In 1990, the World Wide Web was invented on Steve Jobs' computer. Steve ignored it.
This is the story I tell in my new book Steve Jobs in Exile. Here is what it should tell the rest of us about the moment we are in now.
Steve was running NeXT, an unsuccessful computer company. He had been pushed out of Apple five years earlier and was burning his fortune trying to build a successor to the Macintosh. The machine NeXT sold was a matte-black magnesium cube -- expensive and beautiful and not selling.
In October of that year, on the other side of the Atlantic, a British physicist named Tim Berners-Lee took delivery of a NeXT Cube at CERN, the physics laboratory on the Swiss-French border. He used it to invent the World Wide Web. The web ran on the Cube for its first year of existence. The revolution was happening on Steve's hardware, and yet Steve ignored it.
Here is the question I keep thinking about from my book.
If Steve Jobs, the most visionary tech mind of his generation, missed the Web, the most civilization-shaping tech of his lifetime, how are the rest of us supposed to see anything coming?
Berners-Lee had been asking his boss at CERN for a NeXT Cube for months. His boss finally signed off, hoping to test the exotic Cube. "He suggested that I should buy one of these NeXT machines I'd been talking about so enthusiastically," Berners-Lee later told Fresh Air. "And if we needed a sort of test project to run on the NeXT machine ... 'Why not just do this hypertext thing you're talking about?'"
The "test project" evolved into the World Wide Web.
The problem Berners-Lee was trying to solve was not a glamorous one. CERN employed thousands of scientists from over a hundred countries, most cycling through on short assignments and taking their knowledge with them when they left. Berners-Lee was trying to keep institutional knowledge from walking out the door. He wanted a system that worked the way human memory does, where any piece of information could connect to any other without permission or central control.
Through late 1990, he coded in his gray-floored office. The Cube's object-oriented system let him build in months what would have taken a year on anything else.
By December, the first website went online. The World Wide Web now existed, running on a single black NeXT Cube in CERN's Building 31. Berners-Lee scrawled a warning on it in red ink: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"
Underneath the elegant interface he was building HTTP, HTML, and the server software that would deliver web pages. These three inventions would form much of the invisible plumbing of our modern connectivity.
When a colleague of Berners-Lee's brought a demo of the Web to NeXT's headquarters in California, he could not get anyone there to pay attention. Nobody even dared show it to Steve, afraid he would dismiss it. NeXT was busy with its own internet plans, which Steve eventually killed.
So back to the question. If Steve Jobs missed the web, how are the rest of us supposed to see whatever comes next?
The honest answer is that we cannot. Nobody can. The rest of us are not going to outpattern-match Steve Jobs.
But here is what I learned writing Steve Jobs in Exile. Transformations almost always begin in obscurity, on the margins, solving boring problems with boring tools. The web did not look revolutionary in 1990. It looked like a tool for sharing physics papers.
We are in another such moment now. AI is the obvious changemaker. But the biggest transformations are rarely the obvious ones. The next one is happening somewhere right now, and it is trickier to spot than any sweeping proclamation about AI. We will recognize it, if we recognize it at all, from the unglamorous work few people are focused on.
I will not speculate on what Steve would have made of AI today. But if he could miss the Web, the rest of us are going to have to look harder.
Photo of the original CERN NeXT Cube courtesy of Robert Scoble.
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Elon Musk just proved that the body is optional.
A quadriplegic sat motionless in a chair and played a video game using nothing but thought.
No hands. No voice. No movement whatsoever.
Just a decision firing across a chip the size of a coin.
Musk: “You just lie there and think, and you can move the mouse cursor around the screen and click things.”
Download software. Browse the web. Navigate a screen with the same effort you use to remember your mother’s name.
Without lifting a finger.
Because he can’t.
And now he doesn’t have to.
That isn’t a product demo.
That is a quadriplegic man doing with silence what you do with your entire body.
And this is the version with a thousand electrodes.
Musk: “I think ultimately you need something which has probably a hundred thousand or a million electrodes.”
A thousand gave us telepathy.
A million gives us something that doesn’t have a name yet.
Musk is honest about how far this still has to go.
He’s not overselling it.
He’s underselling it.
Because the part that should keep you up tonight isn’t what Neuralink still has to build.
It’s that the line between human thought and machine action already disappeared.
And the world just kept scrolling.
Musk: “Our human brain has a lot of constraints. We only have about maybe 10 watts of higher brain function.”
Ten watts.
That’s less than the light inside your refrigerator.
Every empire ever built. Every symphony ever written. Every theory that bent the arc of history.
Ten watts of wet biological circuitry.
Musk: “It’s not bad for a bunch of monkeys.”
He’s not joking.
He’s framing the question nobody wants to sit with.
If ten watts of constrained primate hardware produced Shakespeare and general relativity and nuclear fission, what happens when the constraint disappears?
Not when the brain gets faster.
When the wall between thinking something and doing something no longer exists.
The entire history of human tools has been one long negotiation with the same problem.
You think something. Then you spend hours, years, lifetimes turning that thought into reality.
Your hands. Your voice. Your body.
Fire shortened the distance. Language shortened it more. Writing. The printing press. Electricity. Code.
Every invention ever built was a cruder, slower translation layer between the mind and the world.
Neuralink isn’t another layer.
It’s the elimination of translation itself.
Diamandis: “It’s a matter of when, not if.”
Musk didn’t push back.
He just kept discussing electrode counts like an engineer reviewing specs on a vehicle that already left the ground.
That calm is the tell.
The philosophical event already happened.
A thought left a human skull, entered a machine, and executed a command in the physical world.
No hand touched anything.
No mouth spoke.
A man thought the word “move” and the screen obeyed.
Every tool before this was a prosthetic for intention.
This is intention, naked, arriving without a body.
The oldest question in philosophy was never about what we can build.
It was about where the mind ends and the world begins.
Neuralink just made that question obsolete.
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Kylie Minogue reveals in her Netflix docuseries that she had a second cancer diagnosis in 2021:
“I was able to keep that to myself and go through that year, not like the first time. […] I don't feel obliged to tell the world, and actually I just couldn't at the time because I was just a shell of a person. I didn’t want to leave the house again at one point.
‘Padam Padam’ opened so many doors for me but on the inside I knew that cancer wasn’t just a blip in my life. And I really just wanted to say what happened so I could let go of it. I would sit through interviews. And every opportunity I thought, ‘Now’s the time.’ But I kept it to myself. […] Thankfully I got through it again, and all is well. Who knows what’s around the corner, but pop music nurtures me.”
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2025 HA SUNG WOON FANMEETING [Tell The World] D-7🏜️
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25.12.30 7:30PM / 25.12.31 7:30PM
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I’ve always wanted to tell the story of Wukong to the world in my own way.
Not as a legend frozen in time, but as a mirror of the world we live in now.
This album is only the first chapter of a much larger story.The journey of Wukong has just begun.
ROCK THE HEAVENLY PALACE is now out on all platforms.
Link in bio.
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Emma Watson explains why having your dream life doesn't guarantee happiness
“To have to ask myself the question of like, you right now have the career and the life that looks like the dream but are you really happy Emma? Are you really healthy? Are you really happy? Is this really what you want?”
“To be at that point and have to admit to myself that I wasn't and I didn't was one of the scariest things I've ever had to do because I basically had to ask myself on a daily basis. I felt like I was crazy and walking away from something without knowing what you're walking towards”
“Not having the answers but leaving something that the world considered to be such a high value moment in my professional life and career”
“I think sitting with that was a real moment of reckoning of like, can you tell yourself the truth? Can you live with your truth? Can you accept the fact that for most other people your truth is pretty confusing and unpalatable?”
“That was definitely a hard moment of sitting, more recently because I've been being my own partner asking myself, are you really living your values, things that you preach? Are you actually aligned?”
“Looking at some spaces in my life I was like, no, not at all. I'm actually not doing what I talk about and I need to create some sort of urgency or a deadline for that so that I make sure that I'm a person of integrity. I purport to be someone that cares about the world and about the planet and sustainability”
“There are some things I was doing. Was it enough by my own standards? Not by anyone else's. Just by my own. Probably not but what's nice is I actually have the time now to be like, ‘Okay, what are you going to do about it? Get on with it’”
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X is the most powerful platform in the world.
Today, the Prime Minister of India himself used X to fact-check a major news claim and directly tell people the truth.
That’s the power of X.
X is not just a social media app. It is the world’s real-time public square.
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There has been a lot of hand wringing on the appropriate valuation of SpaceX. Some large institutions believe SpaceX can only be valued at half what the market seems to be willing to pay for it. Others are claiming it has 15X appreciation ahead of it.
Almost all of this difference of opinion comes down to how comfortable you are modeling beyond 2030 and what valuation method you use.
2030 valuation using a traditional Gordan DCF produces a very different result than a 2040 EV/EBITDA Multiple. Both have pros and cons. Most analysts don’t really discuss this and lead with a headline number.
We are very comfortable modeling out to 2040, as large portions of what SpaceX is proposing is real world infrastructure, which provides modelable physics constraints to anchor against.
The analysis we released today explores this in-depth, its open to the public all the way through IPO. I highly encourage you check it out prior to then.
We’ve run 5,000 monte carlo runs across 500 variables (real number, even though it sounds fake) and three valuation methods.
This video is of a 3D cloud chart showing every simulation outcome expected in valuation output across two of the most impactful variables to the model when using an EV/EBITDA multiple from 2026 to 2040.
The horizontal axis is the steepness of the orbital data center demand S-curve.
The vertical axis is the rate at which chip compute efficiency becomes cheaper.
Each of the 5,000 dots is one simulated future; green dots are the ones where SpaceX's 2040 value clears the $1.77T IPO line, over time.
Under EV/EBITDA valuation through 2040, 96% of our simulated futures clear the expected IPO price once the bell rings Friday.
We aren’t publishing this publicly to tell investors what the stock is worth, we’re publishing this to help investors understand the world of outcomes, what the fundamentals suggest through 2040, and what frankly most analysis simply won’t share.
SpaceX is a generational company working on long term infrastructure harnessing a domain no one has been able to tap in so far: space.
It deserves doing the work as an investor. because this in not financial advice.
The cleanest way to hold SpaceX is a bond stapled to a call option (AI-Compute); Starlink is the bond, the near term SatCom annuity that funds the next flywheel.
Understand the world of outcomes and take your position accordingly.
Comparables and P/E won't take you far enough.
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I’m gonna tell my kids this was the worlds first trillionaire