this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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I thought for-profit companies were supposed to make a profit...
Well actually there is a long and rich history of companies that are able to operate at a loss using funds appropriated from sale of shares to investors, and this process continues so long as new investors keep buying in such that anybody selling out is covered by the new funds until enough people try to sell out that the price starts to plunge, although the collapse can be delayed by the company strategically buying back and occasionally splitting or reorganizing, meaning everyone gets their money back unless they sell too late.
You know.
A fucking Ponze Scheme.
Well that's a damn good post Mr banjo
Ding ding na na na na na ding ding ding
Oh honey, that hasn't been true since 2008.
The government will bail out companies that get too big to fail. So investors want to loan money to companies so that those companies become too big to fail, so that when those investors "collect on their debt with interest" the government pays them.
They funded Uber, which lost 33 billion dollars over the course of 7 years before ever turning a profit, but by driving taxi companies out of business and lobbying that public transit is unnecessary, they're an unmissable part of society, so investors will get their dues.
They funded Elon Musk, whose companies are the primary means of communication between politicians and the public, a replacing NASA as the US government's primary space launch provider for both civilian and military missions, and whose prestige got a bunch of governments to defund public transit to feed continued dependence on car companies. So investors will get their dues through military contracts and through being able to threaten politicians with a media blackout.
And so they fund AI, which they're trying to have replace so many essential functions that society can't run without it, and which muddies the waters of anonymous interaction to the point that people have no choice but to only rely on information that has been vetted by institutions - usually corporations like for-profit news.
The point of AI is not to make itself so desirable that people want to give AI companies money to have it in their life. The point of AI is to make people more dependent on AI and on other corporations that the AI company's owners own.