The current situation bears structural similarities to three major accounting frauds: Enron (2001), WorldCom (2002), and Lucent Technologies (2000).
Lucent, once America’s largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer, grew revenue through vendor financing arrangements. The company lent money to telecom carriers to purchase Lucent equipment, booking the equipment sales as revenue while the loans appeared as receivables. When carriers couldn’t repay, Lucent took $8.7 billion in writeoffs.
Lucent’s DSO peaked at 64 days before the fraud became public. Nvidia’s current 53-day DSO remains below that threshold but exceeds its historical baseline by the same percentage that preceded Lucent’s collapse.
Enron used Special Purpose Entities to hide debt and inflate revenue. These entities existed as legally separate companies but were economically controlled by Enron. The structure created artificial revenue through transactions with entities Enron itself funded.
The xAI SPV structure mirrors this approach. Nvidia provides equity capital to an entity that exists primarily to purchase Nvidia products. The transaction appears as an arms-length sale in Nvidia’s accounting, but economically, Nvidia is funding its own revenue.
This is probably the key metric to lead to a crash. The US empire is all in on NVIDIA other AI oligarchy, and western chip industry is all in on making only datacenter AI chips. Computers, and soon phones, will become grossly overpriced and unbuyable. Even if TSMC makes only and all of the “AI brains chips”, there’s not enough memory production to package them all into GPUs, and then actually less TSMC production/profits even though it is positioned as a winner no matter which hardware company succeeds. This can also crash economy and consumer inflation.
The actual worst circular financing AI deal is not mentioned, and involves an older traditional scam. If you buy 1 share in a private company for $1000, then the company boasts a PR where its new value is $1000/share. VC firms like Softbank have always done this to boost their accounting value, because they bought millions of share at $100 or less, and small amounts of new shares makes whole stake appear to succeed.
Anthropic recently made a circular deal with NVDA and MSFT investing $15B in Anthropic, but at over double its valuation. This gives Anthropic shareholders over $150B in “value”. Circularly, Anthropic will be paying $30B to the above 2 companies.
xAI and StarX also made scam new valuations for each other early this year. They just swapped shares among themselves, while imagining a new $ amount for each where accounting permits the imaginary to be real.