Dear Financial Samurai,
One of the reasons I left Credit Suisse in 2012 is that I no longer felt good working in finance. We had finally clawed our way out of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, and I had figured out how to keep all my deferred compensation by negotiating a severance. The money was still there. The conviction was gone.
So when Meta agreed to pay roughly $18 billion to settle with 29 states over social media addiction claims, I thought about that trade off all over again. How much money is enough to keep doing work you’re not sure you believe in?
Everybody, parents and non-parents alike, knows the goal of a social media company is to keep you scrolling as long as possible so it can sell more ads. It’s the same way everybody knows smoking is terrible for you, and yet thousands of talented people show up to work at tobacco companies anyway. The paycheck clears either way.
At some point you have to decide for yourself how much is enough. I can promise you that doing work close to what you actually value feels a whole lot better, even when it pays less.
If you’re curious, here’s what’s changing for users under 18 on Instagram and Facebook:
- A default 2-hour daily time limit and a 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. nighttime block, with parent approval required to remove either
- An option for a non-personalized feed, plus the ability to hide like and reaction counts
- Stronger age checks and removal of users under 13
- A response to 90% of potentially harmful content reports within 6 hours
- Ten years of maintaining these measures, with five years of independent compliance audits
As a parent, I’m relieved. Social media is a real brain rotter if you don’t carefully curate your feed and limit your usage.
My favorite detail: about 30% of the money only gets paid if TikTok and YouTube adopt the same framework. Nothing says corporate accountability like making your competitors pay for it too.
The Break That Never Came
What’s funny as a parent is that summer break is not a break. It’s more work. You can cobble together camps here and there, but the constantly changing routine wears you down.
After a month in Honolulu, followed by the park ranger incident the day I got back and the nationwide coverage that came with it, I was on childcare duty 7-10 hours a day for a couple of weeks while my wife was sick. She’s still sick. And I didn’t want to break my 17-year streak of publishing three times a week plus a weekly newsletter. So I was running on fumes.
I thought about taking a week off. Then I remembered two things. Nobody cares. And the golden window to spend time with your kids is much shorter than you think.
If you’re a tired parent putting in long days at work, at home, or both, this one is for you.
Read: The Golden Window To Spend Time With Your Kids Is Smaller Than You Think
Cheaper Housing For All Equity Investors
There’s a constant debate over which is the better investment: real estate or stocks. For the average person, I think real estate builds more wealth over the long term. You get leverage on an asset that has historically outpaced inflation, plus forced savings. That’s why the median net worth of a homeowner is roughly 40X that of a renter’s.
Yes, everybody who disagrees says they rent and invest the difference for greater returns. But if that were so easy, we’d all have four-pack abs too. We all rationally want to live longer and healthier. Very few of us do the work.
But let me lean all the way into the belief that renting and investing the difference is superior. If it is, then home prices have never been cheaper. The S&P 500, the Dow, and the NASDAQ have all outperformed real estate for decades. So a disciplined stock investor should look at housing today and see a bargain.
Therefore, in Financial Samurai fashion, I’ve come up with a solution so no renter ever has to complain about home prices again.
Read: Build A Taxable Investment Portfolio Equal To The Cost Of Your Dream Home
My Declining Desire To Own Physical Rental Properties
Staying on real estate, I want to reiterate how much less I want to own physical rentals as I get older. I suspect you’ll feel the same way as you age and, hopefully, get wealthier. Your tolerance for inconvenience goes down. If you’re retired, it goes down even further.
Think about the corporate politics you have to navigate the higher you climb. I bit my tongue plenty of times when I disagreed with my big bosses because I didn’t want to sully my career. Once I was gone, living 100% true to myself felt incredible.
Here’s the problem with being a landlord. You still have clients, they’re just called tenants. And some uncomfortable interaction is always coming.
The latest incident: The Beeping Was Coming From Inside The House
Waiting For Anthropic’s IPO
The Information and Reuters are reporting Anthropic will file its S-1 after Labor Day, September 7, which makes sense given how many people are out next week. An S-1 is the registration statement a company files with the SEC to sell shares to the public for the first time.
Polymarket now puts the probability of Anthropic completing its IPO before October at 86%. The reported target valuation is $1.5 to $2 trillion, and the raise is expected to exceed SpaceX’s $86 billion. If Anthropic’s management and bankers are wise, they’ll price closer to $1.5 trillion for goodwill and to increase the chances the stock performs well after listing.
It’s the same reason San Francisco listing agents price homes 10% to 20% below fair market value. The bidding war brings out the emotion, and emotion carries the price past where a rational buyer would stop.
I’m an LP in multiple venture capital funds, I talk to VCs here in SF, I know people who work at Anthropic, and I know some of the bankers and fund managers who would be target buyers. So I’m confident this IPO will be one for the record books. I’m also completely biased as a user and an investor in Anthropic through various funds since 2023. And as someone technically in media, I understand exactly how the hype cycle works.
The next few months are going to be one of the most exciting stretches for investors and AI maximalists everywhere.
Here’s my latest VCX NAV update after its 6/30/2026 N-PORT (portfolio holdings report) dropped on August 28. Its top holding is still Anthropic.
To your financial freedom,
Sam
The Physical Side Of The AI Trade
Every AI conversation eventually becomes a real estate conversation.
Models don’t live in the cloud. They live in buildings, on land, next to a substation. Each new frontier model needs more compute, more compute needs more square footage, and more square footage needs more power than the grid was built to deliver. The binding constraint on AI is no longer ideas. It’s electricity and permitting.
That’s the part of the AI trade most public investors can’t reach. Everybody can buy the chipmakers. Very few can own the dirt underneath them.
Fundrise, my longtime sponsor, invests in the industrial side of that build out, including last-mile distribution and data centers, alongside its build-for-rent residential portfolio. The minimum is $10 instead of an accredited investor check and a $250,000 wire.
I’ve been investing with Fundrise since 2016 and hold a seven-figure position in its products. As always, do your own due diligence before investing. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
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