“The We Company's guiding mission will be to elevate the world's consciousness.”
- Adam Neumann, CEO
“What I hope is that we successively develop more and more powerful systems that …become an amplifier of human will."
- Sam Altman, CEO
Welcome to your weekly Dark Markets free edition, where we talk about techno-frauds, utopian techno-fascists, and dimwit crypto grifters.
I’m David Z. Morris, longtime finance reporter and PhD historian of technology, and author of Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia.
It’s been a bad week, maybe a bad month, for Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the so-called “AI industry” in general. Scroll down for why OpenAI’s IPO might crash and burn like WeWork’s.
But first, an update and one bit of news.
Subscribe
I was very honored to be invited to discuss the book, and my recent reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, with Gil Duran and The Nerd Reich. Please have a listen.
New evidence shows Argentine President Javier Milei called $Libra memecoin promoter Mauricio Novelli seven times on the night of the fraudulent token’s launch. This pretty well disproves Milei’s previous claims to have some vague sort of distance from the project, which Milei endorsed and wound up costing speculators about $250 mil.
The revelations also show a longer corrupt relationship between the two. Records from 2023 have Novelli telling an assistant to budget “the usual 2,000 for Milei,” calling it a monthly salary, while in a separate April 2024 message he referenced “the 4,000 we need to give to Karina” - Milei’s sister.
Novelli, remember, worked alongside Hayden Davis, who launched and then rug-pulled Milei’s token, walking away with close to $100 million. Davis is the grandson of Mormon mass-murderer Evril LeBaron, and adjecent to a multigenerational scheme to exert American influence in South and Central America.
We’ll be continuing our dive into the LeBarons - and their link to Keith Raniere’s Nexium - soon. Catch up below.
·
Jan 5
·
Feb 8
Subscribe
One of the memos, about Altman, begins with a list headed “Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of . . .”
The first item is “Lying.”
I was at Fortune during the WeWork saga of late 2019, and it’s easily one of the highlights of my mainstream media career. Here’s me blurbing just one of the hilarious ways the offering was a painfully obvious con-job - the tax advantages it gave to insiders.
There’s so much to remember about WeWork, and it has been an incredibly long six years since its vaunted IPO turned into a suicide vest for backers. But with OpenAI aiming to IPO later this year, it’s a critical moment to gaze directly at the very scary parallels.
Fundamentally Stupid Valuation Propped up By Venture. Above all other causes, WeWork collapsed when a years-long narrative sold to venture investors collided with real revenue numbers that had to be disclosed in an S-1.
Now we have this absolutely staggering report from The Information that Altman is boxing out his CFO because she’s telling him things he doesn’t want to hear about revenue.
Core Business Doesn’t Do What it Says On the Tin. WeWork rented real estate, but tried to transubstantiate that into something about technology and, even more vaguely, “consciousness.”
OpenAI builds probabilistic chatbots and meme-generators, but Altman (who is not an engineer or computer scientist!) promises to create superintelligence within just a few years, cure cancer and solve climate change. The latest of a thousand blows to Altman’s delusion is this paper demonstrating that LLMs can’t do basic math reliably.
What’s shocking is that the mainstream media are actually starting to talk about this openly. A Bloomberg editor is publicly speculating that LLMs were a “false start.” Not great!
“Scale Is All You Need” is dead
4 months ago · 377 likes · 151 comments · Gary Marcus
But that’s not what matters about the scaling narrative. Because it involves infrastructure and not just software, scaling has always been a useful justification for huge capital raising.
And in a couple of years when they admit this and pivot away from scaling, OpenAI still gets to keep the money.
You might not guess (because why would you), but even at a relatively forthright and outspoken publication like back-of-the-book Fortune, reporters had far harsher assessments of WeWork than you’d actually read in our pages.
I remember chatter around the release of the “strange and alarming” S-1 and cancellation of the IPO was basically gleeful, because we’d all been proven right about our assessment of this absolute dogshit and its carnival-barker figurehead.
Here’s a haunting quote from CNBC’s coverage of the filing at the time: “You can say I’m growing faster, but you can’t say that if for every dollar you’re getting, you’re losing a dollar,” said Renaissance Capital principal Kathleen Smith.
Well, who does that remind you of?
Subscribe
“The We Company's guiding mission will be to elevate the world's consciousness.”
- Adam Neumann, CEO
“What I hope is that we successively develop more and more powerful systems that …become an amplifier of human will."
- Sam Altman, CEO
Welcome to your weekly Dark Markets free edition, where we talk about techno-frauds, utopian techno-fascists, and dimwit crypto grifters.
I’m David Z. Morris, longtime finance reporter and PhD historian of technology, and author of Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia.
It’s been a bad week, maybe a bad month, for Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the so-called “AI industry” in general. Scroll down for why OpenAI’s IPO might crash and burn like WeWork’s.
But first, an update and one bit of news.
Subscribe
I was very honored to be invited to discuss the book, and my recent reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, with Gil Duran and The Nerd Reich. Please have a listen.
New evidence shows Argentine President Javier Milei called $Libra memecoin promoter Mauricio Novelli seven times on the night of the fraudulent token’s launch. This pretty well disproves Milei’s previous claims to have some vague sort of distance from the project, which Milei endorsed and wound up costing speculators about $250 mil.
The revelations also show a longer corrupt relationship between the two. Records from 2023 have Novelli telling an assistant to budget “the usual 2,000 for Milei,” calling it a monthly salary, while in a separate April 2024 message he referenced “the 4,000 we need to give to Karina” - Milei’s sister.
Novelli, remember, worked alongside Hayden Davis, who launched and then rug-pulled Milei’s token, walking away with close to $100 million. Davis is the grandson of Mormon mass-murderer Evril LeBaron, and adjecent to a multigenerational scheme to exert American influence in South and Central America.
We’ll be continuing our dive into the LeBarons - and their link to Keith Raniere’s Nexium - soon. Catch up below.
·
Jan 5
·
Feb 8
Subscribe
One of the memos, about Altman, begins with a list headed “Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of . . .”
The first item is “Lying.”
I was at Fortune during the WeWork saga of late 2019, and it’s easily one of the highlights of my mainstream media career. Here’s me blurbing just one of the hilarious ways the offering was a painfully obvious con-job - the tax advantages it gave to insiders.
There’s so much to remember about WeWork, and it has been an incredibly long six years since its vaunted IPO turned into a suicide vest for backers. But with OpenAI aiming to IPO later this year, it’s a critical moment to gaze directly at the very scary parallels.
Fundamentally Stupid Valuation Propped up By Venture. Above all other causes, WeWork collapsed when a years-long narrative sold to venture investors collided with real revenue numbers that had to be disclosed in an S-1.
Now we have this absolutely staggering report from The Information that Altman is boxing out his CFO because she’s telling him things he doesn’t want to hear about revenue.
Core Business Doesn’t Do What it Says On the Tin. WeWork rented real estate, but tried to transubstantiate that into something about technology and, even more vaguely, “consciousness.”
OpenAI builds probabilistic chatbots and meme-generators, but Altman (who is not an engineer or computer scientist!) promises to create superintelligence within just a few years, cure cancer and solve climate change. The latest of a thousand blows to Altman’s delusion is this paper demonstrating that LLMs can’t do basic math reliably.
What’s shocking is that the mainstream media are actually starting to talk about this openly. A Bloomberg editor is publicly speculating that LLMs were a “false start.” Not great!
“Scale Is All You Need” is dead
4 months ago · 377 likes · 151 comments · Gary Marcus
But that’s not what matters about the scaling narrative. Because it involves infrastructure and not just software, scaling has always been a useful justification for huge capital raising.
And in a couple of years when they admit this and pivot away from scaling, OpenAI still gets to keep the money.
You might not guess (because why would you), but even at a relatively forthright and outspoken publication like back-of-the-book Fortune, reporters had far harsher assessments of WeWork than you’d actually read in our pages.
I remember chatter around the release of the “strange and alarming” S-1 and cancellation of the IPO was basically gleeful, because we’d all been proven right about our assessment of this absolute dogshit and its carnival-barker figurehead.
Here’s a haunting quote from CNBC’s coverage of the filing at the time: “You can say I’m growing faster, but you can’t say that if for every dollar you’re getting, you’re losing a dollar,” said Renaissance Capital principal Kathleen Smith.
Well, who does that remind you of?
Subscribe
Incredible things happening at OpenAI per @theinformation Sam Altman is rushing the company toward IPO despite his CFO’s concerns about compute spend and revenue growth. Now Sam Altman is leaving her out of financial planning for compute. That’ll work! theinformation.com/articles/opena…
10:12 PM · Apr 5, 2026 · 102K Views
41 Replies · 123 Reposts · 1.12K Likes
According to The Information: “She told some colleagues earlier this year that she didn’t believe [OpenAI] would be ready to go public in 2026 … said she wasn’t sure yet whether OpenAI would need to pour so much money into obtaining AI servers in the coming years, or whether its revenue growth, which has been slowing, would support the commitments.”
That alone might be enough to convince me this IPO is already doomed.
Subscribe
Deception at the Top. Adam Neumann was a shameless self-enricher as WeWork’s founder, with famous maneuvers like personally trademarking “We” and leasing buildings he owned back to his own company. Karen Hao’s “Empire of AI” and Ronan Farrow’s recent New Yorker piece make it truly unambiguous that, while quieter in his personal presentation, Sam Altman is cut from the same cloth.
And the meme that Sam Altman is a habitual liar is very much spreading. I don’t think the IPO can outrun it.
(As an aside: Andreessen had Adam Neumann on the a16z podcast just last year, talking of all things about “how to build iconic companies.” WeWork was certainly an iconic failure, I guess! A16z has also put big money into Neumann’s post-WeWork projects. Why? My thesis is that they know they have to keep polishing the image of these huge failures in order to maintain credibility when they promote future failures.)
Built around a Weird, Insular Community. Adam Neumann’s nepotism at WeWork was legendary, particularly his decision to let his wife launch a comically inept schooling project called WeGrow. OpenAI sits at a similarly insular nexus of fringe ideological movements like Effective Altruism and Yudkowskyite Rationalism - movements that frequently veer all the way into cult behavior. Nothing coming from inside these AI firms should be trusted, any more than Neumann’s declarations about WeWork should have been trusted.
A Narrative to Rationalize Huge Capital Raises. WeWork pitched itself as a tech company that needed big money to lease real estate. OpenAI is pitching itself as a tech company that needs big money to build data centers.
Data scaling is the idea that if you throw more compute at a probabilistic LLM architecture, it will somehow become a God-like intelligence. There has never been any real reason to believe this, and the underlying computer science now clearly rebuts it.
Incredible things happening at OpenAI per @theinformation Sam Altman is rushing the company toward IPO despite his CFO’s concerns about compute spend and revenue growth. Now Sam Altman is leaving her out of financial planning for compute. That’ll work! theinformation.com/articles/opena…
10:12 PM · Apr 5, 2026 · 102K Views
41 Replies · 123 Reposts · 1.12K Likes
According to The Information: “She told some colleagues earlier this year that she didn’t believe [OpenAI] would be ready to go public in 2026 … said she wasn’t sure yet whether OpenAI would need to pour so much money into obtaining AI servers in the coming years, or whether its revenue growth, which has been slowing, would support the commitments.”
That alone might be enough to convince me this IPO is already doomed.
Subscribe
Deception at the Top. Adam Neumann was a shameless self-enricher as WeWork’s founder, with famous maneuvers like personally trademarking “We” and leasing buildings he owned back to his own company. Karen Hao’s “Empire of AI” and Ronan Farrow’s recent New Yorker piece make it truly unambiguous that, while quieter in his personal presentation, Sam Altman is cut from the same cloth.
And the meme that Sam Altman is a habitual liar is very much spreading. I don’t think the IPO can outrun it.
(As an aside: Andreessen had Adam Neumann on the a16z podcast just last year, talking of all things about “how to build iconic companies.” WeWork was certainly an iconic failure, I guess! A16z has also put big money into Neumann’s post-WeWork projects. Why? My thesis is that they know they have to keep polishing the image of these huge failures in order to maintain credibility when they promote future failures.)
Built around a Weird, Insular Community. Adam Neumann’s nepotism at WeWork was legendary, particularly his decision to let his wife launch a comically inept schooling project called WeGrow. OpenAI sits at a similarly insular nexus of fringe ideological movements like Effective Altruism and Yudkowskyite Rationalism - movements that frequently veer all the way into cult behavior. Nothing coming from inside these AI firms should be trusted, any more than Neumann’s declarations about WeWork should have been trusted.
A Narrative to Rationalize Huge Capital Raises. WeWork pitched itself as a tech company that needed big money to lease real estate. OpenAI is pitching itself as a tech company that needs big money to build data centers.
Data scaling is the idea that if you throw more compute at a probabilistic LLM architecture, it will somehow become a God-like intelligence. There has never been any real reason to believe this, and the underlying computer science now clearly rebuts it.
Dark Markets👁️ Bullish and EOS: “A Fraud in Plain Sight”
The team behind Bullish brutally rugpulled their earliest investors. They'll do the same to public markets.
Dark Markets👁️ The Metaverse is On Its Last Legs
Say goodbye to the Previous Thing. Also: Salesforce gets f*cked by AI, Tesla's Roadster scam, and more.
Dark MarketsThe Mormon Manson and the $Libra Fraud, Pt. 2: Hayden Davis' Family Murder Cult Was All About Money
The $Libra scammer's great-grandfather built a lasting empire of fraud, extortion, and theft, enforced by murder, brainwashing ... and elite government connections.
Dark Markets👁️ Bullish and EOS: “A Fraud in Plain Sight”
The team behind Bullish brutally rugpulled their earliest investors. They'll do the same to public markets.
Dark Markets👁️ The Metaverse is On Its Last Legs
Say goodbye to the Previous Thing. Also: Salesforce gets f*cked by AI, Tesla's Roadster scam, and more.
Dark MarketsThe Mormon Manson and the $Libra Fraud, Pt. 2: Hayden Davis' Family Murder Cult Was All About Money
The $Libra scammer's great-grandfather built a lasting empire of fraud, extortion, and theft, enforced by murder, brainwashing ... and elite government connections.
Dark Markets is a newsletter about technology fraud - not just financial chicanery, but also ideological manipulation and misleading technical hype. Author David Z. Morris is a longtime financial fraud investigator and crypto pioneer. In 2013 while writing for Fortune, he became one of the first reporters to ever cover cryptocurrency in a mainstream publication.
Dark Markets is a newsletter about technology fraud - not just financial chicanery, but also ideological manipulation and misleading technical hype. Author David Z. Morris is a longtime financial fraud investigator and crypto pioneer. In 2013 while writing for Fortune, he became one of the first reporters to ever cover cryptocurrency in a mainstream publication.
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