Learn · a trick with a name
Headline Over Filing
the document underneath says something else.
Press releases are marketing. Filings are legal documents. When they disagree, the filing wins.
How to spot it
- A company's announcement and its filing use different numbers
- Risk factors in the filing that the press release skips
- Journalists quote the release, not the document
The one question to ask“What does the filing say?”
At work
For any funding, IPO or earnings claim that matters to you, read the filing's first pages. The caveats live there.
Caught in the wild
Every time we've caught it so far. Try calling each one before you open it.
- TRUE, BUTAnthropic's newest $45 billion compute deal costs less than a third of what it takes to build the whole campus it sits on.
- TRUE, BUTThe paper everyone cites to prove AI is destroying entry-level jobs opens by saying it found no such thing.
- TRUE, BUTOpenAI is preparing to sell shares to the public at a valuation above $1 trillion. For every dollar the company earns, it loses $1.22. Its gross margin is falling, not rising, as revenue grows. HSBC estimates it needs another $207 billion in capital by 2030.
- TRUE, BUTDeepSeek launched a free coding tool and raised API prices 355% on the same day. It collected 135K GitHub stars. Independent audits found tenfold token overhead and a security sandbox that skips networks.
- TRUE, BUTHeadlines say Anthropic signed a $9.1 billion deal. Riot's SEC filing names no customer. The $9.1 billion runs 20 years to 2048.
- TRUE, BUTCisco headlined 9.3 billion dollars of AI orders, 4.5 times last year. Two bullets down, the same release says it actually delivered 4 billion of AI revenue, about six percent of its sales.
- TRUE, BUTNebius grew revenue 454 percent and signed four deals averaging a billion dollars each. It also lost 190 million dollars in the same quarter, and its own management did not raise guidance.
- TRUE, BUTCoreWeave says it has $104 billion in revenue backlog, up 246 percent. The same release shows a $626 million quarterly loss, and the credit market is pricing a coin flip on whether the company survives five years to collect.
- TRUE, BUTAI servers are now more than half of Foxconn's revenue, a first. Foxconn's own release shows what half the revenue buys: a 6.12 percent gross margin, thinner than last year.
- TRUE, BUTTencent says the AI compute it is buying will convert into revenue going forward. This quarter it converted into a 176 percent capex jump, negative free cash flow, and 10.5 billion yuan of losses on the new AI products.