found the article quite weak, hurt by the East Coast media’s tendency to make everything about government & Trump.
> Donald Trump has unashamedly profited from the presidency, earning more than $1.4 billion in 2025 from cryptocurrency deals. The Trump family has received significant money coming from countries that wish to bend the president’s ear on foreign policy. Donald Trump Jr. has benefited from the sudden interest in his business acumen. Months after the younger Trump’s venture-capital firm took an ownership stake in a rare-earth-magnet start-up, it was awarded a $620 million government loan.
I was hoping, if this style of fraud has become the norm, that we would have more true non-governmental examples. I do not agree that it has become the norm and don’t think this article does much to make the case.
I wasn't wow-ed by this piece either. There does seem to be something there, though: this thing where someone commits some serious fraud yet gives Trump a slice and then they're pardoned, along with the precipitous drop in prosecuting just these kinds of cases.
We’re talking about fraud about medical results over technology that essentially violates basic principles.
Honestly it’s kind of astounding Theranos ever became so hyped. The mythology of Silicon Valley and the glorification of shady shit probably helped. Reddit for example started out by doing shady shit. They would fake activity on the site with bots.
Y Combinator and Paul Graham glorified this kind of fake it until you make it bullshit. Reddit was an early Y Combinator startup. So I think they have an indirect responsibility of promoting this culture.
(Obviously they were not directly involved in Theranos)
Yeah —- the fake it till you make it, ghost-in-the-machine strategy has these as extreme outcomes. AI companies whose devices are in fact human-level intelligent because they are being remote-managed by teleworkers, etc.
Delve (YC W24) was a great example of this going badly wrong really recently, but honestly I think the cavalcade of startups using a fork of someone else's open source wrapper around someone else's cloud AI are not far off.
After all, if you have no real secret sauce at all because your supplier's cloud LLM is basically capable of everything you're claiming as a feature with just the thinnest amount of tool-calling, should anyone be investing in you at all, even just to acquihire?
Fraud is rampant before major economic crashes. Same thing happened in the 1920s. Charles Ponzi, the Florida real estate schemes, Goldman Sachs leveraged investment trusts. There was even what might be the first tech bubble pump and dump with RCA (a radio company). A bunch of investors bought up shares and then went to work hyping it to the public so they would buy in. The investors then dumped it and left everyone else holding the bag. Sound familiar?
It sounds less familiar than it ought to. Investment bankers facilitated Elon merging herds of dead cows into his herds of still living cows. How, for example do you take Twitter, crash the revenue numbers, roll it into SpaceX, and the SpaceX valuation doesn't get dinged? I'll tell you how: the banks underwriting the SpaceX IPO manipulated the price. They did it because Elon is going to come back to them with even more bigger transactions.
It looks like Elizabeth Holmes payed some PR company to get a lot of news articles her to whitewash her name just when we forgot about how cruel she was. On me it works just the opposite, she should just serve her sentence in her luxury prison and come out quiet.
Most of the analysis I've seen focus on how unlikely it is that OpenAI and anthropic can make their compute commitments. But the biggest divergence between revenue and first tier ambitions is xAI, or is it XSI now?
24 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 6.8 ms ] thread> Donald Trump has unashamedly profited from the presidency, earning more than $1.4 billion in 2025 from cryptocurrency deals. The Trump family has received significant money coming from countries that wish to bend the president’s ear on foreign policy. Donald Trump Jr. has benefited from the sudden interest in his business acumen. Months after the younger Trump’s venture-capital firm took an ownership stake in a rare-earth-magnet start-up, it was awarded a $620 million government loan.
I was hoping, if this style of fraud has become the norm, that we would have more true non-governmental examples. I do not agree that it has become the norm and don’t think this article does much to make the case.
Now you've got a third of the country who are just totally ok with fraud if its perpetrated by someone on their team.
Nearly all tech billionaires are on their team.
FTX, Terra-Luna, Nikola (as mentioned), Builder.ai, Frank, Kalder, Joonko
O and have you heard about the AI labs and how they calculate ARR? lol.
Statistically significant though? I do not know.
We’re talking about fraud about medical results over technology that essentially violates basic principles.
Honestly it’s kind of astounding Theranos ever became so hyped. The mythology of Silicon Valley and the glorification of shady shit probably helped. Reddit for example started out by doing shady shit. They would fake activity on the site with bots.
Y Combinator and Paul Graham glorified this kind of fake it until you make it bullshit. Reddit was an early Y Combinator startup. So I think they have an indirect responsibility of promoting this culture.
(Obviously they were not directly involved in Theranos)
Delve (YC W24) was a great example of this going badly wrong really recently, but honestly I think the cavalcade of startups using a fork of someone else's open source wrapper around someone else's cloud AI are not far off.
After all, if you have no real secret sauce at all because your supplier's cloud LLM is basically capable of everything you're claiming as a feature with just the thinnest amount of tool-calling, should anyone be investing in you at all, even just to acquihire?
explain
but jobs actually delivered.