The House of Ellison is on the Brink

Dude. Why can't he just retire and enjoy the rest of his life with all of his stacks of money? He could spend $50m a day for the next 20 years and still have money left over. Why does he need more?

yeahiknow3 reply

lemmy.dbzer0.com

The only way to have that much wealth is to be insane. You can’t reason with these creatures, whose minds and motives are so alien, because they don’t “think” or “reason” the way you do. Their decisions are simultaneously algorithmic and aberrant. Their eyes are blank, their smiles and faces plastic (often literally).

There’s no one home.

BananaTrifleViolin

piefed.world

I found this article very interesting; the author is shorting on Oracle and makes that clear. But they give a convincing and cogent argument about the severity of the AI bubble and where it's going, with links to interesting news stories and opinion pieces throughout.

The circular flow of cash between AI companies, and the Enron style revenue inflation is laid out in a clear way. It's scary that such crazy behaviour is going on in the markets, and it seems the markets are catching on.

pelespirit

sh.itjust.works

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fu...

Then there is CoreWeave, the cleanest loop in the pile. Nvidia holds an equity stake in CoreWeave that it has kept topping up. CoreWeave raises debt collateralized by the GPUs themselves and spends the majority of everything it raises buying Nvidia hardware. And Nvidia has agreed, per CoreWeave‘s 8-K, to buy back $6.3 billion of whatever capacity CoreWeave fails to sell, through April 2032. Vendor, investor, and buyer of last resort: one company, all three seats. And who rents the capacity? Microsoft alone accounted for about two-thirds of CoreWeave‘s revenue — the same Microsoft that owns 27 percent of OpenAI, which holds its own $11.9 billion CoreWeave contract. Four companies, and every dollar visits all four before it rests.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, in a formal letter to Sam Altman demanding answers about the spending commitments, wrote that OpenAI “appears to be privatizing profits while seeking ways to let the public defray the costs of any potential failures of its business strategy.”

For scale: Enron‘s entire final-year revenue was about $100 billion; the Oracle–OpenAI contract alone is three times that. Enron‘s peak market value was roughly $70 billion; Nvidia‘s is five trillion. The Bank for International Settlements — an institution constitutionally incapable of hyperbole — compared the AI buildout to canal mania, railway mania, and the dot-com bubble, and observed that “these episodes ended with an eventual reversal in investment, inducing economy-wide recessions.”

lemmyman reply

lemmy.world

I have read many descriptions of these "loops" and I still don't get it. The articles use words like "pledge" and "collateralize" that have nebulous meanings.

I get accounting on a basic level. I took managerial accounting in college and I am the bookkeeper and tax accountant for my one-person business. But I don't get this, despite some moderate attempt.

Also over the years I've found that things I can't understand after a little effort are certainly out of the reach of lawmakers, who barely care about facts at all in the face of all the political pressure they are under.

So I don't get it, but it sounds skeezy as fuck to me, and we're all fucked.

pelespirit reply

sh.itjust.works

You don't get the loop because it's a scam at its core. It's magic accounting by renting and selling "products" to yourself, other companies you made that are ultimately yourself, and other companies in the loop.

[email protected] reply

lemmy.zip

Brem

lemmy.world

Oh Larry

Lookin' scary

Typical villainous billionaire

Got a stare that scares 'Care Bears' into fuzzy little balls of despair

Why can't the greedy and worthless self immolate?

'Prolly because they too busy watchin' immigrants weave whips for them to self-flagellate