People heavily underestimate the number of tricks available to corporates for taking on "debt": https://latentstate.net/the-hidden-ledger/

That's effectively borrowing money with a different name though. The only way to go into debt is to sign an agreement to pay someone money in the future, regardless of the terms used to describe it.

No, it's really not. Do you have a war chest to drag out a legal battle and the ability to bankrupt your landlord by withholding payment? The rules are different at this scale, and "you can't enforce a contract if the attempt will bankrupt you" is only one of the possible games.

Here's another one: pay a supplier to cripple their deployment. Suddenly it's the neocloud's fault for failing to deliver, not your fault for failing to pay.

Did we all forget how Sam Altman turned a non-profit into a for-profit? Do we think he'll bring less sociopathy to this battle?

If you consider Nvidia an LLM company, and I do at this point given how heavily they've invested in frontier labs and where much of their revenue comes from, they alone are worth slightly more than Apple.

No, and moreover it’s not entirely inconceivable that the Apple of AI may turn out to be Apple itself.

Completely agree it will be a huge slap in the face to the public, unfortunately that's a common solution.

When everyone is afraid the market will collapse, or more likely distracted because the market collapsed just enough to hurt the average person, the government will bail them out and either people won't notice or will welcome it as a solution to huge levels of fear.

Voting isn't usually much of a solution after the fact, the political machine doesn't allow for candidates that would fix anything to have a chance at any office that matters. There's a reason our politicians today all seem to have roughly the same goals and all seem to become extremely wealthy while in office.

Have more confidence - you are correct.

Their revenue taps, product releases and marketing campaigns were all strategic: to be able to show nice numbers in the financials.

Once they stop playing games with quality of output of these models and revenue's shrink - they will be in deep deep trouble. They are hoping they will conjure up a break through with the IPO proceeds.

Let's see.

Yes but its growth rates with respect to expenditures, and in particular capital expenditures (R&D etc), which we have no idea about.

Gross margins here are irrelevant: if they can't charge a high enough price to cover all expenditures and rely on cash raised via fund-raises, they are not financially healthy.

Could they be one day? Maybe.