>These deals are also being done in the open with publicly traded companies. Investors can see the balance sheets and react accordingly in the stock price.

I'm no expert on the specifics of the circular financing we're seeing here so the rest of what you wrote might be true, but I know enough about how Wall Street and the world in general works to know that closing with this as a defense shows an incredible naivete that makes me question everything else you have said.

▲

epistasis 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Indeed, a comment above linked to Matt Levine's newsletter on the off-books debt that is showing up instead as things like JVs, and here's another Bloomberg Reporter, Carmen Arroyo, covering it from a more journalistic angle:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-31/meta-xai-...

▲

refulgentis 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No need for all that, the idea OpenAI is committed to $1.4 trillion in pay is a Ed Zitron-sourced number where he calculates $400B based on a number he made up for how much a gigawatt costs, and the trillion figure by multiplying further by claiming every deal is for 2026 and will be repeated over next N years.

▲

peaseagee 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Exactly. Enron was a publicly traded company doing weird circular financing stuff. It was all in the open for anyone who cared to look. Just no one did until the music stopped...

	▲	refulgentis 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		We’re a bit too far if we assert this. The weird circular Enron stuff wasn’t all in the open, was by wholly owned subsidiaries, and the downfall was massive trading losses that could no longer be hidden by shuttling money to and from subsidiaries at the right time. A hole in a balance sheet is quite different from a purchase done by financing, thus “circular financing” when applied to both means “things we worry about that involve payments between 2 entities”