Pluralistic: How much (little) are the AI companies making? (30 Jun 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

But that was small potatoes. What Google – and the rest of the tech sector – needed was a massive growth story, a story about how their companies, worth trillions of dollars , could double or triple in size in the coming years. There's a kind of reflexive anti-capitalist critique that locates the drive to tell growth stories in ideology: "endless g... See more

In other words, if you can tell a convincing growth story, it's much easier to grow. The corollary, though, is that when a growth company stops growing, when it becomes "mature," it experiences a massive sell-off of its stock, as its share price plummets to a tenth or less of the old "growth" valuation. That's why the biggest tech companies in the ... See more

Even companies that are actually profitable (in the sense of bringing in more revenue than it costs to keep the business's lights on) love to juice their stats, and the worst offenders are the Big Tech companies, who reap a vast commercial reward from creating the illusion that they are continuing to grow, even after they've dominated their sector.

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