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Marc Andreessen explains why AI might be the end of James Burnham's "managerial society" In his book The Managerial Revolution, Burnham divided capitalism into two phases. The first phase was what he called "bourgeois capitalism" "Think of this as name on the door -- it's Ford Motor Company because Henry Ford runs the company. It's a dictatorial model and Henry Ford just tells everyone what to do. He said the problem with bourgeois capitalism is it doesn't scale because Henry Ford can only tell so many people to do so many things." The second phase was what Burnham called "managerial capitalism", which was Marc describes as, "the creation of a professional class of managers that are trained -- not to be car experts or experts in any particular field but to be experts in management. And then that led to business schools and management consultant firms and all these things." Marc continues: "You look at every big company today and most executives at most of the Fortune 500 companies are not domain experts in whatever the company does. And they're certainly not the founders of those companies. They're professional managers. And in fact, over the course of their careers, they'll probably manage many different kinds of businesses. They might work in healthcare for a while and then work in financial services and then go work in something else." "What Burnham said was that transition was absolutely required because the problem with bourgeois capitalism is it doesn't scale... So if you're going to run capitalist enterprises that are going to have millions to billions of customers, they're going to be operating at a level of scale and complexity that will require this professional management class." Burnham acknowledged that this professional management class has its downsides -- they're not as inventive and not going to come up with the next breakthrough. But whether you think that's good or bad, that's what's going to be required. And basically that's what happened. Marc continues: "Managerialism basically took over everything. What I'm describing is basically how all big companies run and how all governments run and how our large-scale non-profits run." Marc believes venture capital is a protest movement to that -- backing founders under the Henry Ford model, and trying to find the next Elon Musk or Steve Jobs who can out-innovate the incumbents. "I've always viewed my entire life as: we're raging against the dying of the light. We're constantly trying to fight off managerialism from swamping everything and everything getting boring, gray, dumb, and old." But AI may now offer a third model. Marc explains: "Maybe the new Henry Ford, Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs + AI is the best of both because it's the spark of genius of the name on the door model but gives that person AI superpowers to do all the managerial stuff... What's the thing these bots are really good at? They're really good at doing paperwork, writing reports, and doing all the managerial work." "The challenge is going to be for the innovators to figure out how to leverage AI to actually do this." "The other challenge is going to be for the incumbents that are managerial to figure out: what does that mean? Because now they're going to be facing a different kind of insurgent competitor that has a different set of capabilities than they're used to." "I think this is going to force a lot of big companies to figure out innovation - figure out innovation or die trying." Ben Horowitz elaborates on this point further in his article Databricks & the Future Firm below. Video: @latentspacepod (Apr 2026)

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

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Tether just released its quarterly USDT attestation for Q2 2026. Tether had a great second quarter of 2026, with ~1.5B in net operating profit, despite highly volatile global markets. USDT user base continued to grow, reaching the new all-time-high of 650M+, with the widest surge across all emerging markets, fueled by the continued period of geopolitical uncertainty. Without a doubt, Tether continues to deliver financial inclusion in the developing world like no other company or organization ever has in the history of humanity; we're all incredibly proud of this achievement. Most of the financial industry today is so excited for overly-inflated AI stock valuations, like moths to a flame. But at Tether we keep dreaming of a stable Society that drives both financial and intelligence inclusion for the 4 billion people left behind. Highlights as of 30 June 2026: * ~1.5B in net operating profits for Q2 2026. * ~184.6B total issued USDT, end of Q2 2026. * ~4.1B excess reserves, on top of the 100% reserves in liquid assets that back all issued tokens, end of Q2 2026. These results show that Tether has the liquidity, discipline and scale to remain resilient across market cycles while continuing to serve hundreds of millions of users around the world. Thank you very much for the continued support ❤️

On Kimi K3 pricing being higher than DeepSeek etc at $15/m tokens: 1. It is optimised so it has very high cache hit rates (90% lower cost) 2. It is not optimised for large RAM (B300 etc) node clusters as @Kimi_Moonshot doesn't have access to them! Cost per token lower there

We are so going to see KYP (Know Your Prompter) and ATL (Anti Token Laundering) regulations. Professional licenses to use frontier models etc, play the whole regulated finance playbook

🚨SHORT SELLERS HAVE MADE $4 BILLION BETTING AGAINST SPACEX ONE MONTH AFTER ITS IPO Traders betting against SpaceX have booked $4 BILLION in paper profits as 30% of all tradeable shares are now being shorted, up 10 percentage points in just 10 days, per S3 Partners. SpaceX shares fell below their $135 listing price for the first time on Friday, down 40% from their mid-June high of $225, now trading at $123.