave like champions before they are champions - Bill Walsh

J-bots think I dislike HOV in favor of Drake but I love this track that ended Ep 4 last night…. (But Jay-Z in 8 is a rough watch)… Numb / Encore by LINKIN PARK on #SoundCloud on.soundcloud.com/sDdSigHrPT…

On HBO this week Jay-Z said of his early songs, "it was my story to tell." He's right. The copyright register names him as the author. It also shows a company owning Reasonable Doubt, a US Marshal auctioning a third of that company in a hotel on 11th Avenue, and the buyers paying nothing because they bid debt they were already owed. Being the author and owning it are two different things.

Microsoft was $352.73 on June 25. It's over $516 today — up 46% in three months. That's $1.2 trillion of market cap added in a single quarter. Only about a dozen companies on earth are worth more than what Microsoft just added. The market isn't pricing AI as a story anymore. It's pricing it as infrastructure.

Looking forward to diving deeper into $OPEN with @ericjackson, exclusively available for my subscribers. nitter.net/i/spaces/1aKbdEpEzqkJX

Guggenheim Partners has a first lien term loan, $1.16 billion outstanding, maturing 2031. Mutual funds have to tell the SEC what they mark every holding at, quarterly, by CUSIP. It's free and almost nobody reads it. Three funds marked this loan at 100.0805 on 30 June. Three different funds marked it at 98.1250 on 31 July. Identical to four decimal places, across unrelated fund families. Bloomberg has it at 73.25 today, on direct observations rather than a model. The entire move happened after 31 July.

SunCar (ticker: SDA) released earnings a couple of days ago. Market hasn't noticed and stock is trading at all-time lows. However, some interesting highlights: - Multiple SunCar partners (Tesla, Xiaomi, NIO, Xpeng, Li Auto, Huawei (multiple brands), and Zeekr) leveraging AI to automate finance and aftermarket services - Lots of talk about physical AI but SunCar is actually generating revenues and improving customer experiences for all its ecosystem partners (EV and Insurance) by integrating physical AI into its ecosystem. - Multimodal (video) AI in particular is extremely high value add when you are managing mobile assets like cars. Disclaimer: I'm a paid advisor to SunCar, so keep that in mind.

Speaking of copyrights on hotel lobby videos. It's getting interesting

The AI layer of the Hotel Lobby videos has no copyright. No human author, no copyright. The performance underneath is a master owned by Universal. 8 weeks ago Universal's CEO told investors: "Licensed innovation is replacing unlicensed exploitation. That is our North Star." Nobody opted in. The streams went up. Nothing happened.

We still grinding

A viewer asked who owns the No Limit music videos. I searched the Copyright Office register 4 ways over 3 days and could not find one. A music video is a third copyright. Not the song, not the master. Section 101 keeps "sounds accompanying a motion picture or other audiovisual work" out of the sound recording definition entirely. Under 90s deals the label owned it, and the artist's royalties were charged for part of the cost.

A true original that added his unique style to Showtime. Rest in peace, LT.

Lessgo

Bitcoin bull run just started, but no one cares.

Steve Ballmer on how Microsoft spent up to 15 years preparing Satya Nadella to become CEO: When it came time to find his replacement, Ballmer says the decision was essentially made before the search began. "I kind of knew up front, look, we've been grooming this guy for about 10 years, 15 years. This guy is really talented, so he gets the job, obviously." The grooming wasn't accidental. Ballmer explains that Satya, "a very technical person," was repeatedly moved into areas where he had no background: "We said hey, you don't really know anything about an area called general ledger and accounting, but why don't you go run this thing called Dynamics, probably called Great Plains at the time. I can't even remember." Then, "quite rapidly," another unfamiliar problem: "We got to get this search thing together. This is the high potential guy. This is a guy who can learn new things. He's technically minded. Boom, throw him a new problem, and he's building new skill sets along the way." Search exposed Satya to machine learning, which Ballmer describes as a fundamentally different style of software: "Old programs were supposed to generate the right answer. Many new programs are supposed to generate the statistically best answer, and you only know after whether it was precisely the right answer." He did well in every one of these roles. Ballmer lists what became clear along the way: "He clearly had good people skills. He clearly had an affinity for product. He clearly had a knack for understanding how to think about particularly our enterprise selling operation." So Ballmer, Bill, and the senior leadership team agreed: "This is a guy we should be thinking about for the future of the company." Ballmer then recalls a conversation with Satya about his father, a senior government official who worked with people who went on to become prime ministers. His father told him: "Look, Satya, a lot of people come to the leadership positions in government and they're just not ready. But guess what? They learn what they don't know pretty well on the job." Ballmer's read on what that gave Satya is a pairing of two traits that usually pull in opposite directions: "The irrational confidence, which I can get there, partly backed by kind of his father's experience, as well as a lot of realism about where he was." That realism sat alongside real range: "He had huge skills in many areas of the business, more than anybody else… He knew more of the breadth of this place than anybody." His verdict today: "He's done an incredible job with the company." He even admits, "I never know whether I'm supposed to say we or you or they [when I] talk about Microsoft. I lapse into we pretty easily."