Story
A natural gas trader with a warehouse full of graphics cards.
Michael Intrator was not a technologist. He spent his career in commodities and energy finance and co-founded Hudson Ridge Asset Management, a natural gas hedge fund he ran as CEO. In 2017 he and two co-founders, Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee, started buying graphics cards to mine Ethereum.
In September 2022 Ethereum changed how it validates transactions, and mining with graphics cards stopped being profitable more or less overnight. The industry's answer was to dump the hardware on the secondary market or point it at smaller coins. The equipment was treated as the thing that had died.
They had already been doing something else with it. The same dense racks that mined coins could rent to anyone who needed heavy parallel computing — visual effects, simulation, and early machine learning. They renamed the company CoreWeave in December 2019 and shut the mining business down on 30 September 2022.
The Code
Code 5 — Yes / No Season
Code 5 of 7 · Business Brainwash
You are the index fund. You won't cash out today — you will cash out.
Pick a season of NO to everything misaligned, and a season of YES to everything aligned. Delay is not denial.
- A season of no. Then a season of yes. Both on purpose.
- Delay is not denial — learn to love delayed gratification.
- The SM-ME 500: you are your own greatest investment.
Lessons
Four shifts that make this Code real.
A dead market is not a dead asset.
Mining was the first buyer for those graphics cards, not the only possible one. When the buyer left, the scarcity of the hardware did not change.
When demand collapses, separate the thing you own from the reason you bought it. Those are two different questions and only one of them just changed.
The pivot started before the crisis.
CoreWeave was selling compute years before the Merge, and had already renamed itself in 2019. The 2022 shutdown was the end of a transition, not the start of a panic.
Options are built in calm weather. The people who pivot well in a crisis are usually finishing something they began earlier.
Outsider judgment beat insider expertise.
A commodities trader read a hardware glut the way you read a commodity — as supply that would find a price. Career technologists saw an obsolete rig.
Domain expertise tells you how a thing works. It does not always tell you what a thing is worth to someone outside your domain.
Take the operating figure over the personal one.
Bloomberg reported his net worth at $10.3 billion in June 2025. Forbes has shown a materially lower figure since. Both are estimates of a stake in a volatile stock.
When two reputable outlets disagree by billions, neither number is the story. The company's own filed revenue is.
Data
The revenue the same hardware produced, once the customer changed.
These are the company's own figures — the first three from the Form S-1 filed with the SEC ahead of the IPO, the last from its full-year 2025 results. The physical asset was largely the same throughout.
CoreWeave Form S-1 (SEC) · FY2025 company results
2022: $15.83M. 2023: $228.9M. 2024: $1.92B. FY2025: $5.13B. Mining ceased 30 September 2022. Microsoft signed a master services agreement in February 2023 and became the largest customer.
Strategy
The play: hold the scarce thing, and go find who else needs it.
The move was not a prediction about artificial intelligence. It was a refusal to accept that a specific asset had only one possible customer, held long enough for a second customer to arrive at scale.
That is Code 5 of Business Brainwash — Yes / No Season. The industry said yes to selling. He said no, and the cost of that no was carrying idle hardware through a period when the consensus said it was worthless. Most no's cost something before they pay.
The honest book about the decisions that have no good option, which is what holding depreciating hardware through a market collapse actually feels like. Pairing is not endorsement.
Name one asset in your business whose original customer has gone quiet — a skill, a licence, a piece of equipment, an audience. Write down two other people who would pay for the same capability. If you cannot name two, that is this week's research.
References
Sources for this article.
- CoreWeave Form S-1 (revenue history, mining cessation, data-centre scale) — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
- CoreWeave announces pricing of initial public offering — CoreWeave Investor Relations
- CoreWeave reports fourth quarter and full year 2025 results — CoreWeave Investor Relations
- CoreWeave agreement with OpenAI to deliver AI infrastructure — CoreWeave / PR Newswire
- Ethereum miners eye cloud and AI to repurpose equipment the Merge will make obsolete — Forbes
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Code 5 · Yes / No Season
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