Private equity is killing private ownership: first it was housing, now it's PCs
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This point about "private equity" being a boogeyman is such a tired take, the vast majority of equity of companies are held privately, and the vulture PE firms do exist but are not as prevalent as people make it seem online. It's a meme that many people seem to have latched on when the vast majority of PE firms and companies work perfectly fine, buying a company, growing it, then selling it for a profit.
Aside, why not link the original video instead of a reddit post?
the vast majority of equity of companies are held privately
vulture PE firms do exist but are not as prevalent as people make it seem online. It's a meme that many people seem to have latched on when the vast majority of PE firms and companies work perfectly fine
If you're seeing it in the media, of course it's confirmation bias. Do you think it makes a good headline to say that a firm bought a company, grew it over 5 years, then sold it? Yet that's what happens in the majority of cases. Those in the media are the exceptions that prove the rule.
It's a huge mistake to narrow down the problems of private equity firms (PEFs) to the dissolution of the companies they buy.
> Do you think it makes a good headline to say that a firm bought a company, grew it over 5 years, then sold it?
How is that different from what the video said? They buy all the hardware, grow the price of it by the mere fact of buying it up, hoard it, and then they sell it back to you at even higher prices as cloud services.
They make a profit but you are robbed. It's the strategy of scalping which has been going on in the GPU market for quite some time, but now it's used by corporations on an industrial scale.
The problem is precisely in the normal operation of PEFs, or rather, in the regulations that allow them to operate that way.
I'm not sure I ever said this, certainly there are some problems attributable to their companies but not all.
> but now it's used by corporations on an industrial scale.
You mean, buying raw goods? It's not "scalping" if a company is buying what they need to integrate into their finished goods. That is to say, they are not buying them with the express purpose of reselling those same items back to you, as is, which is the case with actual scalpers of concert tickets or GPUs for example (and which is the actual definition of scalping, no economist would call this scalping). That's like saying I'm being "scalped" when a construction company buys timber to build into a house. Oh no, I'm being "robbed" of being able to buy my own wood, and the company is increasing the price of the wood by mere fact of buying it up, and then because the house costs more than what I would've paid for the wood.
No, it's not same as anyone, the AI and datacenter companies have long term supply agreements at lower prices, essentially front-running the retail market. These agreements redistrict the volume available for retail and we end up scalped.
At every step the corporate purchases happen at lower price points, like this:
Price at 10 ->
corporate, high volume, buys at 10, hoarding of hardware ->
price up, retail buys at 20 due to a starved retail space ->
corporate, high volume, buys at 20, more hoarding ->
price up, retail buys at 30 due to a starved retail space ->
... etc.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/now-more-pe-funds-mcdonald-12...
So while PE firms are not inherently “vulture” like, I would argue that the increasing number of firms fighting over the same number of assets to squeeze out returns (hopefully) above market returns leads to behavior that can be considered “vulture” like. For context, part of my work is to sell assets to PE firms
I'd actually be very interested to see if anyone ever managed to break down who actually owns what
I think PE just become a very popular way for wall street grads and MBA types to make a decent living without necessarily having to be a good investor (PE funds don’t present their full returns until 10+ after the fund has closed).
Also not particularly enjoying this new ragey vibe Steve has going but I guess it must be getting clicks because each video seems to have it turned up another notch
I wouldn't limit this to PE, although they are feeding on cheap dollars too, but the general trend of big capital out competing mom and pop for future resources. We're all short on real goods (need to buy food, shelter, ram, etc... in the future) and big capital is putting the squeeze on our short position by bidding up real resources with cheap dollars. Regular folks cover at a loss, or we go bust, and that's the gamble we're being put in.
A "market" is just a set of regulations, there can be infinitely many such sets and thus infinitely many different "markets".
Do you think each of these "markets" is perfect and cannot be criticized because the "existence of markets" is beyond criticism?
That's not true for all markets, least of all for "free" markets which not only "tend" to become monopolized, they do end up as Robber Baron lands on steroids.
If you were right, there would be no need for anti-monopoly regulation or even for any market regulation, and I wouldn't have to repeat twice that a market is just a set of regulations.
> But the idea that GPU prices rising is the end of the world is just silly.
Nobody claimed that but it can't be disproved either :) On the other hand, you seem to think we should be concerned only with problems that provably lead to the end of the world. I'm not sure how wise that is.
> Or maybe it’s not a long-standing trend
Or maybe it is? Should we close our eyes and rely on chance or just use the opportunity to fix what clearly is a systemic problem in the fundamentals of the US market and economy - it's quite clear that the problem isn't limited to just RAM and GPUs.
I am deeply sceptical of trying to use large public institutions and government to solve the “problem” of a price rising and falling from time to time as supply and demand change.
If you don’t believe in supply and demand or markets or you think that economics is some big scam, then we could save some time if you just say that, and then we don’t have to go back-and-forth pretending the issue is about AI or GPUs.
If there is a monopoly case to be made in GPU manufacturing or whatever, then make the case and let’s regulate that monopoly or break it up.
If there’s financial fraud going on, great make the case and let’s deal with it.
If all that’s happening is that some people are making speculative bets on prices a few years out, and they’ll either be right or wrong and either way it will be over, then I just have trouble getting worked up about it. If it means the gaming PC you have planned to build this year will either be a bit more expensive or you’ll have to put it off till the next year, I have trouble getting worked up about it.
Go back to 4chan
46k up votes for this shit, Jesus Christ everyone's insane these days man
Have you tried buying a home recently? It’s very tough to compete against the all-cash offers from investors.
Tangent but corporate landlords in my experience are so much better than mom and pops.
Depends on where you live, but if you build for yourself it's a non-commercial activity which can drop off a lot of red tape. Cost me only ~60k to build a house last year by doing everything myself. I did have to sign an affidavit promising not to sell it in X time to get the county to issue a permit like that.
I've even found land for <100k in places like San Francisco that is enough to drop a shipping container on, but of course the fascists won't let you, better to be homeless and shit hepatitis into the street than have an unpermitted shipping container and bury some 50 gallon drums and drain field DIY septic system.
1) Google 'opt out' or 'no permit' 'no codes' counties in USA.
2) Watched basically every video by larry haun and read his book (the entire theory to build structure of a house is explained in ~3 hours, but I think I watched it 5 or 8 times)
3) Looked at simple cabin / small home plans
There are a couple civil engineering 'saints' that visit some of the cabin and small home forums online. I won't reveal who they are. They pop up randomly and intermittently and tend to not respond unless people are actually in the middle of a home build because there are always a gazillion people that are 'going to do it' but then never do and waste everyone's time with questions. I ran through a lot of my roof structure through them because the IRC is quite sparse on roof design and wind load capacities. I also have a friend that is a civil engineer and ran things through them a lot, although in the end following the examples by larry haun and the IRC he did not recommend much different.
I basically just followed IRC design to frame a simple rectangular house with gable roof. This is about the easiest house to frame, other than one with a shed roof. I would recommend 16' max width because the lumber is much easier to get and then you can use a perimeter foundation as your only foundational load bearing points. But you can get away with 20' wide if you have the means to find and haul it, otherwise you're dealing with a more complex foundation or engineered joists.
I've also seen success with friends finishing out shipping containers. In that case you may be able to just build piers with sonotubes, drop a shipping container, frame the inside (all non-structural, so if you fuck it up not a huge deal), then use the inside framing to build like a conventional wooden home (except you will need an insulation that does not need to breath). The caveat here is that if you want any windows or doors other than the one already part of it, you will need to know how to weld and cut steel.
You could make an offer on 40+ houses and will likely never be in a 'bidding war' with a big PE firm or a company backed by one.
PE is a boogeyman used by politicians to obscure the uncomfortable fact that the problem is the policies they themselves have implemented in pretty much every community in the western world (making building new stuff defacto illegal).
“We find that investors' purchases increase the price-to-income ratio, especially in the bottom price-tier”
I hear this rhetoric a lot, but it’s almost always from people who have never actually been involved in selling a home, or are shopping for a home way out of their price range and were going to get outbid anyway.
“In 2025’s first half, 36% of purchases statewide were made by investors – up from 31% for all of 2024 and 16% at the recent low in 2020 as coronavirus was scrambling the economy.”
https://www.dailynews.com/2025/09/11/36-of-california-homebu...
"AI" is just the vehicle (the excuse) - it's not the root of the problem nor is it the ultimate goal.
You can say they're fools if you want - you might even be right! But pretending like hundreds (thousands?) of board members across the world are conspiring to build a buyer's cartel (monopsony?) in order to starve out the PC Gaming market of all things is just myopic.
I hope I'm not too vitriolic, especially if the guy in the video is here -- I certainly share a lot of politics with him, and absolutely share his priors regarding PE. I just think it's extremely clear that this particular subreddit has "lost the plot" as the ~~kids~~ mid-30s nerds say. If anyone's not familiar, I highly recommend a perusal through the top posts of the past week/month...
yet again I am begging, weeping, pleading for markdown support on HN, my lord
EDIT: more accurate language
Does it bother you if people express negative opinions about the things that affect them?
Every so often, there are events that really get people upset about the state of things. I think the Taylor Swift Ticketmaster thing would be one of them. In this case a guy who mostly wants his games to run fast is now caught in the middle of supply chains for the AI race and is finding out that when a trillion dollars are involved, his hobbies literally do not matter in comparison. So when someone ends up realizing this, I am hopeful that more people will as well and do something about it.
Firstly, institutional investors own ~3% of single-family homes in the US , even in hot markets, they rarely exceed 10%. The lack of supply is outweighs the private equity problem.
GPUs are manufactured goods where production scales with demand. When AI investment inevitably contracts, that fab capacity will redirect to consumer products. I don't know where this idea comes from that NVIDIA is conspiring with these companies to never sell consumers GPUs. It only takes so many GPUs to build out a streaming service, would they just stop making GPUs entirely? It doesn't make any sense if you think about it for more than 2 seconds.
Now it's the only thing that seems to be "surfaced" and "boosted" in any of the infosilos like reddit/youtube/etc.
I'm not against progress, obviously make things better, but the perspective is important.
I think a better metric would be what percent of purchases are made by institutional investors. This is because pricing is based on sales, not on the overall stock including properties that have been sat on for a long time. Have you looked at that metric?
One heuristic that points in the direction of this being meaningful is that a lot of SFHs seem to be owned by old people who have lived there for a long time.
I agree that the comparison is stupid though since computer hardware is much easier to scale with demand. If anything this may show that hardware manufacturers are betting that this demand spike is temporary and they aren’t yet willing to ramp up production since they could end up sitting on unsold inventory after the bubble pops.
Another recent video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvahiVBvn9A
We are not that at all. But then again for rich it pretty much is, just not 100% yet