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SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

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Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#431
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX is _not_ profitable by most reasonable measurements of accounting. If you discount rocket depreciation costs and R&D, then yeah its profitable from starlink revenue.

SpaceX reuses its boosters 20+ times. Surely the depreciation is tiny when compared to the revenue of 60M+ per launch?

Depreciation isn't the only thing that matters. R&D, manufacturing, maintenance, fuel, launch, support staff, and I'm sure there are countless others.

I'm not saying they aren't profitable. I don't know, but it's definitely not a given.

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're going to force a S&P500 index listing on IPO day so we're all going to be forced to baghold this regardless of if we want to or not unless you've got $0 in any major retirement fund.

Maybe this already exists, but it would be great if one of the major index ETFs omitted all the firms with problematic board governance like there is at Tesla, SpaceX.

S&P500 had a rule from 2017 to 2023 that prevented companies with dual classes of shares (the sort that allow them to maintain founder control- like what GOOG and META did) that went public after the rule was instituted from ever being in the index. To be clear, META and GOOG were both in the index, but it was to prevent new companies from coming along and doing it. (I think it was related to SNAP going public?)

They removed it largely because investors wanted higher returns, and the tech companies that had such dual classes (1) were doing really well, and the S&P ended up caving on that rule.

1: Perennial hot button around here Palantir did this in a more extreme fashion than most. The three founders F class shares will always be at 49.9999% of the votes and the early investors B class shares have 10 votes each as compared to the publicly traded A class shares 1 votes.

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#433

Every time Musk does anything these days, it further reveals the shell game he's playing with his companies. This is going to be an Enron type of story eventually. I truly wish I had a choice to pull my tax money out of this particular subsidy.

Enron was absolute peanuts compared to the financial fraud Musk has been executing (with the apparent blessing of the SEC). At its peak Enron had a roughly $70B market cap, TSLA is currently sitting at $1.74T. We can expect similar numbers from the SpaceX IPO.

It's hard to compare these numbers directly since valuations have increased quite a bit since a quarter century ago. As a proportion of the S&P 500, Tesla (2.3%) is about 4x of Enron at that $70b (0.6%).

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate That’s SpaceX’s version of Tesla’s self driving car pipe dream Edit - I use self-driving car and Autopilot interchangeably

It's so pipe-dreamy that I used it for an hour today through SF rush hour traffic. Clearly never going to work though, right? right???

Did you follow Tesla's published instructions on how to use it (https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB6080...)? You're explicitly forbidden, for example, from assuming that it's going to make the right decision at intersections; you must manually inspect each intersection and evaluate whether it's "safe and/or appropriate" to continue. You're also not allowed to look away from the road or use your phone. YMMV, but to me that level of required attention doesn't match the term "self-driving".

What I see a lot of people do, unfortunately, is reconcile this contradiction by not following the published limitations of the "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" product. They assume that Elon Musk wouldn't call it that if it couldn't be trusted to do what they expect. Then they get into fatal crashes, and someone sues, and Tesla argues that they can't be held accountable for bad drivers who don't follow the rules.

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#436
post #65

I really don't know what Elon is thinking here because SpaceX's IPO is already precarious, for several reasons: 1. It was used to rescue himself and key investors from overpaying for Twitter, which was first rescued through xAI (and I don't know why anyone thought investing in xAI was a good idea but here we are). If our regulators weren't defanged, this deal would've gotten alot more scrutiny (IMHO). Whatever the ca…

Starship won’t compete with F9, or BO because it is fully reusable and cost less than either. The Chinese are not a player in the global launch services market at all so don’t count. Starship isn’t comparable to Falcon Heavy because it has vastly more volume, which will make it the cheapest way to launch Starlinks, which will be a lot of launches to begin with.

> Starship won’t compete with F9, or BO because it is fully reusable and cost less than either.

Currently, this is not the case. Not fully reusable, and not costing less than F9 or BO.

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX is _not_ profitable by most reasonable measurements of accounting. If you discount rocket depreciation costs and R&D, then yeah its profitable from starlink revenue.

They haven't released a 10k yet so we don't know, but from what I understand SpaceX+X.ai is not GAAP profitable.

SpaceX was, but SpaceTwitter is not. xAI is hoovering all the money out of SpaceX.

Re: SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

#439
post #378
post #212

I just want to make the observation that this whole SpaceX IPO is turning out entirely unlike the CDOs that led to the 2008 financial crisis. There's no mixing of AAA level assets with a bunch of subprime stuff and then getting someone to buy it all as AAA. Not at all similar. Completely different. Will turn out just fine this time.

The assets weren’t AAA, you’re mixing it up a bond concepts. The deal had bonds that were AAA. And if you’re talking about CDOs then the assets were bonds which were usually BBB or similarly cuspy bonds. You should learn about securitizations. It’s actually interesting. But people talk about it colloquially and so incorrectly that it’s mind dumbing. Here’s a simplified example of how you can take something and turn i…

> The problem w this model is that it only works if assets are relatively uncorrelated (it was true in the past but ignored systematic risk and adverse selection in originations). What this has to do w musk or spacex I’m still not sure

What this has to do with with SpaceX is that there's the same blatant disregard for sound financial analysis by the very institutions that were/are supposed to know better. The NASDAQ 100 fast track decision is a similar level of financial malpractice as the ratings agencies slapping AAA on things that they knew were little better than junk. The abuses of the subprime mortgage originators were well known long before the actual meltdown. As were those systemic risks you spoke of. They were ignored by those whose entire job it was to not ignore them, and they sold out their credibility for a quick buck. If you can't see the similarities to the present situation then I can only wish you luck.

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