Anyone have any historical data on the dotcom bubble and what stocks benefited from the crash?
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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If I had to guess, all the big companies that were deemed "to big to fail" and were bailed out.
bump
Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.
[...] Nvidia ... "invest[s]" tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. The the same chunk of money being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).
investing back and forth, forever
Feels like when banks could lend x10 times their wealth, they'd just borrow lots of money forth and back, infinite money (and a good old crash)!
This is actually kind of scary. These huge tech companies that, for better or worse, form the foundation of modern life, could collapse overnight if the chips fall a certain way.
Hehe chips.
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Well Nvidia's the one laughing to the bank here; they've offloaded their GPUs for cash and stakes, and Microsoft/OpenAI/'AI' providers are the ones holding the bag (and GPUs).
Picks and shovels. The profiteers of the gold rush were the suppliers... I mean, Nvidia wants the grift to keep going, of course, but still.
They'll be hit hard also. Apparently about 50% of their sales revenue comes from 3 customers, almost certainly members of the Magnificent 7 buying GPUs for data centers. In the modern economy, a quarter without revenue growth is failure, but imagine double digit decline.
I mean, their stock price will take a hit. But realistically, that is not necessarily bad for Nvidia as a company, as long as they are ready for the burst and don't over extend.
Yeah, exactly.
Their stock will tank, but financially? They will be fine. They'll go back to a more sane baseline market with an absolute mountain of cash and disturbing market share to show for it.
Seriously. NVDA and AMD are the only ones who are going to profit from this. And the CEOs, of course.
Their golden parachutes are locked and ready.
FYI
Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, and AMD's CEO, Lisa Su, are first cousins once removed.
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I feel like he missed a key opportunity to tell the kid asking “what do we do?” “You need to unionize. Collective effort and mutual aid will serve you better in life than most things.”
Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters ("humans in the loop"), which won't work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job.
I've been reading David Graeber. How many of these jobs are bullshit jobs that don't need doing in the first place?
Maybe we should figure out which jobs aren't bullshit jobs.
With our efficiency there would be loads of people left out, maybe we should reinstate jobs like artists (real ones, not bullshit artists)?
Probably quite a few, but don’t let the fact they’re bullshit jobs fool you into thinking they don’t matter. The middle manager making $100K a year is spending that money on food, clothing, and other items that are produced by people who don’t have bullshit jobs.
Good middle management keeps things running in the background for the people that don't have bullshit jobs. With businesses overvaluing middle management and making it a career path to move up to, there are way too many middle management positions which is why most of them are bullshit.
You're right. These bullshit job kinda need to exist as people need to eat, and that's difficult without a steady income. We really do need to start talking seriously about a UBI.
If AI can do it, it's more than likely a bullshit job that doesn't need to be done.
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We need a better tool than that old, easily-manipulated "stock market" to track value. Value needs to become real again, not always inflated, because "shareholders".
Value is a mechanism that hides what actually creates value: human labor power
Energy & material extraction also create value.
But who mines the materials? Natural resources are given to the oil and gas industries. The gasoline and fuels displace the value of human work by technological means, but the machines still need people to run them. The machines were built by workers. Without people doing stuff the oil and minerals just stay in the ground.
You can argue that oil and gas mineral industry mines the resources, but those resources, and the work it takes to extract them, is incredibly valuable to society. So who owns them, and why, becomes a political question.
Value is nothing but a store for human labor.
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It's a pyramid scheme, always has been... every decade for the last 30yrs there's been a few of them... The dot.com boom and bust of the 90's was the start, in the 2000's everything went 'digital' which was the same old shit with an LCD added to it and a doubling of the price, digital services for games/music/movies where they could take away what you bought... then they got even more serious in the 2010's where the real enshitification of the internet started... the 'cloud' where you were no longer allowed to own your own data, subscription fees for everything... 'smart' appliances that just tracked you and stole your privacy for the enrichment of a few billionaires... Crypotocurrency, the biggest scam and pyramid scheme to date... and now in the 2020's, crypto as a means to launder money and bribe politicians, massive corruption, fraud and consolidation of power by evil people and their corporate paymasters... and of course... the newest and worst pyramid scheme of them all... AI...
The only way to win is not to play... don't use it, disable it, remove it... every time you use it you are encouraging them to invade you life, take away your rights and exert control over what you can do and think... I know some of you will think that's an over reaction, you will learn one day that I and others were right to warn you as I have been doing for years now... But by then it will be too late, the climate is burning and these billionaires are trying to make it happen quicker, they value their wealth more than your very existence and they will hide away in their bunkers and private islands as the rest of humanity burns.
The fall is going to be epic.
I can't wait for a flood of liquidated A100/H100/MI300 servers. I'm in for the cheap rentals, if not buying one.
My whale oil investments are looking pretty good now
I've chosen to put everything into gourd futures.
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Don't forget a similar amount is tied up real estate and that bubble is already popping, starting in the SE
Nvidia is profiteering
selling shovels aint illegal
selling shovels on credit is pretty dumb though
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AI may not be profitable right now, but there's a lot more to "the magnificent 7" than AI that keeps them profitable. Even if the AI bubble popped, people would still be wasting their time on Facebook and Microsoft teams.
They still have to make that money back somehow though. They can't just put a load of investment down on AI, make zero money off it (or worse, less than zero) and then expect everything to be fine with the existing profits. They need to raise revenue from existing streams to cover for the loss they just incurred by doing AI. That, or cut costs, which means layoffs, which means people have less money, meaning they spend less money, which means businesses make less money, so they do layoffs, and so on and so on leading to a recession.
US taxpayes will be proud to carry this burden, as always.
Privatize profits, socialize losses. The American (and thus global) way
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I love how with the previous schemes like crypto, communities like this would have thought they were in on it, now with AI it's like nope not falling for that Spanish prisoner BS again.
Crypto allowes everyone to gamble. LLM hype only works for the owners, everyone else have only fugly pictures and schizophrenic texts
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