• Buffalox@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Enron was cooking the books hiding huge deficits, and spending the money from the workers pension funds, so no Nvidia isn’t Enron, but that doesn’t mean it’s all good.
    Enron was the absolute worst, only matched by the Bernie Madoff pyramid scheme and the Bankman Fried crypto fraud.

    Saying you are better than that is a very bad look.

  • weew@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    Nvidia definitely isn’t Enron. It’s all of Nvidia’s customers that are mini-Enrons.

    Enron crashed because they were cooking their books and faking income, declaring potential profit where none existed.

    That’s not Nvidia. Nvidia is selling actual product as fast as they can make it at whatever price they want to charge.

    Nvidia’s customers, on the other hand, are the ones who have to justify buying billions of dollars of product from Nvidia and explaining how they plan to make a profit from that.

    • trolololol@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      NVIDIA is producing and delivering GPUs. However this does NOT translate into income, and that’s what’s making it shady. These companies are paying in shares that will be worth nothing when it pops.

    • Dead_or_Alive@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      It depends on the customer. Microsoft, Google, Amazon all have the revenue to carry the debts they are taking on. Oracle, Chat GPT, Musk and others are waay more sketchy.

      The build out is going to take billions of dollars and these companies aren’t going to see a return for at least 5 years or more. The majors can carry that kind of debt load long term even if AI doesn’t pan out. Other businesses will struggle or go under if AI doesn’t bring the returns.

      The next major movers will be companies that do a lot of IT business consulting like IBM. They are going to be busy helping non IT focused firms incorporate AI into their business model.

      Finally if all these data centers pan out and the US keeps oscillating between shunning Renewables or Fossil fuels every time a new party comes to office we are going to have major problems with our energy infrastructure. Think energy bills as high as your mortgage within the next 5 years. Invest in utilities or energy companies and try to put solar and some kind of storage on your home.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      2 months ago

      It’s all of Nvidia’s customers that are mini-Enrons.

      I don’t think that those are faking profit. Well, I don’t have some comprehensive list, and maybe somewhere someone is, but not for the majority of purchases. It’s possible that they won’t wind up being long-term profitable, but there isn’t fraud involved in that.

      I don’t think that the Enron analogy is very applicable in general. Like, what people who are critical of the extent of AI investment are worried about is analogous to the dot-com bubble, where the returns to investors from companies didn’t warrant the level of investment and stock prices for many companies shot way up and then fell back down.

      EDIT: It’s fair to say that Nvidia is driving demand for its products. But…that may be quite sensible, since if you have a killer app or two explode, it can drive massive demand for the hardware that runs it. If you have capital available and control the best hardware out there, it may well make more sense to use that capital on building more demand for your product than to go and try and improve the product more. There’s only so many chip engineers available that Nvidia can hire, and unless they want to get into the “writing AI software” game themselves, which would have them compete with their customers, I’d think that that’s potentially a reasonable place to put their capital if they’re trying to improve their business potential.

      Nvidia sold a lot of hardware when cryptocurrency became popular. I think that it’s probably fairly safe to say that AI applications have considerably more potential to provide utility than does cryptocurrency.

  • zebidiah@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    If a company says they are not like Enron, it means they 1000% are exactly like Enron

  • Sirdubdee@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Big tech is just trading the same $100b between each other to generate infinite shareholder value.

    • AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Man that reminds me of an old comic where two guys give each other the same $50,000 back and forth to eat horse shit and in the end their like, “we just created two jobs and grew GDP by $100,000!” Lol

      • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 months ago

        In Russia it’s an anecdote about two cowboys with one saying in the end “Bill, I think we’ve both just eaten shit for free”.

  • fodor@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    Remember that when the news article talks about the economy, it’s mostly talking about rich people’s yachts.

    Obviously there are some people nearing retirement age who need their pension plans not to lose value rapidly, they do exist. But the vast majority of the money that is being discussed here, that a bubble might make or break, is millionaires and billionaires savings accounts… So when this bubble bursts and when these companies go bankrupt, to hell with the ultra rich. If we want to help out people who are struggling to live out their retirement because of the stock market collapse that will occur, let’s do that, and let’s just tell the billionaires to go to hell.

    • Pup Biru@aussie.zone
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      2 months ago

      openai has practically no value and that’s well known… nvidia is paying companies to buy their chips and playing bullshit shell games

      the difference is openai is a pretty well known unprofitable company, and they aren’t doing quite as much of the bullshit shell games. nvidia is selling to basically everyone, taking stakes in companies, giving weird deals… it’s bloody impossible to track how much of their sales are real and how much those real sales are actually worth, or if those sales are loss leaders for some investment then those investments look a lot like openai

      so nvidia not only is invested in a lot of very questionable AI bubble companies, but also their own sales figures are… unreliable

      they’re making billions upon billions because they’re using their own money multiple times. it’s kinda like leveraged trading with all the risk and it’s incredible arrogant at the scale that nvidia is doing it

    • CandleTiger@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      If you want to get advantage from a speculative fund making a bet on a popped bubble, then you need to be already invested now, before the bubble bursts. (And also, you/your fund need to be right that it’s really about to pop now, and not later)

      Once the race is over it’s too late to bet on the ponies.

  • mesa@piefed.social
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    2 months ago

    The SP500 is starting to look like NVIDIA -> companies NVIDIA is investing in -> everyone else. Its starting to get NVIDIA heavy. If they go down…SP500 is gong to look terrible.

    • UltraMagnus@startrek.website
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      2 months ago

      It’s a bad position to be in. If they crash it will be bad, but if they keep growing and then crash it could be worse.

  • tja@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    If you have to protest the insinuation as the CEO of a company in a public forum…Then I think the accusation has already found enough root to at least contain more than a grain of truth. The phrase “He doth protest too much” comes to mind.