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i'm so curious to understand the economics behind this business. have they actually built the thing? how much did it cost to make? what do they do if nobody buys it? how did they finance it? do they sell smaller subs? let's investigate https://t.co/ZOmAOEjKNd
ok so first of all important detail is it doesn't exist, it seems more like a "if you want it we'll build it" type of deal. a lot of press attention for a thing that doesn't exist! (and the attention economics makes sense there; billionaire bashing is always great for clicks) https://t.co/UzFT3CCB6x
next question: does any migaloo submarine exist at all? i don't see any smoking gun of "yes", all of their videos and instagram posts etc appear to be artist renderings https://t.co/tyczUGsWKM
so before i get into more details my instinct is that this is probably an entertainment business, where the people running this thing get invited to hang out at rich people's parties, give presentations, etc, but functionally speaking they don't actually expect to ship product
we have at least a name of a founder. what's his backstory? https://t.co/iz7g9pM1Cj
seeing some signs of an industrial design background but no obvious proof that he's ever actually made anything https://t.co/HPTt2ZTyJC
the amount of content generated for this stuff is tremendous though, it goes on and on https://t.co/SOB2g5THv9
they also sell NFTs while selling NFTs is not a smoking gun proof of fraud, it does raise my suspicion that "this is not a serious business" by like 20x well it looks like nobody's buying the NFTs either lol https://t.co/usyzVyJgRN
got at least some proof that mr. gumpold is a real guy, consistent with his linkedin profile. he was doing 3d mockups of yachts 10 years ago. i do believe he's probably a yacht/sub nerd at some level, but still no evidence of any working prototypes of anything https://t.co/ondSeJf4yU
here's him speaking at what looks like a euro startup conference, which further increases my suspicion that *this* is his actual thing. you introduce yourself as the submersible yacht entrepreneur, and go around giving lectures and speaking engagements etc. yachts sold = 0 https://t.co/3ZJMpCaT5n
yea i'm increasingly certain that what we have here is a pretty refined bullshit artist, the slides in particular are a huge tell for me lol. orrr maybe he's the austrian tony stark. it's probably one of those two things https://t.co/3AfphyRn3a
tag yourself, i'm- https://t.co/wZMXCLZ8jv
anyway that about satisfies my curiosity, hope you had some fun on this little learning journey with me a fun companion read to this would be paul graham's essay about PR, which funnily enough happens to be titled "the submarine" https://t.co/aBM3oMDlFr https://t.co/QRbNLxUnmj
wait just one more fun detail from their instagram page: AI generated submarine captain https://t.co/ZPEBVPx9Hj https://t.co/2s6nhIO0ZB
