Hello and welcome to your weekly Dark Markets. Last week I tried something new - writing a column instead of a bulleted news roundup. That was very successful, so it’s likely to be the standard going forward, with a much-condensed news links section I’m for now calling Bullet Points. Column-ing was what made my name at CoinDesk, so probably pretty silly of me to not just keep doing the thing.

Second: For some reason that I hope is not costing me money, Stealing the Future is still on sale for $12 at Amazon. If you’ve been on the fence, now is a great time to pull the trigger.

Also, many of you haven’t yet checked out my recorded presentation at Codex Books last month. Please do!

“The concept of measurable unitary intelligence that drives faith in true emergent computer intelligence is inextricable from eugenics and racist ideologies.”

Elon Bails Himself Out Again. Musk’s only truly profitable company, the government-contract-dependent SpaceX, has bought out xAI, which also now includes X/Twitter. The buyout is a sham, as the FT’s reporting makes clear (limited gift link). Most important of all, the deal is being sold to the public on the basis that SpaceX will now build orbital AI Data Centers, a complete canard and delusional fantasy, as shown by Wall Street Millenial in this excellent video.

The AI Unwind is Starting. It’s a shame other things are also happening, because NVIDIA is backing out of its $100m OpenAI deal, while Oracle is frantically signalling that this has absolutely nothing to do with them. NOTHING. The defensive tweet was compared to other classic blunders like Caroline Ellison’s “we’ll buy F

Oracle@Oracle

The NVIDIA-OpenAI deal has zero impact on our financial relationship with OpenAI. We remain highly confident in OpenAI’s ability to raise funds and meet its commitments.

5:00 PM · Feb 2, 2026 · 512K Views

242 Replies · 111 Reposts · 1.73K Likes

Epstein Used Brock Peirce as a Sock Puppet. For investing, you pervert. For investing in Coinbase. There will be a lot more string to pull there, since Pierce is tied (both as victim and possible perp) to the Bryan Singer/Hollywood trafficking ring. Pierce’s activities in Puerto Rico, where he has already faced allegations of running a sextortion operation, are also cast in a very new light.

See also some new reporting on Brock Pierce from Protos:

Protos@Protos

https://t.co/BBVQyfaCgU

10:33 PM · Feb 2, 2026 · 52.8K Views

13 Replies · 48 Reposts · 239 Likes

Masha Drakova and “Day One VC.” I’ve written before about fake short-con venture capitalists trying to hack me, but the Epstein files seem to have revealed more about Vladimir Putin’s favorite Silicon Valley cutout and her actual VC fund handing out actual money.

Bryan Johnson tried to meet Epstein. Damn, just after his new PR team walked him back from taking thirst traps with his son.

David Z. Morris

·

January 28, 2025

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If you ever need a reminder of the potential dire consequences of compromising yourself by taking money from, say, a convicted statutory rapist, just read this crie de couer from Joscha Bach, an AI researcher who allowed himself to be pulled into Epstein’s circle. Bach showed up in an earlier tranche of Epstein files, and writes that he has lost speaking gigs and other opportunities, and receives regular death threats. On the surface, Bach seems vaguely sympathetic - an unlucky bystander, in an environment (the MIT Media Lab) where refusing to interact with Epstein probably would have been as uncomfortable as being the only honest cop in Gotham City.

But then you look at Boch’s actual emails, and whoops, he’s a scientific racist.

“One 2016 email in which tech researcher and influencer Joscha Bach suggests that Black kids’ brains ‘are slower at learning high-level concepts’ but adds that they maintain high motor skills that make them better adapted “to a more hunting/running style of life,” MSNow reports. Bach also opines on why women are bad at math, etc.

In this light, Bach’s November mea culpa goes from sympathetic to simply pathetic: he writes, presumably while frantically backpedalling on a literal Peloton, that he is “extremely uncomfortable discussing topics that touch on heritability of intelligence in public, because scientific nuance is lost when it becomes instrumentalized by racists.” So instead he discussed them privately, with a malevolent serial pedophile.

Bach’s emails to Epstein also included “explicit proposals about genetically altering whole populations, described mass executions of the elderly as rational, and framed fascism as ‘the most efficient and rationally stringent’ system of governance,” according to one deep reader.

Bach now claims that his views on race and intelligence have completely changed in the past decade. If you believe that, I’ve got an IQ test to sell you.

And let’s not forget cosmologist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, another late-game Epstein academic friend - and also both a defender of eugenics and an accused sex pest who went to Epstein for advice on how to handle his own allegations … in 2017.

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That Bach is a racist AI researcher is no coincidence: the concept of measurable unitary intelligence that drives faith in true emergent computer intelligence is inextricable from eugenics and racist ideologies. As I write in Stealing the Future, it is also a formula for a view of the world reduced to numbers, stripped of insight, and therefore constantly wrong.

This is reflected in the actual explicit beliefs of AI researchers. As the Byline Times put it:

“Taken together, the Bach correspondence and the longtermist ideas circulating in this environment show that human hierarchy, population thinning and genetic destiny were not fringe provocations, but part of the ambient intellectual air inside the circles designing the next generation of AI.”

And quel surprise, the ultimate AI Racist, Nick Bostrom, was also funded by Epstein, shared Bach’s open contempt for Black people, and effectively ran his Oxford Future of Humanity Institute as an arm of Epstein’s personal selective breeding program.

Then of course there’s the Alpha Eugenicist himself: Elon Musk.

I recently cancelled my Twitter Blue account - I signed up about a year ago because I like writing long tweets and had a book to promote. But Elon is undeniably a Nazi now, so paying him money is, well, not on brand. The good news is I haven’t noticed any harm to my engagement - maybe the opposite, even. In fact, this week I got my first Certified Banger of my post-Verified era.

David Z. Morris@davidzmorris

Pretty clear that Elon's own eugenicist breeding program was directly inspired by Epstein. Sam Altman and Peter Thiel share the same ideology, obviously. Along with lesser lights like SBF and Caroline Ellison. Fraudsters and race scientists, every one. amazon.com/Stealing-Futur…

Robert Skvarla @RobertSkvarla

Seeing accounts being intentionally obtuse about this. Epstein's racism was tied to his sex trafficking: he was a eugenicist obsessed with birthing genetically superior offspring. His sex trafficking operation was likely at least partially about recruitment for that effort. https://t.co/01WkkOcerP

1:12 PM · Feb 2, 2026 · 30.2K Views

9 Replies · 275 Reposts · 951 Likes

This was inspired, of course, by the revelation in the Epstein Dump that Elon Musk absolutely begged to go to the Pedo Island and do Pedo Stuff at a Wild Pedo Party - in 2012, four years after Epstein’s first conviction for trafficking minors. The logistics of the visit apparently didn’t quite work out.

But the secondary implication is what matters most: Elon’s own campaign of planting vile seeds in people whose careers he controls is clearly an echo of Epstein’s plan to improve the world’s genetic hygeine through industrialized rape. (Neuralink CEO Shivon Zillis had four children with the South African white supremacist, I’m sure entirely of her own free will).

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The most important thing about Epstein, in general but also specifically in light of his engagement with the scientific community, is that Epstein was a fucking moron. Even Bach admits that Epstein didn’t really understand science, making scientists’ interactions with him nothing more than favor-currying and reputation laundering.

Epstein’s stupidity is reflected in his gullibility to bad ideas (including eugenics), but also more directly in his subliterate communication style, what is often written off as a symptom of ‘dyslexia.’ There’s a more interesting perspective from Edward Luce at FT (limited gift link).

“George Orwell wrote that ‘the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts’. Though sub-literacy among the educated is no sin, it offers a window on their minds,” Luce writes. “It would be far harder to disclose lust or avarice after opening with, “Dear Sir,” or “Mr Epstein” than with “hey bro”. Likewise with “cuz” for because and “R U?” for are you. With their abbreviated slang, powerful figures in a hurry signal ethical decay.”

Interesting, but I think this is a fairly generous read, placing the line of influence from evil → stupidity. Instead, I think it’s more accurate that stupidity → evil, once you add enough money - and a theory of racial or genetic superiority that will always and everywhere excuse fraud and failure.

David Z. Morris

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May 16, 2022

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I’ve seen versions of this again and again in fraudsters like Sam Bankman-Fried, Trevor Milton, and Do Kwon: scammers as a whole are people always already convinced of their own greatness. That’s not always tied to eugenics, but it seems significant that three of the 21st century’s most notorious frauds - Do Kwon, Elizabeth Holmes, and Sam Bankman-Fried - are tied to Stanford, perhaps the single most important historical cradle of scientific racism, pioneered by early Stanford luminaries like Lewis Terman.

All three of these delusional figures were very confident until they were proven wrong by reality, at which point they turned to massive crime. In SBF’s case at least, this was rationalized continuously by his evidence-free faith that he would inevitably succeed later, no matter how much of his customers’ funds he embezzled. That’s a eugenic self-conception, expressed through the idea of immutable “genius.”

Sam Bankman-Fried’s Stanford-professor parents effectively acted on eugenic ideas in raising him, treating him as exceptional and flawless despite a lot of signs that he was quite lacking in many departments. When Barbara Fried said that Sam “could never speak an untruth,” she was revealing her own eugenic understanding of her son and herself.

David Z. Morris

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October 14, 2023

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The eugenic mindset assumes perfection separate from actual behavior, a timeless genetic superiority unanswerable to any real-world actions or choices or evidence. This was also manifest in Bankman-Fried’s sociopathy - his inability to take responsibility for his own actions, or seemingly even to understand that he had committed a crime, reflects his mother’s unshakeable belief that Sam was great and flawless. As I explore in detail in my book, this twisted Sam’s worldview so thoroughly that he continues to believe that it was the system that failed him when the market turned against his reckless bets with customer money.

In reality, if we define “intelligence” as the ability to actually thrive in the world, Sam Bankman-Fried was a drooling moron. Just like Epstein. Just like Musk.

David Z. Morris

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March 13, 2025

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In light of this web of connections, it’s also worth recalling that SBF appears to have hung out very comfortably with a pedophile cop.

David Z. Morris

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March 11, 2024

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Finally, we get to the Current Fraud - OpenAI. It’s not just that Sam Altman’s 100% faith in compute scaling as a path to AGI is based on eugenicist concepts of intelligence. Sam Altman himself is clearly deeply unethical, yet has an untroubled view of himself as doing good in the world.

Given that Altman’s mentor was Peter Thiel - an even more open racist than Nick Bostrom or Elon Musk - we can impute eugenic thinking to Altman’s self-conception, as well. Karen Hao’s “Empire of AI” goes into depth about the infamous near-firing of Altman from OpenAI, and it turns out people like Ilya Sutskever had pretty concrete reasons for wanting to depose Altman - not some ideological power struggle, but Altman’s habit of deception, including examples of lying for no reason at all that begin to hint at sociopathic tendencies.

Marcus on AI

“Scale Is All You Need” is dead

Over three and half years ago, I launched a campaign against the wrong-headed hypothesis that scaling would get us all the way to AGI, in my infamous essay Deep Learning is Hitting a Wall (March 2022) and in the first essay of this Substack, entitled…

Read more

2 months ago · 376 likes · 151 comments · Gary Marcus

Failure to kick out Altman is starting to look a LOT like the failed early Alameda rebellion against Sam Bankman-Fried. That cleansing would have left the company stronger (those who left Alameda went on to consistent success) and prevented the later FTX fraud. But Bankman-Fried was protected, in part, by corrupt Effective Altruism cofounder Will MacAskill, who funneled $36 million of stolen FTX funds to his own operations as head of various charitable cutouts. MacAskill, of course, is based at Oxford, and closely associated with Nick Bostrom. Again, the shadow of eugenics lurks - did MacAskill have such faith in SBF because of a fixed idea that he was a genetically exceptional “genius”?

With the entire American economy teetering in the balance thanks to Altman’s very convincing but extremely mistaken pitch for the scaling route to AGI, we may be on the verge of living through the first modern recession directly caused by eugenic thought. Altman’s faith in himself is only loosely based in past accomplishments: his own startups failed before he took over YCombinator, and most praise of his abilities is focused on his gift for persuasion, not for actual achievement.

This is why so many fraudsters and con artists are fully embracing eugenics, or being exposed as secret eugenicists: racism is a great rationalization for failure and ineptitude. By naturalizing authoritarianism, it frees the already-powerful from any duty of truth or care. It convinces them that their “genius” is separate from their accomplishments in the real world.

And, of course, it makes clear that all of the inferior little people out there - including vulnerable children - can be used freely to whatever end the genius desires.

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