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Comment by pols45 | Hacker News Reader

Yup. Not just Nvidia. Just look at the quarterly results reported by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Apple. Each one is reporting revenues never before seen in history. If you make 100 Billion a quarter you have to spend it on something.

These guys are running hyper optimized cash extraction mega machines. There is no comparison to previous bubbles, cause so no such companies ever existed in the past.

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100 billion a quarter is Alphabet, right? Given how much click fraud there is, and that every org and business under the sun is held to ransom to feature on the SERP for their own name even — it’s tempting to say Google’s become a private tax on everything.

No, Apple also has 100 billion dollars in revenue despite floundering AI and running a very hardware dependent business.

> Given how much click fraud there is [etc]

It's easy for the techies to see the problems. But advertising results have been very measurable for a very long time by now. Larger advertisers can leave the details to their techies and still be very clear as to their advertising's productivity post-cost of doing business.

What's shocking is the gulf between those companies and corporate 'normality'.

Eastern Airways, a UK airline, has just gone bust due to accumulated debts of £26 million. That's not even a rounding error for Google, yet was enough to put a 47-year-old company into bankruptcy and its staff out of work.

I think the only historical parallel to this disparity was the era of the East India Company.

Odd how they are simultaneously having large layoffs even as reporting record revenues.

The question is where the profits are.

Amazon - 14,000 layoffs; significant

Microsoft - 14,000 (multiple rounds); significant

Meta - 600 layoffs; insignificant for company size

Google - "Several hundred layoffs"; insignificant for a company size

Apple - No layoffs

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/24/tech-layoffs-2025-list/

Google's Youtube unit is doing soft layoffs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45766368

Also every one of them has hundreds of thousands of external contractors which are not reported anywhere.

And offshoring is also a huge cost-cutting effort everywhere.

The layoffs at Amazon and Microsoft are not due to lack of profits. They’re massively profitable right now.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/ebi...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/ebitda

They're "massively profitable" because they're laying off large portions of a major cost center - labor - and backloading uncoming data center construction costs. As those come due, and labor needs rise again, that profit disappears.

yes, these companies have a track record of disappearing profits :)

They have a track record of cornering a market and abusing their position, and also still somehow not being able to balance expenses and revenues to turn a profit that pleases shareholders. You get to decide if that's a problem with the company or the shareholders, I guess.

So many such profitable companies are the best possible evidence for the need for drastic antitrust intervention. The lack of competition and regulation is leading to a massive drain on every other sector.

This bubble is caused by excess competition. There are 4 large companies who believe that a large new market is being created so each is investing large amounts without any evidence that there will be a single winner that dominates the future market. None of these companies has anything remotely resembling a monopoly except for Amazon in online retail.

Google: search, chrome, youtube

Microsoft: desktop software

Meta: social media

Maybe on some technical definitions of "monopoly" these aren't monopolies, but nothing remotely resembling a monopoly? come on maan

Monopolies being bad for free markets is a simplification. Substantial control over the market would be more accurate description of the issue.

How much more was worth USD at the beginning of the year?

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