🚨 THE ENTIRE AI BOOM MIGHT BE BUILT ON FAKE REVENUE.
Latest corporate filings show that OpenAI and Anthropic alone make up over half of the entire $2 trillion future cloud backlog held by Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Amazon.
This massive pipeline is actually being created through a circular accounting trick called a round trip revenue loop.
But how it works ?
A tech giant gives billions of dollars to an AI startup as an "investment". But hidden in the contract is a strict rule forcing the startup to hand that exact same money straight back to the tech giant to rent their computer servers.
Look at the documented case of Microsoft and OpenAI.
When Microsoft invested $13 billion into OpenAI, it didn't just give them cash; it gave them "cloud credits" to use Microsoft servers. OpenAI used those exact credits to train its AI models, and Microsoft then turned around and recorded that server usage as brand new "cloud revenue" from a customer.
The tech giant is literally paying itself with its own money and calling it a sale.
This is why OpenAI’s annual cloud bill has ballooned to over $60 billion, double its actual revenue of $25 billion, kept alive solely by this recycled funding loop.
Anthropic runs the exact same play, spending $2.66 billion on Amazon Web Services in just nine months, which was basically 100% of all the money it earned at the time.
This manufactured demand triggers a second accounting trick where tech giants book massive paper profits. Every time a startup gets a higher value from a new funding round, the tech giant updates the value of its investment on its books and counts that unearned paper gain as direct profit.
In Q1 2026, Alphabet reported a record $62.6 billion profit, but $28.7 billion nearly half, was just a paper markup on its Anthropic investment. In the same quarter, Amazon reported $30.3 billion in profit, but $16.8 billion of it was just an Anthropic paper gain.
While Amazon reported record profits, its actual free cash flow collapsed 95% to just $1.2 billion because it had to spend $44.2 billion in real cash to build physical data centers.
This has created a massive danger where these giant companies rely heavily on just one or two unstable startups. Microsoft has 49% of its $627 billion future backlog tied to OpenAI, while Oracle has an incredible 54% of its entire $553 billion pipeline relying on OpenAI alone.
This perfectly mirrors the 2001 dot-com crash when Global Crossing and Qwest Communications swapped identical fiber-optic network capacity with each other just to book fake sales.
Qwest had to erase $1.4 billion in fake income, and Global Crossing went completely bankrupt.
The only difference is that the dot-com swaps were illegal, but today's AI loop is fully legal under current accounting rules.
This legal loop inflates tech company stock prices, forcing automatic retirement accounts and index funds to buy even more of these tech stocks. It is a self feeding loop where investments, sales, and stock prices all go up on paper without the AI technology ever making real cash profits.
Dave: "Hello caller, you're on the air."
Caller: "I put all my emergency savings into an investment."
Dave: "Oh no. How much did you lose?"
Caller: "It made $5m in 37 months."
Dave: "Well you got lucky."
Caller: I converted my 401k into a similar investment & borrowed $8M."
Dave: "that’s the most irresponsible thing I’ve ever heard."
Caller: "It’s worth almost $20M and cash flows to me at $80,000 a month."
Dave: "That's speculation."
Caller: "I sold my house and used all the equity & borrowed another $15M to do the same thing."
Dave: "What is wrong with you?"
Caller: "Dave the investment is worth $250,000,000 today and I’ve refinanced it twice returning all my equity plus $100M, tax free."
Dave: “How many times have you heard me say All debt is bad debt?”
Caller: “I started raising money from friends, family & customers and now I am doing it for them.”
Dave: “Partnerships are risky.”
Caller: “I have 20,000 investors & sent out $100m in cash to them last year.”
Dave: “Who are you?”
Caller: Grant Cardone, CEO of CardoneCapital, $5.3B of real estate holdings, and $2.2B in debt and free cash flow of $112M.”
Dave: Hangs Up
Getting rich usually involves big bets, and asymmetric risk (exactly what trading + early crypto did for many people).
On the other hand, staying rich requires almost the opposite: diversification, boredom, and sitting on your hands. Protection mode.
Someone who 5–10x’s their net worth in a bull market, then keeps the same leverage and same size (if spot --> never sells) into the next cycle instead of derisking. Yep, you guessed it, they prob will round-trip it all. Losing 50% when you’re worth 100k is painful but survivable, but losing 50% when you’re worth 10M is life‑changing.
So, you get rich once on a certain risk profile, but if you keep that degen risk profile, you can wipe yourself out once or twice, or even 5x times (depending on how many times you try).
Making a lot of money in, e.g., one bull cycle, one asset class, one type of trading style can make people think they’re in God mode. They then take that confidence into areas where they don’t have an edge: perp trading (as an example, we saw this with the meme boys, who lost their money trying a game they had no skills in when meme liq was zero after Trump, Feb 2025).
The behaviour that made you rich is often highly path‑dependent: a specific cycle (usually bull), focusing on a specific inefficiency, certain types of trades, etc.
But by the end of 2025, for most people, that edge was gone. If you don’t adapt, your old playbook can become a liability where you lose it all. Many people only realize their edge is gone after a big drawdown (think 10/10 last year).
Either you are good at making money, or you are good at protecting money. Very few are good at both and are the ones that survive cycle after cycle. Cockroach mode.
You need to read more, and you need to consume less. You need to set aside time to do a workout for the mind, and you need to give it time to recover. Especially now that it's so easy for your cognitive capacity to atrophy. Refuse to become mentally obese.
We need to talk about the most silent, crushing realization that almost every good man goes through in his late twenties or thirties. This is the exact nerve that men are currently feeling but don't have the words to explain without sounding bitter.
He was the ultimate "solid guy." He was the boyfriend who always drove, always planned, always remembered the details, and always carried the heavy boxes. He was the guy his friends called when they were stranded, and the guy his girlfriend leaned on for every single emotional and logistical problem. He was an absolute machine of consistency.
Then, one winter, he got hit with a severe, bedridden case of the flu. He literally could not stand up for five days.
This was his first time dropping the ball in three years.
This is when the relationship should perfectly balance out. His partner should have stepped up, brought him soup, handled the chores, and let him rest.
Instead, he watched her get annoyed.
She wasn't worried about his fever; she was visibly irritated that their weekend plans were ruined. She was frustrated that the bills were piling up. When she walked into the bedroom, she didn't gently ask how he was feeling, she sighed and asked, "So, are you going to be able to drive me to the airport on Tuesday or do I have to figure it out myself?"
He told me that lying in that bed was the loneliest he had ever felt in his entire life. He said, "I realized right then that she didn't actually love me. She loved what I did for her. I wasn't a human being to her; I was a household appliance. And she was just pissed off that the appliance was broken."
This is the dark, heavy truth that millions of men are walking around with right now.
Men are absolutely exhausted, but they are terrified to stop moving, stop providing, or stop being the "rock." Not because they are toxic workaholics, but because they secretly suspect that the exact moment they stop being useful, the people who claim to love them will simply get annoyed and abandon them.
Remember this. Only thing that you have control over is your mind.
You do not have control over the weather, your health, what partner says to you.
The moment you lose control over your mind. You're done.
Take control of the only thing in this world you have control over.
The richest man in China, Jack Ma, said, If you put the bananas and money in front of the monkeys, the monkeys will choose bananas, because the monkeys don't know that money can buy a lot of bananas.
In fact, if you offer work and business to people, they will choose to work, because most people don't know that a business can make more money than a salary. One of the reasons the poor are poor is because the poor are not trained to recognize the entrepreneurial opportunity.
They spend a lot of time in school and what they learn in school is to work for a salary instead of working for themselves.
Profit is better than wages because wages can support you, but profits can make you a fortune.
If you don't learn to recognize opportunities, you will continue to choose the safe path rather than the profitable one.