Troll Maximus. If you're not cynical, you arent paying attention
If you are coming to me for investment advice, your problems are WAY bigger than you realize.
@vharbinger@OperaSocialist@JDVance In the US, its the community relations service that badgers grieving parents to get in front of a press conference and repeat the same line of bullshit.
@dbssteeler29754@Hartley_Patter@JDVance Here in the US it's done by the "Community Relations Service." When these killings happen here, they immediately badger the grieving parents to get in front of a camera and repeat the same line of bullshit. It's absolutely shameful and being done with tax dollars.
@Hartley_Patter@JohnBar28691234@JDVance Yes, here in the US we have a government agency that is paid to badger the parents of children slain by minorities immigrants to get in front of the press and repeat tripe like that. Here it's called the "Community Relations Service." All propaganda and manipulation.
@WallStreetMav Often its the reverse. In either case these are violations of black letter anti trust laws that have been on the books for 100 years & the Supreme Court has previously ruled they DO apply to insurance and healthcare. All thats missing is an AG willing to toss executives in prison
@Anarseldain I wish Republicans would quit pretending these are legitimate elections. If they are just going to roll over and allow fraud like that to stand, then they probably deserve the screwing they are getting.
Corporation: "We made $4B but spent $3.9B so we only owe taxes on $100M."
Government: "Totally reasonable."
You: "I made $60K but spent $58K on survival."
Government: "You owe taxes on $60K."
You: "That's notโ"
Government: "File by May 15."
@pastoreric@BaronDestructo These executives are not stewards of their shareholder's investment...They are vandals with a cultural axe to grind, and they will destroy as much valuable IP as they have to in service of grinding that axe.
@ThomBrady5 But whatever you do, don't even consider weaponizing your spending to punish the companies that are doing this. Inconvenience must be avoid no matter the cost.
@WallStreetMav Fun Fact: Ronald Reagan was the first governor to sign a no-fault divorce bill into law in CA, thus birthing the Divorce Industry and gutting the nuclear family like a trout.
@themarketsniper The problem here isn't Larry Fink...the problem is too many lazy, feckless people can't be bothered to even see if their retirement accounts have any Blackrock funds, let alone sell them if there are any. Too many people bitching about BR are funding them!
@Jack2LOneill@AmazonMGMStudio I have ZERO reason to re-subscribe to Amazon Prime now. That's ok...I have plenty of other things I can do with that $139 this year.
@ErikSTownsend@biancoresearch That and the major economies established enormous petroleum reserves. China's stockpile appears to have been much larger than commonly believed. Once those are drawn down, $90-$100/barrel oil is probably going to look cheap.
NVIDIA IS BUYING ITS OWN CHIPS AND CALLING IT REVENUE
And your retirement account is secretly holding the bag.
This scheme is literally straight out of the Enron playbook...
In January 2026, a special purpose vehicle called Valor Compute Infrastructure was created with one purpose:
Buy Nvidia's chips so Nvidia could book the sale as revenue.
Valor raised $5.4 billion and purchased over 100,000 of Nvidia's GB200 GPUs.
But $1.9 billion of that money came FROM Nvidia itself.
Nvidia invested $1.9 billion into the shell company, then sold that same shell company $5.4 billion worth of its own chips and booked every dollar as revenue.
It's the Girl Scout whose dad bought all the cookies and then she wins the sales contest because Dad was the customer. Except this Girl Scout is a trillion-dollar company and the cookie sale is $5.4 billion.
But it gets MUCH worse:
The remaining $3.5 billion in financing came from Apollo Global Management. Apollo structured the debt, packaged it into securities, and then sold those securities to Athene.
And guess who Athene is? Apollo's OWN insurance subsidiary. The one that sells fixed annuities to American retirees as safe, conservative retirement products.
Follow the chain:
Nvidia funds a shell company with $1.9 billion. The shell company buys $5.4 billion in Nvidia chips. Apollo finances the remaining $3.5 billion. Apollo sells the debt to its own insurance arm. That insurance arm packages it into annuity products and sells them to retirees who think they're buying something safe.
The retirees have no idea that their retirement savings are now backed by 100,000 computer chips sitting in some data center that will be worth pennies on the dollar in three years.
Now look at what's happening inside Athene:
$74.2 billion in US reserves but $217 billion in assets have been shifted to a Bermuda-based captive insurer, outside normal US regulatory oversight.
$103 billion of that portfolio (roughly 35%) is classified as Level 3 assets. That means there is no observable market price.
These assets are valued by internal models, not by actual markets.
And sitting on top of all those unpriced assets? 16.6x leverage.
If you're getting flashbacks to 2008, you should be.
Back then it was mortgages bundled into securities that nobody understood, sold to investors who had no idea what they were holding, rated as safe by agencies that never looked under the hood.
Today it's GPU-backed securities. Computer chips bundled into structured credit instruments, routed through an offshore insurance subsidiary, and sold to you as a retirement product.
The collateral is 100,000 GPUs leased to a single customer through an xAI subsidiary. If xAI stops making lease payments for any reason - financial distress, a pivot in strategy, anything - the entire structure unravels.
And Nvidia releases new architectures every year, so each generation delivers dramatically more compute per watt. A 5 year lease on technology that's obsolete in 2 years creates a mismatch that should terrify every annuity holder in America.
Every single step in this chain is technically legal. The SPV is legal, the lease is legal, Nvidia's equity stake is legal, the securitization is legal, and the Bermuda transfer is legal.
But legality and legitimacy are not the same thing.
I've seen every trick Wall Street has ever pulled in my 45 years of doing this.
And what I'm looking at right now is a pipeline that takes AI infrastructure risk, launders it through 8 layers of financial engineering, and deposits it in the retirement accounts of Americans who never agreed to fund Elon Musk's data centers.
In 2008 it was mortgage-backed securities.
In 2026 it's GPU-backed securities.
Different asset. Same greed. With the same ending.