Ed Zitron and Gary Marcus are... confused.
Amazon was unprofitable because they poured their revenue into growth. On paper, they were in the red, but everyone - especially investors - saw what was going to happen, given their trajectory.
Is it the case that any of these AI companies are actually making a ton of money and growing accordingly? AFAICT, we've just got [a] big players like Google that can subsidize AI in the hopes of waiting everyone else out and [b] private companies raising capital in the hopes that when the market returns to rationality, they may be solvent.
As I recall, no, Wall Street and public shareholders were getting pretty antsy over AMZN earnings, which is why Bezos famously said "We are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."
The same thing is playing out today: insiders and early investors (presumably privy to information we don't have) see the trajectory of the frontier AI labs, but Wall Street and public shareholders see only the losses. This is why at every earnings report the hyperscalers simultaneously 1) post record revenues and earnings, 2) announce even greater CapEx spending and AI investments, and hence 3) get punished by the stock market.
Clearly all the AI players are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
> HSBC Global Investment Research projects that OpenAI still won’t be profitable by 2030, even though its consumer base will grow by that point to comprise some 44% of the world’s adult population (up from 10% in 2025). Beyond that, it will need at least another $207 billion of compute to keep up with its growth plans.
This article is from six months ago. Was HSBC wrong; did something dramatically change in the last six months; is OpenAI not, in fact, profitable?, or are they in fact doing well but doing a huge investment (as was the case with Amazon 25ish years ago)?
I genuinely do not know, but my impression is that they're burning investment capital trying to compete with others' investment capital and Google's bottomless pockets.
[0] https://fortune.com/2025/11/26/is-openai-profitable-forecast...
The trend lines are going in the opposite direction.
Similarly he thinks that an investment into an AI startup is also a loan that the startup needs to pay back out of their own revenue, instead of a share of a company that will IPO at a higher valuation.
Basically his doomerism is a byproduct of financial illiteracy.
That's not to say they will be or are wrong, it's just that they aren't exactly unbiased, or humble, sources.
