not to mention hiding all the Twitter losses inside of xAI because AI in general loses lots of money.
18,423 karma · joined July 22, 2015
1. 401Ks were introduced in 1978, making mainstream the concept of automatic payroll deductions that funded an investment account. Trillions more dollars moved into pension funds that might otherwise have been spent elsewhere.
2. Bloomberg Terminals went online in 1982, kicking off an ever-growing information assymetry between investment professionals and retail investors.
3. Electronic trading didn't take off until 1992 with Globex, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's platform
4. High-frequency trading didn't take off until 2005 or so
5. Finally, the Nasdaq changed its rules in 2026 in a way that directly benefited new IPOs like SpaceX, triggering automated purchases from investment funds, propping up its price beyond what its business fundamentals might have justified.
After the Cold War, McKinsey and big 4 consultancies are working in every part of government, ostensibly to make government as efficient as the private sector. The NSA's surveillance program wouldn't have seen the light of day had Booz Allen not had a contract with them.
When I think about elder dude fantasizing about pwning the rascal youth, I think of those self-written scenes of a boomer/early GenX actor asking for "black coffee", then delivering a diatribe to the Gen Z minimum wage worker who's contractually obligated to try to upsell them on the higher-priced and infuriatingly named mixed coffee beverages.
WordPress and WooCommerce? Nah, here's how you set up a Squarespace Ecommerce site - if you hit publish, you'll be auto-subscribed to their $20/month plan.
Reddit has been one of the world's top websites for over a decade, yet they are totally irrelevant in terms of ad product market share.
If you kids could stop wasting money on Spotify and Xbox Live, you could pay $200/mo for ChatGPT Pro to become AI-native.
Their innovation isn't in ads, it's in creating a sticky app experience that downranks posts with external URLs to keep people on their site, one that's now fine-tuned to retain the lowest-common denominator of technology user (boomers). Ironically, a segment that the OG Facebook avoided like the plague is now their bread and butter.
People who don't understand nor care about how the system works are the ones most likely to click on targeted ads, share sensationalist slop and comment positively on AI videos of of Hegseth fighting Godzilla.
And even then, for ad buyers, the ROI is a complete crapshoot because of how purchase attribution works on every ads platform. Every ad platform puts their marketing pixel on your site, and they all try to take credit for every sale made on it.
After Vietnam and Afghanistan, has the US not learned that countries at war are willing to incur costs well beyond what the State Department thinks they should?
Beyond that, what would prevent the next administration from unilaterally decreeing this current agreement null and void as was done with the JCPOA? They certainly aren't going to want to bear the brunt of political unpopularity of paying out billions in war reparations.
He seems like a private person doesn't flaunt his wealth and has mostly avoided inserting himself into public discourse, unlike many of his tech-rich peers.
By hiring McKinsey to tell them they need to start selling and and acquire their competitors? That is the only way the unicorns established their position.