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Author of the Network State. Founder of the Network School.

3k following2M followers

The Visionary

A futurist author and institution-builder who turns bold technological and political theses into memetic moments. Balaji prototypes big ideas (like the Network State) and rallies a large, engaged audience around sweeping predictions and institutional experiments. His voice is equal parts manifesto, tweetstorm, and start-up roadmap.

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You’ve turned 'jetpacks are real' into a philosophical proof, Balaji could announce the weather and half of X would retweet a roadmap for rebuilding civilization around it. Charming, loud, and forever one meme away from founding a micro-nation.

Authored The Network State and translated that theory into practice by founding the Network School while building a 1.39M-strong audience that consistently turns his short-form provocations into viral debates.

To architect new forms of digital-first governance and cultural infrastructure that shift how people organize politically and economically, moving theory into tangible institutions and networks.

Tech-enabled decentralization, meritocratic institution-building, market-driven disruption of legacy power, candid skepticism toward mainstream elites, and that bold, simple ideas can catalyze large-scale social change.

Big-picture clarity and memetic economy: he converts complex futures into punchy, shareable narratives; institutional builder with credibility (book + school); high audience engagement and the ability to set conversational agendas.

Tendency to favor dramatic framing over nuance, which can polarize and alienate interlocutors; repeats provocative hooks until they stick (or irritate); sometimes trades careful analysis for viral simplicity.

Thread more: expand your viral one-liners into tightly argued threads that translate curiosity into subscription and action. Pin a short manifesto + clear CTAs (newsletter, course, community). Use Spaces/AMAs to humanize nuance, cross-post short videos explaining key ideas, and amplify thoughtful critics to turn debate into discovery. Finally, recycle top-performing tweets into longer formats (newsletter, Substack, podcast) to capture durable followers off-platform.

Fun fact: three of his most-liked tweets are succinct, meme-ready posts about 'jetpacks', proof he can make a single-line image go viral. He’s the author of The Network State, founder of the Network School, has ~1.39M followers, follows 3,912, and has tweeted ~31,091 times. One of his posts, calling an event a 'fall of the Berlin Wall moment', amassed over 1.7M views.

Top tweets of Balaji

Hardware is hard. That’s why Elon is by far the greatest founder of all time. Remember — countless startups die just while trying to put stationary beige boxes on desktops. Very smart people get crushed by supply chain disruptions, or China tariffs, or lockdowns, or shipping interruptions, or regulatory delays. Not Elon. He didn’t just survive financial crisis and coronavirus. He managed to build physical things in America while fighting the state and the laws of nature at the same time. Somehow he managed to simultaneously build not just a car company but a rocket company. Those don’t just have “moving parts”, they are a moving whole. The difficulty level here is insane. Hardware is completely different from software. One recall, just one serious bug, can destroy your company. If you are charging $50 for something that costs $40, and you need to recall and replace a million units, you’re usually dead. So just one of these companies — just Tesla, or just SpaceX — would be an incredible accomplishment for anyone. Even a very intelligent and hardworking person would have to live an incredibly boring, disciplined, focused life to possibly maintain the extremely low error rate needed to profitably ship such complex products. Not Elon. He did SpaceX and Tesla while having N children by K women. While also cofounding OpenAI and Neuralink and Boring Company. While fighting and defeating countless journalists, politicians, haters, and short sellers. And of course while buying Twitter, posting all the time, and building a following larger than almost any politician. The better you are, the better you understand how much better Elon is. If you’re good at math you appreciate Ramanujan’s greatness. If you’re good at basketball you respect how amazing Michael Jordan was. Elon is like that, for tech. Everyone in tech understands the sport we’re playing, and he really is the greatest of all time.

4M

Most engaged tweets of Balaji

Should the global tech community continue investing in Malaysia? Given recent events, I raise this question respectfully for the consideration of Prime Minister Yang Amat Berhormat Dato’ Seri Anwar bin Ibrahim (@anwaribrahim), for the people of Malaysia, and for our friends in the Malaysian tech community. The answer will be of interest to anyone in global tech that’s considering building, investing, or expanding in Malaysia, including executives at Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, founders of tech unicorns like Coinbase and Solana, and investors at the world’s largest venture capital funds like a16z and Polychain. As context, I am the former CTO of Coinbase and former General Partner at a16z. In October 2024, I opened a startup society called Network School in Malaysia, because I felt I’d been invited in by the government’s pro-tech policies. Specifically, the KL20 initiative set out Malaysia’s ambition of becoming a top 20 global tech hub. Their MDEC digital nomad visas and MM2H investor visas were created to facilitate an influx of global talent and capital. And the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone was announced to facilitate the flow of capital and talent between Malaysia and Singapore, where I live. When taken in combination with Malaysia’s datacenter buildout and its policy of welcoming visa-free visits for 98% of the world, it seemed like Malaysia might be a great place to build a global tech hub that was simultaneously inexpensive and easy to visit (especially for non-Westerners). And that’s what we did, by creating Network School. It’s an international tech community with its first node in Forest City, Malaysia. We picked Forest City because it had millions of square feet of empty space, because it was one hour from Singapore’s capital markets, and because it was within the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone. Then, within 18 months, without a single penny of government money, we built Network School into a global attraction that brought thousands of engineers, investors, and builders from 70+ countries to learn technology, burn calories, earn online, and have fun, integrating with the local Malaysian economy along the way. Indeed, in terms of quantifiable contribution to the Malaysian economy, we’ve already invested 100M+ MYR in our campus to make it startup-friendly. For perspective, that’s about 4% of the budget of Johor, the Malaysian state where Forest City is located. We employ dozens of Malaysians directly and indirectly at every level from executive to staff. We’ve backed Malaysian tech startups like Collektr, hosted events for local teams like Superteam Malaysia, and are major customers of many local businesses like barbers, laundromats, and restaurants. We’ve also revitalized the multibillion-dollar Forest City project, causing millions of MYR in real estate appreciation. And, as the video below describes, we were on the cusp of a 500M+ MYR expansion to grow our community, as well as a global merit scholarship with my friend Amjad Masad of Replit. However, that emerging multi-billion dollar success story — which should rightfully have been hailed as a huge victory for the pro-tech policies of the Malaysian government — is at risk of being derailed by a fake story spread by an anonymous account named MP4P. In short: on the day before the July 11 Johor elections, MP4P posted an Instagram post falsely accusing Network School of harboring illegal aliens. The sensational accusations caused a tizzy in Malaysia, until Malaysian authorities came to our campus on July 14 to investigate. (I should note that the officers were very polite and professional.) After checking hundreds of physical passports from 40 countries, including dual passport holders, the authorities confirmed to the press on July 15 that all travel documents were in order. During the process, we cooperated fully; in the thread below you can see a photo of the men, women, and children of Network School smiling and holding up their passports in the bright daylight. Our faces are shown and our names are known; we have nothing to hide. With that said, the process is the punishment. What MP4P did is very similar to the American crime of “swatting”, because MP4P created a hoax report of a serious threat, thereby forcing the Malaysian police to take time away from protecting the Malaysian people towards investigating a nonexistent issue. Moreover, this anonymous MP4P account has also called for Malaysia to boycott Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft…a move that would cost ordinary Malaysians thousands of jobs…even while MP4P’s own Instagram collaborators promote their Apple and Google apps! I mean, we aren’t talking about a credible accuser, but just someone screaming inconsistently at the top of their lungs on social media for traffic, an all-too-common phenomenon these days. Anyway, at this point, all further investment we were planning to make in Malaysia is on hold until we get sufficient assurance that such issues won’t recur. So are the investment plans of many of our friends, including the execs and investors at global tech firms that we brought to Forest City. Because to put it very plainly: we have invested 100M+ MYR in Malaysia, while creating jobs for dozens of Malaysians, and our faces and names are known. Our Malaysian executives and employees deserve the benefit of the doubt over anonymous internet trolls. There are two paths forward. In the first case, if Malaysia still wants continued global tech investment, if it wants to be a top 20 tech hub, if it wants us to revitalize Forest City, then we request an audience with the Prime Minister’s office to discuss the terms of a memorandum of understanding between Network School and the Malaysian government, similar to the document recently signed between the Solana Foundation and the Kazakhstan government. Specifics can of course be discussed, but we would publicly commit to abiding by all Malaysian laws (we already do) and respecting Malaysia’s sovereignty (never in question). In return, they’d get to know our friendly community, and realize that we actually chose Malaysia because we thought it was a great place to build a tech hub where engineers from the global South, investors from the West, and builders from Malaysia itself could meet new people, build cool things, and perhaps create millions of dollars in economic growth in the fullness of time. That vision of peace and trade, internationalism and entrepreneurialism, is still on the table. We aren’t asking for any money — just a meeting, to help restore confidence in Malaysia as an investable jurisdiction. Alternatively, if you don’t want our investment, or those of our colleagues at billion dollar funds and trillion dollar companies, we will of course respect your wishes, and reallocate our capital to other countries instead. Either way, we will remain friends and abide by your decision. Please let us know.

3M

Here’s the thing: Indians are rising. And that is actually why anti-Indian sentiment is rising. Not because Indians are so weak, but because Indians are once again becoming strong. CEOs of companies. Leaders of countries. Founders and investors. Doctors, writers, professors. Not just slumdogs. Millionaires. Now, I know what people will say. Not all Indians are doing well. More than a billion are still poor! And of course that’s true, and will be for a while. But Indians abroad have risen as individuals: And India is now rising as a country: Indeed, India is the fastest growing large economy in the world over the last decade: And I think Indians have a lot of headroom left. Where does it end up? We don’t know, but if even 5% of 1.4B Indian nationals are at the same level as the ~5M strong Indian American diaspora that currently produces ~6% of US tax revenue, that’s ~70M people capable of producing ~72% of current US tax revenue. So I think it’s at least possible that India returns to its historical level of relative prosperity: As a plausibility argument, recall that before America was even a twinkle in anyone’s eye, Marco Polo sought out China and Columbus risked his life to trade with India. So those civilizations were giant economic centers for thousands of years. And are becoming so again. This perspective demands a different approach. Not the victim mindset where Indians mimic Western wokes in whining piteously upon every slight. But a mature, tit-for-tat morality befitting a rising people where you cooperate with those that cooperate, ignore what is best ignored, and (proportionately) punish only when necessary. Because even from a purely realpolitik standpoint, constant cancellation doesn’t work. Recall that wokes tried that for the last decade, and all it got them was epic political defeat. They overused the penicillin called anti-racism, and now we have antibiotic-resistant actual racism. Indians will need different tactics. And that starts with moving from victim mentality to Vedic mentality, if you'll permit the poetic license. Because India isn't just a rising civilization, it's a returning civilization. And wokes are proven losers, but Indians can be winners.

1M

If possible, Marko Elez (@marko_elez) should be reinstated at DOGE. If that is not possible, we should fund him to do his own startup. Let me explain my logic. 1) First, there can be no negotiation with terrorists — or journalists. Giving a single inch to a journo on anything DOGE-related would be like firing Michael Flynn at the beginning of Trump’s first term. Nothing should be done in response to anything they write. 2) Second, the entire practice of digging through people’s old posts to find some negative remark should be deprecated. Some out-of-context remarks almost never represent the whole human being. 3) Third, to my Indian-origin followers — apparently Marko made some anti-Indian comments. Of course, I don’t love that. But he’s only 25, will mature in time, and is clearly very competent. I believe in capitalism and dialogue as a way to bridge this kind of divide. Not summary cancellation. TLDR: if possible, Elon should consider restoring Marko to DOGE.

2M

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