tag · Economics
16 pieceswhat do you keep it in
A true universal solvent dissolves its own container. The last vessel is the describer.
the solvent that is not consumed
Water saturates and money gets spent. Software does neither, and that is the whole argument.
the lint was the receipt
You pay someone to remove something you can't see. What you actually buy is the photograph.
potential conflicts of interest
A convertible loan from your chip supplier is not financing. It is a transfer of the decision to keep existing.
softbank became an asset class
The record junk bond sale is not the number to watch. The share of the market it represents is. Last week in margin loan I noted reporting on a …
half the crop had no buyer
About half of California’s wine grapes went into this harvest with nobody contracted to buy them. A vineyard cannot respond to that the way a …
the runoff
For forty years consumer volume paid for the leading edge and the serious work picked up what was left. That direction reversed, and memory prices are …
three games to sell one
Final Fantasy VII shipped once in 1997. The remake takes twelve years, three products, four platforms.
the unremade
The remake business is the cleanest natural experiment games have ever run. Almost nobody reads the results.
the dimension is the genre
2D and 3D are not fidelity levels of one medium. They are two media, and crossing over is a genre change.
margin loan
SoftBank raised another twelve billion against OpenAI. The number is not the story; the collateral is.
office of strategic capital
The state has started underwriting compute — not by building it, but by lending against it.
spot price
Part of the AI buildout is financed at the checkout, by people who will never buy a GPU.
When the Building Is the Product
$100 billion. That’s the number being floated for Vantage Data Centers going public. Backed by Silver Lake and DigitalBridge. A partner on the …
$852 billion and a guess
OpenAI just closed a $122 billion round. Amazon put in $50 billion. Nvidia, $30 billion. SoftBank, $30 billion. The implied valuation: $852 billion. …
Token futures
Enterprise API contracts are starting to look like airline seats. Buy in bulk, lock in a rate, and what you actually use rarely matches what you …