You’re right!

I was mixing up the acquisition/merger and IPO timelines.

What liability?

What does that even mean?

If I own a stock, a share of a company… what does that make me liable for, just owning the stock?

Do you think that like, if I own a stock, and the company gets sued or something… I personally have to help the company pay out the damages the company is liable for?

No that’s not how stocks or the law works.

If the company’s stock decreases in value after people hear about it having to pay out from a court case, then yeah the stock has less value now… but the government seized the stock, it got it for $0 dollars.

So there’s no net loss.

You are having an entirely different conversation at this point.

I’m talking about the specific proposed law from Bernie.

You’re talking about a whole whole lot more than that.

Yeah, I agree, we need to make a whole lot of changes over here, but… that’s way off topic.

I can actually just keep doing this.

You’ve objectively displayed, repeatedly, that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

You should maybe learn what the words you are using actually mean.

Or, you can curse at me like a child that’s just recieved a bad grade on their writing assignment.

No, not instead.

In addition to, sure.

Class action lawsuits as a primary counter action to damages?

… why not just … stop the damages from happening?

If you have 50% of the shares, you have a controlling interest on the board.

You can significantly just tell the company what to do, what policies to have.

Going through through the courts to compensate the damage after the fact is massively more expensive and time consuming… its hitting someone with your car and they paying their medical bill 2 years later.

Why not just not hit them with the car?

I agree that SpaceX is a fiscal shitshow.

Would you rather own half of it for no cost?

Or own none of it for no cost?

If you own half of it for no cost, you have a substantial ability to … tell it what to do, with its people, its assets, its stuff, its technology.

If you own none of it for no cost, you do not have this ability.

In both scenarios, if the stock value goes to zero, you lose nothing, because you paid nothing.

Again, you seem to be struggling with the concept of nationalization.

The government just takes stuff over, because it says so, and it is the government.

No one is compensated, no one is paid.

In the US, cops can do this thing called asset seizure.

You get pulled over for a dead taillight.

You own a carwash and you’re on your way to deposit the month’s excess cash into the business account at your bank.

Cop decides you smell like marijuana, finds your cash and your well kept accounting records.

Doesn’t matter, that might be drug money, cops take the money.

Imagine that, but with stocks instead.

… Socialism is a process, a path toward an equitable classless society.

There have been many variations of what that path should look like, throughout the history of socialist movements.

‘Minority share’ is a funny way to refer to ‘a 50% share’.

The phrase you are looking for is ‘controlling interest’, as nothing can happen in the board level that you do not approve.

If the stocks and companies go to zero… well the government took them by force, (thats what nationalizing is), costing them no money.

So the net loss is 0.

So again, you don’t understand the words you are using.

Well lets pretend that after totally tripping over the joke, I ended up falling into a corner table but bracing myself as if I was just posting up on it and totally meant to land exactly like that.

I have heard about the Napa Wine Train, the one time I was nearby it, we were planning on going on it, but our schedule for the vacation got too messed up for it.

Maybe one day I’ll find my way back toward it.

Oh and its Pyuu Al Up. Not Poo Yall Up. Pyuu Al Up.

xAI is now (or will very soon be) part of SpaceX.

They physically own massive ‘Colossus’ datacenters with tons of GPUs.

As to leasing vs owning, I already addressed that.

If you are the government and you are half of the shareholders, you can pressure your own AI company, or the companies from whom your AI company leases GPUs from to be more honest and transparent regarding accounting methodologies.

Bernie is not proposing that any taxpayer money be put toward this at all.

The only actual expense here would be the minute cost of simply hiring some people to run and manage the sovereign wealth fund. Miniscule in comparison to the potential equity value of $$$s being managed. Think something like the administrative cost of running say, the SEC or FTC, in comparison to the amount of money moving around that they can affect.

He is proposing the government simply half nationalize these companies, as Trump not long ago did with TikTok.

If the government is half of every US based AI company’s board, they can also very effectively pressure them to make the models open source.

Not sure if you don’t understand the concept of nationalization, but basically, thats when the government looks at something and says ‘i own this now, because I say so’.

Theres no payment. Its… why I use the word ‘seize’.

Same way Marx argued that workers should ‘seize’ the means of production: Just take them.

I genuienly struggle to think of a kind of economic thing that better qualifies as a public utility.

Completely agree that this kind of technology, with such broad and immense ongoing, as well as potential implications, cannot be allowed to be directed by the whims of wealthy capitalist conmen rent seekers.

Man with bagel running away, so far away, but he couldn’t get away

You clearly do not understand what socialism in practice actually means or has historically looked like, so no, no you do not understand the words you are using.

If OpenAI fails, and the government owns half of it…

The assets and power the government acquired for no monetary cost simply becomes zero.

The other part of simply seizing half the shares is that the government (presumably a number of ministers/officials in charge of the new sovereign wealth fund) now has half the voting power of the entire board.

That is a pretty direct way to wield influence as to the decisions the company can make, how the CEO can behave.

You want maybe the accounting to actually deprecate the GPUs they have or lease over a realistic timeframe, instead of a totally bullshit one?

Half of your shareholders now demand this.

C Suite refuse to comply?

Begin the process of firing them.

You didn’t read the article, or you didn’t understand it.

The US Govt would not pay a cent for the shares of these companies.

It would simply seize them, half-nationalize them.

Its a half nationalization, not a half bailout.

You didn’t read the article, or you didn’t understand it.

The US Govt would not pay a cent for the shares of these companies.

It would simply seize them, half-nationalize them.

Its a half nationalization, not a half bailout.

You didn’t read the article, or you didn’t understand it.

The US Govt would not pay a cent for the shares of these companies.

It would simply seize them, half-nationalize them.

That… that is ‘socialism’, a form of it, that’s the government deciding that wealthy private equity/stock owners actually don’t own that stuff, because ‘we are the government and this is ours now.’

This is… is a form of what the US has previously used the CIA to overthrow a number of other country’s governments for, when they did something like this.

Almost everyone in this thread seems to be assuming the US would pay for half the shares/equity of these companies.

That is not what is being proposed.

What is being proposed is that the US Govt simply seize half the shares/equity/board voting powers in these companies, without paying a cent for them.

It is a half-nationalization.

Not a half-bailout.

EDIT

I go into more detail and explain in this comment in this same thread:

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/26357349

Wait.

Remove?

… How? From what?

What does that even mean?

… the point of this is to essentially half nationalize the companies.

No public money would be used to purchase these assets / equity shares. The government would simply seize them.

Is this a perfect solution? Fuck no.

Is it significantly better than the public having 0 effective say in what huge megacorps do? The public bearing the socialized costs of profilgate profit maximization of AI companies, the gains all being funnelled upward toward the already wealthy to super to hyper to uber wealthy?

Uh probably almost certainly yes.

Specifically, Sanders proposes a one-time transfer of 50 percent of equity from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI to the government. The idea: since AI is built on the accumulated knowledge, creativity, conversations, and labor of the American people — typically without permission or payment — the American people deserve a cut of the profits.

This is not ‘public/government money buys out half the equity of AI companies’.

This is ‘we are the government and we own half of you now, because we say so, fuck you’.

The fund would acquire half the stock of the largest AI companies in the country through a mandated equity transfer — Sanders is explicit that this is not a profits tax. The government would then hold voting shares and receive equal board representation at each company, giving it formal power to block decisions deemed harmful to the public.

It is literally ‘we own half your equity now, and have half the voting rights on your board(s)’.

So basically that would be something like doing a stock split.

In a standard stock split, private stock holders who used to own one share, now they own two shares of half the original share’s value. 2 * 1/2 = 1.

But with this, this is more like the private stock owners… the split happens, they still own the one share, but its value has been halved, and now the US government owns the other share.

2 * 1/2 = 1/2 {government/public} + 1/2 {private stock holders}

Then, those stocks owned by the US government get put into essentially a new government organization that would manage those stocks snd finances, as a soveriegn wealth fund.

The top of the K, the wealthiest 10% to 1% that own 90% or whatever of all stocks/equities… they all get a 50% haircut on their AI holdings.

And the proceeds get put toward the people.

Its not technically a wealth tax per se, but it accomplishes a similar thing, in a targeted and managed way.

Anyone who thinks this is ‘the US government is gonna buy half the AI stocks’ is mistaken.

That isn’t what is being proposed, ya’ll either didn’t read the article, or don’t know finance terminology.

The latter I can at least understand, but I absolutely must explain and correct the mistake.

… Was his name localized to Tomas for Spanish speaking regions… or are you doing a Mandella Effect bit?

Um, no, I’ve not been to that museum, does sound awesome, but my (nearly 100% certainly also autistic) grandpa had an entire, fully functional landscape / diorama / train track kit, that he spent like two decades slowly building… it was the size of roughly two queen mattresses, end to end.

I also did go to some train museums / exhibits up in the PNW, the cascades, they’ve kept an old school steam engine working on I think an old rail line for logging, up around snoqualmie, it’ll choo-choo you around a nice little relaxing loop.

Like, I am entirely unironically the stereotype of ‘loved trains waaaay too much as a kid = autism’, and it literally runs in family, hahah!

warning!

may attract flock of c-gulls