That would require regulators to actually pay attention, something they haven’t done actively since a long, long time

First step would be to prevent the regulators from profiting to begin with.

In my experience, if we don't (meaningfully) root out corruption and ineptitude, we will continue to be governed+leveraged by one/both.

Can't root it out, it's part of the system. Sortition is the best we can hope for now.

Outlaw what? Prevent companies from selling goods and services to each other?

it's not about that. it's about how it gets reported in their financials.

Yes, if it's done with an intent to defraud the general population, which could be the case here. Effects and intent really matter when deciding actions.

Except the regulators first outlawed what is generally considered to have caused the great depression (savings banks allowed to invest, which translates to very, very rich people being allowed to take massive risks with poor people's money) ... then re-legalized it.

So not only are the regulators not going to allow things that cause another great depression, they're allowing the things that caused the first great depression too. They must want a rerun.

(Because if you don't allow this you're effectively demanding the extremely rich make good investments to stay rich ... and not even France, otherwise pretty socialist, dares to go that far)

I think SpaceX should be valued on rockets n space n stuff, not how many magical calculator dollars they bring in.

Surely Google can "make compute go" for $1b/month. Nice way to avoid holding the bag, maybe?

The market seems to value both rockets and magical calculators.

I mean, we all understand that this is some sort of circular financial play, but at the end of the day Google is paying SpaceX $1 billion for compute. This is no different from AWS or Azure.

The problem described isn't companies buying goods and services. It's buying from an entity they partially own and then profiting as that entity becomes more valuable because of the purchase.

It’s still very tenuous you can’t prevent companies that own 5% of other companies from buying services from the that company

We can prevent anything we want. If there's a major AI crash analogous to the Depression, we'll probably institute a lot of new regulations.

If the parent comment is true, it seems the problematic aspect is the leverage created by the P/E ratio more than the percentage of ownership. What a weird situation.

Oh yeah, these are definitely circular financial games but you have to be wary about putting in insane regulations that will break growth.

My preferred fix is "corporations can't buy stock, their own or others".

Why was it not outlawed post dotcom crash? This was exactly the thing that led to the dotcom crash.

Maybe there wasn't enough damage, either economical, financial or societal?

It all was many years ago after the great depression, and similar. Then people kept voting in republicans who's life mission is to gut the SEC and all related regulation keeping them from doing things like this.

Perhaps but the AI drone based WW3 might put nvidia in the black before that.