• megopie@beehaw.org
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    20 days ago

    Oh absolutely, the rabbit hole of deception can just go a lot deeper when people don’t even have to report numbers at all.

    Like, they can fudge line items, but, if the line items are growing at the same rate after they merge them, then it’s pretty clear the new thing isn’t driving growth. And changes like that are visible and can be scrutinized as well.

    We can watch the hands on this kind of reporting.

    • JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch
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      20 days ago

      Oh absolutely, you can only do this so long, and you can still see it if you look closely, but is seems that many investors forgot how to look closely?

      Microsoft specifically had 13 billion capex on AI in January 2025, the last time they mentioned it separately. And like 75-100 billion revenue from cloud iirc, which was growing a lot because of AI financing shenanigans. So that could still hide the growing expenses at that point.