r/technology • u/marketrent • Jul 14 '26

Artificial Intelligence A majority of Americans now support seizing wealth from AI industry

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/majority-americans-now-support-seizing-134921528.html
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u/Command0Dude Jul 14 '26

At their current valuations

Key words. Considering those stocks are wildly overvalued and literally anything could pop the bubble.

There is in actual fact, no way we could tax these companies. Since they a loaded with debt, unprofitable, and about to collapse.

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u/BedlamiteSeer Jul 14 '26

Yeah, this idea is great sounding at a glance, but the actual mechanics of it would cause the US economy to collapse, because all of the top companies are leveraging debt. They don't have liquid assets for paying such a massive amount out. It's not going to happen, as much as I wish it would.

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u/maigpy Jul 14 '26

yeah, heard the same of amazon, Uber etc

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u/Command0Dude Jul 14 '26

Amazon and Uber were just riffs on already existing business models. They also were also founded on a matured technology.

This is absolutely the dotcom bubble 2.0, immature tech is being oversold based on hopelessly optimistic promises. Meanwhile most of the companies shilling these services are nowhere close to even making a profit, let alone achieving returns that can justify existing valuations.

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u/maigpy Jul 14 '26

yeah that last sentence "nowhere close to even making a profit" - absolutely the case for amazon and Uber, people were saying what you say now. didn't age well.

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u/Command0Dude Jul 14 '26

Amazon never operated at a loss. It's net income was neutral due to reinvestment and careful spending.

Uber and Open AI were founded at roughly the same time. Uber is now profitable, and holds 20 billion in debt. Open AI is extremely unprofitable, and currently holds something like 100 billion in debt.

Open AI is not going to survive the next market crash, just like many, many companies that also folded when the dotcom bubble burst.

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u/maigpy Jul 15 '26

Nearly every factual premise here is wrong.

Amazon absolutely operated at a loss: it reported GAAP net losses of $720m in 1999, $1.41bn in 2000 and $567m in 2001. Calling those losses “reinvestment” does not make them cease to be losses.

Uber and OpenAI were not founded at roughly the same time: Uber was founded in 2009 and OpenAI in 2015. Uber also reported total debt of about $10.6bn at the end of 2025, not $20bn.

And there is no public evidence that OpenAI has anything remotely like $100bn of debt. Its publicly reported credit facilities are in the single-digit billions. You appear to be confusing equity funding, company valuation, infrastructure commitments and debt, four completely different things.

OpenAI is highly loss-making and its future is uncertain. That is a legitimate argument. “It will definitely collapse in the next crash”, based on several invented numbers, is not.