🚨 1 Billion Deaths, Says Gates

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Bill Gates thinks AI could help cause a billion deaths.

That's roughly one in every eight people on Earth. Coming from the guy who gave us Clippy.

So what’s going on?

In a Meet The Press clip released Friday, the 70-year-old Microsoft co-founder said AI is "powerful enough" to drive events that cause a billion deaths.

His reasoning: no weapon in history has matched people with bad intentions armed with the latest AI tools.

His fix? Lawmakers and law enforcement need to step in, because self-regulation won't cut it.

He reckons it'd add "a little bit of overhead" for the industry with no dramatic slowdown. More paperwork, same speed.

Gates has company. And the loudest alarms are coming from inside the building.

Then it got darker. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit, saying these companies are gambling with humanity's future.

His claim: the people building AI genuinely believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.

Anthropic's Alignment Science Lead, Evan Hubinger, responded... and agreed. He personally puts the odds at more than 10% within the next decade.

He also admitted Anthropic doesn't yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence. (Alignment = making sure AI actually wants what humans want.)

When the fire safety officer says "yeah, it might burn down," you tend to listen.

Not everyone is reaching for the brakes.

Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia's Jensen Huang have both pushed back on any slowdown.

So has Trump, citing the race with China. His take: whoever wins AI wins, guardrails are possible, and "negative forces" are hyping the risk.

His plan is to appoint an "AI czar" to monitor the industry and bring in new safeguards.

One name is already off the list: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent won't be taking the job, despite speculation he wanted it.

The AI trade now has a policy wildcard. Regulation talk is coming from the industry's own leaders, which makes it harder to wave away.

Gates is pitching the gentle version: some overhead, no dramatic slowdown. That's the milder scenario for AI-heavy names like $MSFT ( ▲ 3.66% ), $NVDA ( ▲ 0.22% ), and $META ( ▼ 3.34% ).

The White House is leaning pro-speed for now. Whoever becomes AI czar could be the clearest signal of which camp wins.

Fun detail: the two loudest "keep going" voices run two of the biggest AI stocks on the planet.

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Big Tech has signed up for roughly $3 trillion in AI bills.

That's about the size of France's entire economy. Pledged to data centres. Mostly buried in the fine print.

And Michael Burry, the Big Short guy, thinks the hangover is coming.

In a new Substack post, Burry flagged that net capital investment by S&P 500 companies hit 2.07% of GDP as of June 30.

That's the highest level in nearly 40 years. The only time it ran hotter? Right after the Nasdaq peaked in March 2000.

Burry reckons that record is next. He expects "higher and higher" marks over the next few quarters.

Who's holding the credit card? The usual suspects:

Between them, they've stacked up roughly $3 trillion in purchase commitments, future leases, guarantees, construction-in-progress and other AI-linked exposures.

That's a lot of "we'll pay you later."

Burry's framework is the capital cycle. Everyone piles into the hot thing, builds too much, returns fall, and eventually the write-downs show up.

We've seen this movie. After the late-90s tech and telecom buildout, write-downs got so ugly that S&P 500 net investment went negative for 12 straight quarters, from mid-2003 to mid-2006.

Three full years of Corporate America shrinking. Fun times.

His timeline for the AI sequel? Write-offs perhaps in 2028 or 2029.

The scary bit is scale. With commitments this big, even a small write-off could hit harder than anyone can imagine, in his words.

Quick maths: a 5% haircut on $3 trillion is $150 billion. Gone.

The kicker? These are the most profitable companies on Earth (Apple aside), and Burry says they're betting everything on AI as free cash flow turns negative and borrowing speeds up.

Oracle gets extra scrutiny.

Burry questioned how it books customer prepayments, pointing to a nearly 20% jump in future cloud revenue created by the structure of the contracts. No extra service delivered yet.

The debt market looks twitchy too. Oracle's credit default swaps hit record highs last Thursday, per Zerohedge.

CDS are basically insurance against a company not paying its debts. When the premium spikes, lenders are sweating.

Then Bloomberg reported Oracle sent a force majeure notice to the developer of Project Jupiter, its massive New Mexico data centre, to shield itself from rising costs.

Force majeure is the "events beyond our control" clause. Pulling it on your own flagship AI project is a choice.

Burry's warning runs on a multi-year clock. This is a slow-burn thesis about 2028-29.

But if you own an S&P 500 tracker, you own a big slice of these five companies. Their AI bets are your AI bets.

Worth watching: free cash flow, debt levels, and how much of that $3 trillion is locked in.

One caveat. Burry has been early before, and early can look a lot like wrong for a long time.

Trump rejected a ceasefire and signed a trade deal. Within about 12 hours.

Friday night, the White House announced tariff cuts with China. Saturday morning, Trump told Iran no.

One weekend, two very different moods. Here's the breakdown.

Iran offered a 7-day ceasefire. The terms, per the Wall Street Journal:

Trump turned it down on his way to Marine One, saying Iran wants the strait open fast "because they're losing so badly."

Why should you care about one narrow strip of water? Because roughly a fifth of the world's oil normally squeezes through it.

It gets spicier. Trump has reportedly told advisors he plans to restart bombing Iran after the Nov. 3 midterms.

The catch: officials say he's reluctant to resume major combat, partly because US munitions are running low. How big any future strikes would be is anyone's guess.

Meanwhile, Trump and Xi agreed to cut tariffs on $30 billion of goods in each direction. That's $60 billion of trade getting cheaper.

The deal sticks to "non-sensitive" goods:

Yes, tariffs on Christmas decorations are falling right before Christmas. Santa's logistics team is thrilled.

China also agreed to buy at least 10 million metric tons of US coal in 2027 and 2028. Plus a new Board of Investment, because nothing says friendship like a committee.

The sleeper item? Rare earths. Both sides will work on shortages, aiming for shipments to return to "appropriate levels." Nobody defined appropriate.

Energy is the thread running through both stories. Hormuz stays shut, so oil stays under pressure. Meanwhile, US coal just landed a guaranteed customer.

Nov. 3 now carries double the risk. Midterms were already a volatility magnet. A possible return to bombing makes that date even heavier.

Rare earths quietly matter most. They feed EVs, electronics, and defence. If shipments actually recover, plenty of supply chains get breathing room.

Retailers and farmers get the clearest win. Cheaper imports on one side, easier exports on the other.

The US is playing hardball with one country and patty-cake with the other. Your portfolio has to price both at once.

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