VC
VISTEON CORPORATION
stock NASDAQ

Many of the replies are “I did this, we are doing that” so I’ll try to address the question OP asked; in my opinion.
Getting wealthy by getting up in the morning and heading to see patients, in any setting, is not going to happen. Docs make a comfortable living and most invest in traditional ways (think real estate, stock market, life insurance etc) but is not real wealth. And when you consider hours working, holidays and nights, the responsibility of people health and so on, the compensation is low per effort and qualifications.
How do you get wealthy from scratch - by being an entrepreneur. For those that have that (wealth) desire, MD qualifications and profession should not be the end, but the ticket to a plethora of opportunities, funding, loopholes, and other opportunities that most do not know or qualify for.
Inventing and licensing a technology or treatment that is very attractive to VC or industry giants can mean instant wealth. Becoming a very high level medical executive in the tech or pharma industry (think CMO) comes with comp packages that amass to tens of millions a year. Networking with the right patients (clients) can open the door to “privileged” investments and pre-public deals, as well as partial ownership opportunities into sports teams and other entertainment honey holes.
I can go on and on - you get the picture.
A bit about your big houses experience in mid-america and the small business owners. This country is roughly split in half when it comes to money (lets exclude the mid class and below that work to eat, pay mortgage and bills, watch netflix, and maybe go in a cheap cruise or a family Disney trip - thats just keeping the economy going for the wealthy). The upper crust is generally speaking old money and new money.
New money is more prevalent in/around big cities where entrepreneurial opportunities (think make money fast) are prevalent and most dont care what you look like or who your grandpa was.

I’m with Jensen.  If Altman, Amodei, and fucking Musk all agree on something, then you can be assured that it cannot possibly be the truth.  These cash incinerators need government to build a cartel around them.  They are not afraid of AGI, they are afraid of running out of VC dollars before they can pass their bags onto retail.

A supply side crunch from inept (insane?) geopolitics and the culmination of the VC "pressure valve" turning into an unregulated market bubble to the tune of trillions happening at the same time?

Yeah, I've thought about it once or twice...

I at least half agree with your sentiment that upgrades mean nothing unless they unlock or improve usage. Valuable upgrades certainly are a *prerequisite* for that usage becoming real, though. The fact that, because of these upgrades, BCH now supports extremely scalable DeFi, zero-knowledge privacy, and post-quantum cryptography is bullish for the ecosystem, even before the features get built into apps. But sure, it only matters in the long run if those features get built and they attract users/volume.
I disagree with your claim that you could do this for any chain. Which other chains in the top 50 are shipping high-value upgrades every year? How many of them are hard-coding specific functions into the protocol, instead of building general tools that allow for innovation to occur at the app layer? How many of them actually have decentralized governance, not a VC backed committee that speeds things up in the short term but opens them up to capture in the long term?

Pyth is a VC scam that constantly goes down, NASDAQ will soon learn this. Anyways, Nasdaq is providing Pyth with the Nasdaq Basic market-data feed. It is not the same thing as Nasdaq adopting Pyths oracle technology to generate its own prices.

How Did Kaspa Grow Without a Traditional VC Token Sale?

I spend what it costs to buy things from the people I want to have my money. So anything VC backed, Palantir, and other good actors. I also like shiny stuff.

One runs the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University on Morningside Heights. The other owns more farmland than anyone in America. They never planned to meet. Then Dr. Gadikota and Gates's Breakthrough Energy both walked into the same $4 million stock.
NEW YORK, Dr. Greeshma Gadikota didn't set out to cross paths with Bill Gates.
For most of the last decade she's been on the 116th Street end of things. A Columbia PhD. Stints at Princeton, Wisconsin, Cornell and NIST. Then back uptown to the Columbia Climate School, where she is Professor of Earth & Environmental Engineering, holds the Lenfest Earth Institute Chair, and directs the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy. Three federal CAREER awards, from DOE, NSF and the Army Research Office. Her research question sounds almost quaint: how do you make a rock give up what's inside it
Gates, 2,800 miles away, was asking a bigger version of the same question, with a checkbook.
Neither of them, as far as anyone can tell, knew the other was working the problem. Yet this month both trails lead to the same place: a Vancouver company worth about C$4 million trading under the ticker EONE.
Here's how they got there. Bring a calculator.
THE MAP: 5,600,000,000,000 TONNES
In December 2024, two scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, Geoffrey Ellis and Sarah Gelman, published a model suggesting the Earth holds roughly 5.6 trillion tonnes of natural hydrogen. Not manufactured. Not electrolyzed. Made by the planet, sitting in the rock.
The world uses about 100 million tonnes of hydrogen a year, nearly all cooked from gas and coal, at a cost of roughly 1 billion tonnes of CO₂. Do the division: 56,000 years of supply. The USGS is careful to say most of it is unreachable. But even a small fraction could meet the world's hydrogen needs for 200 years. Take just 2% and you're still at 1,100 years.
A month later, in January 2025, the USGS drew an X on the American heartland: a prospectivity map of the Mid-Continent Rift, covering Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska.
Washington had already started writing checks. The Energy Department announced it was investing $20 million into 16 projects related to geological hydrogen. ARPA-E separately funded Koloma's well-stimulation research.
And the wells are real. Across the first exploratory drilling in Mali, Australia, the US, and Canada, hydrogen concentrations were frequently over 80%. Gold Hydrogen in Australia confirmed purity levels of up to 86% on the Yorke Peninsula. In Mali, the one producing well on Earth served as a proof-of-concept by using naturally produced hydrogen to power a local village. Oil wells don't come out of the ground 86% pure anything.
THE BILLIONAIRE'S TRAIL: $403,000,000 INTO ONE COMPANY
Gates got there before the map did.
In 2023, his fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, chaired by Gates with partner Carmichael Roberts, led a $91 million round into Koloma, a Denver company co-founded by Ohio State geochemist Tom Darrah. Koloma went and drilled: Kansas, Iowa, Idaho. Its subsidiaries High Plains Resources and Twin Rivers Exploration are active in Kansas and Iowa, with the former recently acquiring seismic data over the Mid-Continent Rift in Kansas. Same rift. Same map.
Then Silicon Valley showed up. Koloma's cap table reads like a West Coast power map. Khosla Ventures led a $245.7 million second round in 2024, with Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund and United Airlines' Sustainable Flight Fund alongside. Osaka Gas and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries added $50 million more, bringing the company's total investment to more than $350 million since it launched in 2021. With earlier money, the figure now cited is $403 million, from investors including Khosla Ventures, ASTUTIA Ventures, and Prelude Ventures. All for a company whose public scorecard so far reads "encouraging results"
Put that in context. Global natural hydrogen exploration investment has reached approximately $1 billion in committed capital, with the United States leading at nearly 50%, driven by Koloma's rounds. **One company. Forty cents of every dollar in the sector on Earth.**
And they're doing it while everyone else runs the other way. The IEA reports venture capital for hydrogen continued to fall in 2025, down from a 13% peak in 2023 to 4% of energy VC. Even the big-project money is thin: capital spending on low-emissions hydrogen reached nearly $7 billion in 2025 and could approach $10 billion in 2026. In the U.S., the industry attracted $400 million between January and March, mostly into two large blue hydrogen projects. Compare: $403 million into one natural hydrogen driller, roughly equal to the entire U.S. hydrogen industry's first quarter. The smart money is leaving hydrogen. The smartest money is drilling for it.
Gates's fund then crossed the Atlantic. It seeded Mantle8 in Grenoble with €3.4 million in 2025, and came back for its €31 million Series A in May 2026, alongside Sandwater, Bpifrance, IP Group, Wind Capital and Calderion. That's €34.4 million into a company founded a couple of years ago. Mantle8 produced the first 4D image of a live natural hydrogen system, in the Pyrenees, and holds three natural hydrogen and helium exploration permits in Western Europe. Its tech stack is named like a spy agency: GeoLogix for geological modelling, HOREX for 4D imaging of active underground hydrogen systems and APoGeH for hydrogen-system assessment.
Gates's fund, running tally: two drillers, two continents, $91M plus €3.4M plus a slice of €31M.
And the part the conspiracy crowd loves. Through Cascade Investment, Gates owns 269,000 acres of farmland in 19 states, more than anyone else in America and No. 43 on the 2025 Land Report 100. That's 1,088 square kilometers: the size of Hong Kong, 1.5 Singapores, 18 Manhattans. Louisiana alone, 69,071 acres, is bigger than Washington, D.C. Arkansas: 47,927. Arizona: 25,750. Washington State: 16,097 acres in the Horse Heaven Hills for $171 million. Florida: 14,828. And 20,588 acres across 19 Nebraska counties, bought for $113 million. Nebraska is on the USGS map. So is Iowa, where he holds 552 acres.
Is there any evidence Gates bought farmland for what's under it? None. The farms grow potatoes and soy. But the biggest farmer in America has 20,000 acres in a state the government flagged for hydrogen. We're just pointing at the map.
\## THE PROFESSOR'S TRAIL: THE OTHER HALF OF THE MACHINE
While Gates ws buying drillers, Gadikota was building the reaction.
Her Cornell spinout, Carbon To Stone, became Revora Materials, backed by Frontier, the carbon-removal buyers' club of Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey. Its IonMet process pulls value out of reactive rock.
Her second company, Stone to H2, Inc., in New York, holds her hydrogen IP. She is its CEO.
Both companies, and her Columbia lab, now lead to one door.
\## THE COLLISION: SIX DATES, ONE TICKER
That door is Element One Hydrogen & Critical Minerals Corp. (CSE: EONE / OTC: EHCMF), run by CEO Brad Kitchen with interim CFO Tim Johnson.
\- February 2026: Stone to H2 grants Element One a definitive option and earn-in, paid partly in EONE shares.
\-May 6, 2026: Columbia's Lenfest Center signs a US$1.67 million, two-year sponsored research agreement with Element One.
\- July 7, 2026: Revora partners with Element One.
\- September 10, 2026: Element One announces a dual-pathway natural hydrogen strategy.
\- September 14, 2026: Mantle8, the Gates-backed driller, signs a letter of intent with Element One for British Columbia and Alberta, with an initial 120-day exclusivity period and an automatic 60-day extension, limited to non-stimulated natural hydrogen plays.
\- September 22, 2026, this morning: assays from Twin Sisters, Washington State. Eight samples returned magnesium from 26.39% to 28.46% and nickel from 2,660 to 3,305 ppm. Iron, the ingredient that actually makes hydrogen when water hits the rock, ran 5.0% to 6.1% across every sample. Element One holds the right to purchase up to 50,000 tonnes per year, with an option to increase to 100,000 tonnes. Splits have gone to Revora for IonMet evaluation, while work with Columbia will assess the material's natural hydrogen potential.
Gadikota's route into EONE ran through Morningside Heights. Gates's ran through Grenoble. Eight days ago they collided.
The rock matters. Twin Sisters olivine is being evaluated for hydrogen generation through accelerated serpentinization, the reaction of water with iron-bearing ultramafic rock. That is precisely the professor's specialty. Element One also has ground in BC and Alaska and is raising money in LIFE units at $0.10
Now the number that matters. Market cap: about US$2.93 million, float 48.2 million shares. Call it C$4 million
Stack it up:
\- Koloma's total raise is about 137 times Element One's entire market value.
\- Koloma's Osaka Gas extension alone, $50 million, is 17 times.
\- Mantle8's Series A is roughly 12 times.
\- Columbia's US$1.67 million research deal is more than half of it.
\- Gates's Nebraska farms cost 38 times more than the whole company.
The company holding the Columbia option, the Revora partnership and the Mantle8 LOI is worth less than one of Bill Gates's farms.
To be clear: Bill Gates does not own Element One Breakthrough Energy has not invested in it. What exists is one LOI between Element One and a company Gates's fund backs. That's the whole connection. But look at who is standing in the same room.
\## THE TRIGGER: +65% IN ONE MONTH
Why now? On February 28, 2026, the Strait of Hormuz closed. Brent jumped 65% in March, the biggest quarterly move since 1988, and sits near $100 today. The IMF puts the unpriced cost of fossil fuels at $7 trillion a year
Meanwhile, natural hydrogen companies project wellhead costs of $0.50 to $1.00 per kilogram, plus about $0.50 for purification, for $1.00 to $1.50 fully processed. Green hydrogen currently costs $2.28 to $7.39 per kilogram. If the projections hold, the Earth makes it at a fifth of the price. At 100 million tonnes a year, every dollar per kilogram saved is $100 billion a yea.
Oil spent a century learning to drill. The next rush may use the same rigs, the same crews, the same basins, chasing a different molecule.
\## THE BOARD
Own the ground. Own the drill. Own the reaction.
The ground belongs to landowners. The drill belongs to Koloma and Mantle8, private companies funded by billionaires you can't buy into. The reaction, the Columbia science that makes rock give up hydrogen on purpose, sits inside a public company worth about C$4 million.
A professor and a billionaire, working independently for years, on opposite ends of the same question. They ended up in the smallest box on the board.
Conspiracy? We're just asking questions.
This article is opinion and speculative commentary. It does not allege wrongdoing by, or any undisclosed relationship between, any person or entity named. Natural hydrogen is an early-stage, unproven resource; no company named has announced commercial production, and Element One states it has established no mineral resource or reserve and has not demonstrated hydrogen generation from Twin Sisters. Element One is a micro-cap, speculative security with high risk
Not investment advice.

I don't think you ever understood crypto in the first place if you're seeing genuine large scale tradfi integration and thinking it's bad just because it's linked to Mastercard and a fintech app linked to a VC you don't like.
A large part of the value proposition of crypto is that it is globally accessible and permissionless, that means a lot of people are going to use it for things you might think are dumb, but ultimately if people find uses for it, especially disruptive and legitimate use cases, that should be a good thing if you're bullish on crypto.

Why would it be a combination of the dot com bubble and 2008 crisis😂 that’s insanely alarmist 😂 it won’t be even close to as bad as either of those. If it blows up most of the exposure it held by VC funds. Who cares if they get liquidated?

The common thread is dollar funding, not American consumers. Check who wrote the big checks in each company's last funding rounds, most of it traces back to US-based VC and PE. When those funds want out, the exit route is an IPO, and the story gets dressed up around whatever revenue mix looks best at that moment.