All your DNA just got bought.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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Bought back by the one person who already had prior access, and bought by her own research non-profit. As far as privacy concerns go, that's the best case scenario.
So glad I never did this one.
TTAM later said it had obtained backing from a “Fortune 500 company with a current market capitalization of more than $400 billion and $17 billion of cash on hand.”
That's not at all concerning.
A little searching finds only one company that really fits the bill. Costco has a market cap of $433B and had a reported $14.8B cash on hand as of May 11. That's an interesting possibility that I wouldn't have guessed. Costco is less evil than most big corporations, so that's a little hopeful if I got it right.
Oracle comes close with a market cap of $583B. That's indeed over $400B, but that would make the description a bit weird. In any case, Oracle makes more sense from a business angle. Unfortunately, they are near the top of the evil scale.
Calling it here, Costco is going to use the genetic information to create the perfect hot dog.
If it costs $1.51 I'm gonna flip shit.
Costco already creates the perfect hotdog.
I say they should invest in bringing back the Polish dog. That was fucking delicious.
Membership is going to be linked to your DNA, the register will prick your finger to make sure you're valid.
It’s almost certainly Oracle but there’s a slight possibility this is correct
Soylent dogs
Shit, Oracle was down in the low $400B range in May. Apparently being evil pays well in the current administration.
how the fuck did this company go bankrupt what did i miss
It's not a great business model if you think about it. Customers pay a small fee once then never again.
When did selling a product instead of a subscription become a bad business model?
When it's an inexpensive product that nobody ever has a reason to buy twice yet remains an ongoing cost for the company? (They keep the data available for review and continue to update it with useful information as knowledge of genetic traits and lineages grows). That's not a way to build an ongoing cash flow to cover expenses. Especially when all the people inclined to be interested have already purchased.
Selling a product is a good business model if the product has a shelf life or naturally degrades over time, but served you so well that you'll replace it in kind or with an upgrade.
A product that does something exactly once and done doesn't scale long term, so once the hype was over, that was that.
When quarterly profits must always be green compared to the previous quarter.
Start company.
Run it into the ground.
Go bankrupt.
Buy it back.
📈
Debts are gone might as well
In the capitalist system, the investors deserve all the profits because they're the ones risking everything, or something like this, I'm not an economists.
Bondholders are having a haircut.
Yes, and the workers risk nothing, or something like that, I'm told. 😂
I’m pretty sure the users risked a lot too for this one
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You missed 2. Sell (IPO)company
I’m not sure what ~~he~~ she actually did as far as divestiture, but evidently he wasn’t the current owner. I wonder to what degree unreasonable growth expectations flushed the company.
She
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How about the data they sold
That's exactly where all the value is. Selling people's fucking genetic information. What makes it even more valuable is that it can be used against all subsequent descendants of the person that willingly gave it up. Do a DNA test like this and you're selling out your entire family.
Debts are gone AND now he can sell the user data with impunity! No NO, that was that OTHER GUY
She*
heh fair, gender bias for me.
Hey, don't talk about Guy Incognito like that
Actually an interesting turn of events. Sounds like she'd been fighting hard to get it back, but they'd been fighting her on it.
Not sure what it all means, but there's something going on there. It's all very unusual.
Selling off user data but has an excuse to "wasn't me" the whole situation
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This roller coaster keeps on rollering
I thought they had already agreed the sale of the genetic data to another company?
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Ok so I think I'm the first person in the comments to actually click to read the article, cause I'm gonna say something I'm not seeing.
How did you get it to auto snap to the article comment section?
Didnt realize you could share that and it wouldn't default to the article.
Some webpages have a bad habit of automatically appending tags to the URL, or outright changing it, as you scroll down.
The "#comment" at the end of the URL. It's a title/heading/fragment in HTML that hints to your browser to go there directly.
Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL#fragment
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Everything after the # character in the URL is called an anchor and it's not actually being sent to the website server so it's meant for your browser (though the server can see it using javascript). The anchor can point to any ID in the HTML of the web page and browser will scroll it into view on page load. You can find the ID of any element using right click -> inspect though not all elements have explicit ids.
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