Recently I sat for lunch in a Miami beachfront grill with a few friends, surrounded by plastic people. Most animated among the latin music was my friend "Mustafa". He works for a decabillionaire who recently took their talents to South Beach (note that people are offended being called "billionaires" since it sounds poor now - Chamath and Elon correct twitter commenters). Mustafa quipped "Miami isn't America - two guys at the airport tried to solicit a bribe from me within 5 minutes of landing. We're leaving America in spirit"
At lunch we all agreed: the only acceptable behavior from a rational and intelligent American is to loot the place and leave. The richest 19 year old I know makes a few 10s of millions a year exploiting loopholes in medicare regulation. It's hard to want to be a lawyer.
Venture capital is my favorite example of America's broken incentives: Replit founder Amjad Masad was, today, flexing being a billionaire in Twitter comments, and his company has yet to even reach a billion in annualized negative margin revenue as the eighth best vibe coding company. Causing this: venture funds deploy pension money to cash founders out at absurd valuations while playing hot potato on markups to keep the management fee ponzi going.
To see in numbers that venture is a fugazi exit scam: If you take a company public it generally goes down 50-90% within a few weeks from private marks (see Figma and Klarna respectively). Players know this; SpaceX is trying to rejigger the Nasdaq rules to let them dump shares on index buyers immediately after IPO.
Trump is leading from the top down. A set of memecoin scams was blatant, rivaled by Energy Secretary Chris Wright tweeting and deleting fake news about the oil market this week minutes after a record volume of oil future orders hit the tape. Trump's kids bought a defense company this week. This administration understands they need to steal the remaining assets and get out. Escape to where? It's a good question.
America's similarities to Russia and Orwellian ideas of Russia are stacking in a hilarious manner. Trump used "doublespeak" twice this week, asserting that the war is both over and just beginning, and that the US is attacking mining boats in the strait but that no mines are being set. If we continue a soviet path, and social norms around capitalism go out the window, oligarchs likely divvy the dwindling resources while sending plebs to a forever war.
So should you stay, make friends with the powers that be while avoiding jail and the military, and try to hoover a feudal parcel in the new commune, or just exit? Jake Paul is choosing the former, and I look forward to calling him Chairman. Pundits wonder why "Gen Z" maintains a lazy nihilism and even the hollow career of investment banking is full of wannabe male models instead of driven people. Where are the incentives?