I know nothing about finances at this level, so asking like a complete newbie: doesn't that just mean that instead of risking $10B they're risking $7-8B? It is a cheaper bet for sure, but doesn't look to me like a game changer when the range of the bet's outcome goes from 0 to 1000% or more.
Also, classifying business expenses as "cost to the tax payer" seems less than useful, unless you are a proponent of simply taxing gross receipts. Which has its merits, but then the discussion is about taxing gross receipts versus income with at least some deductible expenses, not anything to do with OpenAI.
I may be way off, but to me it seems like the AI bubble is largely a way to siphon money from institutional investors to the tech industry (and try to get away with it by proxying the investments) based on a volatile and unpredictable promise?
The existential risk is in companies smoking the AI crackpipe that sama (begging your pardon) handed them, thinking it feels great and then projecting[1] that every investment will hit like the first, and continuing to buy the <EXPLETIVE> crack that they can't afford, and they investors can't afford, and their clients can't afford, their vendors can't afford, the grid can't afford, the planet can't afford, the American people can't afford, and sama[2] can't afford, _because it's <EXPLETIVE> crack_!
The wise will shut up and take the win on the slop com bubble.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_dragon
[2]: For those following along at home, sama is Sam Altman, he was a part of the Y Combinator community a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sama
It's the dumb as rocks MBAs that will go head first into the 5% chance deal.
This is only true if the probability distributions for the values of the individual deals are rather uncorrelated (or even better: stochastically mostly independent).
Opportunity costs are a thing.
This is especially true when your investors/owners expect you to generate better returns than the risk-free rate.
However, this discussion will be a perfect introduction to "finances at this level", where about 60% of the action is injecting more variables until you can fit a veneer of quantification onto any narrative.
So MSFT is effectively getting 2x the equity by putting money into OpenAI, it also conveys some financial engineering capability as they can choose to invest more when profits are high to smooth out cash flow growth.
isn't that what buybacks are for?
Är the same time, MS revenues are looking real good, causing the stock price to go up. It's a win win win maybe win huge situation.
So just a loss for governments, or in other words, socializing the losses.
Pension funds buy shares in businesses such as Microsoft. The money going into the pension fund is not typically a function of the tax paid by companies such as Microsoft, but rather from a combination of actuaries’ recommendations, payroll tax receipts, and politicians’ priorities.
Therefore a pension funds’ equity holdings, such as Microsoft, doing well means taxes can be lower.
In the USA, Social Security defined benefit pensions are cash from workers today going to non workers today, same as Germany's national scheme (gesetzliche Rentenversicherung?).
The other defined benefit benefit pension schemes are what are usually invested in equities, and the investment restrictions section in this document indicate Germany's "occupational pensions" can also invest in equities. (page 12)
https://www.aba-online.de/application/files/2816/2945/5946/2...
How's that different than any other sort of R&D incentive? Would you rather that companies return as much money as possible to shareholders, future growth be damned? What about other sorts of tax incentives, which by definition also "just a loss for governments"? Are tax breaks for people with kids also "socializing the losses", given that most households don't have kids?
Speaking for EU, all big tech already not paying taxes one way or another, either using Dublin/Ireland (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, ...) and Luxembourg (Amazon & Microsoft as far as I can tell) to avoid such corporate/income taxes. Simply possible because all the earnings go back to the U.S. entity in terms of "IP rights".
That should be expected, because
https://european-union.europa.eu/priorities-and-actions/acti...
> The EU does not have a direct role in collecting taxes or setting tax rates.
> There was a lawsuit in Belgium but Amazon has won that in late-2024 since they had a separate agreement in/with Luxembourg.
Dec 2023.
> Speaking for EU, all big tech already not paying taxes one way or another, either using Dublin/Ireland (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, ...) and Luxembourg (Amazon & Microsoft as far as I can tell) to avoid such corporate/income taxes. Simply possible because all the earnings go back to the U.S. entity in terms of "IP rights".
Ireland (due to pressure from EU) closed this in 2020. The amount of tax collected by Ireland quadrupled. See Figure 5 and 6 in link below.
https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2024/10/14/the-...
Its clear that OP means "in the EU".
> Ireland (due to pressure from EU) closed this in 2020. The amount of tax collected by Ireland quadrupled. See Figure 5 and 6 in link below.
And Ireland fought against this tooth and nail. Yes, a country was fighting to have less income. All out of fear that the companies will leave the little tax heaven. Did they leave? No ...
> See Figure 5 and 6 in link below.
Figure 7 is also interesting if we look at the tax income increase and the outbound.
1. Amazon reports 250bn$+ revenue for entire EU in 2025. (of course, revenue != profit) while all 250bn$+ evaporates to somewhere. Their own page [1] reports 225k employees across EU, meaning that each employee returns whopping 1 million plus dollars! While being compensated less than 10% of their value!
2. In their own article [1], they boast how they invested (translated; smuggled money out) and enabled SMEs 20bn$+ revenue. (Like seriously, less than 10%?! actually goes back into the economy...)
3. Amazon says that they have invested 250bn$ in EU since 2010. It is completely unknown what or where that was invested. I do not see my street lightning being improved by the Amazon's investment or garbage being collected better.
4. Luxembourg's GDP is ~95bn$ in 2025. Amazon has contributed to that with the 0$ corporate tax. Obviously they employed about 4.5k people which they've decided to let go about 10% of them. Where the median/average yearly gross salary stands somewhere around 80k eur, it is hardly anywhere near 1mm+$ total income. I am guessing that they heat up the offices with burning the remaining cash...
[1]: https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/job-creation-and-investment/...
For the date of the verdict for Amazon vs EU, apologies. The article date was November 2024 in the source [2].
[2]: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/308509/20241129/amazons-2...
For the Ireland, I only knew similarities between Luxembourg and specific laws allowing such loopholes pre-brexit period. The source is certainly interesting and I need to dive deeper to understand better.
An employee's "value" is not revenue / number of employees. There are many businesses where employees are reduced, but revenue does not decrease in direct proportion.
An employee's compensation is only related to what the employer thinks they can pay someone else and what the employee thinks another employer will pay them. Just like how the price of an apple is related to what the grocery store thinks a customer will pay for it and what the customer thinks a different grocery store will sell it for. (Obviously bounded on both sides by the minimum cost to produce and transport the apple, and by the maximum price a customer is able and willing to pay).
These big corps use holdings in low tax jurisdisctions like Ireland and Luxemburg, funnel all their EU subsidiaries’ revenues there and end up paying 0 tax in the individual EU countries.
This system is actually legal, EU lawmakers should pass laws to prevent this.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich?wprov=sfla1
And the decision how to distribute these (corporate tax) should be done by the government. Essentially, companies evading [corporate] tax decides themselves where to distribute that money. Obviously, they make decisions that drives more profits and income, not the public good. Even if it improves living conditions (ie. delivery service would help elderly), it still requires that person to be user of the product. A layman/citizen cannot effectively utilize the benefits.
What should be taxed?
Amazon, as an example, has servers in country X. Country X taxes the transaction or the income from the server company.
Amazon pays delivery drivers in country X to deliver goods, and the driver is taxed through various means (vehicle, fuel, payroll, etc).
What is Amazon doing in country X that should be taxed?
its profits within that country (income minus actual expenses)
in practice expenses are fakely inflated to transfer tax payments top jurisdiction with near-zero taxes
Amazon can add up the costs to install and operate a datacenter or warehouse in country X, but most of the demand for services from that datacenter or warehouse will be due to expenses incurred in country Y.
> What should be taxed?
Profits of the company, like all other (local) companies do. > Amazon, as an example, has servers in country X. Country X taxes the transaction or the income from the server company.
Amazon has servers in Germany, Germany is unable to tax the transaction or income from Amazon, because;1. The user completes a transaction either on Amazon (buying a product) or in AWS (running an EC2 instance)
2. If the user is a business, there is no VAT. Because VAT is applied only to the end user. (To prevent compounding effect also). If it was the end-user, then end-user already pays for their VAT, usually around 18-20% in the case of an EC2 instance. But that has nothing to do with Amazon. User technically pays the VAT directly to the government depending on where he/she is located and where the server is.
3. Obviously Amazon does not sell the products or servers for free, they have a markup or profit margin, let's say 40% for a 100eur EC2 instance. So, 40eur lands into Amazon's bank account. While other 60eur goes to the operating expenses. (ie. Electricity, maintenance, employees' salaries, etc...)
4. In this case, Amazon should be taxed from that 40%, (ie. from the 40eur profit). Luxembourg corporate tax is about ~16-17%. Mind that US federal corporate tax is 21% itself. For the sake of simplicity, let's take 20% as the corporate tax. This would make 8eur going into the government's pocket. while 32eur stays as the profit with amazon.
5. All other companies provide the same service and has no magical entity outside pays that ~8eur to the government. Which in turn used to provide services to the citizens. (For example, Luxembourg has completely free public transportation that works 24/7, subsidized by the taxes)
6. However, Amazon having a magical entity, they declare all that 40eur profit belongs to the US entity due to the IP rights. They essentially say 100% of the things that are produced in Luxembourg, by employees in Luxembourg even owned by the US entity. Therefore, they do not pay any income tax as in fact there is no income on paper.
7. Instead, since they were able to save that 8eur, they can reduce the prices of the services up to that amount. But instead, Amazon usually reduces prices about half, reducing 4eur for customers and other 4eur going into Amazon's profit pocket.
8. It all seems nice so far, since users also benefit from reduced prices, right? Unfortunately, no. In the longer term, it hurts competition as other companies must pay taxes and losing the customers [to Amazon].
9. When there is no competition left, then Amazon can just start syphoning all the 8eur profit back to themselves. Even setting the prices as there is no longer any alternative to go.
10. Not only it hurts customers, it also hurts the random person on the street; as they receive services from government which were subsidized by the taxes. You may say that Amazon can or may invest even better products or services, but that's again not helping the layman unless he/she is an Amazon customer. And mind that a citizen does not need to be Amazon customer to get their electricity and water running.
> Amazon pays delivery drivers in country X to deliver goods, and the driver is taxed through various means (vehicle, fuel, payroll, etc).
Similar to the above, Amazon does not pay VAT or any other service taxes for any of the services they provide. But the driver does! It is even worse for the driver when he/she uses Amazon because on the net balance sheet, the driver pays income tax from his/her salary. Pays VAT for the services they receive. If he/she receives 1000eur salary at the end of the month, they can use at most about ~60% of their salary to receive goods and services. (~20% income tax + ~20% VAT). Hence, there is a corporate tax that balance these scenarios. But evading it causes more harm than good in the long run. > What is Amazon doing in country X that should be taxed?
All the profits (earnings, surpluses) they receive should be taxed.The consumer pays a certain price for a product and a portion of that money goes to taxes and costs to Amazon (including things that are taxed, like driver salaries and fuel). Those taxes are collected on the way from Amazon to the end user in every country they pass through, more or less.
Amazon is creating commerce that is taxed. They aren't skating by for free.
So EU lawmakers should determine the amount member countries collect in tax?
The countries like Ireland and Luxembourg need to stop granting these loopholes.
To give an (absurd) example; You work in country X, but the parent company is in country Y. Imagine your income tax is not going to where you reside but where you work, (usually the opposite) in this case, country Y. (~20-40% of the gross salary).
One day, your basic needs (electricity, water, etc) stops working. You call the relevant government department asking what's the problem. They reply with saying they do not know and cannot afford to figure our or fix because they do not have the money to do so.
But you've been paying at least 20% (and up to 46%) of your salary as the income tax. Where the money go? Why do you work here but someone else in the other side of the world getting that slice for free?
OpenAI is anyways seeking Govt Bailout for "National Security" reasons. Wow, I earlier scoffed at "Privatize Profits, Socialize Losses", but this appears to now be Standard Operating Procedure in the U.S.
https://www.citizen.org/news/openais-request-for-massive-gov...
So the U.S. Taxpayer will effectively pay for it. And not just the U.S. Taxpayer - due to USD reserve currency status, increasing U.S. debt is effectively shared by the world. Make billionaires richer, make the middle class poor. Make the poor destitute. Make the destitute dead. (All USAID cuts)
It shouldn't be the job of the US taxpayer to feed someone that doesn't want to work, study, or pass a drug test, and it absolutely shouldn't be the job of the US taxpayer to feed another country's citizens half a world away.
Compare that to when we still had revolutions, where it was very hard for government to know what is going on, and to find individuals without a huge effort.
I think revolutions have become next to impossible, unless it is lead by significant parts of the elite that controls at least part of the apparatus.
That's not even counting the far more sophisticated propaganda methods, so that many of the affected people won't even begin to target the actual culprits but are lead to chase shadows, or one another.
> You can’t kill/arrest 25% of your population.
Unnecessary.
> That is why Russia/China/etc are so scared to let any protests begin
Especially Russia's issue is that lots of the elites want change too. But you also underestimate that what the population also does not want is a repeat of 1990s chaos, and Russian weakness.
What about someone who works and still can’t afford enough housing/food?
> shouldn't be the job of the US taxpayer to feed another country's citizens half a world away.
I mean where’s the profit in that, am i right?
Food stamps? The original comment is addressing those not working or studying, or staying off drugs.
>I mean where’s the profit in that, am i right?
We’re $38 trillion dollars in debt. Digging a deeper whole isn’t a sound decision.
That's pretty close to the story other Brits give themselves for why losing the empire was actually a good thing for the UK.
This would make sense if every person was given similar opportunities, like providing quality education to all of our youngest and making higher education a mission rather than a business as a starter.
As a society we move at the speed of the weakest among us, we only move forward when we start lifting and helping the weakest and most vulnerable.
You also need to realize that not doing that work is also cause for other taxpayer money to be spent elsewhere, such as spending an average of 37k $ per incarcerated person, and that ignores all the damage that criminal might've caused, all the additional police staffing and personal security that is needed to be spent outside prisons, etc.
Those are complex systems, are you sure it wouldn't be better to spend the same gargantuan amount of money that's spent on millions of inmates and fighting crime into fighting the causes that make many fall into that?
Again, those are complex, but closed systems and the argument of "we shouldn't spend on X" often ignores the cost of not spending on X.
You’re right that these are complex systems, and just pouring more tax dollars and more debt into them isn’t working. Portions of our society need to value education, value contributing to society instead of taking, and reject criminality - but those changes require more than blind spending.
In another way, the top talent gets Ferraris for their tuition, the rest gets a bike. In a lot of European countries everyone can get the Toyota Camry of education, decent but not world class. That does scale though.
Spending isn't everything, it's how you apply that spending.
A lot.
As an European I can assure you even public second tier universities have excellent education.
Where they lag the rankings is where money matters: politics to be highly ranked and money for high impact research.
But when it comes to testing proficiency in e.g. science and math, the second university of Rome ranks higher than most ivy leagues in US ;)
For science/math would you rather go to Rome or MIT? I know which one I would pick if they cost the same. A lot of it is also the people you're surrounded by.
Much of the problem comes from a poor grasp of what education is and is for, and because of that, money and effort are not allocated properly. One source of the problem are various educational fads. I personally remember when computers were artificially jammed into school curricula for no good reason. There was absolutely no merit to what was being done. But how much do you think the companies selling that garbage made out?
Or consider the publishing industry that fleeces schools and students with 12978th editions of the same poorly-presented material packaged in overpriced books. Financially, education is quite cheap, but there are sectors of the economy devoted to convincing pedagogues and politicians that it isn't, and that what you need to do is buy in order to "change with the times". Sorry, but basic education isn't fast fashion. Materially, basic education is stable and cheap.
Another problem is that American culture is pragmatic to a fault. Americans have a long history of viewing education, particularly the university, with distaste, as some kind of "European", un-American, and aristocratic thing. This explains the appeal of the pragmatic turn of the university: you now go to university to "get a job". Of course, that isn't the core mission of the university, and most professions don't require anything the university might provide, especially not at these absurd costs (hence why GenZ is seeing something like a 1500% increase in pursuing trades).
We have a cultural momentum that must fizzle out or must be reshaped. Where the modern university specifically is concerned, its days may very well be numbered. It may very well be forced to undergo very painful changes, or crumble, with a new crop of smaller colleges taking their place. Where primary education is concerned, parents are increasingly taking their children out of the savage factory known as public education. This, too, may force public education to finally deal with its dysfunction, or collapse.
A morbid thought that would probably address the bulk of this: male birth control.
The backlash would be profound, it’ll never happen. But if there were a way to make a “perfect pill/shot/procedure” boys had maybe at birth to prevent unplanned pregnancies… just think about it.
I’m not even sure I’m advocating for it. Everyone says “education will fix all the things!” I think raising kids where the parents wanted to be parents would fix a whole lot, at least on the incarnation side.
Our first obligations are toward our immediate families. As the human race is essentially a large extended family, the obligations dissipate the further out we go. We do have a general obligation to help those in need, but this obligation is prioritized. In classical texts, this is called the ordo amoris or "order of love" (in the older, more technically accurate terminology, order of charity, where "charity" - from caritas - means willing the good of the other).
Now, to address your comment specifically...
> There's already a lot that the US taxpayer is on the hook for that's a lot less valuable than a best on the next big thing in software, productivity, and warfare.
For example? Whatever the benefits of LLMs, I find this relative exuberance unreasonable.
> It shouldn't be the job of the US taxpayer to feed someone that doesn't want to work,
In someone able-bodied and of sound mind refuses to work, then we don't have an obligation to support someone like that. This is true. In fact, it would be uncharitable to enable their laziness, because it harms the character and virtue of that person. Of course, in practice, if someone you have determined is able to work is found starving and in danger of death, for example, then it is unlikely they are merely lazy. Would a man of sound mind allow himself to starve?
The manner in which we deal with such cases is a prudential matter, not a matter or principle. We need to determine how best to satisfy the principle in the given circumstances, and there is room for debate here.
> it absolutely shouldn't be the job of the US taxpayer to feed another country's citizens half a world away.
If there is a humanitarian crisis somewhere in the world, for example, then there is a general obligation of the entire world to help those affected. How that happens, how that is coordinate, is a matter of prudence and implementation detail, as it were. Naturally, several factors enter the equation (proximity, wealth, etc).
How do you square this thought with the actual rate of poverty being on a steady downward trend while billionaires do their things?
This does not show your "steady downward trend", but has considerably fluctuated over the last few years. It is an increase to 12.9% in 2024, compared to 7.1% in 2020-21. Will need to wait till end of 2026 for the 2025 computation.
https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/ec3d46c25a822d6d248e86d...
Please note that if you exclude China, the trend of poverty reduction is laughable.
"Slowed to a near standstill" means it's still moving in the right direction.
There may have been some global event in the 2020s that maybe had a bit of an impact on the global economy.
> Please note that if you exclude China, the trend of poverty reduction is laughable.
If you exclude the area of the world that used to be extremely poor but has benefitted massively from the wealth generated by creating products for the billionaires abroad, why would you exclude that?
Their investors, if publicly traded like Microsoft do have to take write-downs on their financial statements but those aren't realized losses for tax purposes. The only tax "benefit" Microsoft might get from the OpenAI investment is writing off the amount it invested if/when OpenAI goes bankrupt.
So kinda looking at a bank level run on tech companies if they go broke.
Was that an organic "it's not A, it's B" or synthetic?
Nobody is talking about this because it's not a thing.
People here will shit on LLMs all day for being confidently incorrect, then upvote aggressively financially illiterate comments like this.
Note: other people seem to be confused because companies can write off investments in corporate subsidiaries before the subsidiary is dissolved or sold...for book purposes. This creates what is known in the accounting world as a book-tax difference. If you have a few weeks to spare, look up tax provisions...