635: Elon Musk's 180 on Anthropic, Hyperscaler Capex & When the Customer Becomes the Bank, Fairfax Financial, Big Tech earnings, S&P Global and Moody’s, Brookfield Nuclear, and Claude Dreams
"everywhere and nowhere at the same time"
I learned more from idiots and nobodies than from professors of this and that. Life is the teacher, not the Board of Education.
—Henry Miller, On Turning Eighty (1972)
🐦🤔😕 One of the reasons I don’t post as much to Twitter lately is because I have no idea what I’m doing when I’m posting anymore.
It used to be that I knew I was writing to a group of people who followed me, and who I largely followed back. A sub-community having an ongoing conversation about whatever was going on or what people were finding interesting.
But now, the default ‘for you’ page looks a lot more like TikTok than anything else, with random tweets that are clearly selected for broad engagement appeal rather than anything specific to me or the clusters I belong to (graph-based distribution was replaced by attention-based distribution, optimizing for doom-scrolling at the expense of community).
Don’t get me wrong, I still see tweets by people I follow, but they are now mostly one-way broadcasts, and there’s very little discussion going on when I click to see threads. If there’s a back-and-forth that is deeper than 2 levels, it’s kind of a special occasion. Back in the heyday of Twitter, it was common to have a few threads each day turn into huge convos involving many of my favorite accounts. Points, counterpoints, showing screenshots of charts and book passages, etc.
It was glorious.
Twitter was a discovery engine, both for interesting people and interesting things (books, films, podcasts, websites, newsletters, etc). I know you know. I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said a thousand times. But I still kind of mourn it, even after all this time.
I’ve met many of my closest friends on Twitter. I’ve discovered many of my favorite films and books. I’ve learned about all kinds of things, from business to technology to history, on that stupid platform.
Twitter’s current incarnation isn’t as bad as when every tweet attracted 60 spambots, but it has morphed into a completely different thing. I feel like I don’t know how to post there anymore. Do I really want to talk about the latest book I read or film I watched with my kids and have that be sandwiched between posts about horrific Epstein abuse and reposted TikTok videos? 🫤
It feels a bit like everything you post goes everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
How does that work? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴
🤖 Elon Musk Does 180 on Anthropic, Rents 220,000 Nvidia GPUs to Claude 🤔
I wrote a bunch about xAI lately. The co-founders leaving, the $1.25 trillion merger with SpaceX (which valued xAI at $250bn!), the lack of traction with users, the falling behind the frontier… and the $60bn Cursor Hail Mary offer to try to get things unstuck by injecting new talent and data (even though Cursor has never trained a frontier model from scratch).
They certainly aren’t boring. Whether the news is good or bad is a separate question. The latest development makes sense if you first consider two things:
Anthropic is STARVING for compute. They are growing usage faster than, well, pretty much anything ever at that scale, so they are desperate to find ways to fill that compute hole. Dario said they “planned for 10x growth and saw 80x” (I assume he meant in compute usage, not revenue).
xAI bought hundreds of thousands of expensive Nvidia GPUs, barn-raised a data-center at a speed that would make the Amish proud, trained what was at the time a frontier model on it, and then… 🦗🦗🦗
Pricey GPUs don’t earn their keep if they’re idling (xAI was reportedly running its cluster at ~11% utilization).
So this happened:
SpaceXAI has signed an agreement with Anthropic to provide access to Colossus 1, one of the world’s largest and fastest-deployed AI supercomputers.
Built from the ground up in record time, Colossus delivers unprecedented scale for AI training, fine-tuning, inference, and high-performance computing workloads. Colossus 1 features over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators. The cluster delivers extreme parallel performance for large language models, multimodal systems, scientific simulations, and generative AI at frontier scale.
This gives Anthropic access to 300 megawatts of additional capacity.
Wait. Doesn’t Elon hate Anthropic? 😅
Here’s just a sample of what Musk publicly said about them recently:
Oct 2025: “Anthropic is misanthropic” and “Claude is pure evil.”
Feb 2026: “Your AI hates Whites & Asians, especially Chinese, heterosexuals and men. This is misanthropic and evil. Fix it.”
Feb 2026: “Grok must win or we will be ruled by an insufferably woke and sanctimonious AI.”
Feb 2026: “Yeah, but we’re not super smug, sanctimonious and hypocritical about it like Anthropic is.”
Feb 2026: “Anthropic hates Western Civilization.”
March 2026: “Claude is woke and their logo looks like an anal sphincter 😂”
March 2026: “Is there a more hypocritical company than Anthropic?”
I guess that’s water under the bridge, because he spent some time with them and his finely tuned evil detector (🤨) gave them the all-clear:
Musk also added: “We reserve the right to reclaim the compute if their AI engages in actions that harm humanity.”
That feels like a pretty subjective and broad clause, giving one party a unilateral 'we'll know it when we see it' trigger. Talk about a Sword of Damocles! 🗡️ A bit like OpenAI’s ‘AGI Clause’ in their deal with Microsoft (which has recently been removed).
Looking at everyone’s position on the board, it feels likely that this is actually a case of:
