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> whole US economy is propped up by FAANG

This is nonsense. The stock market had been propped up by FAANG. But with AI we have a few trillion dollars of value being created by new entrants (e.g. OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic) and legacy companies newly stepping on FAANG (e.g. Oracle, Perplexity).

It may all be a fever dream. But like the dark fiber of the 90s, it should—worst case—leave behind a lot of energy and datacentre infrastructure. (If Washington would get out of the way.)

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LinXitoW 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

The AI companies that are famously making massive profits and have found a well working way to make money, correct? They aren't just propped up by the sale of a fantasy world full of money that's always just a couple months or years away. Just a couple billion more, I swear.

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lm28469 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"our companies are worth gazillion units of the money we print like there is no tomorrow and which isn't actually backed by any tangible thing"

Yeah OK, cool I guess

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JustExAWS 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

And none of those are public companies and no one knows how much any of those companies are worth.

Right now using the valuation technique that tge value of a company is the net present value of all future returns * some multiple, we don’t know if any of them will ever be valuable.

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JumpCrisscross 5 days ago | parent [-]

> using the valuation technique that tge value of a company is the net present value of all future returns some multiple, we don’t know if any of them will ever be valuable*

This metric has nothing to do with whether a company is public or private.

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JustExAWS 5 days ago | parent [-]

But no one knows how much a company is truly worth until it goes on the public market and if all of the private companies “worth billions” went under, only VCs would be harmed. This isn’t like the dot com bust.

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JumpCrisscross 5 days ago | parent [-]

> no one knows how much a company is truly worth until it goes on the public market

Nobody ever knows what a company is worth other than the people buying and selling it in an M&A transaction at that precise moment. Public markets just have more transactions than private markets—the mechanism of price discovery is similar, if not the same.

> if all of the private companies “worth billions” went under, only VCs would be harmed

I’d be shocked if it didn’t take out the banking system.

You’re describing the annihilation of trillions of dollars of pension, endowment and retirement wealth; to say nothing of the effects on municipal, state and federal payroll finances; to say nothing of the asset-backed loans tied to these assets and purchases they make from public companies and their employees’ spending.

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scarface_74 5 days ago | parent [-]

Private equity makes up less than 1% of pensions

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/11/private-equity-wants-a-large...

	▲	s1artibartfast 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Is significantly more for pensions. The article says 1% of retirement is for retirement plans, which are predominantly 401ks. The article claims pensions, on the other hand, as one of the leading investors in private equity. The term retirement plan is radically different from pensions. By way of example, your local teachers union pension is probably massively invested to private equity. Your tech worker 401k is not.