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Absolutely insane week. We’ll spare you the preamble, just look at these headlines:

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Ryan Cohen just got handed the keys to a $35 billion compensation package, and the catch is absolutely wild. GameStop's board wants their CEO to 10x the company's market cap to $100 billion while hitting $10 billion in cumulative EBITDA. No salary, no cash bonuses, no guaranteed anything. Just 171.5 million stock options at $20.66 per share that vest only if Cohen pulls off the turnaround of the decade.

The timing is interesting, to say the least. This announcement dropped while retail enthusiasm has been cooling faster than your 2021 portfolio, and insiders have been quietly selling shares. CFO Daniel Moore just offloaded $111,000 worth of stock to cover tax withholdings from vesting RSUs. The company's revenue has cratered 35% since 2022, and that meme-era market cap of $34 billion feels like ancient history compared to today's $9.26 billion.

Here's what makes this spicy for shareholders: Cohen already owns 8.3% of the company, so any moonshot benefits him twice over. The package mirrors Tesla's controversial Musk compensation structure, which means shareholders will vote on it around March or April. Whether this is a genuine alignment of incentives or a Hail Mary play while the digital pivot remains stuck in limbo is the real question.

Crypto investors are suddenly very interested in what's hiding in Venezuela's digital wallets. Official records show a modest 240 BTC (about $22 million), but investigative reports are floating a shadow reserve of up to 600,000 Bitcoin worth roughly $60 billion. If that number is even directionally accurate, we're talking about nearly 3% of Bitcoin's circulating supply potentially changing hands.

How to monitor the Venezuela oil situation (17 stocks to watch) →

The alleged accumulation method reads like a bad Tom Clancy novel. Venezuela supposedly converted $2 billion in gold from the Orinoco Mining Arc into Bitcoin around 2018 when BTC was trading near $5,000. Oil trades through USDT, later converted to Bitcoin to avoid stablecoin freezes. Mining seizures from the crackdown on local miners. The regime banned Bitcoin mining in 2024 while simultaneously killing the Petro token, which makes a lot more sense if you're consolidating all digital wealth into a centralized state reserve.

The market implications depend entirely on what happens next. A "frozen float" scenario where litigation from Venezuela's creditors locks the coins in escrow for years? That's bullish supply removal. A strategic reserve pivot where the Trump administration keeps the Bitcoin as sovereign assets? Even more bullish. A Germany-style fire sale? Unlikely, since dumping 600,000 BTC would crash the price and destroy the value of what they're trying to seize. Either way, this introduces a new variable to Bitcoin models: hidden sovereign risk from nations that had every incentive to stack sats in the shadows.

In this episode, TWIT rings in the new year by skipping the surface-level AI hype and digging into the messy middle: billion-dollar talent raids, anxious tech giants, lawmakers flailing for control, and the growing sense that artificial intelligence might be moving faster than the people building—or regulating—it.

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That’s all for today. Write us and let us know your thoughts on the market, the newsletter, or the weather—we’d just love to hear from you.

Till next time,
— Brandon and Blake