TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* It’s An En En En En Ron feat. Ed Zitron

Episode Date: November 29, 2025

Ed returns quickly after his last appearance to address Nvidia’s apropos-of-almost-nothing reassurance to the world “by the way, we’re not Enron.” Also, we read an article about probably one of the worst AI companies going. Get the whole episode on Patreon here!   TF Merch is still available here!   *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

So basically what happened is a few substacks and Twitter posts went up. By the way, that's also how you know that you're a really secure company. Is really responding to the haters on like a kind of granular level. Long live the posters. Yeah. It's like you're not getting sort of like because Muddy Waters doesn't exist anymore, if I remember correctly. Like Hindenberg doesn't exist anymore. The age of those kind of like big short sellers doesn't, it's kind of gone.

And so now the only option is to become your haters waiter at this. their table of envy and really scrutinized their order. So what happened is Michael Burry, as well as another couple of skeptics, Jim Chanos is in this, Jim Dugod Chanos is in this as well, but he was mostly in the pages of the FT. Guys, guys that you heard of because they were played by a character actor, you sort of recognize in either the big short or margin call. So Michael Burry, who was Christian Bale in the big short, Michael Bury played Christian Bale in the making of the big short, the documentary about the making of the big short. So basically, what he's

done is he's written a blog post, a substack, that lays out why he thinks Nvidia is hugely overvalued. And he makes two core arguments, one that we're going to talk about quite a bit more and one that I think we can kind of leave aside. The one we can leave aside is that they basically fraudulently stated the value of the stock-based compensation that they were issuing. Yeah. And to be clear, But that's Christian Bale's argument in the big short, not our argument in the big short. We're not suggesting NVIDIA is committing fraud because frankly, that's a big word to use fraud. And fraud, that requires, you know, a degree of intention. And while admittedly, every corporate leak of emails does have a bunch of guys going,

loves doing crimes with you, thanks so much for the help with the crimes. That hasn't happened with NVIDIA, so we can't say whether or not NVIDIA is committing fraud. Also, it just seems less likely. Yeah. They don't need to. And also, the stock-based compensation argument he made was just off. It was the one, like, in this memo they put out that they quite articulately explained he was wrong on. And I'm actually kind of shocked he.

I think he kind of overplayed his hand. And then, in video, went, no, no, no, sir. We can also do that. Watch this. The two worst poker players in the game. Five-h-h-holt. No, six aces. oh yeah well i have five identical cards and it's just the backs of the cards

instructions for playing stud poker this is the magic the gathering cards um turning it toward turning the card faces towards his opponents all red speaking of all red i mean there is a part of me that wonders like is it a sign of a company's health that they're like you know what this guy who's a skeptic on a blog somewhere is we have to stop what we're doing. We have to stop the Infinity Semiconductor factory to respond and take our clothes off and scream at him. And it's like, what is, what about this makes it such a priority? I mean, like,

he's not just a guy who was wrong. He's Christian bail one time who was wrong. But it's the thing. I actually was having this conversation with an analyst who was saying, oh, well, this was meant to stay internal. This is a big analyst. I'm not going to say who, but it's just like, and their arguments oh, it's going to stay, it was meant to stay internal. I'm like, it got sent to fucking Michael.

Barry and he said, not real. I sent him the tweet, goes, oh, and he didn't respond to me the rest of the night. It's so strange, I mean, putting aside the Nroniness of it, what the fuck is this for? Yeah, it's some sort of like internal vent slack channel

that's just named like get a load of this guy. Well, my theory is that this is, as a PR professional, this is a client gone wild scenario. Every so often a client is like, well, I'm going to fucking say something. I'm going to say something, I'm going to go online and say something.

And you were just like, no, no, no, don't do that. They said we're like Emron. No, Jensen, Jensen, put a keyboard down, mate. Arguably, it wasn't Jensen so much as the like leather jacket controlling his mind. The Green Goblin situation, like we discussed it. We got about 20 minutes out of Jensen Hong's leather jacket on the last week. Because I've never seen him not wearing it. And I've never seen him wear even a different leather jacket.

I'm just kind of looking at him thinking if I take that thing off or you die. Yeah. Or if it gets taken off, will you suddenly snap into reality and beg not to be reinserted into the jacket? The jacket is basically like the venom suit that Peter Parker brought back

from the different dimension and it's controlling him, but in the form of a very ugly jacket. Jets said we need to eat a chicken. So basically, right? So Michael Burry's note also doesn't say the word, I know, Cremere if I'm wrong, Ed, I looked at this,

It doesn't say the word Enron. It says Lucent and Cisco. Yes, very specific. Yeah. And because Enron was like what Cisco did was not criminal. It was hugely reckless. It ended up sort of being a big sort of focal point of the dot-com crash. And a lot of that is to do with like creative accounting, let's say like financing your customers.

But Enron, Enron was it was the emails, right? It was not just like we're going to hide the company's debt in a bunch of like special purpose vehicles. because that's legal to do, I guess, if you just name those, we have a lot of debt we're trying to hide LLC or whatever the fuck. But what you can't do is put a bunch of your company's debt into those special purpose vehicles,

not tell your investors, and then write a bunch of emails to each other going, hey, nice job, defrauding our investors. That was what Enron was doing. I just watched Michael Clayton yesterday and great movie for bits in it where there's just like the whole thing hinges on memo. Yeah, we did the thing we claim we didn't do.

Hey, should we have done this? Probably not. It's super illegal. It's a bad idea, I think. Which is realistic as we've learned. No, no, it really is just like, because at this point, the whole thing, it's the obvious Dryzand effect of it all, where it's like, I wasn't thinking that before. But now, before this, I would not have for even a second thought that they were Enron.

Riley, we were talking about this, where it's like, they're not Enron. They're not doing anything. close to what Enron's doing, I hope. Because before this point, I would have said, with my whole chest, like, there's no way they were doing that. Now I'm like, I don't know. It's weird that you denied it that specifically.

It's weird that that was your first pull as well. Walking into a room being like, yeah, I haven't shot my pants recently. I don't know, but you're all pretty quiet about whether or not your Enron or have been pants shitters. Maybe we should look at all of you. Yeah.

So specifically, the memo said, But unlike Enron, NVIDIA does not use special purpose entities to hide debt and inflate revenue. We're not specifically employing Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. Yeah, you'll notice our logo is quite different, even though they both start with an N sound. They're different companies, different offices as well, geographically distant locations. So let's talk about the other claim that Burry makes. And this is the one that I think is probably more relevant and useful. and that is sort of more expanding

on something we've touched on before, which is he has said that the valuation of NVIDIA and the valuation of a lot of NVIDIA's customers that are accumulating huge amounts of assets, although, Ed, we'll talk about this in a minute, it's becoming very clear that a lot of graphics cards are just sitting in warehouses and there's no onset financial to like do a sale and lease back of them,

that this is the case, and that the values of these assets, not just for NVIDIA, but for meta, Google, also for private companies like OpenAI, they're massively overstating their value because they're saying, okay, well, these are never going to depreciate. And there was a chart that is in Burry's newsletter that I think is pretty useful. It's from the company filings themselves,

which is here's how we've calculated the depreciation curve, which is like how long does it take for this graphics card to become worth $0, basically, either from being burnt out or from being made obsolete or whatever, is that in 2020, meta, Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon was like roughly between like three and four years mostly. Oracle was five. They said it was a little longer. But then something happens in 2020, three and four, which is these numbers start jumping. All of a sudden, as a 2025, meta says it's five and a half years. Google six, Oracle six, Microsoft six, Amazon five. They have in some cases doubled the amount of time that they take to

depreciate a GPU, even though GPU, like, that hasn't materially changed how quickly GPUs depreciate. If anything, it's faster because they're coming up with new ones. more quickly. Yeah, it's not like an architecture change. It's just, that's a financial change. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And what's crazy is over time,

GPUs have been run hotter and required more power and thus been in more peril. It's just a really weird thing that they did. It's sort of a great thing to announce, though, is if you're like, my problems are five years away. Well, actually, I've investigated more closely, and I found out that my problems are six years away. And instantly, at the stroke of a pen,

my problems are a year further away than they were. And investors are credulous enough to be like, yeah, absolutely, sounds good to us. It's very funny, like, as a tech company to sort of, after spending so long, making products designed to be destroyed within like a year or two years because of an upgrade to suddenly be like, oh yeah, we've actually made a new piece of technology, which is designed to last for longer, and you should just trust us on that. And it runs hot all the time, 100% of the time, even when it's not on. So basically, like, all of these companies are saying,

we have to run these, you know, basically made of oily rags, pieces of computing infrastructure. And crucially, they need infinite electricity forever to the point that Sam Altman has started talking about. He's doing compute is to computing power. He started calling electricity electrons. I fucking, I'm so fucking sick of this guy.