Michael Jackson @WorkMJ

An absolute non-story by The Guardian yesterday about Amazon’s tax affairs, by a journalist who either doesn’t understand tax or is pretending not to. 1/n

Philippe Aghion & Simon Johnson examine how the continent went from scientific powerhouse to cautious follower—and what to do about it. project-syndicate.org/onpoint/europe…

I’ve recently been worried about brain drain for a very selfish reason. A lot of my friends have been leaving (you know who you are). I couldn’t tell if my concern was bad reasoning from anecdotes so I tracked one group of exceptional Britons you can actually follow individually: International Mathematical Olympiad medallists. These are not normal teenagers. ~3% of IMO winners go on to win major scientific prizes (60x the rate of MIT alumni). The UK's medallists include two Fields Medallists, the designer of the chip in 99% of the world's smartphones, and the inventors of public-key cryptography. The headline number says I am wrong to worry: 71% retention and the UK is the second-largest importer of IMO talent globally after the US. But look closer and you see: 1. The most recent settled-career cohort shows the lowest retention on record. 2. Before 2016, not a single UK medallist did their undergrad abroad. Since then, two have. Both went to MIT. 3. Of British medallists in industry, only 33% work for a British firm. The modal employer is Anthropic, OpenAI, or Jane Street. 4. Leaving is individually rational. IMO alumni who moved to the US were up to 6x more productive than equally talented peers who stayed home. The UK multiplier is 2-3x. The individual-optimal and nationally-optimal choice are not the same thing. So was I right to worry? Too early to say. The data is consistent with both a structural shift and noise. But the laments of brain drain are not obviously wrong. Full piece: substack.com/@britishprogre… (A note on statistical validity: we send six kids to the IMO a year, so some of these figures rest on analysing small numbers. This is enough to see the shape of things but not enough to lean hard on any percentage.)

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Julia Willemyns @jujulemons

4 weeks ago

Every time I ask an AI researcher if they are bullish on British talent, they say that – despite all the headlines about new offices and expansions – all the best researchers they know are leaving the country (unless they have families here). I genuinely don't know if this is

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Basically the only way to get "rich" in the UK (and Europe as a whole) is real estate.

Hussein Kanji @hkanji

12 hours ago

This is such a good deck @stanboland drive.google.com/file/d/1s-cKcM…

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Invoking Jason Hickel for mathematical estimates about economic history is in the same league as invoking L. Ron Hubbard for predictions about volcano eruption patterns.

Archie Sengupta @archiexzzz

2 days ago

FYI: the British colonies "stole" $45T from india

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Couldn’t agree more with this. I’d love to see a generation of world-leading British tech firms. Palantir is actually doing something about it. ~20% of our people are in the UK. We draw some of the best engineers in the world to Britain, and we help keep them here. Foundry, our core platform, was invented in our London office. Ten years on, the Palantir UK alumni network is very strong. Take @ElevenLabs : built in London, co-founded by an ex-Palantir engineer, now full of brilliant ex-colleagues. More founders are leaving Palantir UK to build every year. I have no doubt one of the great British AI companies will be built by a Palantir alum.

Martha Dacombe @martha_dacombe

4 days ago

open.substack.com/pub/arguablyma…

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Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale just went on CNBC and said something that is hard to argue with, "It's crazy to think he's not going to win" (Save this). @JTLonsdale is talking about Elon Musk, SpaceX and the single most consequential infrastructure race happening in the world right now. His core argument is that, Musk is the best hardware builder in the world at exactly the moment when trillions of dollars are flowing into hardware. SpaceX's S-1 IPO filing which dropped last month revealed the company spent approximately $20 billion on its AI division in 2025 alone, representing roughly 60% of total capital expenditure. The filing claims SpaceX has identified the largest actionable total addressable market in human history at $28.5 trillion, with $22.7 trillion of that attributed to enterprise AI applications. But the part of Lonsdale's argument that most people missed is the regulatory angle. Every regulation making it harder to build data centers on Earth, every zoning fight, every environmental objection, every piece of legislation used to slow down AI infrastructure directly benefits Musk because his answer to all of it is to build in space, where those rules simply do not apply. Every obstacle that slows down a terrestrial data center is, in practice, an argument for the orbital alternative that only SpaceX is currently positioned to deliver at scale. Bullish on Space.

Palantir Co-Founder Joe Lonsdale on Elon Musk and @SpaceX IPO: "He's the kind of guy who's the best at hardware in the world at a time when Trillions of dollars are going into this area. And by the way, every single time that there’s more dumb regulations, that there’s more data centers that China is spending money to convince us, along with the far left, not to do. That just helps Elon, because he is going to do it in space at massive scale. He’s shown how it’s going to work. So l mean, he's really set this up in a way where he's just right in the key part of the Al wave. It's crazy to think he's not going to win." Boom. 🎯

Middle Eastern, African, Pakistani, and Turkish immigrants to Europe are huge fiscal net-negatives, as are their descendants. They make the “paying for pensions” problem worse. They aren’t propping up the boomers. Somehow this fake talking point just won’t die.

yeshiva frat leader 🇮🇪🇵🇸 @TullamoreJew_

a day ago

a more diverse europe is already baked in. We could well get multiple new far right governments next year and every one of them is gonna take one look at their budgets and realise you can have zero immigration or pensions but not both

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the Belgian Prime Minister today at the “One Europe, one market” event: "there are twice as many people working on compliance compared to innovation in Europe."

What Prostitutes Can Teach About Economics Great talk by Prof Levitt Must watch

New York Post @nypost

2 days ago

Escorts are charging as much as $6k per hour thanks to Silicon Valley's AI boom trib.al/EY38Nuz

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Just when you think Claire Fox couldn’t be more brilliant … she is. Here’s Claire on Alien Culture. “We do not think for example that stoning women for adultery is modern, that it’s just a cultural practice, what’s wrong with that? We do not think that child marriage is an interesting cultural expression. We have to say that’s a backward medieval thing. So ‘Alien culture’ was well chosen, it’s importing Alien culture” Exactly what we were all thinking🔥

Berkeley Professor Mina Aganagic: “‘I realized that for students to follow me…I had to start reviewing basic algebra stuff, like fractions.’ The lack of mathematical fluency, Aganagic said, extended even to ‘the meaning of equals in an equation.’”

We’ve had so many off ramps. I think for me the worst was when David Amess was murdered and MPs instead chose to place the blame on social media and advocate for censorship. A colleague, a man that was by all accounts decent and upstanding, a man many of them knew. Horrible

Ramon Agusta @ramonagusta

2 days ago

@RobertJenrick This should have changed everything...

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"a month ago it was too dangerous to release but now all safety concerns have been addressed" "The anjin says he secured ten of billions of funding in inference compute"

terminally onλine εngineer @tekbog

2 days ago

mythos is such a funny way for anthropic to show how they are not serious: first they say it's too dangerous, then they give it to some companies, now it's just gonna be available as b2b saas as any other model what are we doing here

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The BBC ceased being a serious news service a long time ago.

BBC News (UK) @BBCNews

2 days ago

Man taken to hospital with 'serious injuries' after stabbing bbc.in/49QRLA5

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But with British youth unemployment now rising faster than anywhere else in the G7 – and set to hit 17.8pc next year according to the OECD – something else is going on. Over the last few years, an astonishing divergence has emerged between the employment of young UK-nationals and immigrants in the same age group from outside the European Union. The number of non-EU workers aged under 25 on UK payrolls soared from 82,000 in January 2020 to 370,000 in December 2025, according to analysis of HMRC data by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). That’s an astonishing 355pc rise Over the same period, UK-national under-25s on payrolls increased by just 11,000, a mere 0.3pc increase, as the number of under-25 “Neets” surged almost 200,000. During the year to December 2025, as the labour market has tightened, 33,200 more non-EU under-25s were added to UK payrolls, while a net 32,200 UK-nationals of the same age fell off. That strikes me as a national scandal. Here's a link to the CSJ research 🧵7/8 centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/newsroom/27-yo…

Databricks could have gone public in 2020 at a comparable scale to Snowflake. Instead, it stayed private and raised an estimated $28B across seven subsequent rounds. Consider two scenarios based on public comps: - A hypothetical 2020 listing, resulting in a public company worth ~$200B in 2027. - The current trajectory, where Databricks goes public at a valuation of ~$200B in 2027. The difference between these scenarios is the 7 years of private capital at a cost of around 18%, versus public capital at a cost of 12%. As a result, 2020 shareholders have sacrificed ~$30B of present value in order to stay private, and venture capitalists expanded their fee income by ~$6B. Even the carried interest from a much larger 2027 IPO is lower, if you factor in the time value of money. Unfortunately, it's easy to grandstand with the TVPI on earlier investments and obscure the damage done to the company by injecting more capital.

Exec Sum @exec_sum

2 days ago

NEWS: Databricks is in early discussions to raise a Series M at a valuation between $165B to $175B, per The Information.

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telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/0… Man attempts to behead another man in the street. "No evidence of terror at this stage, say police" If that isn’t terror, what is? How much more terrifying does it need to be to qualify as terror?

The speed with which people are doing the Norm Macdonald joke, but seriously, keeps getting faster.

Colum Eastwood @columeastwood

2 days ago

The horrific scenes in North Belfast should not be used by English, right wing politicians to further their own ends. I don’t ever remember them commenting on any of the other hellish things that community has experienced over the years.

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