If éminences grises like Graydon Carter embody the glory days of New York print media in the 1980s and ’90s, Nick Denton is perhaps the prime avatar of the city’s freewheeling early digital media era. Denton founded Gawker Media in 2002, and oversaw its expansion into a profitable mini-media empire over the next decade. At its height, the company employed a raft of now-name-brand journalists, and its rambunctious flagship site was mandatory reading for the city’s elites and creative underclass. It all came crashing down in baroque fashion in 2016, when Hulk Hogan — backed by a long-aggrieved Peter Thiel — sued Gawker.com out of existence.
Denton has kept a generally low profile since then, but recently he has popped his head back into the fray. On his X feed, he has been sounding off on what he sees as an inevitable decline in the dollar, and a corresponding rise in China’s fortunes. He is backing up his pessimism on America’s near-term prospects by selling his SoHo apartment, once a new-media mecca and party hub, and moving to Hungary, where he has family roots, with his husband and two children. I spoke with Denton in a wide-ranging conversation about why he was “ashamed” of Gawker by the end, why he’s so bearish on America right now, and what his new life in Budapest will look like.
You’re leaving New York — that’s big. You’ve been here for 23 years, I think?
Actually, we went away for Trump One.
I didn’t realize that.
So I guess unlike a lot of people who say “If he wins, we’re leaving …”
You’re one of the few who mean it.
I think my timing has actually been almost perfect. I left in December 2016. I obviously had some special circumstances there because of my opponent in the legal battle over Gawker, who is now pretty much one of the most powerful men in the States — Trump’s biggest Silicon Valley backer, Peter Thiel. And then I guess this time I’ve been a little slower off the mark. It’s only — what, two months into Trump Two?
So you really can’t abide living in America while Trump is president?
I’m actually not as anti-Trump as some people. I don’t think that what’s going on now is all down to Trump. This is a lot of chickens from a lot of administrations coming to roost. It’s pretty much the culmination of 25 years of delayed decisions and delayed reform. I’m a former financial journalist. I was with the Financial Times and the Economist, and I don’t see any way for equilibrium to be restored without a dollar devaluation. The dollar should not be six reais to the dollar; it should probably be about three or four reais, which is what it was 20 years ago.
That’s what you’ve been tweeting quite a bit about. Tell me a little more about where you see things going, financially speaking.
Well, to my mind, the last significant correction was 2000 and the dot-com crash. That was a true purge of the system. It was certainly a purge of excess and enthusiasm for the internet, but I always remained enthusiastic about the internet. And I was always convinced that it was real, despite the disillusionment of 2001, 2002, 2003. I guess it was three or four years before it came back with Flickr and other companies like that. So I still remained a believer, but it was definitely a purge of the excess and the speculative excesses of Cisco being an incredibly highly valued company. I don’t know whether you remember that time?
Sure, Pets.com and so forth.
It was even crazier than the AI-driven boom and the Big Seven. And it was purged. I’m a market guy. I believe in the cycles, and the cycles have to be allowed to cycle. And that was the last time, to my mind, that that was the case. Every single correction since then has been met very quickly with reinflation of the economy, as if the American political system cannot abide any significant or sustained decline in the S&P. Everything is so wrapped up in stock-market valuations. Every single administration — its credibility depends on stock-market appreciation. I don’t think we’ve ever seen since then, not even in 2008, a true purge of the system.
So you’re saying there’s artificially inflated stuff in the market that should be purged and hasn’t been?
Yes. Correct.
And now it might be happening?
I don’t know. I kind of doubt it. Scott Bessent talks about the economy being brittle, needing a “detox” period. Things get ahead of themselves and then you need to restore equilibrium. But they’re pursuing it through this kind of slapdash, haphazard austerity that Musk is in charge of, which doesn’t feel to me like it has a broad base of political support.
It obviously has support among the tech right, but the tech right is just a small part of the Trump coalition. And I don’t believe that the hillbillies are into this, and I don’t believe that the Mar-a-Lago crowd are into this at all. And ultimately, I don’t believe that Trump will be into this, even if he is attached to Musk at the hip. Did you see Tara Palmeri’s reporting about how they are avoiding even polling Musk’s numbers? They’re actually suppressing the data, because if the data came out, it would be devastating for the administration and certainly for the Trump-Musk axis. My theory, and Michael Wolff’s working theory, and anybody who’s followed Trump through the years, in politics and outside of politics — is that eventually Trump dumps everybody. If someone is weighing him down politically, ultimately, even if he behaves like he’s Lil’ X’s grandfather, even if he is the father that Musk never had, when it comes down to it, Trump will choose himself over his allies. Musk is not the only force within the administration — there’s a triangle, and Vance represents a significant part of the coalition. And Trump himself represents, I guess, the boomer, Mar-a-Lago crowd that are definitely deeply into the S&P. Even a 10 percent correction for them is enough to turn those Mar-a-Lago parties into wakes.
But are you saying that some version of what Musk is doing, perhaps a less haphazard version, would actually be a good idea? Because that’s what Bessent seems to be getting at. Most mainstream economists think the economy was running decently well before Trump got in. With flaws, sure, but not ones that necessitate this kind of drastic shake-up.
America’s got $30 trillion worth of debt to insure over the next few years, both to roll over existing debt and to finance new debt with the level of budget deficits. The economy is clearly out of equilibrium. Did you see those stats for agricultural trade?
I haven’t, no.
Even if you think America’s manufacturing sector is weak, and maybe there’s a structural deficit there — that America in the long term will not be such an important manufacturing power, that it’s already lagging two to one behind China, that Tesla sales are lagging two to one behind BYD sales, and that if you projected forward with pretty conservative assumptions, you get to BYD at 10X Tesla sales by 2030 — the optimistic view then is that America’s a very important oil-producing power, and actually, in the fracking industry, it’s basically turned around the decline in its oil production, and that’s definitely an area in which America is world-leading. And you think, okay, even if the manufacturing isn’t going to come back then, raw materials, energy, metals, agricultural commodities — that’s enough to sustain an economy, together with American soft power, dollar supremacy, and, well, I guess they used to think AI supremacy.
But I don’t see how equilibrium is restored without a significant devaluation in the dollar. Maybe America should be thinking about its farmers, who are extremely efficient, world-class farmers who are basically crippled by this high exchange rate. They would benefit enormously from a devaluation.
And then Trump was signaling that the dollar would be allowed to decline or that there’d be some Mar-a-Lago accord with a debt renegotiation combined with a reset of the dollar, in I guess what they hoped would be an orderly fashion. I question whether it’s going to truly be orderly with this administration.
Not much of what they do is orderly.
It’s a very delicate operation to do a debt restructure. This is like brain surgery conducted by three drunken surgeons who are all fighting with each other at the same time, and they can’t decide whether to use a chain saw or a scalpel.
America has some amazing companies. Its logistics system is incredible. There are giant warehouses and a highway network that make England, where I am now, look kind of rinky-dink and inefficient. Warehouses at highway intersections alone explain — was it an eighth of the GDP gap between the U.S. and the U.K.? So just simple scale and having one gigantic continental market is a huge, huge deal. And that’s why I came to America in the first place. It wasn’t necessarily the towns or the people, just that it’s the biggest place, and it’s the first place where you can get to scale if you’re starting a new business. So it is naturally the place that an entrepreneur goes, because the future has happened first in America.
We will see whether that remains the case. But regardless, even just to bring agricultural trade into balance, a significant devaluation is needed. And then I started thinking about how we were wanting to go back to Europe, and then I’m looking at all this from a European perspective and thinking, well, our dollar assets are highly valued, and in Europe, that money goes a very, very, very long way. And maybe now, before things get a little too crazy, maybe now is the time to rebalance my portfolio.
How much of your bearishness on America’s future led to your decision? You’ve got roots in Hungary, but you also think it’s financially advantageous to leave now?
I don’t think you can really distinguish one from the other. We have a house in the Buda Hills that we’re moving into. And the kids — we’re trying to choose between two schools for them to go to. And obviously, in Hungary, you barely even have to think about money. I don’t really want to say this in front of Hungarian friends, because for them it’s kind of expensive, but coming from America … You see it on TikTok, the American tourists arriving in some place, marveling at how low the rents are, whether it’s Medellín or Lisbon or —
Yeah, I was just in Mexico City. It was crazy that way.
You live like a king. I feel like anyone who goes to a country like Mexico or Colombia or Brazil or Hungary feels like they take not one but two steps up the social ladder. And so there’s basically a powerful economic force which is attracting people to those cities, particularly if that’s where you’re from. And that’s where I’m from — H-town.
H-town. It’s a slightly different place, I imagine, than it was, with the political system being what it is. What do you think about that? Are you an Orbán guy?
I’m not an Orbán guy, but I knew him back in the day.
Really?
Uh-huh. I was a Financial Times correspondent in Budapest in ’89 when he was a young radical. He was, I think, the first to just out-and-out call for Russians to go home, and it was, “Oh my God, did he just say that?” In retrospect, it’s obvious that they should go home, and everybody’s going home now.
He’s a bit more pro-Russian these days, I think.
Look, he’s playing all the superpowers. So yes, he wants cheap oil and gas from Russia. Europe needs cheap oil and gas from Russia if it’s going to compete industrially. Yes, he has some domestic political reasons to be allied with Trump, because he plays the anti-Soros, anti-woke card himself. But the hard fact of Hungary is that it has a gigantic BYD factory, 500,000 cars a year coming out of that thing, and the giant CATL factory. And half the Chinese trade finance for Europe, for the E.U., passes through Hungary. So yeah, I think in the end, he’s going to be — and maybe Europe as a whole is going to be — in the Chinese zone. Not the Russian zone, not the American zone, but the Chinese zone.
I don’t know whether you’ve followed European politics at all. The administration’s quite circumspect when it comes to China. But they love to bully small countries. They love to bully Canada, they love to bully Denmark. Even Rubio joined in on the abuse of Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign affairs minister, and one of the last Atlanticists in Europe. That was foreign-policy malpractice.
Oh, it’s all malpractice.
You’re attacking your best friends, your best allies in Europe. I mean, it’s absurd. Little Denmark has done nothing but be a loyal American ally. I think that was the one that did it for me. Like, really, Denmark? You can’t even say that Denmark is part of this civilizational suicide that Vance sees taking place in Europe, because actually they’ve addressed their migration crisis and the political fallout from it more forcefully than any other country in Europe. The far right has been utterly defanged in Denmark.
All of their policies have basically been stolen by the mainstream parties, and immigration is no longer a poisonous political issue. And then you had the Vance speech, and there was that frankly disgusting insult where he couldn’t even remember that England and France had sent troops in support of America’s idiotic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq out of loyalty. Because people actually did care. They did care about 9/11. They felt like it was an attack on the whole West. I’m getting worked up now.
It’s the only time Article 5 has been invoked.
My dad was an Atlanticist, and I was an Atlanticist, I was a man of the West, but there are no men of the West left in Europe now. There are European nationalists, yes. There are people who are circumspect because they know that at least temporarily they depend on the American nuclear umbrella. But Europe is out. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, I don’t know whether it’s going to be Poland that leads it or France. Do you follow Donald Tusk? That great line he has — how come 500 million Europeans are begging 300 million Americans for help in dealing with 100 million Russians who can’t even deal with 40 million Ukrainians? He’s my hero. Donald Tusk for president. He was president of Europe before; he should be again.
Sometimes I think that actually ’89 was only a partial revolution, where half of Europe was liberated from external occupation. And actually that occupation — in some ways it was easier to spot, because there were full-on tanks and an uprising, like in ’56, the uprising in Hungary — suppressed by gunfire and tanks. Whereas the American domination of Europe was rather more insidious and subtle and has left the western part of the continent infantilized. It can’t even imagine what life is like in charge of its own destiny, after 80 years of America basically being the security provider. To that extent, the American right advance is totally correct. Europe does need to stand up and take more responsibility for its own affairs.
The Chinese have described Trump as the great nation-builder. He is the great nation-builder. He’s the great nation-builder of Canada, the great nation-builder of Mexico, and the great nation-builder of Europe. So thank you very much.
Though the last 80 years have been pretty decent for Western Europe compared to the previous 80 years, and that was largely due to the American umbrella of security. So it worked until it didn’t.
There was clearly a point in it. And I moved over to the States to seek my fortune. I didn’t establish my companies in Europe. I use European software developers, and I use Europe as a base for a town. But Silicon Valley was the place where the future was being invented. Now it seems like China might be the place where the future is being invented.
How does this shake out in the near term?
I think there’s going to be a classic political struggle between the capitalist class and the competitive producers in tradable sectors and companies with significant international business. And that is the real underlying political battle, and not between the Democrats and the Republicans, but actually between those interested in the strong dollar and those who aren’t interested in a strong dollar, who actually need the dollar to be at a more realistic level in order for them to be able to compete.
And you’ll be watching it all from 4,000 miles away.
I’ll be coming back on visits and hopefully it won’t be quite so expensive to visit New York. New York actually could do quite well because it’s become excruciatingly expensive for people to visit.
How do you feel about leaving the city? Has it lost the thing that attracted you to it in the first place?
I was attracted first and foremost by the Valley. The Financial Times wanted me to go to New York, and I didn’t want to go to New York. I took like a 30 percent pay cut to go to Silicon Valley because I was obsessed with the internet and I just knew it was going to be a huge deal and I had to get myself into it. I had to go to the epicenter. And Steve Jobs was my hero. And he wasn’t really a Valley figure, but people like Vannevar Bush — 20th-century American technologists, they were my heroes. And frankly, Peter Thiel was one of my heroes. He totally was. Gay guy. I guess it wasn’t completely clear back then that he was gay, but a gay guy, libertarian, trying to free money from the malign control of government. These were the people.
And now I look at it and I see seven monopolies. Seven rather slow-moving monopolies that are now — suddenly it seems, although it’s been building for a while — in competition as an ecosystem. They are in competition with another ecosystem, the Chinese technology ecosystem. You’ve seen those charts where it shows these giant bubbles of American market cap and the companies in these tiny little dots of European companies, and they laugh at us. The Europoors.
I look at that and I question the size of those bubbles. And maybe those bubbles are, metaphorically, bubbles — that Silicon Valley is massively overvalued and that the DeepSeek drop exploded in an instant the idea of American AI supremacy. It was a subtle dagger in the heart of Silicon Valley. You barely even notice the knife going in it was so subtle. But the end result of it is you have OpenAI, which was the greatest start-up of this phase, now going to lobby the U.S. government to restrict DeepSeek access because it can’t compete with a company that is at least nearly as good and offering its services at a fraction of the cost, in the classic Chinese fashion. Just as they did in cars, just as they did in drones, just as they are doing in robots. So if you ask me what is not what it once was, or what does not seem to be the draw that it once was? I would say above all it’s Silicon Valley.
In Europe, manufacturing actually does count, and the economy is probably on a more sound footing and there’s less financialization. The health care is kind of affordable, and it costs half as much, and Europeans live five years longer. So just in terms of outcomes, the health-care system, the education system, it’s leaner. Europe has tons and tons of problems, but having had a 25-year-long bubble is not one of them. Europe has had austerity on and off pretty much since 2008. The austerity has only now ended, and the austerity in the U.S. has only now begun.
So it’s a lack of dynamism among the top dogs of American technology. Things have become sclerotic.
The VCs say it themselves. Absolutely nothing that I’m saying has not been said by Palmer Luckey or Marc Andreessen, a bunch of right-wing tech guys. They are actually the most powerful critics of Silicon Valley. I actually don’t really understand why people don’t see that. I guess the left is a complete distraction. They’re so easily dismissed. They know nothing, and they come at it with so many prejudices that they can’t see anything clearly at all. But when Palmer Luckey talks about Apple, when Palmer Luckey talks about how easily Apple could be shut down with the stroke of a pen by Xi Jinping — all it would take would be just to nationalize the factories, declare them to be strategic or whatever. And Apple was supposed to be trying to diversify its supply chain to Vietnam and India and has totally failed in that. It’s failed to produce a car. It’s failed to produce a Vision Pro at an acceptable price and basically left that entire future open to Xiaomi and probably a dozen other Chinese companies that we haven’t heard of.
So in terms of the States, that’s what I’m most negative about — that Silicon Valley companies became monopolies. It’s sort of the ideology of Peter Thiel: Don’t compete. That’s pretty much the core philosophy of Zero to One. Competition is for losers. Go find yourself a monopoly and have a good life with enough money to afford a bolt-hole in New Zealand in case it all goes wrong.
How do you think about Gawker and the way that all ended?
I’m not going to say Gawker was perfect. It was a relief when it could finally be put out of its misery. It dragged down the other sites. I was embarrassed by it at the end. It basically fell into the same trap as Musk and Rogan are falling into now, where they’re paying way too much attention to their audience. And that feedback loop can drive people crazy.
You’ve posted a lot lately about people being driven insane by the internet, by social media, et cetera. Whether it’s Musk or Rogan or, as you put it, Gawker staffers in a certain era.
2012 to 2015.
So what was it about those years?
I took a little bit of a break in 2011 for personal reasons. And then I came back and it was like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Seriously. Not for the guys writing Gizmodo or Lifehacker — they were the same as they’d ever been. But I just felt like I absolutely could not connect with the Gawker writers. I thought it was a generational change. There had been a bunch of new people hired, a lot of them from Ivy League schools, whereas the early Gawker writers had been misfits, unemployable in most other places. The later Gawker writers were credentialed. And there’s a pipeline from Ivy League gender studies into Jezebel. That’s pretty much one of the only jobs that you could do if you were a gender-studies major.
And there was something more than that. They seemed somehow lobotomized. I would get frustrated, not able to understand where they were coming from. What motivates you? Seriously, what drives you, what motivates you, what are you passionate about? And it was like talking to a bunch of robots. And these are smart people. I hated Gawker. I was not reading it. And I fired half the staff in an afternoon. Thank God, thank God. Because I was ashamed. I was just ashamed.
I assume what you’re saying about the staffers, partly, is that things had become political, had become left wing.
I think it had become homogenous. I was designing and redesigning the comment system to allow for some diversity of opinion. I was writing essays about intellectual diversity way before its time. Hey, this stuff is better if people debate it. I came up through the Oxford tutorial system in which you are expected to be able to argue either side of an argument. You’re supposed to be able to switch over and put yourself in the position of another perspective. I’ve always found that very useful. I find it very useful now in making investment decisions and trying to work out whether Tesla really is going down or not — trying to steelman the case. I respect Elon Musk. Elon Musk was one of my heroes. Our son’s middle name is Elon.
Wow.
I mean, not specifically for him.
Oh, okay.
We liked the sound of the name. And it was absolutely not a problem that the world’s most successful man, achiever of reusable rockets that have revolutionized the cost of space travel, the electric car, and global internet in the ether — to have done one of those things would be a major achievement. And I think he’s serious about being the first leader of the Mars colony. I think he’s absolutely dead serious about that. And I think that would be the absolute best outcome.
I would prefer a different leader, personally. I just want to put that on the record.
Maybe. But there is nobody else presenting themselves. I would prefer for there to be somebody. Columbus wasn’t a good guy. None of these people are good guys. They’ve usually lost in some way back on their home continents or home planets. And exploration — exit — is their only option. That’s how progress happens. The crazy ones leave. The crazy ones left Europe, and you got all our crazies. This one I apologize for: You got the Scots-Irish too. You’ve got the hillbillies who were so toxic, so pernicious — I think the word they used at the time — that the Quakers in Pennsylvania and the gentry in Virginia pushed them up into the hills.
We’re finally paying that price with J.D. Vance.
J.D. Vance is the revenge of the hillbillies. J.D. Vance is getting revenge for that betrayal. There are many things I think America should be thanking Europe for. I did a little Twitter essay on this. Basically all the things that we gave you, all the talents, the patience that we gave you, the loyalty that we gave you, the fact that we don’t pull our money out of Treasuries right now as any rational investor would. But the one thing I would like to apologize for is the hillbillies. We gave you the hillbillies, and now you’re paying the price, because the hillbillies are at the core of MAGA.
To go back to Gawker for a second — were you actually glad when the ax came down in 2016?
I was glad when Univision said they didn’t want it. I was glad that it had a good clean end.
And not some kind of bastardization that’s happened with some other sites. Though it did relaunch later, I suppose.
It did come back in some bastard form. But I think it was a sufficient interval that that was clearly another thing. But yeah, I agreed with Peter Thiel’s criticisms.
You recently posted that Thiel was “right, as usual,” in this case about Democrats.
Well, I would like to know about his positions right now. First, I want to know why he’s so quiet when he ought to be at his point of maximum power. I’m super-curious about his attitude toward Vance, while Vance is busy destroying the Atlantic alliance, and Palantir depends on the Atlantic alliance for a large portion of its contracts. I’m very curious as to how Peter Thiel thinks about the abuse of America’s most loyal allies in Europe.
Are you nostalgic for the previous era of Gawker? The Wild West era, which is when I started reading it in the mid-aughts?
I mean, it was fresh. It was fun. It was a — I wouldn’t say a breath, it was a blast of fresh air.
There was energy behind it, there was novelty behind it.
Right now, it’s the first time in eight, ten or maybe even longer — 12 years that I’ve felt sufficiently free and sufficiently … I guess angry about the vandalism and the wanton destruction of the western alliance that the words just come out.
Yeah. You’ve been fairly quiet the last few years.
Eight years.
Yeah, so why now?
It just happened. Seriously. I was on Twitter — I never stopped being on X …
This is how every bad story starts. “I was on Twitter …”
I was on X and I guess I can’t remember exactly which one it was, whether it was Denmark or whether it was Poland. I mean, everybody was upset about Ukraine and I guess I wasn’t any more upset than anybody else was. Denmark definitely got to me. I love Denmark. Denmark is kind of like a model country as far as I’m concerned.
I’m with you.
If you do talk shit about it, that says something about you. It says much more about you than it does about Denmark. I have these little weird obsessions. Like, I love Singapore.
You’re a fan of Lee Kuan Yew, I recall.
Yeah. I think he’s the greatest statesman of the 20th century. Deng Xiaoping is probably the second greatest statesman of the 20th century.
You like the benevolent authoritarians?
I like countries with rising GDP. That’s what I like. I like rising GDP.
Fair enough.
I like prosperous countries in which people can bring up kids and rely on an excellent state education system and get good health care. Where the country just gets better and better every single year, every single decade, every single generation. So the track record of Singapore deserves respect.
Sure, though GDP is a measure that people often point to as an illustration of how great the U.S. is doing, even when health care, cost of living, life expectancy isn’t so great.
I’m much more skeptical of American GDP numbers than of other countries’ GDP numbers. And it seems like the administration has begun the process of a reevaluation of American GDP numbers — they are themselves saying, “Oh, hey, you shouldn’t really be counting any of the government spending.” Then half of health care is completely dysfunctional, so subtract 10 percent of GDP for that. And while you’re at it, subtract the 3 percent of GDP that basically goes on litigation, and maybe the 6 percent that goes on broker fees on real estate, and the 7 percent on IPO fees, and the billion dollars a year on scaffolding in New York, which is completely unnecessary, and $120,000 that I paid for some pathetic legal dispute that actually should have been resolved for a thousand dollars. So all of that counts toward GDP, but it absolutely does not count toward well-being.
I get the sense you’re excited to be sharing these ideas after some time in the wilderness.
Part of it is that I’m on my way out. I don’t have to think about, Oh, maybe you need to sell to Silicon Valley, about Silicon Valley being the acquirer, the ultimate acquirer of everything. Silicon Valley exerts a huge, huge amount of power. And when you no longer are looking for money from Silicon Valley in any way, that is actually extremely liberating.
To end where we began, you’re putting your apartment on the market. How do you feel about that? It seems like the end of an era.
I was just thinking if there was a physical manifestation of the digital-media era, it was that.
Look, for everything there is a cycle. It was a great bachelor pad and party pad with an independent entrance — doorman building, but independent entrance opposite Balthazar. So you’d have parties and they wouldn’t bother the neighbors and you never even saw your neighbors. It was awesome. And then it had a period as a refuge during the pandemic. I’m sorry to say this, but we loved the pandemic, because we were in the apartment, and Crosby Street was completely deserted. And we loved the apartment. And you could hear the birds tweeting and I could sunbathe out on the fire escape and it was like being the last man in the city. I guess everybody else had gone off to their country houses or whatever.
But it felt like you’re in the absolute middle of the bustle — the epicenter of downtown, the coolest district, the best location in the coolest district in the whole of the United States. That’s how I felt. And you could retreat up the stairs into the apartment. There’s double-pane glass in the bedrooms, and it’s completely silent. So you’re basically in the thick of things, in the fray and at the same time, just a few steps away — peace. Like a total haven.
And it was a family apartment for us. The kids had their first two, three years there, rushing to the windows to watch the fire engines going back to the fire station over on Lafayette Street, and the ambulances and the police cars. Some kids in the country might be obsessed with horses or animals or whatever, but our kids are completely vehicle-obsessed. I’m showing them pictures of trams in Budapest and cogwheel railways and things basically to console them, to provide some kind of replacement for basically the vehicle extravaganza that they could see from the windows of that apartment.
Well, they can marvel at BYD cars now.
My husband Derrence wants a G-Wagon. He wants a full suburban life in a G-Wagon: garden, own house, no neighbors, all that kind of stuff.
But bringing all of this together with the economics: The apartment has been a safe haven for us as a family during COVID and after, but as an investment, I think a lot of the smart money is out of the market. I think a lot of people are like me, that basically they’ve sold down a significant portion of their U.S. stocks. I saw Chamath from the All-In podcast said that he was short Wall Street, long Main Street.
A lot of people have taken this up. Jamie Dimon just sold a huge chunk of his JPMorgan stock, and I’m surprised it didn’t get more notice. So you’ve got a lot of these people sitting on a lot of cash and there isn’t anywhere really very obvious to put it. They can’t, for political reasons, put it in China. Gold is already at $3,000. What other markets are attractive? I think people are going to be buying land, they’re going to be buying prime apartments. They’re going to be seeking refuge, finding safe haven in the real.
So I’m looking at this from a euro perspective. I want euros, so I want to get a sale done promptly. I don’t want this hanging around through rounds and rounds of tariff wars and devaluation, speculation and all that kind of stuff. I hedge myself some, so I’m not totally exposed to the dollar. But I feel like now is actually probably quite a good time to sell. We put it on, deliberately, probably about a million dollars below where it ought to be. Basically that’s a low price as a lure for, “Hey, come and look.” But I’m expecting that it’s going to get bid up into probably the low fours at least.
What are you actually going to be doing in Hungary, if anything, professionally? Or is it just family life?
The only site I ever wrote for among the Gawker sites was Valleywag, which was kind of gossipy financial. My specialty is financial gossip, not sexual gossip. I’m not that interested in sexual gossip, but I love financial gossip. Give me more and more and more of it. I did a book on the Barings derivatives scandal and the collapse of England’s oldest merchant bank. That’s why I went to Singapore for the first time. I’m a psycho-historian. I love all this stuff. So when AI came along — first of all, Claude, and then I, switched to DeepSeek, and now I’m using Deep Research — I’ve tried them all. I think I’m pretty good at it, at getting answers out. And so I do scenario planning, I do timelines, and then I set the timelines off against each other.
I was a huge Asimov Foundation fan along with Paul Krugman, Elon Musk, and God knows who else. And the core of that is, can you predict the future? I guess his idea was mathematically, and I don’t know whether that’s really possible. But you can certainly predict the future by playing out a story, writing a story of the future and judging how credible it is, or writing two different stories of the future.
Will Elon Musk make it? Will he pull Tesla out of this death spiral? Can the Optimus compete with Unitree’s latest? Is he going to show up to the big human-robot race in Beijing next month, which is going to be kind of like the test, just as much as the Nürburgring is a test of the speed of the SU7 Ultra versus the Tesla S Plaid. So you can use the AI to play out these scenarios and then, depending on what stories you get out, you can trade. And I have been trading. Just last week, I did a whole extensive timeline game for the F-35. At what point do these cancellations in Canada, Germany, Switzerland, put the F-35 program into a death spiral? And I’m not the only one. There’s a lot of people using AI to do this kind of thing.
So you’re a futurist AI speculator trader?
Pretty much.
That’s a growing industry, they tell me.
I think it is. I think all these things are merging. The short sellers have always been journalists as much as they’ve been traders. They do a trade and they put out a story. And so I don’t see why it can’t work the other way around.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
