I liked the idea, but this literally could have been a list. The AI-generated pages with filler text create a stark contrast in utility compared to the influential nature of the listed papers.
Wild to see NFT nothingburgers next to "real ideas". Also very bizarre to see 2026 thinkpieces floating around in the same space as Gates' internet memos.
Maybe these are more million dollar PDFs than billion dollar ones, if only because there's enough VC money churning around for "friends" to give any idea by people in a certain segment a minimum of funding no matter how bad it is.
The problem with many of these kinds of works is that they are a product of a provincial SV mindset that is largely unaware of the broader world or anything at all outside of its cultural and economic ecosystem, so it winds up being a super narrow slice of conventional, mostly boring topics that everyone in SV rehashes over and over.
Wouldn't it be interesting to learn an influential work that changed how health care professionals run hospitals? Or a document that changed how mining works? A paper on Wright's theory of manufacturing scaling that explains the solar revolution? A thesis on how the world's factories moved from pneumatics to servo systems and why? How a policy thesis changed federal regulators' approach to approving rare disease drugs? Maybe Hayek's views on socialism and information theory, or perhaps an influential thesis on how antitrust monopoly regulation should work?
But instead it's a bunch of crypto and AI stuff that everyone in tech already knows about, rewarmed again for its hundredth serving.
That NFT entry leads to a 404, and even if you Google the one quote they provide from it ("You do not understand NFTs yet, but you will"), the only reference to it is the "Billion Dollar PDFs" site.
What a stupid list. Heavily biased. I'd just like to point out that a large bulk of these papers depend on the existence of the computer and yet Alan Turing is not even on the list.
I followed the footer links to the site's author and his other work and I'll dare say my impression is that the whole thing is engagement bait to draw attention to his VC investment firm from other people who also think bollocks like this is somehow inspirational[1] - also not helped by how the other footer link goes to an obvious AI slop blog on Beehiiv (a "hiiv" of scum and villainy; for bots who get banned from Substack).
This site does a terrible job of curating what is supposed to be a limited, selective list. I tried to access the first 60 entries. 11 of them were dead links. 4 were just links to advertisements for books (very much not a "memo, a deck, a whitepaper, a thread").
18 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 39.1 ms ] threadedit: same with youtube
Maybe these are more million dollar PDFs than billion dollar ones, if only because there's enough VC money churning around for "friends" to give any idea by people in a certain segment a minimum of funding no matter how bad it is.
Wouldn't it be interesting to learn an influential work that changed how health care professionals run hospitals? Or a document that changed how mining works? A paper on Wright's theory of manufacturing scaling that explains the solar revolution? A thesis on how the world's factories moved from pneumatics to servo systems and why? How a policy thesis changed federal regulators' approach to approving rare disease drugs? Maybe Hayek's views on socialism and information theory, or perhaps an influential thesis on how antitrust monopoly regulation should work?
But instead it's a bunch of crypto and AI stuff that everyone in tech already knows about, rewarmed again for its hundredth serving.
[1] https://x.com/jeremygiffon/status/1965535859073319334
The link to the original for Scion Capital is a 404 FYI: https://billiondollarpdf.com/entry/burry-scion-subprime/
What does "strict receipt" mean? Every entry seems to be labelled "strict receipt".
god i hate this so much