How They Make Money
Weekly business breakdowns delivered by a Silicon Valley senior finance executive. Join investors, visual thinkers, and data-driven professionals. Become a smarter decision-maker in minutes.
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- Bestseller 1k
- Followers
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What they write about
Visual business breakdowns explaining how individual companies make money, written by a technology finance executive. Regular features include earnings visuals, weekly roundups of reported results across dozens of tickers, and deep dives into software, semiconductor and consumer-hardware businesses.
- business breakdowns
- earnings
- software
- semiconductors
- technology companies
- data visualisation
Recent examples: ☁️ How Nscale Makes Money · 📊 PRO: This Week in Visuals
Written from How They Make Money’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
Most-mentioned tickers
Symbols named in the headline of a post from the last 30 days, most-covered first. The number is how many of those posts mentioned it.
ADBEAVGOCHWYCOSTDELLDOCUDRIGISHPEIOTLULUMDB
Read from 3 post headlines in the last 30 days. A newsletter that names a company only in the body of a post will not appear here, and a mention is not a recommendation — it only means the symbol came up.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
334K on Sep 10, 2026 → 342K on Sep 30, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #8 today · #8 a week ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 21 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 2%
- Best rank seen
- #8
- Subscribers added
- +8.0K
- Followers added
- +7.7K
- Posts
- 12
- Reactions per post
- 82
- Reactions tracked
- 1.6K
- Tickers covered
- 30
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 30, 2026
since tracking began
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 20 posts
in tracked posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: ☁️ Alibaba: The AI Payback — 105 reactions on Aug 21, 2026.
Recent posts
- ☁️ How Nscale Makes Money
Over 300,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. In case you missed it: ☁️ Neocloud Economics 📈 How to Invest in IPOs 💍 How Oura Makes Money ⚡️ How SB Energy Makes Money ☁️ Nscale is going public Nscale was spun out barely two and a half years ago. It has already signed contracts worth up to $103 billion in future revenue. Now it wants to build a full-stack AI hyperscaler from power to token. The company secures power and land , builds data centers , buys the GPUs , sells the compute , and is now pushing further into AI software . And it’s scaling at an almost…
- 📊 PRO: This Week in Visuals
Over 300,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. In case you missed it: 💬 Meta Wants the Interface 🤖 OpenAI’s Advertising Machine Premium members get: 📊 Monthly reports : 200+ companies visualized. 📩 Tuesday articles : Exclusive deep dives and insights. 📚 Access to our archive : Hundreds of business breakdowns. PRO members get everything PLUS : 📩 Saturday PRO reports : Timely insights on the latest earnings. Today at a glance: 🛒 Costco : Refunds Fund Price Cuts 🍪 General Mills : Innovation Gains Traction 🫒 Darden : Olive Garden Still Lags 1. 🛒 Costco…
- 💬 Meta Wants The Interface
Over 300,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. In case you missed it: 🚖 Uber: AV Anxiety 💍 How Oura Makes Money 🤖 OpenAI’s Advertising Machine 💳 PRO: Apple, Meta, Samsung, Visa…. 📊 Check out 100+ companies visualized in our latest monthly report. Muse breaks out Muse launched on September 8 as Meta’s latest attempt to catch up in AI. Despite being available only in the US and Canada, Meta’s new personal agent has reached more than 3.4 million downloads , according to Sensor Tower. Muse climbed to the top of the US app stores, and sent investors scrambling to…
- 🤖 OpenAI’s Advertising Machine
Over 300,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. In case you missed it: ☁️ Neocloud Economics 💍 How Oura Makes Money ⚡️ How SB Energy Makes Money 💰 Wall Street’s Top Stocks in Q2 AI is changing business models in real time OpenAI is building an advertising machine, Meta is pushing deeper into subscriptions, and Salesforce is rethinking how software gets monetized in an agentic world. How do you make money when AI changes the interface? AI is no longer just changing products. It’s reshaping the economics underneath them, determining who pays, what they pay for, and…
- ⚽️ Why Is Bezos Buying Liverpool FC?
Over 300,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. In case you missed it: 💡 WTF is an ETF? ⚽️ Football Economics 💵 Free Cash Flow Explained 🚀 SpaceX: Growth Meets the Bill Jeff Bezos is buying into Liverpool FC. Last month, the Amazon founder joined a consortium acquiring roughly a third of the English football club at a valuation north of $7 billion . Since then, record-setting sports deals have kept coming. ⚽ Liverpool FC: $7.0 billion — Bezos, Saverin, and Bhatia 🏈 Seattle Seahawks: $9.6 billion — Vinod Khosla and family 🏀 Los Angeles Lakers: $12.5 billion…
- ⚡️ How SB Energy Makes Money
Over 300,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. In case you missed it: 📈 How to Invest in IPOs 💍 How Oura Makes Money 📊 Earnings Visuals (8/2026) ☁️ Oracle: 850 Megawatts Later ⚡️ SB Energy is going public If you have been watching the race to power the AI boom, this is one of the most aggressive bets on physical infrastructure yet. The stakes just got higher. With AI leaders like Dario Amodei and Sam Altman openly discussing a more cautious pace at the frontier, investors face a fundamental question. How durable is the physical infrastructure buildout if frontier…
- 📊 PRO: This Week in Visuals
Over 300,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. In case you missed it: 💍 How Oura Makes Money ☁️ Oracle: 850 Megawatts Later Premium members get: 📊 Monthly reports : 200+ companies visualized. 📩 Tuesday articles : Exclusive deep dives and insights. 📚 Access to our archive : Hundreds of business breakdowns. PRO members get everything PLUS : 📩 Saturday PRO reports : Timely insights on the latest earnings. Today at a glance: 🎨 Adobe : 100M Free Creators 🐶 Chewy : Treats Get Cut 📈 WealthFront : Assets Outrun Revenue 1. 🎨 Adobe: 100M Free Creators Adobe Q3…
- ☁️ Oracle: 850 Megawatts Later
Over 300,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. In case you missed it: 🚖 Uber: AV Anxiety 💻 Software Strikes Back 💍 How Oura Makes Money 💳 PRO: Apple, Meta, Samsung, Visa…. 📊 Check out 100+ companies visualized in our latest monthly report. AI had a strange week Meta launched Muse , a personal AI agent that can send emails, shop, book travel, and keep working after you close the app. Muse reached #3 in the US App Store within two days , and Meta says usage has already blown past expectations. More importantly, it pushes Meta into the race to own the consumer…
- 💍 How Oura Makes Money
Over 300,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. In case you missed it: 📈 How to Invest in IPOs 📊 Earnings Visuals (8/2026) ❄️ Snowflake & Palo Alto Networks 💻 PRO: Broadcom, Dell, MongoDB… 💍 Oura is going public Oura started as a niche sleep tracker and has become one of the breakout consumer health products of the decade. It still looks like a hardware company. But the S-1 tells a more interesting story. Revenue surged 74% Y/Y to $1.2 billion in the first nine months of FY26, which ends in September. The company is profitable, and 5 million members now pay for…
- 📊 PRO: This Week in Visuals
Over 300,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. In case you missed it: 📊 Earnings Visuals (8/2026) ❄️ Snowflake & Palo Alto Networks Premium members get: 📊 Monthly reports : 200+ companies visualized. 📩 Tuesday articles : Exclusive deep dives and insights. 📚 Access to our archive : Hundreds of business breakdowns. PRO members get everything PLUS : 📩 Saturday PRO reports : Timely insights on the latest earnings. Today at a glance: 📈 Broadcom : AI Target Jumps 💻 Dell : Margins Catch Up 📡 HPE : Juniper Starts Paying Off 🌱 MongoDB : Enterprise Advanced Roars…
- ❄️ Snowflake: AI Fuels Consumption
Over 300,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights In case you missed it: 💻 Software Strikes Back 📊 Earnings Visuals (8/2026) 🤖 NVIDIA: Can’t Build Fast Enough 💰 Stock-Based Compensation Explained Software Strikes Back: Part Deux For the past two years, software investors have worried that AI would eat into seats, pricing, and eventually the software model itself. This week, Palo Alto Networks and Snowflake showed the other side of that trade. Palo Alto is seeing AI create more identities, traffic, and attack surfaces to secure. Snowflake is seeing AI workloads drive…
- 📊 Earnings Visuals (8/2026)
Over 300,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. 🔥 The August report is here, with over 100 businesses visualized ! All the key earnings from the past month in one report. ✔️ Cut through the noise with clear, concise financial snapshots. ✔️ See revenue trends, profit margins, and key takeaways instantly. Download the full report below or log in to your account. Here’s a sneak peek. 👀 What to expect in our monthly report? 🤖 Big Tech & AI New IPOs : SpaceX, Cerebras Hardware : Sandisk, HP, Lenovo Chip Design: NVIDIA, AMD, ARM Infrastructure: Arista, Cisco, CoreWeave…
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Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: How They Make Money. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Sep 30, 2026.