BUILD WEALTH

“I pay a lot in taxes. I pay 37% of federal taxes, and I paid 83—I made 83 million last year total, so I paid 37% of that. And what do you do with like $40 million left over? I invest it.”

“The fact that the U.S. now imports more from Taiwan than from China is a massive signal of how the geopolitical landscape has shifted. We have to understand that this isn't just about trade balances; it is about the fundamental security of the digital world and the physical assets that power it.”

“To effectively counter the massive state-sponsored investments China is making in semiconductors and rare earth minerals, we need a U.S. sovereign wealth fund. We need a vehicle that allows for long-term, patient capital to be deployed into high-capex industries that are vital for our national survival over the next century.”

“I have currently, I'm in the process of getting three properties. I have two, about to have a third in Florida, and I invest it in as much as I can. I'm right now investing into my farm. I have cows that I take care of. That's my dream, is I want to own a cattle ranch.”

“The reality of life is this. Nobody's coming to save you financially. You are going to have to save yourself financially, and it's going to get worse, not better. What I thought was if I made more money, then I'd start saving. But when I made $50,000 a year at a college, I was still broke. And then when I made over $100,000 a year, somehow I was still broke.”

“I sat down at a dining room table in my house, and opened my journal, and said, today is the day you're changing your life. And I wrote to myself a letter, like, David, we're done looking rich and not being rich. No more big hat, no cattle. This is, when we go back to the office tomorrow, we're changing everything.”

“The fiction stories are where I'm basically trying to grapple with what's happening and my moral and ethical responsibility in it. So you can read them, and I view it as like messages in a bottle I'm trying to throw out of this, semi frightening AI lab, which I'm I'm a principal character in.”

“We are living in an automatic economy. That economy today is making you automatically rich because you use the technology and the tools to build wealth automatically, or it is making you automatically poor because you have signed up and given people access to your income where you're paying everybody else automatically. So the key is the way your money flows. It has to flow to you first.”

“Andy Grove was my mentor for 35 years, and it all started with a cold call that changed the entire trajectory of my career. He taught me the rigor and discipline required to lead at scale, and his influence is why I believe so strongly in the role of the technologist-leader in Silicon Valley.”

“The last time I checked, of all time... Last time I checked, it was 100 million. I'm going to show you guys here in person that it is real. This has been just like a big thing that everyone's arguing online about, that it's fake and everything. I'm going to show you guys here in person that it is real.”

“Intel chose to give $70 billion back to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends during a period when that capital should have been going into the ground to build fabs. It was a failure of vision that prioritized short-term financial engineering over the long-term technological leadership of the company.”

“By April 2027, AI systems should be able to do tasks that might take a person a hundred and fifty hours. Now about what is that? That's almost a month's worth of work, which it requires strange things to happen in the economy. Yeah.”

“So I think a good metaphor for the housing market is musical chairs. Like, the people who already own houses are sitting in their chairs and whenever there's a new spring housing market, some people get up and they move and they select a new chair. And if you're not adding more chairs in, you can't get first time homebuyers into the market so easily.”

“I think if you end up in a world where you have a closed loop production system with just machine to machine to machine to machine, and then people buy stuff, People need money, well established. So you need to tax the robots and AI companies, significantly, and you need to somehow find a way to reallocate money from this machine economy to the human economy.”

“I would find myself telling people over and over again, the one thing you need to do is make it automatic. What does that mean? It means you have to automate your entire financial life. And I would go through what that meant. And I would say, you have to pay yourself first. What does that mean? And I would explain it.”

“I think it was a lot of consistency. Another thing that I've noticed, like being around a lot of other girls in the industry is, I don't really care like what gets put out there about me because I have thick skin. Obviously, people are going to say what they want to say, and they're going to believe what they want to believe because they hear certain things.”

“When new candidate products are found, it runs through a series of tuned expert systems. If it passes these tests, then a candidate product is produced, airlifted by drone to a nearby human focus group, and if it satisfies their criteria, is sold on an eBay like auction site frequented by the factory's thousands of distributors.”

“It's just a subscription page. So I know people who like, who have cooking channels on there, and they sell their recipes. And I think that's the great thing about it. You can do whatever you want on there and make a living off of it. And it's just the new digital world nowadays.”

“I firmly believe that tech companies, especially those in deep tech, need technologist CEOs who understand the underlying physics of the product. When you are making multi-billion dollar bets on architectures that won't ship for five years, you cannot rely solely on a spreadsheet; you need to have a fundamental intuition for the technology.”

“And I go, David, we just did everything you talked about in your class, except we didn't do that budgeting thing. That thing where you talked about budget, we didn't do that because we tried to budget the first year of our marriage and we almost got divorced over it. So we put everything on autopilot, like you talked about, but we automated everything.”