Patrick Boyle’s video on this is much more accurate imho as it relates to exposure, potential drawdowns, and the intertwined asset classes contributing capital.
His livelihood includes AI/software consulting and paid technology/AI speaking, and his firm sells/implements products associated with major technology companies. Its neither an economist or a technologist.
> But don’t call them Enron. Enron caused the Enron crash.
it needs to come from the Enron region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling creative financial engineering.
> It’s highly unlikely that fraud at that level is being perpetuated now by these companies.
if we're going to have someone make a full-throated defense of the balance-sheet shenanigans AI companies are engaged in - shenanigans he himself describes:
> This way Meta gets its datacenter but most of the debt incurred to build it is not shown as a liability on its books.
...I would really like to hear a stronger claim than it being "highly unlikely" that fraud is occurring.
Meta is a public company. one of the tradeoffs we require public companies to make, in exchange for the larger pool of possible stockholders, is making their financial information publicly available.
so this author, or another journalist, should be able to look at that published financial information and definitively say that large-scale fraud isn't occurring.
but that's not possible, precisely because of the shell game the author is defending, where the liability is not on the books of Meta, but a company named Special-Purpose Vehicle That Is Totally Not Meta, LLC.
I mean, there was the messy end of the telecoms/internet boom in 2000, and the bursting of the dot com bubble which peaked in 2002. In amongst those were the September 11th shock, and the various accounting scandals including Arthur Andersen, Enron, and WorldCom.
Seen at this distance, it's reasonable to group them all together as the 'early 2000s recession' or similar.
Bad times, particularly in the tech industry. But Enron was neither the cause nor particularly totemic.
5 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 4.9 ms ] threadHere are some real hard facts:
"Why Big Tech’s AI Spending Is $3 Trillion Higher Than It Seems" - https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/why-big-techs-ai-spending-is-3-t...
"Geospatial monitoring, AI infrastructure buildout, and the emerging credit implications for private credit markets" - https://www.moodys.com/web/en/us/insights/credit-risk/privat...
Why the Market Can't Escape Artificial Intelligence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49403365 - August 2026
it needs to come from the Enron region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling creative financial engineering.
> It’s highly unlikely that fraud at that level is being perpetuated now by these companies.
if we're going to have someone make a full-throated defense of the balance-sheet shenanigans AI companies are engaged in - shenanigans he himself describes:
> This way Meta gets its datacenter but most of the debt incurred to build it is not shown as a liability on its books.
...I would really like to hear a stronger claim than it being "highly unlikely" that fraud is occurring.
Meta is a public company. one of the tradeoffs we require public companies to make, in exchange for the larger pool of possible stockholders, is making their financial information publicly available.
so this author, or another journalist, should be able to look at that published financial information and definitively say that large-scale fraud isn't occurring.
but that's not possible, precisely because of the shell game the author is defending, where the liability is not on the books of Meta, but a company named Special-Purpose Vehicle That Is Totally Not Meta, LLC.
I mean, there was the messy end of the telecoms/internet boom in 2000, and the bursting of the dot com bubble which peaked in 2002. In amongst those were the September 11th shock, and the various accounting scandals including Arthur Andersen, Enron, and WorldCom.
Seen at this distance, it's reasonable to group them all together as the 'early 2000s recession' or similar.
Bad times, particularly in the tech industry. But Enron was neither the cause nor particularly totemic.