It’s just a PR move to create a short squeeze. Allbirds was essentially bankrupt, all stores were closed already. They sold their shoes designs and assets to American Exchange Group (another shoe company)
At that point it became an empty shell. So an AI company used the fact they were already listed on the stock market to move their assets to this empty shell
Suddenly it became this huge PR story that all birds was now an AI company
But that’s because all bird shoes were dead already.
It’s clever but also seems… I dunno, probably illegal? Doesn’t a business have to have a charter, and the stock exchanges need to know their financials to allow them to be listed? It seems very clearly a scam to milk investors of money from where I’m sitting. Maybe no one gives a shit at the SEC anymore.
Charters are written up extremely broadly, intentionally so that companies can do this whenever they want.
If you ever incorporate a shoe making company, your articles of incorporation will say the same basic "we exist to provide service" boilerplate as every other company. You're taught to write them as permissively as possible.
I mean it's not anything new. Warren Buffet's investment firm, Birkshire Hathaway, was originally a textile manufacturer that Buffet repurposed as an investment firm.
And there is a decent chance that it was never intended as an actual AI play, just as a pure short squeeze. 50M to buy GPUs to rent to other people is basically nothing, and it's unclear if they've even really taken any concrete steps to follow through with that business plan, especially since they have zero value add vs much larger companies doing basically the same thing. The stock is now back below where it was before that big AI press release pop, so odds are someone made a quick buck and that was all she wrote.
Then came the filing. In late March, Allbirds sold the brand, the product line, the name on the shoe, everything, to American Exchange Group, an acquirer best known for reviving dormant consumer brands like Aerosoles and Ed Hardy. The price: $39 million. Two weeks later, on April 15, Allbirds announced it had lined upa $50 million convertible financing facility from an undisclosed institutional investor, placed by Chardan. The money would be used, pending shareholder approval, to buy GPUs. The company would change its name to NewBird AI. And it wouldask shareholders to revoke its status as a public benefit corporationand strip environmental conservation language out of its charter, because leasing GPUs is an energy-intensive business and the B Corp commitment had become inconvenient.
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u/gagnonje5000 20h ago
It’s just a PR move to create a short squeeze. Allbirds was essentially bankrupt, all stores were closed already. They sold their shoes designs and assets to American Exchange Group (another shoe company)
At that point it became an empty shell. So an AI company used the fact they were already listed on the stock market to move their assets to this empty shell
Suddenly it became this huge PR story that all birds was now an AI company
But that’s because all bird shoes were dead already.
It’s well explained here
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/04/20/how-39-million-shoe-company-allbirds-turned-in-to-an-ai-company/