| ▲ | dgellow 10 hours ago |
| I don’t understand the issue, cannot you ignore his commentary and just look at the numbers? |
|
| ▲ | simonw 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I'm not financially literate enough to trust my own analysis of the numbers. Ideally I'd like commentary from someone like Bloomberg's Matt Levine, a genuine expert in financial matters who is also extremely good at explaining them in terms non-finance-professionals like me can understand. |
| |
| ▲ | jdgoesmarching 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I didn’t even see the OP comment as a criticism of his analyses, just that he likes to do this rhetorical trick of dropping in numbers that are, at best, tangential to his point to prop up the argument’s credibility. Sometimes he does this in the middle of a real financial analysis which is even more maddening and confusing. | |
| ▲ | dgellow 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Fair, if you’re looking for reliable financial commentary Matt Levine is indeed the goat. Zitron is more like an old school blogger, with a very aggressive and corrosive style. My approach for internal documents leaked by Zitron is just to wait to see if Bloomberg picks up on the info or not. |
|
|
| ▲ | dcre 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No, you can't. The numbers are genuinely confusing, and Zitron actively works to make them more confusing rather than explaining what they mean because he needs them to sound as bad as possible. He also buries the numbers in thousands of words of prose! |
|
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The problem is that some numbers genuinely require a critical eye. If a source tells you that the OpenAI CFO told employees July ARR exceeded the Q2 total, there are a number of serious questions to be raised on how these numbers were calculated and what the point of such a confusing comparison is supposed to be. (I think the answer has to be that ChatGPT wrote the CFO’s script, no human financial expert would think to compare an annualized figure to the sum of three specific months.) But it’s hard to analyze the facts appropriately when they’re relayed by a guy who tells you that it’s all a giant scam and infers the worst possible answer to all the questions. |
| |
| ▲ | dcre 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're broadly right but I think you're dead wrong about the CFO statement — I think "July revenue alone exceeded all of Q2" is an extremely normal thing to say when revenue is going up at an insane rate. For example, if it was not true that June revenue exceeded March-May revenue, the point would be to show how their revenue growth has accelerated. | | |
| ▲ | tovej 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If he meant that he would've said July revenue, not ARR. ARR means it's multiplied by twelve. | | |
| ▲ | dcre 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | She, and we do not have the direct quote. It's a paraphrase, and the report can't seem to decide whether they're talking about revenue or growth. If she was talking about growth, "the ARR growth in July exceeded the ARR growth of Q2" is perfectly coherent. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/29/openai-cfo-sarah-friar-tells... OP is way overinterpreting something we don't even have verbatim in a way that unfortunately resembles what they're rightly accusing Zitron of. |
| |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "July revenue alone exceeded all of Q2" would be a very normal thing to say, but you're skipping over some of the words. Unless revenue is sharply dropping, annualized recurring revenue in any month will exceed the revenue incurred in any quarter, because it's an annualized figure. I think the most likely explanation is that the CFO misspoke and intended to say something more like your quote, or perhaps she spoke correctly and was misquoted. But without audited financial statements, all we have is speculation, and there have definitely been times in the past when executives of major companies made intentionally misleading statements about their revenue. (In fact, this thread began with a question about why you can't just look at the numbers, and here the answer is that nobody has reported the actual revenue numbers this comparison is based on.) | | |
| ▲ | dcre 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | But you are using the misquote to do the thing Zitron does that you hate! I don't get it! | | |
| ▲ | 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I didn't say I hate it. I've never seen any reason to doubt that Ed Zitron is a great guy who's working hard to tell the truth as he understands it. My point is that any discussion of how a large, complex company is doing requires making judgment calls about which numbers are more or less reliable, do or don't matter, etc. This is especially so when it's a private company that has not yet any kind of meaningful disclosures. So if you don't think Ed Zitron's judgment is sound, there's no good way to adjust his commentary for that and "just look at the numbers", because the numbers have been filtered by his judgment even if they all came from accurate underlying sources. | | |
|
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | simonuv 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| He's the biggest AI shill on this forum. The point is AI haters are bad, AI addicts are good. |
| |
