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Telemakhos • today at 1:35 PM • 6 replies • view on HN

Nobody who has ever run a business or knows about how a business runs would think that any business "sits on piles of assets like dragons." Very little cash sits idle, usually for anticipated operational expenditures with a reserve for unanticipated expenditures; the rest is invested, loaned, spent on building the business, or returned to investors. If OpenAI is holding $25 billion in cash, it's because they anticipate spending that much in the near future, not because they're sleeping atop it in a mountain cave.


Replies

Iolaum • today at 1:42 PM

He didn't say cash, he said assets.

Also funny enough - AAPL is siting on 62B$ cash according to google search.

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zardo • today at 1:39 PM

In this case, companies actually do have large inventories of GPUs they bought before they had datacenters to install them in.

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thesmtsolver2 • today at 1:39 PM

Next you will be telling me the rich don’t have a vault of gold coins you can swim in like Scrooge McDuck!

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theandrewbailey • today at 2:09 PM

Assets, not just cash. Though sometimes, they literally have stuff they can't use:

> Microsoft CEO says the company doesn't have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-ceo-says-company-do...

braiamp • today at 1:45 PM

In this particular case and with these particular companies... yes, they were sitting in a hoard of cash like dragons. They literally didn't know what to do with it, so they gambled on The Next Big Thing™....

Either way, it's more efficient to give whatever money to bail out individuals/consumers than to bail out rent seeking organizations

d0liver • today at 2:01 PM

Right. Corporations own people, not cash.