Anton Dieckhoff
LightNews LightNews
antondieckhoff.bsky.social
Anton Dieckhoff
@antondieckhoff.bsky.social
86 followers 310 following 19 posts
Journalist @KJS @Handelsblatt
Finanzen/Tech/Unternehmen/Klima
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Anton Dieckhoff
rutgerbregman.com
It's that magical time of year when private jets descend on a Swiss mountain village to discuss climate change and poverty! Anyway, here's my annual reminder. I'll stop posting this when they stop avoiding the real issue: their own massive tax avoidance 💰
January 19, 2026 at 1:00 PM
Reposted by Anton Dieckhoff
annikajoeres.bsky.social
Man hat sich an diese Nachricht so sehr gewöhnt.
Aber diese Macht der Milliardäre, diese Ungleichheit, befeuert größte Probleme - Rechtsruck, Klimakrise, US-Autoritarismus, allgemeines Misstrauen.
Und sie ist kein Naturgesetz. Also?!
www.zeit.de/gesellschaft...
Reichtum: Vermögen von Milliardären legt laut Oxfam-Bericht rasant zu
Die etwa 3.000 Milliardäre auf der Welt wurden seit 2020 um 80 Prozent reicher. Die Hilfsorganisation Oxfam sieht ihren Einfluss als Gefahr für die Demokratie.
www.zeit.de
January 19, 2026 at 5:33 AM
antondieckhoff.bsky.social
I don’t think that‘s true. AI has not become that important. A lot of people who want to make money off of it are saying that it is but i feel like most people can still do every part of their work without ai - just slower.
abeba.bsky.social Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 6d
talking about AI as a bubble doesn't make sense. AI/tech has become integrated into critical social/financial infrastructure means fall of AI = fall of these institutions. just like govnt's bailed banks during the financial crisis, they will do same with AI so long as AI remains social infrastrctr
January 17, 2026 at 10:34 AM
Reposted by Anton Dieckhoff
edzitron.com
The AI bubble is, as a result, a lot simpler — and thus, more dangerous. The magnificent 7 - especially NVIDIA - is now a load-bearing beam of the global markets, both in their valuations (which aren't based on actual AI revenue) and GPU spend.

www.wheresyoured.at/dot-com-bubble/
While the dot com bubble was a mixture of dodgy venture capital deals in websites that could never turn a profit combined with a global mania around the interconnectivity of high-speed internet companies, the AI bubble is one company selling GPUs, a bunch of companies building data centers to put them in, and a bunch of companies building shit that runs on GPUs. Economically-speaking, this meant that telecoms companies, server hardware companies, internet service providers, construction firms, optical cable providers, wireless technology companies and basically anybody related to the business of providing internet access in any way was directly and materially benefiting from the dot com boom and suffering as a result of the dot com bubble bursting. One could get a startup funded if you had a website, or even take it public, one could raise debt to build a nascent ISP or a fiber network. As far as the dot com part of the dot com bubble — the unsustainable websites — the problem wasn’t so much the industry but the businesses themselves, which were then hyped and dumped onto the public markets with little regard for their long-term health. The problem here was relatively simple: these were bad companies that people ignored the issues with because “the power of the internet” would somehow save them, which it did not. Had they been kept private and died in the dark, I don’t think these companies would have had the same reputation. I also don’t really think they were an accurate comparison to anything happening today. While valuations were ridiculous — TheGlobe’s market cap was at one point over $840 million — the scale of destruction caused by dot com startups was significantly smaller, even in today’s money. The economics were bad, but not anywhere near as bad. For the first nine months of 1998, TheGlobe made $2.7 million in revenue and lost $11.5 million, largely due to trying to move into multiple different business lines (like a Voice over IP phone service, and … While the dot com bubble rested on the back of companies like Lucent, Cisco, Nortel, WorldCom, Enron, and others, the AI bubble rests, fundamentally, on one company: NVIDIA, and to a lesser extent the valuations of the remainder of the magnificent 7 — Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple and Tesla. Four of those companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta), through intermediaries I’ll get to in a minute, have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on GPUs and their associated infrastructure for reasons that none of them can seem to explain. NVIDIA’s revenue is predominantly (88%) in its data center segment, and its customers are those who can afford, at the very least, 50 to 100 GPUs retailing at $400,000 or so for a pod of 8, requiring tens of thousands of dollars of networking gear to go with them. The customers of those renting those GPUs are either AI labs training or running inference for models, and their customers are AI startups. The problem isn’t so much that nobody can afford a GPU, but that you can’t get very far with just one — you have to buy so many of them, and you need to build a data center around them, and you need to get power to that data center. This naturally means that there are really only two customers who can afford these chips at scale: The magnificent 7, who have begun to take on debt after previously financing their GPU purchases with cashflow. Companies that raise debt, with “companies” meaning “anybody who wants to build a data center” and Oracle, which had negative $13 billion in cash flow last quarter and is steeped in debt to the point that bondholders are suing. We also have no idea if the economics of renting GPUs actually makes sense, and based on everything I’ve found, I’m not sure anybody renting them can ever make a profit, due to either or both the up-front cost (and debt necessary to pay it) and the power-intensive nature of providing AI compute. It is fundamentally insane that we don’t know for sure. What we do kno… The demand for NVIDIA chips is fueled by hype, and that hype has caused this company — and to a lesser extent the magnificent 7 — to become load-bearing parts of the American stock market. An analysis from portfolio manager Danke Wang from January 2025 found that the Magnificent 7 stocks accounted for 47.87% of the Russell 1000 Index's returns in 2024 (an index fund of the 1000 highest-ranked stocks on FTSE Russell’s index). In really simple terms, without the mostly vibes-driven nature of the magnificent 7’s growth (as none of this is based on anyone’s actual AI revenues), the US stock market would be in incredibly rough shape. Except unlike the dot com bubble, most of these companies have taken on incredibly large amounts of GPUs, debt, finance and operating leases, and data centers full of GPUs that can’t be used for anything else. And because GPUs are guaranteed to depreciate, each and every one of them will, without fail, have to write down the value of upwards of a hundred billion dollars of investments. This is going to happen whether or not the bubble bursts, as NVIDIA is on a yearly cycle of GPU launches. Every single year every single GPU investment loses value. Even if the AI bubble doesn’t burst, the US stock market has an unhealthy relationship with NVIDIA, which, by this time next year, will have to make over $90 billion a quarter to keep up with its 50%+ year-over-year growth. And by 2028, NVIDIA will — to keep its ridiculous valuation — have to be making more than Apple ($416 billion) a year in revenue.
January 16, 2026 at 5:43 PM
Reposted by Anton Dieckhoff
edzitron.com
This dearth of ideas isn’t just found in the world’s largest tech companies, but in venture capital, which went from making bets on nascent technologies to funding growth-focused companies with the explicit goal of dumping them via M&A or onto the public markets.
www.wheresyoured.at/dot-com-bubble/
In fact, most of the show felt like companies doing madlibs with startup decks to try and trick people into thinking they’d done anything other than staple a frontend on top of a Large Language Model. Nowhere was that more obvious than the glut of useless AI-powered “smart” glasses, all of which claim to do translation, or dictation, or run “apps” using clunky, ugly and hard-to-use interfaces, all using the same LLMs, all doing effectively the same thing. These products only exist because Meta decided to blow several billion dollars on launching “AI glasses,” with the slew of copycats phrased as being “part of a new category” rather than “a bunch of companies making a bunch of useless bullshit nobody wants or needs.” These are not the actions of companies that truly fear missing the mark, let alone the judgment of the media, analysts or investors. These are the actions of a tech industry that has escaped any meaningful criticism — let alone regulation! — of their core businesses or new products under the auspices of “giving them a chance” or “being open to new ideas,” and those ideas are always whatever the tech industry just said, even if it’s nonsensical. When Facebook announced it was changing its name to Meta as a means of pursuing “the successor to the mobile internet,” it didn’t really provide any proof beyond a series of extremely shitty VR apps, but not to worry, Casey Newton of Platformer was there to tell us that Facebook was going to “strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — a world known as the metaverse,” adding that the metaverse was “having a moment.” Similarly, Futurum Group’s Dan Newman said in April 2022 that “the metaverse was coming” and that it “would likely continue to be one of the biggest trends for years to come.” Three years and $70 billion later, the metaverse is dead, and everybody acts as if it didn’t happen. Whoops! In a sane society, investors, analysts and the media would never trus… All the while, the largest tech firms have continued growing, always finding new ways (largely through aggressive monopolies and massive sales teams) to make Number Go Up to the point that the media, analysts and investors have stopped asking any challenging questions, and naturally assumed that they — and the financiers that back them — would ever do something really stupid. The tech, business and finance media had been well-trained at this point to understand that progress was always the story, and that failure was somehow “necessary for innovation,” whether or not anything was innovative. Over time, this created an evolutionary problem. The successes of companies like Uber — which grew to quasi-profitability after more than a decade of burning billions of dollars — convinced journalists that startups had to burn tons of money to grow. All that it took to convince some members of the media that something was a good idea was $50 million or more in funding, with larger funding rounds making it — for whatever reason — less palatable to critique a company, for fear that you would “bet against a winner,” as the assumption would be that this company would go public or get acquired, and nobody wants to be wrong, do they? This naturally created a world of startup investment and innovation that oriented itself around the growth-at-all-costs nightmare of The Rot Economy. Startups were rewarded not for creating real businesses, or having good ideas, or even creating new categories, but for their ability to play “brainwash a venture capitalist,” either through being “a founder to bet on” or appealing to the next bazillion-dollar TAM boondoggle. Perhaps they’d find some sort of product-market fit, or grow a large audience by providing a service at an unsustainable cost, but this was all done with the knowledge of an upcoming bailout via IPO or acquisition.
January 16, 2026 at 5:43 PM
antondieckhoff.bsky.social
Hat jemand Follow-Empfehlungen für die Tech/KI/Finanz/Private Equity Szene(n)? Gerne kritisch aber auch einfach aus Interesse. @edzitron.com hab ich schon gefunden, @acquiredfm.bsky.social geht auch in die Richtung als Beispiel.
January 16, 2026 at 11:54 PM
antondieckhoff.bsky.social
Ich habe bei der @taz.de zusammen mit @lobbycontrol.bsky.social recherchiert, wie die Rüstungsindustrie bei der EU-Kommission lobbyiert hat, um als nachhaltig deklariert zu werden - und Erfolg hatte.
taz.de/Waffenlobby-...
Waffenlobby in der EU: Wie Rüstung nachhaltig werden soll
Die EU erwägt, Rüstungsfirmen als nachhaltig zu klassifizieren. Recherchen von Taz und LobbyControl zeigen: Die Branche hat dafür lobbyiert.
taz.de
October 8, 2024 at 12:47 PM
Reposted by Anton Dieckhoff
tspbackground.bsky.social
Sophia Eltrop ist immer wieder zwischen dem öffentlichen und dem privaten Sektor sowie zwischen Ost- und Westdeutschland gewechselt. Jetzt arbeitet sie im Vorstand der Naturstrom AG dafür, dass dieser sich gegen große #Energiekonzerne behaupten kann.
Jetzt lesen: bit.ly/3uvDKWY

#Wissensvorsprung
February 7, 2024 at 10:51 AM