Customer A pays you $100 for goods that cost you $10. You invest $100-$10=$90 in customer B so that they'll pay you $90 for goods that cost you $9. Your reported revenue is now $100+$90=$190, but the only money that entered the system is the original $100.

Yes, but you’ve also incurred a $90 expense in purchasing the stock of Company B and that stock is on the balance sheet.

In the actual shady version of this, Company B isn’t the hottest AI investment around, it’s a shell company created by your brother’s cousin that isn’t actually worth what you’re claiming on the balance sheet because it was only created for the round tripping shell game.

Except that this is isn't round-tripping at all. Round-tripping doesn't result in a company actually incurring expenses to create more product. Round-tripping is the term for schemes that enable you to double count assets/revenue without any economic effects taking place.

Every time HackerNews talks about anything in the legal or finance realm, people trip over themselves to make arguments for why something a big tech is doing is illegal. This is definitively neither illegal nor shady. If Nvidia believes, for example, that OpenAI can use their GPUs to turn a profit, then this is inherently positive sum economically for both sides: OpenAI gets capital in the form of GPUs, uses them to generate tokens which they sell above the cost of that capital and then the return some of the excess value to Nvidia. This is done via equity. It's a way for Nvidia to get access to some of the excess value of their product.

And your evaluation also rises as a consequence of your increased revenue.