jay plemons (@jayplemons)

MrBeast reveals Big Chocolate using 1.5M+ kids in illegal child labor on cacao farms 🍫 “There’s 1.5 to 1.8 million kids working in illegal child labor on cacao farms in West Africa, where majority of the world’s cacao comes from. I had no idea how bad it was until I started a chocolate company. It’s been normalized for decades in the chocolate industry. Big Chocolate pays farmers so little that they just can’t afford to not use children.” “When I asked distributors if I could pay a premium and not have little kids work on my farms, it literally didn’t exist. No one really seemed to even think it needed to exist.” “So we went to five villages that the average child labor there was like 45%. Seven months later we were able to get a 90% reduction and get it to where there are only around 50 still in child labor with our first check-in.” “There literally wasn’t a school because kids just worked on the farm. So we built a school so they could go to school. The goal isn’t just to get the kids out of child labor. It’s also to get them an education so they’re not only working on a cacao farm and doomed to work on it their whole life, because they don’t know anything else.”

Nick Shirley uncovers an adult day care in Flushing, Queens with 7,000 phantom members. Nick: “This public document says you have 7,899 members.” Employee: “No, we don’t have 7,000 members.” Nick: “So you’re overbilling then? You’re getting paid $1,600 per patient — that’s how you got $12.9 million in 2024.” Employee: “Please leave.” American taxpayer dollars at work.

The great lie is that society is divided between rich and poor. The great truth, as David Friedberg puts it, is makers vs takers. Makers build, create, and deliver real value: houses, software, art, businesses, and everything that moves civilization forward. Takers watch, criticize, analyze, and politic. They push the lie that the rich hoard unfairly so the poor must seize it… all while positioning themselves to rule the chaos. As @friedberg tells his kids: “At the end of the day, if you made something and someone else valued it, you were a maker. That was an amazing achievement. That is a great day.” Takers thrive on division. Makers drive progress. Time to choose your side.

David Sacks just delivered an economics masterclass on Elon becoming the world’s first trillionaire. @davidsacks: “People see the headline and imagine Elon suddenly has a trillion dollars in the bank. That’s not how it works. His balance sheet didn’t change overnight.” Why? The real point is deeper. Wealth isn’t in the “stuff” we consume. Food, shelter, clothes. Things that depreciate and disappear. It’s in the machines that create stuff for decades: tools, workflows, and corporations. These are the true engines of human progress. “If you create a machine that makes more stuff, then there’s a discounted present value for all the stuff in the future that machine might create. That’s where the wealth comes from.” Elon started with nothing. An immigrant who slept on the floor building Zip2. He created these machines from vision and relentless effort. Thousands joined him, including a SpaceX welder who turned his labor into a million dollars in stock. That’s the magic of tech and free markets: labor can become capital. It’s fluid. The outrage misses this entirely. The people building machines that deliver medicines, energy, and abundance are creating lasting prosperity for everyone. What do you think? Does viewing wealth as future productivity change how you see stories like this?