"The most consequential earnings quality debate of the artificial intelligence capital expenditure cycle is being fought over a single line item that almost no investor reads carefully: the estimated useful life of servers and network equipment. In a series of public posts beginning November 11, 2025, the investor Michael Burry—best known for his pre-crisis short of the United States housing market—accused five public companies of having understated depreciation expense across the period from 2026 through 2028 by approximately $176 billion, with the result that, in his estimate, Oracle Corporation’s reported earnings for 2028 will be overstated by 26.9 percent and Meta Platforms, Inc.’s by 20.8 percent.¹ The companies named in those public statements were Microsoft Corporation, Meta Platforms, Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com, Inc., and Oracle.² CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fortune have each reported on the allegations and confirmed the directional movement of the underlying disclosure changes from primary filings.³"

"In November 2025, Tesla shareholders approved a compensation package for Elon Musk potentially worth $1 trillion over ten years—the largest executive pay arrangement in corporate history.¹ More than 75 percent of voting shareholders supported the plan, despite opposition from both major proxy advisory firms, ISS and Glass Lewis, as well as Norway's sovereign wealth fund, which cited concerns over total award size, dilution, and key-person risk.² The advisory recommendations were overridden, and comfortably."

"In May 2023, Bloomberg reported that new accounting rules had forced approximately eighty S&P 500 companies to reveal at least $64.1 billion in supplier finance obligations that had previously been invisible to investors.¹ The obligations were not new. The companies had been carrying them for years—in some cases, for over a decade. What was new was the disclosure. For the first time, investors could see the scale of a financing mechanism that had quietly become one of the largest categories of unrecognized leverage in American corporate finance."