Is it just me or has money like this lost it's appeal and value? A billion dollars used to be unthinkable, now it's just some number. Companies valued at X doesn't even raise an eyebrow for me. It's like were playing with Monopoly money.
It’s because they’re playing with monopoly money. If you leverage all the money on itself repeatedly, you can make the numbers look insane. Then, you hand pieces of the leveraged money (stock options) to a bunch of executives who will be watched very closely. You don’t sell stock that’s going to go up in value, so they have to be very careful about when and how much they sell. If they sell too much, then the facade can break, and the leverage evaporates.
To be clear, there is real, underlying value & revenue. But there’s a lot of froth right now
I think it's a very small chance. Look at how many absolutely technically useless CEOs, such as Elon Musk, are still perceived by many in the industry and outside of it. The WeWork guy got funding for a new startup immediately post collapse. It takes a lot to reach SBF/Madoff levels.
Sbf built a pyramid scheme that collapsed. Sam altman has built a pyramid scheme that will soon collapse. The collapse is the point. This way insurance companies, advertisers, etc can buy the company and its assets, the customer data, that gives them a level of access to people laws and anti-trusts would otherwise prevent.
You know the saying, "when you owe the bank a million dollars, that's your problem, but when you owe the bank a billion dollars, that's the bank's problem"?
I suspect the theory behind OpenAI is to grow to be "too big to fail" as fast as they can, because once they cross that threshold, their liquidity/solvency problems will cease to be theirs, and become everyone else's.
‘A Guardian investigation last month revealed many of these were “phantom investments” and a supercomputer scheduled to go live in 2026 was this March still a scaffolding yard in Essex. That supercomputer was to be built by Nscale, a UK firm that had never built a datacentre before but said it was aiming to deliver the project in 2027. Nscale was also to build key datacentres for Stargate UK.’
Guys… it’s an obvious scam. Has everyone lost their damn mind?
There are so, so many naked scams right now which are still being hyped by Big Names, it boggles my mind. Substrate is an obvious scam, data centers in space are an obvious scam, it goes on and on. But they all have famous names insisting with a straight face that these should be taken seriously. It feels like psychological warfare against intelligent people.
Quantum is a scam. It's embarrassing to see it being peddled as the next big thing, with public companies being valued in the billions. For technology that does not exist in any useful sense.
Im convinced many who are actually intelligent have just lost their damn mind from too much exposure to LLMs. And it shouldnt be surprising - we already know the effects of mindless doom scrolling.
Very few have the discipline to prevent being sucked in.
Reminds me of Foxconn's "$10 billion" factory investments in Wisconsin in 2017 that turned out to be just another tax dodge. In 2022, the investment amount and jobs created estimates were reduced by more than 90%.
‘Among those affected were a senior military officer responsible for information security, a counter terrorism coordinator in the foreign affairs department, and an employee whose role was to identify hybrid threats against the country.’
There shouldn’t even be the option to use simple passwords. And MFA should be mandatory. This reads like something from the 90’s.
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