Tag: Venture Capital

@DavidSacks Isn’t a Neutral Observer—He’s an Architect of the AI Circular-Investment Maze

When White House AI Czar David Sacks tweets confidently that “there will be no federal bailout for AI” because “five major frontier model companies” will simply replace each other, he is not speaking as a neutral observer. He is speaking as a venture capitalist with overlapping financial ties to the very AI companies now engaged in the most circular investment structure Silicon Valley has engineered since the dot-com bubble—but on a scale measured not in millions or even billions, but in trillions.

Sacks is a PayPal alumnus turned political-tech kingmaker who has positioned himself at the intersection of public policy and private AI investment. His recent stint as a Special Government Employee to the federal government raised eyebrows precisely because of this dual role. Yet he now frames the AI sector as a robust ecosystem that can absorb firm-level failure without systemic consequence.

The numbers say otherwise. The diagram circulating in the X-thread exposes the real structure: mutually dependent investments tied together through cross-equity stakes, GPU pre-purchases, cloud-compute lock-ins, and stock-option-backed revenue games. So Microsoft invests in OpenAI; OpenAI pays Microsoft for cloud resources; Microsoft books the revenue and inflates its stake OpenAI. Nvidia invests in OpenAI; OpenAI buys tens of billions in Nvidia chips; Nvidia’s valuation inflates; and that valuation becomes the collateral propping up the entire sector. Oracle buys Nvidia chips; OpenAI signs a $300 billion cloud deal with Oracle; Oracle books the upside. Every player’s “growth” relies on every other player’s spending.

This is not competition. It is a closed liquidity loop. And it’s a repeat of the dot-bomb “carriage” deals that contributed to the stock market crash in 2000.

And underlying all of it is the real endgame: a frantic rush to secure taxpayer-funded backstops—through federal energy deals, subsidized data-center access, CHIPS-style grants, or Department of Energy land leases—to pay for the staggering infrastructure costs required to keep this circularity spinning. The singularity may be speculative, but the push for a public subsidy to sustain it is very real.

Call it what it is: an industry searching for a government-sized safety net while insisting it doesn’t need one.

In the meantime, the circular investing game serves another purpose: it manufactures sky-high paper valuations that can be recycled into legal war chests. Those inflated asset values are now being used to bankroll litigation and lobbying campaigns aimed at rewriting copyright, fair use, and publicity law so that AI firms can keep strip-mining culture without paying for it.

The same feedback loop that props up their stock prices is funding the effort to devalue the work of every writer, musician, actor, and visual artist on the planet—and to lock that extraction in as a permanent feature of the digital economy.

by Trichordist

#SXSW REWIND : Venture Capitalist Admits Artists Can Not Make A Living Streaming

The grand irony here is that the panel which asked the question “”Will Artists Make Money on Big Music Platforms?” not only reported that artists could not, but also suggested that artists needed to focus on selling concert tickets and merchandise. You know, things artists did BEFORE the internet.

We admire the honesty of Hany Nada, Managing Partner GGV Capital who bluntly and glibly admitted during the SXSW Panel “Will Artists Make Money on Big Music Platforms?” that he believed that they would not be able to do so. He also added that he the point of digital streaming platforms such as Pandora, Spotify, and others was promotion to help the artists tour, sell t-shirts and offer other non-digitally distributable “experiences” to fans (why is this sounding more and more like prostitution?).

At least Mr.Nada is honest, which is refreshing given that the man has more integrity than most of the executives at that streaming services who claim the problem of royalties is one of scale and not sustainability. Mr. Nada (ironically named in this context) may be well intentioned and honest but he is also grossly misguided.

Mr. Nada’s statement and philosophy that streaming sites should be viewed by artists as a promotional platform more so than a financial one are an admission of the failure of these unprofitable start ups to serve musicans. As such, let artists decide if there is a value proposition in these companies that benefits the artist and allow them to opt out. Not every album should be on streaming services. Not every artist should be on streaming services. And if streaming is nothing more than promotion with little value proposition, than artists need to rethink their relationships and strategies regarding those businesses.

To be fair, it’s not just Mr.Nada who has promoted this philosophy. It appears that many of the music streaming company executives on panels at SXSW alternate between two talking points. First is that these services will support musicians when they scale (which we can find no evidence of). And second, when pressed on the first point, that streaming platforms offer promotional value for artists to make money in other ways. Oddly, other than “t-shirts and touring” no one seems to have any idea how to translate an artists participation on streaming services into a sustainable revenue stream.

In almost every way streaming companies represent the worst of both the old boss and the new boss.

So here’s the take away, which was put forth by a series of questions from the floor that largely went unanswered.

1) If artists can’t be expected to make a living from streaming music why should streaming executives make a living from streaming businesses at the artists expense? These are essentially, artists subsidized corporations.

2) As artist’s are bringing the audience to the platform, why should the platform profit, but not the artists? Test this theory, No Music = No Business. Done.

3) Artists have been able to sell t-shirts and tour long before the internet and without streaming platforms, but streaming platforms can’t exists without the artists music. Again, No Music = No Business. Done.

4) Given that the streaming music thought leaders believe that the”new revenue model’s” for musicians are “touring and t-shirts” when are the streaming company executives going on tour to sell t-shirts to support their businesses? We find it odd that the executives running companies that are not profitable are giving business advice to musicians.

by Trichordist Editor