Live data from Hacker News

Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

economist.com

171–180 of 1001 posts

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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for the $30 million claim? It'd be nice to work out the math. Not _all_ of 401k funds / index funds are going to go to SpaceX.

*trillion The 12 largest companies in the USA together have that market cap, so probably not.

yeah, trillion. 30m isn't even a vapor droplet.

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

#172

Can the stock market remain legitimate after such a brazen example of dumping? Regular everyday people can’t access private shares and participate in upside even if they want to. They don’t have the connections like VCs, and aren’t accredited investors. And companies ban secondary transactions, which should be forced by law to be always allowed. And then after all that, the public have to deal with their index funds,…

> then they have to deal with their index funds, ETFs, mutual funds, pensions, 401ks, etc buying up overpriced stocks Only about a third of American stocks are held by passive capital [1]. Out of that, index funds are about 16%, and most of those in America reference the S&P 500, which has not yet announced whether it is changing its rules. [1] https://alexchinco.com/double-what-you-think-it-is.pdf

Sure, but it's the Americans that can least afford to be stood up as exit liquidity that have the most exposure here relative to their net worth. The ultra wealthy are going to be heavily overrepresented in the active basket. Meanwhile the folks lower down on the income scale are more likely to have their money in passive funds.

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

#173

For SpaceX (and possible the others): Yes it can, since they changed the rules to force over $30 trillion in passive 401k and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations. From https://x.com/Hedgeye/status/2060435253928604065 : "Rule changes for the SpaceX $SPCX IPO: Index providers waived the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to 5. This forces over $30 trillion in passive 401k a…

>and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to 5.

90 days or 5 days, it doesn't really matter because the float will be tiny due to the 6 month lockup. What kind of price discovery are we expecting that would happen in the other 85 days?

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

#174
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If this is a bubble... The pop stage will be devastating... Why? It could be sudden. It could be slow and gradual. I've seen no reason it needs to be one versus the other.

Irrational exuberance rarely transitions to a rational drawn down. The minute the first selfish-actor flood-liquidates, everyone else will too. That's now runs work.

but this isn't "irrational exuberance", literally everyone I know paying and kind of attention has "rational dread".

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s defensible about Anthropic’s revenue? It seems like OpenAI and others are equivalent. Open weight models are catching up. Google has ads networks, video platforms, and so much more. I am skeptical that Anthropic and OpenAI can defend their dominance for long enough to make meaningful gaap accounted profits

Anthropic is profitable unlike OpenAI though. Sure they'll owe a lot of money for probably decades, but if they remain profitable moving forward, it will be worthwhile.

The question still remains whether they will be defensively profitable when things settle down.

I don't think open weight models are likely to overtake or match frontier models in the next year or so when it comes to doing the most difficult tasks, but I do expect a lot of people who are currently funneling wheelbarrows of money to Anthropic to realize that they can achieve the vast majority of things they are doing with LLMs just as well with much cheaper open weight models.

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

#176
post #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 tr…

As I was reading the start of your argument, I thought you were gonna call the models a depreciating asset! Totally agree about GPUs too, but literally everything they’re spending money on has to be rebuilt to stay competitive. They have to go for the moonshot of training a full new model when better tech comes, they have to upgrade GPUs to keep their data centers efficient.

Technically, the model is a depreciating asset too. Just consider the difference between a model you need a B200 cluster to run vs one you can run on a Raspberry Pi. One's going to have a moat around it that gives it value and the other isn't. It's a hyperbolic argument to be sure but the nature of "enthusiast" hardware is that we're currently running, say, ~27B parameter models on hardware for a few thousand. What's that going to look like in 2 years?

Anthropic/OpenAI really need to train ever-bigger models to keep their moat. But that assumes there isn't a law of diminishing returns and also that a compressed model isn't sufficient for what many people need.

You mihgt say that the training is a barrier. And it is, kind of. Notice how it's Chinese companies coming out with open-source models like DeepSeek and Qwen? That's no accident. As soon as DeepSeek came out I knew what was going on: China is going to make sure no single Western company "owns" AI. It's in their national interest for that not to happen.

I wouldn't be surprised if the rush-to-IPO is motivated, at least in part, by getting ahead of Chinese AI commoditization.

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

#177

For SpaceX (and possible the others): Yes it can, since they changed the rules to force over $30 trillion in passive 401k and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations. From https://x.com/Hedgeye/status/2060435253928604065 : "Rule changes for the SpaceX $SPCX IPO: Index providers waived the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to 5. This forces over $30 trillion in passive 401k a…

Wow, didn’t know that.

If SpaceX tanks and 401ks are left holding the bag, this could result in the biggest class action lawsuit ever.

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

#178

> Firms in the broad Russell 3000 share index have a total market value of $79trn I sometimes try to get people to worry about the catastrophic state of American public finances by pointing out that the net national debt, including unfunded liabilities, is estimated to be $175T [0]. The government could appropriate all the equity from the top 3000 largest companies, and also the entire real estate market, and it stil…

The thing is that at these levels of debt, repayment is never the goal.

Repayment isn't a goal that anyone in the system should reasonably want. Federal debt is not like credit card debt. Debt is a product that the US Government sells. Me, being a big corporation or human, go to the USG and say "I need somewhere to park my money that is safeish from inflation". The USG sells me debt at X.Y% interest. The money now generates safe interest, which means its safeish from inflation. A world where the USG "repays the debt" is a world where this essential product is no longer available.

High levels of debt only signals high demand for this product.

This is super-counterintuitive, but the debt has little to do with the deficit. We could run a surplus and still be in the same level of debt (in fact, this would be a tremendous place to be). We could run a deficit and have no debt (just print money, duh). The decisions that go into column A generally do not impact the decisions our leaders have to make in column B, though there are of course convenient relationships between the two.

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the accelerated S&P 500 inclusion of SpaceX To be clear, S&P hasn't announced a decision on this yet.

Perhaps they’re afraid announcement would trigger divestment

I imagine the vast majority don’t care. All they care about is trying to hit their 401k or Roth IRA contributions for the month.

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

#180

For SpaceX (and possible the others): Yes it can, since they changed the rules to force over $30 trillion in passive 401k and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations. From https://x.com/Hedgeye/status/2060435253928604065 : "Rule changes for the SpaceX $SPCX IPO: Index providers waived the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to 5. This forces over $30 trillion in passive 401k a…

Do you have a source for the $30 million claim? It'd be nice to work out the math. Not _all_ of 401k funds / index funds are going to go to SpaceX.

> Do you have a source for the $30 million claim?

Index funds in total had about5 $7 trillion in 2021 [1].

[1] https://alexchinco.com/double-what-you-think-it-is.pdf

Post reply on HN