“I think that's why the data licensing business exists and AI companies need high quality human generated text to just train their models. Reddit's archive is one of the richest such datasets. Licensing that data has been another nice little boost to profits. It's not a huge thing. It's not the core business of Reddit, but I like it that with all these companies that are basically threatened by AI currently, with Reddit, you basically have somewhat of a hedge because they are so valuable to all of these LLMs.”
“And one of the other advantages that Airbnb has is they have this degree of supply exclusivity. And so, a large part of Airbnb listings are exclusive to the platform. They're not on Vrbo, V-R-B-O, or booking.com. And that's especially true in newer markets like Latin America and the Asia Pacific region. And so, the vast majority of Airbnb hosts are individuals with one or two properties, and it's a side income for them. It's not their primary business.”
“The point being, if I have to choose between upgrading TransDigm and maybe Copart to full 5% positions or selling them and taking Amazon from 5% to, let's say, a 9% position, I would actually go for the latter.”
“Exor's net asset value, the total value of all of its investments minus any debt is somewhere around 33 billion euros. And the market cap of Exor itself is only 13 billion euros. So that means you're buying those assets at a 60% discount to what they're actually worth on paper in the public markets. And so if you just look at the Ferrari stake alone, which is about two-fifths of Exor's total net assets, it's worth almost the entire market cap of Exor because of that 60% discount.”
FICO loses its exclusive government-backed mortgage mandate
“But in mid-2025, the FHFA, the regulator that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, officially approved Vantage Score 4 as an alternative scoring model for those government-backed loans. And Vantage Score is owned jointly by the three major credit bureaus for context. So the very institutions that used to distribute FICO scores now have a competing product that they would love to push themselves.”
“But in mid-2025, the FHFA, the regulator that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, officially approved Vantage Score 4 as an alternative scoring model for those government-backed loans. And Vantage Score is owned jointly by the three major credit bureaus for context. So that's Equifax, TransUnion and Experian. So the very institutions that used to distribute FICO scores now have a competing product that they would love to push themselves.”
Project Leo positions Amazon as a viable SpaceX competitor
“I think what you're going to have here is one, there's a huge opening for even a distant number two to SpaceX, and two, the most popular loyalty program in the history of the planet is Amazon Prime. And I think the mission here, what I would be talking about if I were in strategy at Amazon, is we're going to offer a competent phone. It won't be as good as the iPhone, but it will be as good as an Android phone. And with Amazon Prime Plus, you're going to get Wi-Fi, you're going to get blazing fast broadband into your home.”
Amazon leads Big Tech due to massive robotics investment
“And there are one million total industrialized robots under at Amazon, in an Amazon warehouse or somewhere in Amazon infrastructure. The rest of the nation, private companies, has a total of 400,000. And AI was the thing that took is going to help industrialized robotics meet its potential too. They're talking about using AI industrialized robots to not increase their personnel by one person in their biggest business set as Amazon retail.”
“I feel like some people will listen to this and feel like, okay, this is a rejection of Copart and TransDigm or some sort of implicit prediction that we don't think the businesses will do well, which is not the case at all. It's just a question of when we're managing our portfolio, if we can exchange two companies on the margins, that we have to do all the same amount of work to track and keep up with, for one company or a bigger bet on one company that we know we really, really like, it's just a lot easier to manage.”
Universal Music Group owns perpetual royalty streams
“Because once you own the rights to a song, you essentially own a perpetual royalty stream with almost zero marginal cost of production. So you don't need to manufacture anything. You don't need to run servers. You don't need to reprint the music every single time that somebody plays it. And that's why their free cash flow conversion is so astronomically high.”
Growing anti-AI sentiment triggers violent acts and legislation
“Fourteen states now have active bills proposing restrictions or outright bans. So, Scott, this is something I wrote about in my newsletter about two months ago, this idea that the biggest obstacle to AI isn't energy, it isn't compute capacity, it's its own popularity. Since I wrote that, some crazy things have happened. There were the attacks on the councilman's house. He supported a data center. Someone shot at his house thirteen times and they left a sign that says no data centers.”
Timeline fatigue makes investors ignore geopolitical war risks
“I wonder if there's also been a little bit of what I would call the timeline fatigue, where we thought we understood what the story of this war was. And there were all of these different plot points. We strike Iran, we kill the supreme leader, but then the son is appointed. Then Trump says that we've had productive talks and we think that maybe the negotiations are going to go somewhere. Then they don't. Then he says, open the fucking street, you crazy bastards.”
Trade Desk faces deteriorating revenue growth and fundamentals
“And so, the problems compounded through 2025 for them when the company first got on our radar. And you've seen revenue growth decelerate from 25% in Q1 to down to 14% by Q4 of 25. And then, with the most recent earnings just a few weeks ago, they actually did beat Wall Street estimates, but their guidance for Q1 2026 implied growth of only 10% year over year.”
Amazon leads Big Tech due to massive robotics investment
“And there are one million total industrialized robots under at Amazon, in an Amazon warehouse or somewhere in Amazon infrastructure. The rest of the nation, private companies, has a total of 400,000. And AI was the thing that took is going to help industrialized robotics meet its potential too. They're talking about using AI industrialized robots to not increase their personnel by one person in their biggest business set as Amazon retail.”
Microsoft remains undervalued despite recent tech sector drawdowns
“I just think that it's gotten absolutely destroyed on a valuation basis. And I actually bought it in SaaSpocalypse one. I built up a decent position there. I bought it at around $400. It got battered, continued to get battered. And then last week, I was looking at it, it was $380 and I just doubled my position. I was like, fuck it. As we record this, we're up to $420 per share. So it's risen 10% in literally a matter of days.”
Top earners remain price insensitive to surging energy costs
“The only real systemic impact that it will have is on the consumer spending habits of lower income households who, as you said, in the lowest income, spend nearly 20% of their total expenditures on gas. But other than that, it's not gonna hurt the top quintile very much at all. It's also not really gonna hurt tech companies that much. I mean, there was some concern at the beginning that some of the materials that go through the Strait of Hormuz are used for chips, but eventually people started to be a little bit less worried about that.”
Amazon replaces TransDigm and Copart in the portfolio
“The point being, if I have to choose between upgrading TransDigm and maybe Copart to full 5% positions or selling them and taking Amazon from 5% to, let's say, a 9% position, I would actually go for the latter.”
Music catalogs are perpetual low-cost royalty streams
“I think what makes this business model so attractive from an investment standpoint is the cost structure. Because once you own the rights to a song, you essentially own a perpetual royalty stream with almost zero marginal cost of production. So you don't need to manufacture anything. You don't need to run servers. You don't need to reprint the music every single time that somebody plays it. And that's why their free cash flow conversion is so astronomically high.”
Income inequality drives systemic resentment against corporate figureheads
“The defining issue of our time is income inequality. And what's so sad about it is the incumbents who benefit from income inequality will weaponize this bullshit notion of complexity and talk about technology and network effects. And at the end of the day, it's just about redistribution of income. And that is stop transferring wealth to corporations and the wealthy. Corporations are paying their lowest taxes since 1929.”
Markets disassociate from the economic reality of most people
“And I've said for a long time, I think the NASDAQ and the Dow are two of the worst metrics or most unhealthy metrics ever invented because they give the illusion that people are doing well. And it really is, it's a proxy for earnings and a proxy for the wealth of the top 10%. So what do you have? All right, so, I mean, think about it. If the majority of our markets now are being run by 10 companies that are in the business of AI or online or software, do they care that gas prices are up?”
Income inequality drives systemic resentment against corporate figureheads
“The defining issue of our time is income inequality. And what's so sad about it is the incumbents who benefit from income inequality will weaponize this bullshit notion of complexity and talk about technology and network effects. And at the end of the day, it's just about redistribution of income. And that is stop transferring wealth to corporations and the wealthy. Corporations are paying their lowest taxes since 1929.”
Microsoft remains undervalued despite recent tech sector drawdowns
“I just think that it's gotten absolutely destroyed on a valuation basis. And I actually bought it in SaaSpocalypse one. I built up a decent position there. I bought it at around $400. It got battered, continued to get battered. And then last week, I was looking at it, it was $380 and I just doubled my position. I was like, fuck it. As we record this, we're up to $420 per share. So it's risen 10% in literally a matter of days.”
Airbnb benefits from significant supply exclusivity
“So, managing calendars and bookings across multiple platforms ends up being more hassle than it's worth. So, they just pick Airbnb and stay there, and it also helps that Airbnb has this really smooth user-friendly interface. And that stickiness means a guest searching for a specific type of property in a specific location genuinely cannot always find it elsewhere.”
Reddit achieves a massive post-IPO margin turnaround
“And then one of the craziest changes when looking at Reddit has just been the inflection and the margins of the business of net income margins in 2024 were negative 37%. And by 2025, a year later, they were 24% in the positive direction. So in Q4, we actually saw margins hit 34%.”
Markets disassociate from the economic reality of most people
“And I've said for a long time, I think the NASDAQ and the Dow are two of the worst metrics or most unhealthy metrics ever invented because they give the illusion that people are doing well. And it really is, it's a proxy for earnings and a proxy for the wealth of the top 10%. So what do you have? All right, so, I mean, think about it. If the majority of our markets now are being run by 10 companies that are in the business of AI or online or software, do they care that gas prices are up?”
“That means you're buying those assets at a 60% discount to what they're actually worth on paper in the public markets. So if you just look at the Ferrari stake alone, which is about two-fifths of Exor's total net assets, it's worth almost the entire market cap of Exor because of that 60% discount.”
Growing anti-AI sentiment triggers violent acts and legislation
“Fourteen states now have active bills proposing restrictions or outright bans. So, Scott, this is something I wrote about in my newsletter about two months ago, this idea that the biggest obstacle to AI isn't energy, it isn't compute capacity, it's its own popularity. Since I wrote that, some crazy things have happened. There were the attacks on the councilman's house. He supported a data center. Someone shot at his house thirteen times and they left a sign that says no data centers.”
Nintendo successfully transitioned to an ecosystem model
“The Switch 2 is the first console that embraced an ecosystem-like approach. And so one major difference being backward compatibility, which means that a new console could play games from older console generations. So if you own a Switch 1 and decide to buy the new Switch, then you can still play the same games on your Switch 2 without needing to buy a new version of the game or losing all of the progress within the game.”
Project Leo positions Amazon as a viable SpaceX competitor
“I think what you're going to have here is one, there's a huge opening for even a distant number two to SpaceX, and two, the most popular loyalty program in the history of the planet is Amazon Prime. And I think the mission here, what I would be talking about if I were in strategy at Amazon, is we're going to offer a competent phone. It won't be as good as the iPhone, but it will be as good as an Android phone. And with Amazon Prime Plus, you're going to get Wi-Fi, you're going to get blazing fast broadband into your home.”
Top earners remain price insensitive to surging energy costs
“The only real systemic impact that it will have is on the consumer spending habits of lower income households who, as you said, in the lowest income, spend nearly 20% of their total expenditures on gas. But other than that, it's not gonna hurt the top quintile very much at all. It's also not really gonna hurt tech companies that much. I mean, there was some concern at the beginning that some of the materials that go through the Strait of Hormuz are used for chips, but eventually people started to be a little bit less worried about that.”
Nintendo Switch 2 is the fastest-selling console ever
“The Switch 2 launched in June last year and it sold 3.5 million units in the first four days online. So that's the fastest launch of any Nintendo console in its history. And by the end of December 2025, it had sold far more than 17 million units in just 7 months.”
Avoid Trade Desk due to deteriorating fundamentals
“But I do think that as a stock price has fallen, Trade Desk has not necessarily gotten cheaper because the intrinsic value of the company has declined simultaneously. So yeah, it's just hard for me to argue that the Trade Desk has a clear moat. And so for context, in March, a major ad agency in France known as Publicis issued a memo advising clients to avoid working with the Trade Desk due to this failed audit on their fee structures that apparently happened.”
Timeline fatigue makes investors ignore geopolitical war risks
“I wonder if there's also been a little bit of what I would call the timeline fatigue, where we thought we understood what the story of this war was. And there were all of these different plot points. We strike Iran, we kill the supreme leader, but then the son is appointed. Then Trump says that we've had productive talks and we think that maybe the negotiations are going to go somewhere. Then they don't. Then he says, open the fucking street, you crazy bastards.”
