zlacker

The book on GE is specifically about how they lied, cheated, and committed fraud -- er, accounting irregularities -- for decades, in order to maintain the illusion of number goes up predictably.

In retrospect, it was exactly as unlikely as Madoff's numbers.

>>dsr_+(OP)
But ALL of the FANGs pride themselves on predictably rising numbers. They all have a semi-believable story, and in fact only Amazon has a unique tactic (which is cheating taxes entirely by having zero profit, hence their revenue goes up predictably instead of profit. The others have steadily rising profit with slight variation in the rise of their revenue)

But all of them do it. Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple. Even the non-FANG fangs like Tesla, Twitter, ... and all have stories about faking it. Most are advertising and that's easy to fake on both sides (buy your own adertising, and of course fake engagement), Amazon has zero profit so they proudly declare they're faking it for the government (but, of course, they're not cheating you), Netflix has steadily rising subscriber numbers where everyone else has failed, even Apple's growth has switched to subscriber growth, the part of their business that would be the easiest to fake.

In fact this is quite common in the whole S&P 500, including outside of the US, with numbers not quite as dramatic as the FANGs, but still going up.