The magnitude of their unsupported claims is a good indication but I suggest checking out their LinkedIn. They employ a handful of people none of them with a chemistry background, most of them don't have an engineering/science background at all.

The final data point: here's the CEO of Donut Lab also announcing "The World's First True Artificial Superintelligence" in a company where supposedly he is the chairman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilgJKjiDLV8 (for contrast here's Donut Lab's video announcement of the SSB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-aPS2AwMbc).

Notice that I never disagreed with his underlying take. Everyone should have concerns about investments in the magnitude of 1 or 2 pp of GDP that serve novel and unproven business models. He even cites a few people that I love to read - Matt Levine. I just think that the way he is representing things is grossly misleading.

If I had little financial knowledge my take away from reading his article would be (and _this_ is a simplification for comedic purposes): all of these big tech companies are all "cooking the books", and they all know that these investments are all bad and they just don't care (for some reason)... and they just hide all of these costs because they don't have money... And this is not a fair representation.

I think we are too forgiving of these type of "simplifications", if you think they are reasonable, ok. I just shared my take, probably I should have stuck with just the observations on the content and left out the subtle ad hominem, so that's a fair point.

BUT (my point)

Is that the article is terrible at reflecting all of that and makes wrong and misleading comments about it.

The idea that companies depreciating assets is them "pretending they haven't spent the money" or that "management gets to pick your depreciation period" is simply wrong.

Do you think any of those two statements are accurate?

P.S. Maybe you make a good point, I said that I suspected based on those statements that he had little financial knowledge. tbh I didn't know the author, hence the "suspect". But now that you say that it might be that he is so biased in this particular topic that he can't make a fair representation of his point. Irrespective of that, I will say it again: statements like the ones I've commented are absurd.

> When companies buy expensive stuff, for accounting purposes they pretend they haven’t spent the money; instead they “depreciate” it over a few years.

There's no pretending. It's accounting. When you buy an asset, you own it, it is now part of your balance sheet. You incur a cost when the value of the asset falls, i.e. it depreciates. If you spend 20k on a car you are not pretending to not having spent 20k by considering it an asset, you spent money but now you have something of similar value as an asset. Your cost is the depreciation as years go by and the car becomes less valuable. That's a very misleading way to put it.

> Management gets to pick your depreciation period, (...)

They don't. GAAP, IFRS, or whatever other accounting rules that apply to the company do. There's some degree of freedom in certain situations but it's not "management wants". And it's funny that the author thinks that companies in general are interested in defining longer useful lives when in most cases (this depends on other tax considerations) it's the opposite because while depreciation is a non-cash expense you can get real cash by reducing your taxable income and the sooner you get that money the better. There's some more nuance to this, tax vs accounting, how much freedom management has vs what is industry practice and auditors will allow you to do... my point is, again, "management gets to pick" is not an accurate representation of what goes on.

> It’s like this. The Big-Tech giants are insanely profitable but they don’t have enough money lying around to build the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of data centers the AI prophets say we’re going to need.

Actually they do, Meta is the one that has the least but it could still easily raise that money. Meta in this case just thinks it's a better deal to share risk with investors that at the moment have a very strong appetite to own these assets. Meta is actually paying a higher rate through these SPVs compared to funding them outright. Now, personally I don't know how I would feel about that deal in particular if I was an investor just because you need to dig a little deeper in their balance sheet to have a good snapshot of what is going on but it's not any trick, arguably it can make economic sense.