If we can't get billionaires to pay taxes and stay out of politics then at least they are stupid enough and have enough hubris to spend billions and years on stupid vanity projects that go nowhere so that they will eventually lose said billions.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Fuck AI
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I missed working during the dot com boom, but I heard some crazy stories from older coworkers. Like showing up at 10am hungover, playing video games until the CEO came in around noon coked out of his gourd, then hitting up the strip club at 4 on the company dime.
Then one day they get there and the CEO says “sorry guys, money ran out, go home.”
I can’t imagine what it’s like at these AI startups with orders of magnitude more money to burn.
My dad worked during the heyday of the .com era - he once had a CFO who would just go on benders for like 4-5 days, wake up in some foreign country surrounded by hookers and blow (like, very literally, not as a futurama reference), then just fly back and act like nothing happened.
When I worked for Oracle I had to take yearly training to tell me in no uncertain terms that I am NOT allowed to buy hookers for customers OR potential customers. And I was an engineer.
I just wonder what the hell happened that they had to do that.
Somebody put hookers on their expense report for reimbursement: "She was for a client!"
Seriously, they said it’s not a valid expense like five times. WTF Oracle.
They used to have a hooker tent at CES. Seriously.
Was it a luxury tent at least?
no, but with the blow you didn't really care.
My company wouldn't even let us expense tips at restaurants.
We had a CTO who was a massive coke fiend as well. Dumb as dirt, only had his position because he was married to the daughter of the company's founder. We once had a client who had been with us for ten years visit and this CTO wandered into a meeting with them and babbled for 45 minutes and then suddenly said "so ... does it sound like you guys would like to do business with us?"
He eventually divorced the daughter, who was friends with many of the employees and aired her dirty laundry on Facebook so we all got to see it. Apparently her nickname for him was "ol' three inches two minutes".
I worked for a startup in 1996. We were desperate for cash and started sucking up to RJR Nabisco's venture capital division. Yes, the tobacco companies were so overloaded with cash that they got into venture capital just to have somewhere to put some of it. We had some of these guys (and gals, to be fair) visit our office for a whole day. We were a non-smoking office in a non-smoking building but these motherfuckers chain-smoked in the conference room the entire time. We had no ventilation and the smoke was so thick you couldn't see the end of the fucking hallway. I kept walking past the conference room and coughing loudly (although I was hardly faking it) and my bosses got pissed and sent me home. I wasn't fired because I was the only person who knew how the code worked.
We got no money from them. The only good thing about this story was that probably all those RJR Nabisco vultures died horrible deaths from lung cancer and emphysema. The only Internet-startup thing we had in the office was a fucking ping pong table, which would have been great except the CEO was absolutely fantastic at it and would obliterate us while saying "good shot" and "way to go" and "almost" the whole time.
I should join an AI startup
I will invest!
Here's a dollar. I now own 10% of your AI.
What? Yes I know I just spent real money, on a product that doesn't exist, running in a data center that hasn't been built yet, chasing profits that are impossible to achieve.
Isn't that what everyone is doing?
Sorry, my totally real and not made-up valuation is already at $1BN.
I'll still take your dollar tho
And offer you a pre-order for $10 worth of use of my not yet existing machine.
They were more concerned about us accepting hookers and blow.
What do you expect from a company whose specialty is offloading cognition?
How many of these are just ways of making sums of money disappear
They all do that, at least.
Guys, I can light $14b on fire at least as well as they can.