The X Factor Is X
When news broke last Friday of President Trump's executive order targeting the government of South Africa for their anti-white policies, author and New Hampshire State Representative Travis Corcoran expressed amazement that a subject that had been discussed on rightwing social media for years had been acted on by the White House.
It's like everything we've been shitpoasting about for 20 years came true overnight. https://t.co/vSECYTOjcb
— ⓘ Dogs don't have thumbs (@MorlockP) February 7, 2025
X has become a sounding board for sentiment and policy in the second Trump term in an entirely novel way, as our friend Lomez explained in the excellent thread below. Lomez is uniquely positioned observer here, as the founder of Passage Press, which has published books by the most influential thinkers on the newly ascendant right.
This was always the big promise of the internet as a free speech platform, where legacy gatekeepers with built-in structural advantages to shape and manipulate the news would lose their power to do so...
— Lomez (@L0m3z) February 9, 2025
But it really is only now that this is actually happening.
This was always the big promise of the internet as a free speech platform, where legacy gatekeepers with built-in structural advantages to shape and manipulate the news would lose their power to do so...
— Lomez (@L0m3z) February 9, 2025
But it really is only now that this is actually happening.
The reason this is only just now working is because legacy media previously served the function of aggregating X sentiment and then reinterpreting/feeding it back to decision makers.
— Lomez (@L0m3z) February 9, 2025
Trump 2.0 has discovered that you can just ignore them all together.
This creates an massive advantage in the right's ability to speak directly to decision makers (who themselves are distributed throughout network). It's a kind of ideal "populist" feedback loop, that also doesn't sacrifice sophistication, nuance, or expertise (the real kind).
— Lomez (@L0m3z) February 9, 2025
*One additional note: the left abandoning X for bsky means they've given up the ability to either persuade the right or scramble the signal. It's a stunning self-own that betrays their constitutional frailty and the fact that they are simply out of arguments. Good riddance.
— Lomez (@L0m3z) February 9, 2025
X As An X Factor In Investing Too
Lomez's point about how you can get a "higher fidelity signal" by ignoring the legacy media for X is true, but there's also an additional advantage: you avoid the time lag. One reason liberals seem flatfooted in response to Trump this time is he's not waiting until issues get batted around in op/ed pages before acting on them.
This applies in investing too, where avoiding time lags can be crucial. A recent example of that was our bearish bet against Nvidia (NVDA) on January 24th.
The night before, we had seen the post below, by physicist and AI startup founder Steve Hsu.
Stargate and lots of Davos blather about massive build-out of compute infra and data centers. Very jarring as coincides with a tour de force demonstration that human brainpower applied to algos/models can give you ~30x improvement in training and inference costs.
— steve hsu (@hsu_steve) January 23, 2025
When you… pic.twitter.com/YPWpa8bHLu
By acting on the information in that X post, along with that of another post on DeepSeek by venture capitalist and browser inventor Marc Andreesen, we were able to buy puts on Nvidia Friday morning. We sold half of those puts later that Friday for a 200% gain, and then the other half the following Monday, when the stock plummeted 17%, for a 2,633% gain.
Had we waited for the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal to absorb those X posts and distill their own takes on DeepSeek, it would have been too late.
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