this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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So they invested in things that didn't come through with borrowed money?
I think the "original" money is still mostly from their 2021 IPO, so "leveraged" was the wrong word, my brain is a mess today.
But, they certainly look like they either ate up to a quarter billion loss on crypto gambling, or shuffled the money from that column into a different part of the books to pay for AI, or spent that money on other new investments. I don't think it could be entirely new investments because they've never even hit one billion in annual revenue, their net income has never been positive, and they've had no new acquisitions over the last couple of years. The new CFO in January move also points at a big financial fuckup being the reason.
I was just wondering how they could have lost more than a hundred percent on anything if they didn't leverage some sort of debt in a reckless way. Because, like, I'm not a finance person, but I feel like it's hard to lose more than 100% of whatever money you put up otherwise.
Oh, that percentage is the year on year change, not a return on investment. So 2025 financial year they reported roughly -30 million cash from investments, this year is roughly -267 million, so they reported a loss of (267-30) / 30 = ~7.78 times as much money against the scope of the category "investments".
You'd expect to see the percentage go below zero when you buy more stocks / bonds or securities than you sell or which mature, or (I think) when you take money gained from an investment and then put it towards another investment or other cash category, so it's not necessarily a really bad thing for a company to have a negative number there. It just means they're either shuffling it internally or committed to spending it. The size and timing of the change is what is unusual.
There are all sorts of rules and tricks in this shell game though, I couldn't say with any certainty where that money went, or if it ever really existed at all. I just see a pattern of companies with big negative short term investment cash flows and layoffs that correlate maybe too well with the Bitcoin dump at the end of January.
Thanks, that makes a lot more sense.
ohhh lol holy shit, that'd be a fine thread to pull on