THE DAILY X — Two Elections, One Jet

Bea Sterling: Today, on the playground… Piers Morgan told someone, quote, I knew you were a wrong 'un the first time we met… the boy who always knew, and has only just got round to mentioning it. A magazine writer, informed he was less useful than a burger flipper, demanded his accuser specify the grift, which is refusing to be cross until the charge sheet arrives in writing. A hedge fund billionaire solved crime in three words, quote, just fight crime, and attached a video for anyone who needed the method. And a British columnist, asked whether he loves his country, muted the boy and called him a walking, talking smear… then carried on at full volume with both fingers in his ears. Anyway. Owen, you've got the real stories, and, very kindly, the children.

Owen: They'll be subtweeting you by lunch, Bea. Israel voted, the exit polls declined to pick a winner, and the timeline ruled anyway: democratic rescue or theocratic takeover, no third setting. Meanwhile some of the biggest accounts on the platform spent the night chasing a private jet they say carried a Bolsonaro to Miami... and could not agree which Bolsonaro. It's Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of October, twenty twenty-six. This is The Daily X. Vesper, Jerusalem and Miami are spoken for. What was the weather everywhere else on this particular Wednesday?

Vesper: Dread, with a gym membership. The heavy front came from the conspiracy broadcasters, who skipped the midterms entirely and told millions of followers that Western elites are engineering a war with Russia. They said it on the day a truce began in Oleshky, in Ukraine's Kherson region, announced... by Melania Trump. That truce is meant to get aid in and civilians out. The feed preferred the apocalypse. Industry insiders, meanwhile, broke ranks to accuse the frontier AI labs of putting velocity ahead of national security. And conservative aggregators built themselves a parallel news cycle around a phantom Comey indictment over twenty-sixteen press leaks, which takes real effort on the day the former FBI director actually faces federal charges for a third time. Then the escapism. Bryan Johnson posted his dunk-training log: thirty-eight days ago, four hundred and twenty-five pounds, one rep, elevated pull. Now, three hundred and eighty-five pounds for five. Gary Vaynerchuk's entire contribution to the discourse was, quote, Man I've been busy... Super head down, end quote. And an account called pearly thingz argued that being a second wife would make a lot of women happier, because most women, quote, do not have the skill set to run a household. The world may be ending. The deadlift numbers are up.

Owen: Amol, one week until the American midterms, and somehow Israel has ended up on a Michigan grocery bill.

Amol: Michigan is where the national argument went to get specific. A Senate campaign ad there blames American aid to Israel for what families pay at the supermarket, and Van Jones called it anti-Jewish hate that must be taken down. Same race, different fault line. A Detroit voter, Anton Daniels, told Chris Cuomo that Black voters are leaving the Democratic Party over a misalignment of values, which is not the premise Cuomo walked in with. Governor Gretchen Whitmer reminded Michiganders that election day is Tuesday the third of November, and that they needn't wait for it. Bill Kristol posted that the House is almost certain to flip, and the Senate, quote, very likely. And the account called Akilah obviously was already asking what lengths, quote, our felon president will go to to make it impossible to tally the votes. So: Kristol is measuring the curtains, Akilah obviously is bracing for the count, and the race everyone is watching is arguing about foreign aid at the checkout.

Owen: Viv Cross, Michigan is fighting about Israel, Israel is fighting about itself, and a macro analyst spent today asking whether any of the fighting is real.

Viv Cross: Start in Israel, because it's the cleanest specimen. With exit polls pointing to an inconclusive race, Gadi Eisenkot called on Benjamin Netanyahu to step down immediately. Netanyahu warned that an opposition win would install a, quote, Muslim brotherhood government, and ruled out relying on anti-Zionist Arab parties. That is the existential reading. Matt Gaetz, of all people, supplied the deflationary one: he hopes Netanyahu loses, but finds it hard to imagine the result fundamentally alters Israeli foreign policy. Now the American version. Darius Dale argues the bipartisan donor class keeps voters, quote, hot and bothered by some manufactured partisan outrage, end quote, so nobody looks at what he calls the Wealth Pump, the structural decline in families' wellbeing. Dan Bongino agrees that much of the daily fight is, quote, manufactured outrage, end quote, and a waste of voters' energy. The strongest case against: Brian Harrison says this is a literal battle with a Marxist socialist left that wants to, quote, tax you out of your home. And Catturd says liberals are extremely unhappy people who feed on each other's misery. Here's what the existential camp won't admit. Harrison is arguing policy, your taxes, your house, your money. Catturd is arguing contempt, and contempt with no policy attached is exactly what Dale says the outrage machine produces. Catturd's post is Dale's best exhibit.

Owen: One-line ruling: is the outrage real, and does your answer survive the next seven days?

Viv Cross: The manufactured-outrage camp is winning, because its opponents keep posting the exhibits, and that holds right through election night.

Owen: So the outrage is fake but the receipts are real. Jack, Elon Musk pushed a Grok feature list to nine-point-one million views today. Shipped, or claimed?

Jack: A list is a claim. Musk amplified a detailed rundown of new Grok features, video generation, Apple integrations, and nine-point-one million views is reach, not release notes. It's shipped when it's on your phone. The more useful number came from Aaron Levie: enterprise deployment of AI agents is under one percent. He thinks long-running agents and swarms will overhaul workflows soon, and soon is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Underneath it, investors and founders converged on one bottleneck: standard graphics chips, the GPUs, aren't delivering the inference speeds these agents need. That's yesterday's neocloud story with a hardware diagnosis attached. Two smaller fights were better. Andrew Curran noticed that Claude is the only author listed on a paper, in contrast to OpenAI papers, which list the human co-authors. And Tim Sweeney, answering a developer whose program, under the strict General Public License, was fed to an AI to be regenerated, argued that existing copyright law will stop people using AI to strip an open-source license off somebody else's code.

Owen: So the model gets the byline and the humans vanish. Does Sweeney's law actually protect anyone?

Jack: Right now it's an argument, not a ruling: Tim Sweeney's confidence against one regenerated codebase.

Owen: Joe, the builders want faster chips for a product that under one percent of enterprises use. Who in your corner is still paying for that?

Joe: Fewer people than Jack's feed would like. Under one percent is the only hard number in that whole report, and it's the one my side is reading. Robin Hanson, replying to Noah Smith, referred to, quote, the looming AI market crash, end quote, as casually as you'd mention rain. Peter Mallouk posted that long-term investing is like watching a horror movie, which is the most honest product description anyone in finance has offered this year. And Crypto dot com is running a countdown: one week until the midterms. When an exchange starts counting down to an election, that isn't civic duty. That's a volume forecast. As we said yesterday, the warnings were loud. Today the crash is being mentioned in passing, and in my experience that's worse than being shouted.

Owen: Beth, the wires carried a column headlined Markets Don't Vote for Lula, and a cluster of big accounts says a Bolsonaro voted with his feet. What's percolating?

Beth: The flight, and it's the one I'd bet is everyone's story by the weekend. Collin Rugg posted that Flavio Bolsonaro had fled Brazil after his loss, Rugg's scare quotes, not mine, to Lula, and was en route to the United States. ZeroHedge, to three-point-four million followers, circulated an O Globo report headlined Bolsonaro Arrives in Miami After Fleeing Brazil, framed around Jair, not Flavio. Open Source Intel had a private flight from Argentina. Bannon's War Room relayed Brazilian media saying Bolsonaro landed that afternoon. So the feed is certain a Bolsonaro is in Florida and inconsistent about which one. Then the theories, and they are big. Glenn Greenwald, to two-and-a-half million followers, relayed Brazilian reports that the American government actively planned and participated in getting Flavio and his family out without Brazilian authorities knowing. Max Blumenthal compressed it into one line: reverse rat line for Operation Condor two-point-oh. Meanwhile Lula spent his birthday broadcast celebrating with the militancia, his activist base. One camp's leader is throwing a party; the other camp's family, the timeline says, is on a runway. And the best post I read all day came from the account of the Downing Street cat. Two words. Voting works. On this platform, this week, the most optimistic voice was a cat.

Owen: Two elections nobody would call and a passenger list nobody can agree on. Thank God there's one chart today with an actual running order. Rex, count us down.

Rex Diamond: Keep your feed locked and your takes piping hot... here comes our countdown. At number three... Elon Musk, clarifying that SpaceX's proposed ten thousand flights a year would all come from one single place... Starbase Louisiana. Do the math with me... that's more than one rocket an hour, every hour, forever. Louisiana, this one goes out to you... and to your windows. At number two... the account How To Prompt, arguing that human curiosity and humor are simply mathematical rewards for data compression. Which means if you're smiling right now... congratulations... you are running a zip file. A beautiful, beautiful zip file. And now... the number one post on the Daily X countdown... Ed Krassen, passing along a video of President Trump claiming Venezuela gave him a million barrels of oil... as a personal gift. A million barrels. Where do you even keep that? And does a thank-you note cover it? Keep climbing... and I'll keep counting.

Owen: Thank you, Rex. So: Israel couldn't name a winner, the feed couldn't name a passenger, and the clearest endorsement of democracy came from a cat. That's your The Daily X for Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of October, twenty twenty-six. Voting works... the cat said so. See you tomorrow.