Global Crossing

And Brookings estimated at the time that corporate frauds were accountable for maybe up to a quarter of all the lost stock market wealth that had taken place.

And here's a chart on our old friends at Enron, Adelphia, Global Crossing, WorldCom, and Tyco.

I like to look at this chart every few years as a reminder of how bad things can be and how bad people can be.

So I was really struck, while I enjoyed the film, I was really struck by how ambivalent this documentary was about exactly what Holmes had done.

So more than 60 telecom companies went under between 2001 and 2003.

In just two years, 60% flashed or slashed, okay? Global Crossing, which had built a...

a network spanning 27 countries, also filed for bankruptcy in January 2002 and was eventually sold for $250 million after investors lost tens of billions.

WorldCom, you know, the guys of the claim, they also followed six months later the biggest bankruptcy in American history at the time with an accounting fraud on top.

Yes, that's the right word to use.

Back in the telecom bubble, when it was still inflating and Global Crossing was buying up and leasing as much real estate in West Manhattan as they could.

and people trying to be on the OC48 in Virginia and New York City.

Get that sub-x millisecond ping time so that when you're trading app would work, it would give you as fast as humanly possible, and you had that microsecond advantage.

I understand the concern, really I do, but I do think this time is different.

Nvidia isn't pets.com, Amazon isn't eToys, and Alphabet isn't Global Crossing.

What I mean is that the companies powering the AI boom have a ton of cash, real actual businesses, and great leaders at the helm.

Don't take my word for it, though.

And then they collapsed and some went bankrupt.

The same thing happened with fiber optics, Global Crossing, if you remember that company.

You had these companies build out millions of miles, basically, of fiber optic cable, which were needed to power this.

But then the prices collapsed.

Well, we had the same thing happen with fiber.

During the 1990s, everybody and their brother, Global Crossing, everybody else was putting in fiber and interconnects everywhere.

They were installing capacity that was expensive as hell to put in the ground and put in the air and put in the buildings.

uh it got way ahead of everybody's skis those companies all blew up but that that stuff wasn't worthless right it got absorbed over time it's just that people were paying because i gotta have it now i gotta have it now i gotta have it but there was no revenue to go along with the expense and ultimately that's the bottom line is you have to be able to turn a profit at this And I see impending signs of serious dislocations coming in the very near future.