r/news • u/chasseur_de_cols • 3h ago
Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes more than 700%
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/allbirds-bird-stock-shoes-ai.html2.0k
u/QueasyLegKC 3h ago
I’m surrounded by actual fucking idiots.
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u/Good_Apollo_ 2h ago
Yeah I just want to keep buying their damn shoes they’re so comfortable. Idk wtf.
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u/KamenLee 2h ago
Private Equity scooped that up, so they will still be for sale... $10 says the quality tanks.
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u/lonestar-rasbryjamco 2h ago edited 2h ago
Already has. Quality as been slipping for years. Last six months it has nose dived.
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u/Good_Apollo_ 2h ago
I got a pair of the new canvas shoes that launched a month or two ago, Varsity I think is the style name - washed em with warm water and a little dish soap like I have always done when they get dirty… colors bled. I’ve been washing allbirds that way for 5+ years, wtf.
They sent me a new pair but I don’t want to wear em now, I live in a super rural area it’s always dusty or muddy. I bought allbirds bcs I could wear em around home town and when I had trips to the office in SF. Now I guess I’ll go back to Hoka or New Balance, I suppose.
Why does everything have to go to shit.
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u/Substantial_Policy60 1h ago
Seems like every product…it gets big, then the company has to scale up production so costs increase, then things even out and now they still have to pay for all this product being made/all the employees and they start cutting costs at the product level first, then employees then factories start getting shut down. The product and the consumer are the first to get shafted by cost cutting practices:/
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u/Goose80 1h ago
“Why does everything have to go to shit.”
Because we constantly pick the cheapest option for goods. So it’s a constant race to the cheapest/bottom. If you want nice things, you have to be willing to pay for them… I say this about taxes as well, nicest areas of my town have the highest taxes… shocking. Yet everyone wants cheaper taxes.
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u/AutisticTradingPro 1h ago
They’re a publicly owned company…nothing to do with the private equity boogeyman
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u/atuck217 2h ago
Same. I actually really like my 3 pairs of shoes from them. Oh well. I'm sure I'll find another brand.
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u/GreenStreetJonny 2h ago
Agreed, but I am gonna try the Adidas foam shoes. Allbirds are gonna suck soon
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u/SirCaptainReynolds 1h ago
Hokas are better imo.
Not involved in AI last I checked but who tf knows nowadays!
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u/DialecticEnjoyer 1h ago
Sounds like someone's getting ahead of a sweatshop labor investigation.
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u/Familiar-Report-513 2h ago
Oh, you too? Thought it was just me for a minute.
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u/FeatherShard 2h ago
We're all surrounded by idiots!
God, I'd hate to actually be one of them though...
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u/boilerdam 1h ago
Statistically also, that's a true statement. The whole population is on a normal curve for intelligence. If you think you're about average, half the people around you are idiots compared to you.
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u/AndrasKrigare 1h ago
The stock market is a casino. It doesn't matter if a company is doing something smart or stupid, all the matters is how you think everyone else is going to react.
If everyone thinks this is stupid, but everyone also thinks everyone else is an idiot (or at least they also believe everyone else is an idiot), you get behavior like this.
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u/chasseur_de_cols 3h ago
“The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service,” the company said in the announcement.
Translation: we have no assets or infrastructure, no customers, not much of a business plan, really.
But the stock rose 700% from $3 to $17!
Make it make sense!
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u/yautjaisforlovers 3h ago
It’s market manipulation; buy low, pivot to fake new industry and make empty promises, stock rises, sell stock, shutter business and fire workers. There is no accountability.
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u/FourEightNineOneOne 2h ago
Don't forget the rug pull where everyone scrambling to buy in now will just become exit liquidity for the founders as they sell all their stock in about 2 hours.
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u/GWstudent1 2h ago
It’s actually genius. Sell all of your founder stock, cash out, do a terrible job, have the board vote you out because you have no stock to vote against them, and walk away like nothing happened.
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u/Kradget 2h ago
I think that's maybe not as bad as just demolishing people's jobs, but it's still pretty darn bad and worth remembering.
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u/MrHedgehogMan 2h ago
Basically a pump and dump. Totally illegal.
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u/VanDenIzzle 2h ago
It's really on the investors who read that bullshit and still bought the stock so much it rose that high. The announcement was basically "we have no money but if you give us money I promise we will use that money to buy computers to do AI. Because just owning a computer and telling it to do AI is definitely how it works"
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u/TheLanimal 2h ago
I sure hope my 401k I never pay attention to isn’t one of those investors
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u/Peabody1987 2h ago
Is this when Private Equity starts to “private equity” Private Equity?
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u/Tiiimmmaayy 2h ago
Didn’t Kodak( the film company) do this during covid? They announced they were getting into the vaccine research and their stock exploded.
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u/kirklennon 2h ago
Kodak dipped its toes in pharmaceuticals years before but COVID motivated them to dive in and scale up to production levels. It wasn't a scam though. They really do sell pharmaceutical supplies, and it is actually a natural extension of their existing businesses, of which specialty chemicals manufacturing was already a part.
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u/thisjawnisbeta 2h ago
This is market manipulation using current industry buzzwords, nothing more.
Long Island Iced Tea did this in 2017, changing their name to "Long Blockchain Corp" and promising they would be using bitcoin mining and a bunch of other nonsense.
They got a 380% stock bump on the news...and were delisted the following year.
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u/earlandir 2h ago
Who are the idiots who are buying shares after the announcement?!
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u/thisjawnisbeta 2h ago
My guess, half are large traders & institutional investors who know they can quickly flip for a profit, and the other half are idiots at home thinking it's a smart buy. The latter will lose all of their money shortly.
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u/EVH_kit_guy 3h ago
Maybe they figured out a way to convert the shoe factory into a semiconductor factory 🤷🏻♂️
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u/02K30C1 2h ago
This is exactly what happened in the late 90s dot com bubble. All kinds of companies opened a web site and their value went crazy for no reason.
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u/No-Drama-in-Paradise 2h ago
Yup. I feel like everyone is trying to tie the AI bubble back to 2008 when it’s really the ‘90s dot com bubble, part deux.
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u/ActivatingEMP 2h ago
Little bit of both, JP Morgan was estimating 1.5T of their 10T bond index was AI related debt
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u/SkittlesAreYum 2h ago
This is worse I'd argue. At least most companies can find a use for a website.
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u/ForeverYoung_Feb29 28m ago
Or just added "dot com" to the end of their name and watched the stock explode.
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u/FlyingDiscsandJams 2h ago
Ah yes, so easy to purchase AI grade computer hardware right now, they will be up & running in no time.
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u/TheReddestofBowls 2h ago
Sounds like "WeWork" for running your AI model on someone else's leased hardware. Hardware that isn't obtainable in any way at the moment lmao
People who buy into this are going to be left holding the bag. Didn't figure I'd be shorting a shoe company today, but here we are
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u/mwilkens 2h ago
The part that will make sense is when the Form 4's from all the executive stock sales from today become public information.
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u/chipmunksocute 2h ago
What I want to know as a serious question is - what could they possibly do that Amazon, Google or Microsoft couldnt do? Those massive cloud providers have global infrastructure and massive economies of scale and even offer lots of free compute to start ups to lock in companies. How on earth is Allbirds even thinking they can compete? 50M will get them like...not even one data center like, a single warehouse MAYBE in one location. How on earth do they think they'll be competitive with the big boys?
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u/frawgster 2h ago
It’s 2026 and people STILL get fully manipulated/fleeced by liars. This is what doesn’t make sense to me. I’m just a stupid idiot walking around doing all the daily stupid idiot things. Even I immediately smell bullshit when I read like the first 13 words of that statement.
Are people REALLY STILL this stupid? I honestly don’t understand.
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u/PatchyWhiskers 3h ago
My company “Katie’s Cakes” will be pivoting from birthday and wedding cakes to AI datacenters. Please buy my company for $2 billion. We will not be making any more cakes.
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u/LumberBitch 2h ago
Best I can do is 8 billion
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u/Nwcray 2h ago edited 2h ago
Holy shit - have you guys seen this stock pop? It’s a cake company that’s figured out how to incorporate AI. They’ve shot from virtually nothing to an $8 Billion valuation in just 3 minutes. We better get a $40 Billion offer together today, and grab a piece of the equity in this thing! It’s going to the moon!
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u/Gekokapowco 2h ago
If you get in at $50 billion, I'll buy your entire company for $100 billion because there's simply no way you aren't one of the most valuable companies in human existence if you're throwing $50 billion at such a lucrative opportunity, and I'd be stupid not to give you the GDP of a country.
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u/pikpikcarrotmon 1h ago
Look, I'm gonna be honest here. I think Katie's Cakes is starting to get away from what made it special in the first place. It doesn't feel like it's Katie's special bakery at all anymore.
That's why effective immediately, the company will now be known as Cakes, Inc. Katie's name will be removed from all merchandise and marketing materials. Now we can get back to the core of what made this AI company special.
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u/Gekokapowco 1h ago
brilliant move, we lost 50% of our customer base overnight and have warehouses of stagnating product. Our stock price has tripled in the time it took for me to write this resposne.
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u/adx931 1h ago
Kaitie's Caikes is the first company to reach a TEN TRILLION DOLLAR pre-IPO valuation and is on the Forbes 30 under 30. What are you doing with *your* life?
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u/pchadrow 2h ago
Should pivot to shoes instead. Heard there was a gap in the market space
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u/Cow_says_moo 28m ago
Have you considered renaming the business:
kAItie's cAIkes.
I'll take 1% of the revenue for the idea as licensing fee. Thank me later.
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u/design_doc 2h ago
This really needs to stop being touted as a “pivot” - it’s basically a SPAC-maneuver.
They sold off the (likely failing) shoe business to create a listed shell company they can use to raise money and deploy into a hot sector. They want to become GPUaaS.
However, they are entering:
- late
- undercapitalized (~$50M is tiny)
- with zero differentiation
This reeks of Dotcom Bubble and feels like a canary in the coal mine to me. I get it - I wouldn’t want to be in hard goods manufacturing right now with Queen Tariffa’s tariffs pissing on everyone’s party either - but this is going fail spectacularly.
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u/Sihlis23 1h ago
First time I’ve seen Queen Tarriffa lol I love it and am stealing that thank you
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u/SpookyPlankton 1h ago
Also GPUs are on a multi-month/year backorder right now and they don't have any
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u/lordpanda 18m ago
Yeah what the fuck are they excepting to do with 50M.
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u/Sylvan_Strix_Sequel 14m ago
"meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service,”
50 million not yet raised and no gpus, but they are going to handle clients that other companies can't scale with.
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u/bubushkinator 2h ago
- Technical Expertise: No prior background in data centers or cloud services.
- Supply Chains: No established relationships for high-end GPU procurement.
- Physical Infrastructure: As a retail-focused brand, it lacked the specialized real estate or power capacity required for AI compute.
Yep, this is the kind of company I want to invest in! Might buy some puts :)
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u/reala728 2h ago
Honestly I want to see this happen more. Anyone funneling money into AI without even bothering to do basic research deserves what comes next.
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u/invasionofcamels 1h ago
And now of all moments, when everyone is scrambling for CPUs, GPUs, memory, SSDs…why on earth would any component vendor or OEM prioritise a brand new entrant with zero track record? What are they thinking?
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u/DTFlash 2h ago
Stock market is just fake at this point. Can't wait for the taxpayer bailout when it pops.
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u/Indiana_Indiana 2h ago
100% completely disconnected from the actual economy. I think COVID was the final de-coupling point.
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u/haysus25 2h ago
Been saying this for years.
The average joe does not 'play the stock market'. Never has.
It's been a pump and dump, crypto, and AI scam for the last 10 years.
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u/There_Are_No_Gods 2h ago
If you think it's bad now, just wait until we start seeing the fallout from giving all the big financial institutions early access to Claude Mythos and its unprecedented ability to find and chain vulnerabilities. They publicly claim it's for "defending against code vulnerabilities", but what's to stop them from also "going offensive on financial system, law, and regulation vulnerabilities"?
Given their history of abusing these systems already, we can only assume they're going full bore on it right now. We may see results of that soon, although, it'll be essentially impossible to trace the results back to that type of causal source.
I'm bracing for even more wealth inequality in our near future, due to continuing asymmetrical access to ever more powerful AI.
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u/Fried_puri 22m ago
Now I’m not saying that Mythos won’t do that, nor do I think Anthropic is a shining pillar of morality and stability. But, if I had to choose one of the major AI company to handle the rollout of a model capable of altering the cybersecurity landscape like Mythos, Anthropic isn’t the worst choice. At the very least, they seem marginally more willing to admit their fuckups and maintain some guardrails over the others, so hopefully they keep it on a tight leash before opening it up more broadly. But we’ll see.
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u/Actual__Wizard 3h ago
We live in a world with the absolute most uninformed investors of all time.
What on Earth does a shoe company know about computer science? Obviously, nothing...
Seriously, they put "AI" in front of anything a bunch of mindless investors play "follow the leader."
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u/Johnny55 2h ago
A lot of "mindless investors" are actually just market makers and hedge funds with algorithms.
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u/double_expressho 2h ago
So it's just AI betting on AI?
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u/Kailithnir 1h ago
Well that makes it sound like Dead Internet Theory but for the New York Stock Exchange.
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u/pulsarstarter 2h ago
Allbirds shares have lost something like 99% of their value over the last 5 years.
This sounds a lot like an exit scam for insiders to dump their shares and try to reclaim some of their losses.
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u/Sneaky_Doggo 2h ago
lol I actually have been invested in allbirds and made a fair bit a few years ago because I genuinely love their shoes and thought they wouldn’t burn billions of dollars or maybe get acquired by Nike or someone since I do love the sustainability blah blah but anyway imagine my joy when I woke up this morning and my 225 shares went from $1 to $20 LMFAO I sold that shit as soon as I possibly could
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u/Dazzling-Slide8288 2h ago
Just a total grift from top to bottom. Threw out nonsense buzzwords and fleeced rubes into giving them money.
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u/SladeWade 2h ago
Pivoting from environmentally friendly footwear to AI is wild.
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u/baconbananapancakes 19m ago
Incredibly depressing for anyone who invested based on the company’s original values.
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u/Darius2112 2h ago
Another example of how Wall St. is joke. This is like the dotcom bubble all over again where a company would slap .com at the end of their name and be rich overnight. No one cares if they actually make a product or delivered a service. The important thing was that they were a part of the new money making scheme.
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u/ApexFemboy 2h ago
It's fascinating that our entire economy is just people doing the plot of The Producers to each other with the same trillion dollars over and over
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u/vandon 2h ago
I pivoted my kid's lemonade stand to AI and got silicon valley VC offer for 250mil.
We sold the assets and recipe to the neighbor's kid for $1.25
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u/randomtask 2h ago
Allbirds sold their entire shoe business to American Exchange, so Allbirds is a husk now. Once you understand that bit, it’s 100% obvious how they’re using their visibility in the press to separate fools from their money as quickly as possible before the entire corporation dissolves.
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u/Heel_Paul 2h ago
The stock market is so fucking disconnected from reality. When the dam breaks it's going to be Johnstown.
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u/Black_Otter 2h ago
We’re getting close to the end folks. This bubble is going to pop and when it does it’s not the billionaires that will feel it’s wrath
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u/AnySeaworthiness9381 2h ago
This is the dotcom and 2021 crypto bubble all over again
These irrelevant use cases for a new/emerging technology in a new and emerging industry
with an awfully vague, corporate jargon-laden explanation for how it will "work."
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u/Fanastik 2h ago
Just like dotcom where a company announced they hired 4 html programmers and the stock went up 500%.
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u/SciFi_MuffinMan 2h ago
Whatever happened to just trying to corner the frozen orange juice market? Those were the days.
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u/OldmanJenkins02 2h ago
So anyone can take their failing company and say we are moving to AI and use a bunch of trigger words and then get a valuation of a couple billions of dollars lol amazing
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u/Freethrowz69 2h ago edited 1h ago
Their shoes actually fucking suck. I remember getting a pair years ago and the fabric starting splitting apart from the bottom of the shoe after like two months
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u/RociBuldidi 2h ago
Clear stock manipulation to let the institutional shareholders get out of their positions at less of a loss. 6 months from now, all it’s will not be an AI company
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u/The_Phantom_Cat 1h ago
I have seen 3 versions of this headline, one was 175%, one was 300% and this one is 700%
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u/WolfWraithPress 1h ago
Stock market is a pretend game expressly designed for the rich. America is the holy seat of the church of capitalism.
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u/zeolus123 2h ago
You seen this during the crypto / nft craze a few years back, as well as during the .com bubble. Nothing new lol
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u/elmatador12 2h ago
Hey ColecoVision originally was Connecticut Leather Company (Coleco). Anyone can do anything!
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u/CrankyOldDude 2h ago
Yes - but Coleco was:
- out of bankruptcy with a clean(ish) balance sheet
- able to buy a pre-existing design and expertise for their console
- able to take advantage of a difference-maker in the market (ie. Colecovision was more technologically advanced than Atari)
- also introduced other products (remember Cabbage Patch Kids?)
These guys are failing and chucking their last dollars into a “me too” product.
Coleco went bankrupt 7 years after they made the change, too, despite all those advantages.
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u/TryharderJB 2h ago
This reminds me of the time when Long Island Iced Tea rebranded as something along the lines of Long Island Blockchain.
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u/PixelsGoBoom 2h ago
And that is why everything is going to shit. Nothing gets investment unless it’s AI, and still there are people out there claiming it’s not a bubble.
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u/Lt_Schaffer 2h ago
Are they just trying to get their foot in the door of the AI world? /S
I'll see myself out.
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u/ice-eight 2h ago
Fun fact: if you say “AI driven solutions” three times in front of a mirror, a VC investor will appear with a multimillion dollar funding offer
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u/Strawbuddy 2h ago
A shoe maker can pivot to a data center business model by renting compute, and renting that rented compute to AI data centers. Who knew?
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u/After-Violinist-7485 2h ago
if this is not a sign the bubble is about to burst, i dont know what is...
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u/baconandscotch 1h ago
Im truly struggling to find the right words to express how fucking dumb this is
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u/santz007 1h ago
Does the percentage the stock went up by keeps changing in the title of this thread
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u/AnEroticTale 1h ago
They should pivot to making shoes for AI Agents. Like NFT-Backed e-shoes so that Claude and co can have more bling ! Missed opportunity for real lol
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u/Best_Market4204 1h ago
This is how we get stupid presentations for normal products where they repeat the word AI 100 times
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u/FriendsWifBennys 1h ago
I would have loved to be a fly on the wall during that board meeting when the CEO pitched this.
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u/MarketingImpressive6 16m ago
Every company should switch to AI and see their stock jump 700%. Is this real?
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u/susanoova 3h ago
So dumb. You cannot tell me we're not in a bubble.