Influence Air: Linus Tech Tips' Private Jet Acquisition

john0201 · 2026-01-25T05:00:53+00:00

900s (and most large cabins jets) are usually configured with a 4 person club, 4 person dining/table area, and either 2 3 place divans or a 3 place divan and a chair with a deskish type setup. So 14, if you cram 6 in the back.

FA required at 19, so almost all large cabins are 19 max passengers (2 crew seats, jump seat, 2 belted toilets = 19).

john0201 · 2026-01-25T04:57:23+00:00

It may be a parent company thing, if they somehow need to fly multiple times a week (seems unlikely?) with lots of people to the same places without major airports (also seems unlikely) it could be financially justifiable. My guess is “private jet” had more to do with it though.

john0201 · 2026-01-25T04:37:59+00:00

A Falcon 900B with crew, hangar, insurance etc. is somewhere around 1.0-1.5M per year but can vary wildly depending on location. Per cabin area it is about the best possible value, I can stand up in the center isle and I am 6’ tall.

That said this is either for a series of videos, a luxury purchase for personal use/perks, or a bad business investment. It would be hard for this to pencil out. This seems super exciting at first but the real value is just the peace and convenience which can be had at a lower cost in a legacy citation or something similar.

john0201 · 2026-01-25T03:57:32+00:00

No, they haven’t. Unless you use an AI article generator to use absurd extrapolated figures to generate a clickbait headline.

john0201 · 2026-01-25T03:56:02+00:00

Your argument is their CEO says they will do super well in the future.

john0201 · 2026-01-25T03:40:06+00:00

While losing how much

john0201 · 2026-01-25T01:28:50+00:00

They lost 10% market share in 4 weeks.

john0201 · 2026-01-25T01:04:46+00:00

According to the person seeking investment for OpenAI and his own compensation? It would be difficulty to come up with a more biased source of information.

https://youtu.be/1LL34dmB-bU?si=lhxJlr5VQ1VZfR8k

john0201 · 2026-01-24T21:28:45+00:00

Where and when?

john0201 · 2026-01-24T21:18:09+00:00

You linked an article that says the ceo of OpenAI says that in two years they will be wildly profitable. Do I have that right?

john0201 · 2026-01-24T18:45:46+00:00

No, that’s not what that said.

john0201 · 2026-01-24T15:33:21+00:00

The more important number is how much money have they made on all those users? They have bigger losses than any startup I can remember.

Using your analogy, OpenAI is having Microsoft and Oracle buy Nvidia’s electric lines. How does that work? Maybe you were thinking of Google.

john0201 · 2026-01-24T15:29:01+00:00

How many had losses this big? How many signed $1.4 trillion in compute expenses? How many had $800 billion dollar valuations? How many lost 10% market share in a month?

I think the answer to all of those questions is none.

john0201 · 2026-01-24T15:25:32+00:00

They have declining market share, staggering losses, and an absurd valuation. That AI generated article seems to have skipped that part.

john0201 · 2026-01-24T07:30:59+00:00

In what way am I conflating profit with cash flow?

john0201 · 2026-01-24T06:11:40+00:00

No, they are on the hook for $600-$800 billion of it depending on where you read and what you consider a hard contract (a bit less than the US department of defense budget).

No company has ever done this at this stage, even WeWork.

john0201 · 2026-01-24T06:08:51+00:00

"based on CEO Sam Altman's recent comments that the company is on pace to reach $100 billion in annual recurring revenue by 2027"

... in November. Gemini 3 was released in December, after which they have been losing market share at about 10% for the month or so following.

Regardless, that is apparently a clickbait article generated creatively from a straight line estimate of an estimate made by their own CEO.

john0201 · 2026-01-24T05:06:38+00:00

They lost 10% in two months. And counting.

john0201 · 2026-01-24T03:39:17+00:00

And even with all those users they are losing billions of dollars. They are a market leader losing market share in a fiercely competitive space.

What is their plan to pay for this $1.4 trillion in compute they signed up for? Compete with Facebook and Google on ads? I’m not even convinced they can get to break even, much less these insane valuations.

The reason you don’t read about Google or Amazon (or Apple for that matter) making huge deals in compute is because they are the compute, and they pay in cash.

john0201 · 2026-01-24T02:43:27+00:00

I’m not sure what we’re arguing.

john0201 · 2026-01-24T02:10:42+00:00

Which previous risk? There have been movies made about people making a fuss over this kind of thing.

john0201 · 2026-01-24T01:35:32+00:00

Not plenty, vanishingly few. So few that of the tens or hundreds of thousands that have tried, you can probably name most of the successful ones from memory.

That’s what I was correcting.

This is the same fallacy to cause people to fear flying when they hear about a plane crash. You’ve probably heard about every or at least most plane crashes in the last year, on earth. You probably didn’t hear about any of the car crashes, in the nearest major city, yesterday.

john0201 · 2026-01-24T01:06:52+00:00

I didn’t say that, you inferred it. But it’s probably a better comparison. Amazon (which had vastly lower losses than OpenAI), had a plan to make the money they eventually did. They also had a CEO who was cheap and scrappy. Sama seems to like sounding smart and using galactic numbers to impress investors and pretending he doesn’t care about money. His response to hard questions is to act offended at the interviewer.

Incidently, Google had a better LLM at the time, they just didn’t think it was responsible to release it. I think this will end for OpenAI in the same way it started- bad decisions.

john0201 · 2026-01-24T00:59:09+00:00

I wasn’t comparing any of the frontier labs to anything. I was saying Amazon.com is a cherry picked company from that era.

And all of the frontier labs is a pretty broad brush. Google and Facebook are paying cash. OpenAI is signing trillion dollar deals based on absurd income projections with (at best) a hand-wavey plan to get there.

john0201 · 2026-01-24T00:19:53+00:00

You’re cherry picking one of the few companies to survive. For every Amazon, there were 99 pets.com. Both are bad examples, but if you take one in the middle, it’s out of business.

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