Why AI Companies Are Happy To Lose Billions
Everything we relied on for this episode: 108 sources, 49 of them behind claims in the video. Numbers follow our research notes. If you spot an error, tell us in the YouTube comments.
Sources 51
OpenAI, "Announcing The Stargate Project," 2025-01-21
OpenAI/Nvidia, joint strategic partnership announcement, 2025-09-22
CNBC, "Nvidia, OpenAI stalled on their mega deal," 2026-02-03
Microsoft/OpenAI, "The next chapter of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership," 2025-10-28
CNBC, "AWS and OpenAI $38 billion partnership," 2025-11-03
TechCrunch, "Sam Altman says OpenAI has $20B ARR and about $1.4 trillion in data center commitments," 2025-11-06
Amazon, "Amazon announces $5B Anthropic investment"
CNBC, "Anthropic-Google Cloud TPU deal," 2025-10-23
CNBC, "Microsoft to invest $5B in Anthropic, Nvidia alliance," 2025-11-18
CNBC, "Nvidia embraces role of AI investor, pushing past $40 billion in equity bets," 2026-05-09
Bloomberg, "Zuckerberg recruits new superintelligence AI group at Meta," 2025-06-10
TechCrunch, "Meta is offering multimillion-dollar pay for AI researchers, but not $100M 'signing bonuses'," 2025-06-27 (Correction: the Bosworth quote "Sam is just being dishonest here" comes from The Verge (Alex Heath), not TechCrunch. See 70.)
WIRED (Zoë Schiffer), internal OpenAI Slack messages (Mark Chen, Sam Altman), 2025-06-28 through 2025-06-30 (via Techmeme)
CNBC, "Mark Zuckerberg announces creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs," 2025-06-30
TechCrunch, "Thinking Machines Lab raises $2B seed," 2025-07-15
Fortune, "Chegg stock crash," 2023-05-02 (Correction: this covers the first 40%+ one-day drop, not the 99% collapse over 39 months. See 69.)
TechCrunch, "Sam Altman says ChatGPT has hit 800M weekly active users," 2025-10-06
Reuters (via US News syndication), "ChatGPT app hits 1 billion monthly active users," 2026-06-02
Fortune, "Sam Altman says OpenAI is currently losing money on Pro subscriptions," 2025-01-07
TechCrunch, "OpenAI-Microsoft leaked documents," 2025-11-14
Forbes, "OpenAI preparing legal action against Apple over Siri partnership" (via 9to5Mac/MacRumors), 2026-05-14
TechCrunch, "Google's Gemini to power Apple's Siri," 2026-01-12
TechCrunch, "OpenAI kills Atlas browser," corroborated by TechTimes, 2026-07-11
VentureBeat, "Anthropic hits $30 billion revenue run rate," 2026-05-08
Fortune, "Why OpenAI could lose $5 billion this year," 2024-09-28 (citing The Information's original reporting)
Fortune, "OpenAI's leaked 2028 loss projections," 2025-11-12 (WSJ-sourced leak chain; also the source of the 2029–2030 cash-flow-positive target)
Ed Zitron / wheresyoured.at, "Why Everybody Is Losing Money On AI," 2026 (leak-sourced; flagged UNVERIFIED wherever used)
CNBC, "Nvidia Q4 FY2026/full-year results," 2026-02-25, and "Nvidia Q1 FY2027 earnings," 2026-05-20
Yahoo Finance, "DeepSeek shock, Nvidia's $589 billion single-day loss," 2025-01-27
CNBC, "Michael Burry's next 'Big Short': an inside look at his analysis showing AI is a bubble," 2025-11-25
Goodwin Law / NPR, coverage of the Bartz v. Anthropic ruling (Judge Alsup), 2025-06 (Correction: the Goodwin post's title covers the Chhabria/Meta ruling, so it supports 66. The NPR piece covers Alsup.)
NPR, "Anthropic $1.5 billion settlement," 2025-09-05 (also the source of the Aparna Sridhar statement)
Writer Beware, "Anthropic settlement update: the opt-outs strike back," 2026-07-17
Tom's Hardware, "Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training"; Cybernews (unsealed Kadrey v. Meta records, 2025)
TechCrunch, "NYT says OpenAI hid evidence in ChatGPT copyright trial," 2026-07-09
Judiciary.uk, Getty Images v. Stability AI judgment, [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch), 2025-11-04
TechCrunch, "Windsurf's CEO goes to Google; OpenAI's acquisition falls apart," 2025-07-11
CNBC, "SpaceX to acquire Cursor-maker Anysphere for $60 billion," 2026-06-16
CNBC, "Sam Altman warns AI market is in a bubble," 2025-08-18
CNBC, "Jeff Bezos says AI is in an industrial bubble," 2025-10-03
Yahoo Finance, "Nvidia says it isn't using circular financing schemes; 2 famous short sellers disagree" (Jim Chanos quote)
Forbes (Dan Runkevicius), "Is The AI Boom Headed For Its 'Dark Fiber' Moment?," 2025-03-24
CNBC / Al Jazeera / Euronews, "IMF and Bank of England warn of AI bubble," 2025-10-09 through 2026-06-29
Leaked Google memo, "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" (Luke Sernau), 2023-05-04. Simon Willison's mirror; SemiAnalysis original
Technology.org, "xAI 59 unpermitted gas turbines Southaven," 2026-07-15
TranscriptMate/WSJ, Dario Amodei World Economic Forum interview, January 2026
Forbes, "WeWork's rise to $47 billion and fall to bankruptcy: a timeline," 2023-11-07
Britannica Money / HistoryLink.org, Amazon's early years and profitability (Bezos's 1997 New York Times quote)
SEC 10-K/S-1 filings (Uber), via sec.gov, cross-referenced with Statista
TechSpot, "A $200 ChatGPT subscription could cost OpenAI $14,000 if you actually used it to its full potential" (coverage of the SemiAnalysis study), 2026
ZME Science, "A $200 ChatGPT Plan Would Cost Them $14,000 If You Used It To the Max" (coverage of the SemiAnalysis study), 2026
More sources behind claims in the video 23
CNBC, "OpenAI's first data center in $500 billion Stargate project is open in Texas" (Larry Ellison: 10 half-million-square-foot buildings in Abilene), 2025-09-23
HPCwire, "Colossus AI Hits 200,000 GPUs as Musk Ramps Up AI Ambitions" (122-day build), 2025-05-13
BG2 podcast, "All things AI w/ @altcap @sama & @satya" (Altman/Gerstner exchange), Oct 31/Nov 2025; TechCrunch coverage, 2025-11-02; also checked against Slashdot and an X transcript
CNBC, "OpenAI resets spending expectations, tells investors compute target is around $600 billion by 2030," 2026-02-20 (also cross-checked with Yahoo Finance and CryptoRank)
SEC filings and earnings guidance for Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft (calendar-2026 capex of $125–190B each)
CNBC, "Scale AI's Alexandr Wang confirms departure for Meta as part of $14.3 billion deal," 2025-06-12
Lucas Beyer, X post ("no, we did not get 100M sign-on, that's fake news"), June 2025; Fortune coverage, 2025-06-26
WSJ/Bloomberg reporting on individual nine- and ten-figure offers (e.g., Andrew Tulloch's $1.5B and Ruoming Pang's $200M+). No specific article is recorded.
OpenAI retention bonuses ($300K–$1.5M for about 1,000 staff) and removal of the vesting cliff: originally reported by The Information (paywalled). Dataconomy, 2025-08-08; WinBuzzer, 2025-08-07
UBS analyst note via Reuters, "ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base" (100M monthly users in about two months), 2023-02
TechCrunch, "OpenAI's ChatGPT now has 100 million weekly active users," 2023-11-06
OpenAI, "OpenAI and Apple announce partnership," 2024-06-10; TechCrunch, "Apple brings ChatGPT to its apps, including Siri," 2024-06-10; Fortune, 2024-06-13
Axios, "What to know about Atlas, OpenAI's new web browser," 2025-10-21
Hacker News court-filing recap / Bartz v. Anthropic order (Ben Mann's June 2021 BitTorrent downloads from LibGen), 2025-06. Primary docket
Kadrey v. Meta summary-judgment ruling (Judge Vince Chhabria, "historically unprecedented pirating"), 2025-06-25, as summarized in legal coverage (see 31)
TechCrunch / Reuters / Yahoo News, final approval of the Anthropic $1.5B settlement, 2026-07-20
TechCrunch, "Music publishers sue Anthropic for $3B over 'flagrant piracy' of 20,000 works," 2026-01-29
Chegg's 99% decline over 39 months: CNBC, 2023-05-02; Forbes (Peter Cohan), 2025-10-29; Gizmodo; Sherwood News
The Verge (Alex Heath), Andrew Bosworth's "Sam is just being dishonest here" from Meta's internal meeting, June 2025 (correct attribution for the Meta CTO denial)
Thomas Stahura, "Token Talk 14: OpenAI killed my startup," Ascend.vc, 2025-04-23
Fortune, Aravind Srinivas at Y Combinator AI Startup School ("assume that a model company will copy it")
Nvidia, "NVIDIA Announces Financial Results for Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2026" (net income of about $120.1B); SEC exhibit
SemiAnalysis, study of subscription price vs. full-use inference cost, 2026 (the primary source behind 50 and 51; paywalled, exact URL not confirmed; used in an earlier prologue draft)
Background research 25
Sam Altman, X post on cost per chat ("probably single-digits cents"), Dec 2022
Sam Altman, X post replying to @tomieinlove ("tens of millions of dollars well spent"), April 2025; Futurism, "Sam Altman Admits That Saying 'Please' and 'Thank You' to ChatGPT Is Wasting Millions of Dollars in Computing Power," (this line was cut from the final script)
Ilya Sutskever, X post on leaving OpenAI, 2024-05-14
CNBC, Mira Murati, Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph depart OpenAI, 2024-09-25
Aggregated reporting, Google's $2.7B "reverse acquihire" of Character.AI's founders, 2024-08 (no outlet named)
CoreWeave, OpenAI compute deals totaling about $22.4B, 2025-09-25
CNBC, Perplexity's Comet browser goes free worldwide, 2025-10-02
CNBC, Deloitte to deploy Claude to 470,000+ employees, 2025-10-06
CNBC, xAI closes $20B Series E at a $230B valuation, 2026-01-06
EnergyConnects, Jensen Huang says the $100B OpenAI deal was "never a commitment," 2026-02
Aggregated reporting, OpenAI funding round at an $852B valuation, 2026-02/03 (no outlet named)
Forbes, Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive Azure revenue-share arrangement, 2026-04-27
CNBC, 2026-05-28, and Forbes, 2026-05-04, Anthropic valuation of about $965B (Series H)
Fortune / Washington Post / CNBC, Masayoshi Son's $5 trillion-a-year AI investment estimate, 2026-07
Microsoft 10-Q filings, Q1 and Q2 FY2026 (OpenAI equity-method loss and gain)
Yahoo Finance, earlier leak of about $44B in cumulative OpenAI losses, 2023–2028
Sherwood News, run-rate accounting caveat comparing Anthropic and OpenAI
Reuters / Sensor Tower, Claude at 56M app MAU, June 2026
The Information (Jessica Lessin), interview with Mark Zuckerberg on the talent market
Michael Burry, Substack thesis on AI depreciation, Nov 2025
Cryptopolitan, "Nvidia fires back at Michael Burry"
Alex Karp (Palantir) "batshit crazy" remark on Burry (widely reported; outlet and date never verified)
Daron Acemoglu (MIT) and Anton Korinek (UVA), AI productivity and GDP projections
MIT Technology Review, "The two people shaping the future of OpenAI's research," 2025-07-31; OpenAI, "Leadership updates," March 2025 (Mark Chen's title)
SEC Form 8-K, SpaceX/Anysphere all-stock agreement, 2026-06-16
News footage used in the video 9
CNBC, "China's DeepSeek triggers global tech sell-off," 2025-01-27
Yahoo Finance, "Why investors ignore SpaceX and OpenAI losses"
Yahoo Finance, "OpenAI revenue concerns weigh on AI trade," 2026-04-28
Yahoo Finance, "Is OpenAI soft-launching an IPO raincheck?"
CNBC, "Anthropic eyes $900 billion valuation," 2026-04-30
CNBC, "Both Anthropic and OpenAI can be multi-trillion-dollar winners," 2026-05-29
Bloomberg, "Anthropic Valuation of $965 Billion Passes OpenAI," 2026-05-29
Bloomberg Tech, 2026-07-08
BG2 podcast (see 54); Jeff Bezos at Italian Tech Week 2025 (see 40)