Bill Gates The Trillionaire

MSFT closed today at a market cap of $3.84 trillion.

At Microsoft’s IPO (1986), Bill Gates ’ stake is commonly reported in the ~45–49% range (the peak of his post-IPO ownership; it only fell afterward).

If he had maintained that same percentage, his hypothetical net worth today would be somewhere between $1.73 to $1.88 trillion.

Even as late as 1999, Gates held more than 15% of Microsoft; if he still had that share today, it would be ~$587 billion.

Why did he end up with a lower percentage? Divorce settlement. Gifts to the Gates Foundation and other charities. Share dilution from new issuance for things like employee options. And sale of stock for diversification into other assets.

His reported net worth today is $106 billion. Had he kept his peak post-IPO stake, his net worth would put him comfortably into 13-digit territory.

Trump Deploying Troops Into American Cities As Further Evidence He Doesn't Understand Specialization

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

- Trump to his top military leaders today.

Put aside the absurdity of a man elected by red states sending military troops into the cities of blue states as one of his first acts of office. That's dictatorship 101 right there and unprecedented.

This also gets to the heart of MAGA confusion about the world. The chief reason that global trade has allowed for such unprecedented prosperity is that it has allowed for unprecedented levels of specialization. I worked with product development teams for decades and many were making incredibly complex products, like nanotechnology, computer chips, medical devices and drugs. In the nearly 30 years I did that I saw a fascinating thing play out: the portion of a project plan that was to be worked by an outside company rather than an inside department rose from roughly 10 to 20% to closer to 33 to 50%. Specialization hit a level that fewer and fewer companies could sustain affordable expertise in most of their processes and skills. The specialization that Adam Smith wrote about in 1776 - "one man draws out the wire, another sharpens it ..." was interpersonal. People along the same factory line each specializing on one step in production. The specialization today is literally different companies making different parts and doing different steps. Adam Smith's specialization played out on one factory line; today's specialization plays out across the globe with hundreds of companies coordinating to make a single product.

Why mention specialization in reference to sending troops into cities? Only people as clueless as Trump and his head of DoD, former Fox commentator Pete Hegseth would think that how you would deploy guys with guns for war has anything to do with how you would deploy guys with guns for policing. Police and military are specialists. They have very different objectives. Very different goals and constraints. And the tactics that might make you a great police officer could get you killed in war; the tactics that might make you a great soldier might get civilians killed in policing.

Then of course, I could be completely wrong. Trump may indeed be aiming for something akin to military occupation in the blue cities that tend to vote 4 to 1 against him. And if so, further evidence that the man cares little about the safety of American people or the economy and his presidency has everything to do with how he feels.

In either case, this is not normal governance for a democracy. This is the kind of thing his buddies Xi, Putin, MBS, and Kim do.

Trump's Nobel Peace Prize

Next month the Nobel Prizes will be announced. Trump has already warned the committee that if he doesn't get a Peace prize he will send troops to occupy their buildings.

The Colonization of Mars and America and Travel Times

For my fellow nerds.

Atlantic, 1776: British colonies were ~5,000–6,000 km from Britain. Crossings typically took 6 to 8 weeks (fast packets ~4 weeks; bad weather 10 to 12).

Earth to Mars (near-term tech): Distance varies from ~55 million km (close opposition) to ~400 million km (solar conjunction).

Launch windows open about every 26 months. Transit is about 6 to 9 months. Miss a window and the door-to-door delay (wait + flight) can be about 32 to 35 months; catch it and it’s only 6 to 9 months.

And that time gap assumes the Mars spacecraft is cruising about 20,000× faster than an 18th-century sailing ship when you compare end-to-end distance covered per day.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

From Will Storr’s Selfie - Pruning Down the Brain's Possible Paths

Excerpt from Will Storr's Selfie ...

The self’s ingestion of culture can be tracked, in a startling form, in the brain of a growing baby. Despite the fact we’re born with almost as many neurons as we’ll ever need, the weight of a child’s brain increases by more than 30 percent during its first fifteen months. If this rapid gain isn’t due to the generation of brain cells, then what is it? Most of it is the weight of new connections, or synapses, that are forming between these cells. By the age of two, a human will have generated over a hundred trillion synapses, double that of an adult. So great is this extra brain functionality that youngsters even develop cognitive powers the rest of us lack. Six-month-olds can recognize the faces of individuals from other races with an ease that would have the rest of us worrying quietly whether we are racist. They can even readily identify monkey faces. Babies can hear tones in foreign languages that their parents are deaf to. They’re also thought to experience synaesthesia, the eerie blending of the senses that enables people to taste colors, and so on.

But then begins the cull. These connections start dying off at a rate of up to 100,000 per second. It’s believed that this is one of the ways the brain shapes itself to its environment. Huge connectivity means it’s prepared to deal with a wide range of potential possibilities. Then, when connections between neurons are not activated, they’re killed. They call this “neural pruning,” and it works a little like a sculptor carving a face out of a block of marble: it’s what’s taken away, as much as what is added, that makes us who we are.

When we’re born, then, our brain is ready for the world – or at least a world. It rushes out to greet it, gets to know it, then prunes itself down, specializing itself for the particular cultures in which it finds itself. …

In a major study, researchers in Queensland collated the results of 2,748 papers and concluded the average variation across all human traits and diseases is caused by 49 percent genetic factors and 51 percent environmental factors. ….

“…. We’ve come to realize that it’s much more complex than just being a dollop of genetics and a squirt of environment.” The relationship is symbiotic. Nature and nurture are not in competition, but in conspiracy.

from pp. 55-6 of Will Storr’s Selfie: How we became so self-obsessed and what it’s doing to us

A Trumped Up Charge

"A trumped-up charge is a deliberately false or fraudulent accusation made with the intention of punishing someone unfairly or making them appear guilty. The term implies that the charge has been fabricated, invented, or concocted to deceive and incriminate someone, rather than being a legitimate legal accusation."

It seems fitting that in 20 years when kids as yet unborn are learning vocabulary they will encounter this word and "know" that its origin traces back to President Trump who lied about everything and made wild accusations against anyone who irritated or offended him.

It is as if the gods of vocabulary were trying to warn us.

Jill Lepore, Changing the Constitution, and the Issues You'll Soon Be Engaged In

I love Jill Lepore. Here she talks about her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution and it is a conversation that at least a few of you will find fascinating. All of you will eventually (and probably soon) live its fascinating relevance.

We are at a point in history similar to the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the New Deal when we need to update the code upon which our country runs. The process is going to be agonizing, stressful, alarming, exciting, and wildly uncertain.

Lepore touches on the history of changing (and trying to change) the constitution in these United States and - as she is prone to do - shares a series of profound insights in the process.

A couple of notes related to her book.

The U.S. Constitution has only 27 amendments in ~235 years.

States use lower bars. Most amendments are passed by a state legislature and then a simple popular vote; about 18 states also allow citizen-initiated constitutional amendments. Many states have held full constitutional conventions or replaced their constitutions outright.

Result: state charters change a lot. Collectively, they’ve been amended thousands of times; several states have hundreds of amendments (e.g., California, Texas, Alabama), and some - like Georgia and Louisiana - have adopted multiple entirely new constitutions over time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gSgkt0E4dk

 

Outlawing Comedy (And what that tells us about the last time America was great)

All of these late-night comedians getting cancelled makes me wonder if at least a portion of the MAGA crowd will decide they don't want to live in a country where comedy is outlawed.

At least those of us who were wondering when the MAGA crowd thought America was last great have our answer: back when the Puritans thought laughter was folly.

MAHA - make Americans humorless again!

Adams - No Reason to Believe That Our Founding Generation Was Better Than You Are

John Adams’s letter to Josiah Quincy III, February 9, 1811. Adams pushes back against “reverence” for the founding generation:

“I ought not to object to your Reverence for your Fathers … but to tell you a very great secret, as far as I am capable of comparing the Merit of the different Periods, I have no reason to believe that We were better than you are. We had as many poor Creatures and selfish Beings, in proportion among us as you have among you: nor were there then more enlightened Men, or in greater Number in proportion than there are now.”
Context: Quincy had praised the [founding] “Fathers.” Adams - then in his mid-70s - downplayed any moral superiority of 1776-era leaders.

This seems to me enormously important. Every period has people who can navigate us into new territory and to pretend that we don't have such people today is really the equivalent to simply shirking responsibility.

Jim Moore's Poem Those Others

 Those Others, by Jim Moore

We lived at the end of an empire.

Sometimes we gathered in huge auditoriums
and tried to understand.
Our shame did not save us,
nor our sadness redeem us,
as we came to understand
how others, far into the future,
would look back at us,
shaking their heads: we hoped
in sorrow; more likely, anger.

The Development of Time Travel That Doesn't Disrupt the Development of Time Travel

Time travel’s problem isn’t engineering; it’s non-disruption. We’ve allegedly cracked it three times, but each visit into the past edited away the very path of causality that led to the development of the time machine, resetting its development back to zero.

At least that’s what he told the investors at Time Is Not a Machine, Inc. as a way to account for the few hundred billion he claimed had been spent developing prototypes and not - as his critics suggested - merely spent on having a good time.

Colbert, Kimmel, Trump and the Role of the Jester

Stephen Colbert has been cancelled.
Jimmy Kimmel has been pulled off the air because of something he supposedly said about Charlie Kirk.

Here's the deal, though. Kimmel didn't make a comment about Kirk: he made a comment about MAGA. Specifically, he said,
"The Maga Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it." His comment was directed at the living, not the dead.

Kings kept jesters for a reason: one person with a license to puncture bad ideas. The jokes were cover; the job was dissent.

King: “My people hate inflation. First, I’ll slap tariffs on foreign goods—”
Jester: “—which will raise prices.”

And the king doesn’t take his head, because that’s why the jester exists.

Trump? He doesn’t just want to be king. He wants no jesters. Anywhere in the land.

P.S. do you know who did not get cancelled? The Fox news host Brian Kilmeade who literally recommended involuntarily euthanizing homeless people. (I think the old-fashioned way one might say that is kill, as in, "We wouldn't have a homeless problem if we just killed anyone who was homeless.")
Trump's US in 2025. You get cancelled for making jokes about the president's policies but not for suggesting mass killings of our poorest people. You MAGA folks might want to do a little soul searching. If, you know, you haven't already sold it.

A Decoder Ring for MAGA Regarding School Shootings

It's not always easy to understand how someone else feels but here's something that might help those of you who lean off to the MAGA side of things. You know how upset you are now about Charlie Kirk's murder? How you feel like something should be done because this never should have happened and something like this shouldn't happen again? Even though you didn't personally know Charlie Kirk and he didn't know you?
That's how the rest of us feel very stinking time there is another gun death, another school shooting.
We're upset.
We think something should be done about it.
And we think we could / should / must do more.
To quote you, All lives matter. Not just the ones with lots of social media followers.

Last Words

They couldn't tell if his last words were

"Carpe diem," or
"Carpet demons."

 
And the question of which haunted them.

Curious Exaggerations in the Socio-Economic World

Wealth is curious.

To be in the top 1% for height, you need to be only 6'4". Median is 5'9".
To be in the top 1% for wealth, you need to have $11.2 million. Median is $193k.

The ratio of top 1% to median in
Height is 1.1 to 1
Wealth is 58 to 1

The social world seems to create larger disparities than the physical world.

Gordon S. Woods On American Chaos in the Generation After the Revolution

We have a tendency to romanticize the past, to gloss over its ridiculous problems. The historian Gordon Woods tells about life in the US in the generation or so after the American Revolution. (This is paraphrased from a talk of his.)

---

In the generation after the American Revolution, there was as much cause for despair as for celebration. Violence of all sorts surged. Rates of homicide rose above those in England. Even family murders - men killing their wives and children - spiked to levels unmatched in the nineteenth century. Urban rioting grew more common and destructive, leaving lives and property in ruins.

Drinking soared to an all-time high. Americans consumed about five gallons of pure alcohol per person each year - the highest rate ever recorded anywhere, before or since. Courts held dram breaks instead of coffee breaks, with judges and juries passing bottles around. Universities saw record riots and student defiance. It was a society both intoxicated and unsettled, leaving many to wonder what exactly they had unleashed.

Religion, too, was in ferment. The Anglican and Puritan dominance of the 1760s gave way to Methodists and Baptists, their horseback ministers carrying revival across the frontier. At Cane Ridge, Kentucky in 1801, tens of thousands gathered for what was hailed as “the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit since the beginning of Christianity.” The scenes were wild - people rolling on the ground, laughing, moaning, crying. Critics joked that more souls were conceived than converted. Yet from these upheavals sprang new sects: Shakers, Universalists, evangelical movements that bloomed and vanished, and a decade later, the Mormons. Some were founded by women, many flared out quickly, but all testified to the volatility of belief.

By 1815, as the revolutionary generation passed from the scene, the founders looked on a nation they barely recognized. Instead of harmony, they saw disorder; instead of sober republican virtue, a society drinking, rioting, and praying itself into a bewildering array of directions. 

---

Far from settling into tranquility, the young republic revealed a pattern that would persist: there has never been a moment in American history when Americans turned to one another and said, *“At last, we have no troubles. Now we can live in peace and prosperity.”

Even Immortal Gods Die Once their Institutions Erode

The Greek and Roman gods animated the lives of Athens and Rome - visible in temples and statues, invoked in conversations, explanations, and hopes. As those institutions crumbled, so did the gods. The same fate befell Egyptian deities once sustained by pyramids and priesthoods, Norse gods once sustained by sagas and rituals, and countless others now remembered only as myths.Even immortal gods died without their institutions. Temples and priesthoods gave the gods life; when those institutions collapsed, the gods became myths.

It is not just the gods who are created, sustained, or forgotten by institutions. That is also the fate of us mortals.

Institutions separate us from the other animals. You’re no match for a gorilla, bear or tiger when you’re naked and alone. You can’t outrun a lion. You’re not stronger than an orangutan. You might – barehanded – catch a rabbit but the energy you’d consume finding it, catching it, preparing it and cooking it might be more than the calories it would give you, take more energy than it would return.

Most of us would quickly perish if left to survive in a world without institutional structures, norms and supply chains.

The degree to which we thrive or flounder is a function of our institutions. Yet weirdly, most of us most of the time treat our institutions with even less creative imagination than the ancient Greeks or Egyptians treated theirs. We take them as inherited or rail at them as if we were cursing the gods. We don’t have a tradition for calmly, rationally, collectively engaging in the task of defining and redefining the institutions that define us. Because who we are and who we will become is not something we will do on our own, naked and afraid; it is something we will only do through the institutions we create and change.

The Secret to Japan's 100,000 100 Year Olds

Japan has set a new record of nearly 100,000 people who are 100 years old.

The secret to their success seems to include

• diet (less sugar, salt and calories than those of us in the West),
• exercise (among other things, a national radio program guiding the elderly through 3-minutes of daily exercise has a wide audience), and
• fraud (family not reporting on the death of a deceased relative in order to continue collecting pension money).

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd07nljlyv0o

Stochastic Terrorism and Social Media

One of the darker inventions of our gatekeeper-free media landscape is something now called stochastic terrorism. The phrase captures a dynamic in which individuals or groups use mass communication to vilify, dehumanize, or target opponents in ways that raise the probability of violence without ever directly calling for it. No explicit order is given; instead, the message circulates widely enough that the odds rise that someone, somewhere, will act on it. The speaker retains deniability, while the damage is all too real. The causality is not deterministic; the communication just raises the probability of violence. It's more like taking a life by drunk driving than shooting someone.

This tactic is not entirely new - fiery rhetoric has always carried the risk of inciting unstable listeners. What is new is the scale, speed, and algorithmic amplification of today’s social media. Where once editors, producers, or publishers acted as gatekeepers and might mitigate such messages, today’s platforms reward whatever drives engagement. Outrage, paranoia, and conspiracy spread with greater virality than moderation or nuance, and that makes stochastic terrorism a kind of emergent property of the digital environment.

In this sense, it is one of the most dangerous side effects of a communications system designed without responsibility or oversight. What looks like “just words” from one angle becomes, at scale, a statistical machine for nudging the probability of violence upward. And unlike older forms of incitement, it requires no coordination, no command, and no conspiracy - only a steady stream of inflammatory content.

Stochastic terrorism is a reminder that the rules of the information economy do not merely shape attention or markets; they change communities, levels of safety, the dynamics of democracy, and trust. Without gatekeepers, we gain openness and access. But we also inherit a new vulnerability: the ability of anyone, anywhere, to pull the rhetorical lever that increases the odds of someone else’s destruction.

Addendum ...
This seems to suggest that we might want to develop a counter-spell in the form of stochastic benevolence? Viral kindness? Random acts of kindness? It seems to call for the development and deployment of some kind of vaccine.

American Identity - and Acceptable Marriages - Now More Defined by Politics Than Religion

In the 1960s, acceptance of interfaith marriage (e.g., Catholic-Protestant, Christian-Jewish) was often in the teens or twenties. Today, more than a quarter of Americans are in interfaith marriages, and most parents say they would not be upset if their child married someone of another faith.
By contrast, partisan identity has hardened. In the mid-20th century, few cared much about marriages across party lines, but now about 35–40% of partisans say they would be upset if their child married someone from the opposite party. This suggests that identity today is more defined by politics than by religion - a reversal from roughly a half century ago.

I wonder to what extent that has to do with plurality. In American politics, if you want your vote to count, you have only two choices. In religion, you have dozens, not even including choices like atheist, agnostic or spiritual but not religious . In such a world, marrying across religious lines becomes increasingly probable given anyone you meet outside of church is probably of another faith. By contrast, meeting someone outside of a political rally still means you've got roughly a 33% chance of a political match: Dem, GOP, or no affiliation.

As institutions shape the categories available to us, they also shape our tolerance for crossing boundaries. Where institutions create many identities (as in religion), crossing them becomes ordinary. Where institutions collapse choices into two rival camps (as in American politics), crossing them becomes taboo.

It might also explain why politics is becoming more divisive. Politics is not - if it ever was - a matter of debating policy so much as a matter of identity. Stats from modern America suggest to me that you'd have an easier time persuading someone to change their faith than to change their politics.