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Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

economist.com

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Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#11
post #2

So they're not just racing to gain dominance in AI, they're also racing to IPO before the music stops? IPOing and getting a bunch of cash, even if your stock subsequently suffers in the crash, is a lot better than being unable to get that capital infusion before the house of cards collapses.

The only reason I can think of for the accelerated S&P 500 inclusion of SpaceX is a pump and dump

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#12
post #8

The way I've been thinking about it: there is too much money trying to pour into the market. That's why valuations are so high. Maybe getting more of these big private companies public will bring valuations down a bit. (Just my impression. No math or financial studies behind it :)

> there is too much money trying to pour into the market

Keep in mind that inflation ran over 7% annualized in April [1].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#13
post #2

So they're not just racing to gain dominance in AI, they're also racing to IPO before the music stops? IPOing and getting a bunch of cash, even if your stock subsequently suffers in the crash, is a lot better than being unable to get that capital infusion before the house of cards collapses.

People keep predicting "house of cards" and keep being wrong. AI bubble was supposed to burst as far back as 2023. When was the last time since 2009 there was a $500+ billion tech valuation that lost 90% or more? After a certain point , 100% market penetration is achieved and these products become mainstream and profitability follows. See Uber and Tesla for examples.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#14
post #8

The way I've been thinking about it: there is too much money trying to pour into the market. That's why valuations are so high. Maybe getting more of these big private companies public will bring valuations down a bit. (Just my impression. No math or financial studies behind it :)

No, the crash (that we all know is coming) will do that. Until then, history teaches that we'll just keep going up and up

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#15
post #4

So, The Economist's paywall is unbypassable?

Download the Bypass Paywalls Clean browser extension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean

The project has been going on for years, it moved to gitflic after being banned from github and gitlab.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#16
post #2

So they're not just racing to gain dominance in AI, they're also racing to IPO before the music stops? IPOing and getting a bunch of cash, even if your stock subsequently suffers in the crash, is a lot better than being unable to get that capital infusion before the house of cards collapses.

The only reason I can think of for the accelerated S&P 500 inclusion of SpaceX is a pump and dump

> the accelerated S&P 500 inclusion of SpaceX

To be clear, S&P hasn't announced a decision on this yet.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#17
So what people seem to be unaware of or are purposely ignoring is that OpenAI and Anthropic have invested trillions in a rapdily depreciating asset. There was a HN post from a day or two ago where someone bought a V100 for 150 pounds and connected it to their computer. Well that was a $10k GPU in 2017. That's the fate of H100/B100 GPUs in 5-10 years (and I suspect closer to 5). What do you do if you've invested $1 trillion that will be worth $100 billion or less in 5 years? I think it'll be worse than that because modern hardware at that time will still probably be the same Wattage but have much higher performance so you'll be getting much higher performance-per-Watt and that's going to really matter.

The only company I'm confident will survive this hardware crunch and still be relatively successful in this space is Google.

OpenAI in particular is a bet that there will be an AI moat and that OpenAI will "win". I don't think there will be a moat and China is a big reason why (eg DeepSeek).

SpaceX is a little different. Yes, launching rockets is a business but it's not a trillion dollar business. 100 Falcon 9 launches doesn't even break $10 billion in revenue. Plus, Starship faces cost overruns, delays and significant headwinds.

But the real kicker is that SpaceX was used to bail out Elon from the Twitter purchase and the xAI investors from the first Twitter bailout. That's a problem because xAI is burning $1 billion a month in a company where that really matters and I don't think Grok will "win" here. Like, at all. SpaceX would be a significantly more attractive company without xAI.

The big potential growth area is Starlink. For that to justify this valuation I think you need handheld Starlink phones. That requires a lot of satellites at a relatively low orbit, which also means they have a relatively short life (because they burn up in the atmosphere). And for that Starship must succeed.

All the AI data center in space stuff is complete bullshit. It makes no sense. It'll never be viable. It's not going to happen.

EDIT: let me clarify because I was careless in my wording. So, Anthropic individually has not spent "trillions". That was more of a general statement on AI spending. Anthropic has raised ~$100B, the last round of which was $65B (at $965B post-money IIRC). This industry as a whole needs to recoup trillions.

Anthropic seems to be in a better position (as a business) than OpeNAI is but I do think the it's a race to cash out before depreciating assets, well, drepreciate and there's the real risk as compute becomes cheaper and the AI craze wears off, Claude just may not have the growth trajectory that is built into the price.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#18
post #2

So they're not just racing to gain dominance in AI, they're also racing to IPO before the music stops? IPOing and getting a bunch of cash, even if your stock subsequently suffers in the crash, is a lot better than being unable to get that capital infusion before the house of cards collapses.

I don't think OpenAI or Anthropic are predicting that the AI market is going to collapse. In fact, I think both are bullish that the public still isn't pricing in exponential growth.

I think what is happening is that OpenAI is racing to IPO before Anthropic because their growth isn't as impressive. If you are the weaker company, you should IPO first to lock up the cash.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#19
post #2

So they're not just racing to gain dominance in AI, they're also racing to IPO before the music stops? IPOing and getting a bunch of cash, even if your stock subsequently suffers in the crash, is a lot better than being unable to get that capital infusion before the house of cards collapses.

People keep predicting "house of cards" and keep being wrong. AI bubble was supposed to burst as far back as 2023. When was the last time since 2009 there was a $500+ billion tech valuation that lost 90% or more? After a certain point , 100% market penetration is achieved and these products become mainstream and profitability follows. See Uber and Tesla for examples.

Read history: people always think everything is fine ... until it isn't.

Re: Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

#20

Why wouldn't it? There huge demand for these shares. It's not like $3+ trillion is dumped at once. It's a tiny percentage of it, and the high multiple does the rest of the work.

There was a huge demand for the World Online IPO in The Netherlands in the late 2000 bubble. Retail investors bought it thinking they got a unicorn.

Turns out it was a scam and shares fell on the first day. Soon after the entire bubble burst.

That said, I don't even see "huge demand" for the AI triocorns right now. Unlike in 2000, most people are skeptical.

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