excellence is the capacity to take pain | founder F/AS | advisor @buildoniris @w3arew3 | former cmo @avax | ex @oakley @strategyand
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Mobile traffic has been growing 50% a year since 2012, but telecom revenue has only grown 1% a year.
They built the network and everyone else got rich monetizing subscriber data.
Proud to be supporting Iris as they work to right this wrong.
Congrats to @JulesEMiller and team on an incredible launch.
Today we're launching Iris, the financial network telecom operators plug into to earn on what they already own.
Operators built the roads the digital economy runs on. Everyone else got rich building the city on top. From 2012 through 2025, traffic on operator networks grew more than 50% a year. Operator revenue grew about 1%. The companies on top took the difference.
Operators own what those companies pay dearly for: distribution, the billing relationship, daily engagement. And money already runs through all of it, in subscriber payments, top-ups, advertising and settlement.
Iris sits underneath all of it. Same business, new revenue, settled in dollars. Iris runs the rails. The operator keeps the economics.
VIVA, a licensed carrier in Bolivia, is the first operator live on Iris. Real transactions, settled in USDi, operating reserves held in dollars.
Until now, operators built everything and kept almost none of the value. Now they build almost nothing and keep almost all of it.
@devonf 🇺🇸 retweeted
We were taught that Earth orbits the Sun in a closed circle. In reality, Earth has never returned to the same point in space once in 4.5 billion years.
Right now, the Sun is carrying Earth and every planet around the center of the Milky Way at 230 km/s (828,000 km/h), more than 18,000 kilometers every 80 seconds.
Because the Solar System is tilted 60.2° to the galactic plane and bobs up and down through the galactic disc roughly every 30 million years, the planets trace open 3D corkscrew helices across deep space rather than flat loops.
The last time the Sun stood where it stands today, one Galactic Year (230 million years) ago, the very first dinosaurs were only beginning to appear on Earth. Since forming 4.6 billion years ago, our Sun has completed only 20 laps.
@devonf 🇺🇸 retweeted
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
@devonf 🇺🇸 retweeted
So, basically, 500 million Europeans expect 300 million Americans to protect them from 120 million Russians who can’t even defeat 40 million Ukrainians while those 500 million Europeans don’t even realize they are being conquered by 2 billion Muslims who claim they are being persecuted by 8 million Israelis. Is that about right?
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@devonf 🇺🇸 retweeted
My biggest concern is that if there is a clean sweep by Democrats of the House, Senate and Presidency in 2028, they will:
1. Make DC and Puerto Rico states to gain a strong majority in the Senate.
2. Open the borders and legalize everyone living in America illegally to cement a permanent majority.
3. Increase the size of the Supreme Court to gain an immediate majority.
This would result in America becoming a permanent one-party state and the end of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word.
All that is needed to ensure this doesn’t happen is 51 Republican senators in 2029. That is why you should vote for Republican senators this election. Other reasons are irrelevant compared to this one.
@devonf 🇺🇸 retweeted
America, more than any other nation in world history, was shaped by the Christian tradition of spreading the gospel unto all nations.
Join us in celebrating International Religious Freedom Day.
@devonf 🇺🇸 retweeted
Was America founded as a Christian nation?
Charlie Kirk answered this question better than anyone I've ever seen. I never get tired of this clip.
@devonf 🇺🇸 retweeted
It's been months that I keep saying Hitler was far left. Every time, thousands of clowns show up in my replies to give me history lessons.
So I made a video to answer all these low IQ takes at once.
Topic closed. Next.
@devonf 🇺🇸 retweeted
Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene."
It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why.
First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created.
So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?"
And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied.
Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake.
Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation.
Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it.
Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better?
The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians?
A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite.
Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences.
The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions.
The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem."
Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing.
Government is the fourth box. By design.
Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it.
And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money.
The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet.
Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it.
So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear.
China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build.
India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie.
South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines.
Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian.
Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%.
No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build.
And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years.
Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity.
Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek.
A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018.
Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years.
One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world.
Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades.
If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet.
It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week.
And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out.
You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake.
Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little.
The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery.
Choose.
Starlink just bought its way into being a US carrier, and the top 3 US operators are already down 8% in after hours trading.
Every operator outside the US needs to read this closely.
First, apps took voice and messaging, then hyperscalers and ad networks took the data, and now, satellites are coming for coverage. The pattern is pretty clear… operators build the network, someone else collects on it.
Cutting costs, selling towers and merging all shrink the business - the only thing that grows it is earning more from the networks they already have.
Here’s where I think it happens:
1. Payments. The networks that carry calls and data can carry also money. Mobile money already tried and (mostly) failed because the infra burden is too great. But stablecoins change everything, and the operators that will win are the ones who get that they have to make stables native their networks.
2. Trust. A mobile operator knows with certainty the identity, location and context of every subscriber at any given moment. The smart ones are figuring out that there are ways to better use those data, in safe and ethical ways and without sharing it with anyone, to create value for the humans and businesses in their networks.
At @buildoniris, we’re making both a reality.
We announced an agreement to acquire a nationwide low-band spectrum license portfolio that will pave the way for @Starlink to become a major mobile carrier in the US.
With this new spectrum and our Gen2 constellation, Starlink Mobile can ensure Americans have access to high-speed mobile broadband no matter where they are → spacex.com/updates#starlink-…
@devonf 🇺🇸 retweeted
SECRETARY RUBIO: “Nationalism” became a dirty word. So we tore down our monuments, we condemned our own history, and in too many places we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process we opened our borders, and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.
@devonf 🇺🇸 retweeted
Democrats are trying to dismiss the White House Accord on Super Intelligence as optional self-policing. But although the agreement was entered into voluntarily, the governance that follows from it is not. As Gavin Baker points out, once an independent auditor reports a safety issue to an independent board committee, directors have a fiduciary duty not to disregard it, and a D&O carrier can use a bad-faith finding to deny coverage. So although the agreement starts with internal controls, these are verified by external audit and board oversight — and then existing FTC and securities law still apply to any public claim the company does not keep. This is far more practical than what Democrats want — a freeze on frontier development while China races ahead. Democrats should applaud what President Trump has accomplished. But they would rather use SI safety as a campaign issue than admit the Accord represents major progress.
The White House Accord on Super Intelligence will have a positive impact on safety.
Committing to hire third party auditors who will report to an independent committee of board members has more practical near term significance than almost any conceivable regulatory action.
These board members will have a fiduciary duty. If they ignore a report from the third party auditors then a bad faith finding from a court is a real possibility. A D&O carrier could use this to deny coverage.
Really good outcome for ordinary Americans.
More effective and elegant than some ridiculous new regulatory body that would take months to do anything, then almost certainly done the wrong thing and along the way probably created a regulated oligopoly at the frontier which is the scariest potential outcome*
As I read the articles about the accord, it did occur to me that they were mostly written by political reporters who may have not understood the significance of the accord given their reporting beats are generally focused on public policy instead of corporate governance.
*Scariest because I do not trust any 5-20 individuals to make the best possible decisions about the direction of this technology. I want as many AIs as possible to maximize the odds that they encompass the diversity of human values across the world and richness of human variation. And I want an AI that shares my own personal values. Safety, freedom and the maximization of human agency through democratization, distribution and diffusion vs. centralization. History has spoken on the dangers of the latter path.
**Also SI not AI still adapting to the change but I do think better branding. Who wants artificial ingredients in their food?
@devonf 🇺🇸 retweeted
Operators built the networks the digital economy runs on and now they need a payment that moves as fast as they do.
USDi, built with @buildoniris and issued by Agora, starts with @vivabo in Bolivia. Read more about why we're excited.
agora.finance/blog/iris-usdi…
