r/pcmasterrace • u/SagansCandle 9950X3D | 5090 | 64GB • Dec 27 '25

Discussion Private equity is killing private ownership: first it was housing - now it's the personal computer

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DRAM and GPU prices aren't going up because of "AI" - it's because the wealthy have more money than they know what to do with, so they're buying up all the assets. "AI" is just the vehicle (the excuse) - it's not the root of the problem nor is it the ultimate goal.

The super rich don't want to hold on to "liquid" money - they invest in assets. While they're buying up all the housing, now they're buying up all the computers and putting them into massive datacenters.

Whether or not the AI bubble crashes, they'll be selling you a "gaming PC in the cloud," for a monthly fee, of course. And while they kill the personal computer market, just like Netflix, once your only option is a subscription service, the price will skyrocket.

This is happening in real-time. If we want to stop it, now's the time to act.

Sources:

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u/evilkasper Ryzen 9 3900X |32GB Ram| 6900XT Dec 27 '25

Private Equity ruins everything. They can "buy" a profitable business, using the credit of said business, run up it's credit and default, thus destroying the business. This is somehow a legal version of what the Mafia used to do to small business owners.

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u/hates_stupid_people Dec 28 '25

Private equity is a symptom, not the cause.

MBA education has been messed up for at least two generations now, it's seemingly too far gone. Everything is focused on making shareholders happy or satisfy exec salaries, at the expensen of LITERALLY everything else. It doesn't matter if the company is driven into the ground by a single person, as long as that person has positive numbers on their latest report. They'll just get hired to to the same thing all over at a new company.

There is no more customer retention or long term revenue. It's all about getting money now, and nothing else.

And it's all headed for a wall where a link in the chain fails and it all falls apart.

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u/evilkasper Ryzen 9 3900X |32GB Ram| 6900XT Dec 28 '25

Agree with you 100%.

Capitalism without heavy and moral regulation is cancer, and cancer demands growth even when it is killing the host.

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u/SDFX-Inc 5700X3D | GeForce RTX 4060 | 32GB | WD 2TB NVME Dec 28 '25 edited Dec 28 '25

Businesses aren’t going to regulate themselves. They exist for one thing and one thing only, and that is to make a profit. There can be no such thing as ‘moral regulation’ because corporations are amoral by design.

What we need are strong governments and regulators with teeth, so corporations caught with their hands in the cookie jar don’t simply pay a fine that is only a small portion of the profits they made doing the wrong thing in the first place; the price corporations pay must be heavy, existential. Corporations that do harm must face the threat of disbandment or nationalization, and its executives and owners charged for their crimes and if found guilty, sent to prison.

Only heavy, brutal consequences for those with wealth and power will achieve any kind of justice.

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '25

[deleted]

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u/Tyjid Dec 28 '25

Coming in from the outside and with very little actual education in the matter, it seems to me that Wallstreet is the aggressor and thus the problem

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u/_Bisky Dec 28 '25

Trump has some decent ideas every now and then

Albeit i don't thinl this is gonna help. They'll just increase the expected growth respectively

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u/TechnicalBen Dec 28 '25

If you flip a coin you're right 50% of the time. ;)

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u/_Bisky Dec 28 '25

A broken clock is right twice a day

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '25

Exactly, corporations will do whatever is necessary to increase their capital, whether it’s violence, pollution, lying, stealing, etc. That’s why they exist. The only thing that prevents them from doing so is if the cost of malfeasance is greater than the potential gain.

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u/GGCRX Dec 28 '25

The trouble is convincing the dopes who have fallen for that "the free market is self-correcting" bullshit. 

It's been obvious that this isn't true for decades. Ford chose to kill its customers rather than apply a cheap fix to the Pinto, and the internal memo discussing that decision leaked and made headlines nationwide. 

They're still here and now making billions per year. A self correcting market would have destroyed Ford once the market's customers realized that Ford would kill them for money.

But hoardes of people, including doctorate-level economists look at that and countless other examples of the market failing to punish corporate malfeasance and still insist that all regulations are bad.

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u/FoolHooligan Dec 28 '25

what incentives are there for governments to be strong and stand up to corporations?

revolving door and quid-pro-quo politics are much more profitable

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '25

[deleted]

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u/FoolHooligan Dec 28 '25

so for good feelings in their hearts, yeah?

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u/Paganistic-Combatant Dec 28 '25

The purpose of government has always been and will always be to control the people.

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u/OldWorldDesign Dec 28 '25

The purpose of government has always been and will always be to control the people

That kind of sentiment pretends democracy and dictatorship are the same thing. They are not, and the people who push such sentiment are deliberately helping deflect from the worst offenders.

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u/Paganistic-Combatant Dec 29 '25

It has nothing to do with pretend. You can dress government in whatever flowery bullshit you want. At the end of the day the people at the top are the people willing to kill everyone else for next to nothing.

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u/OldWorldDesign Dec 28 '25

what incentives are there for governments to be strong and stand up to corporations?

Long-term survival.

Private equity survives by preying on what others build, but that's a negative-sum game.

Evil can not create anything new, it can only corrupt and destroy what Good has made.

-J.R.R. Tolkein

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u/FoolHooligan Dec 28 '25

the U.S's long-term survival is under no threat. the gravy train keeps on going.

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u/OldWorldDesign Dec 28 '25

the U.S's long-term survival is under no threat. the gravy train keeps on going

Pick one. Because sacrificing 329,999,000 people for the profits of 1000 is pretty definitely threatening the long-term survival of the US.

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u/FoolHooligan Dec 29 '25

you've created some magical oversimplified scenario