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Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

reuters.com

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Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#131

Post by nutjob2 »

WarmWash wrote: post #54
londons_explore wrote: post #22

Insiders who have locked up stocks but still want to sell could presumably just short the stock and take out a loan secured on the stock to get the financial effects of selling, without actually selling... I wonder if that's what's happening with ~$1T of stocks currently locked up...

If anyone knows of a broker who will let you withdraw the proceeds (cash) of a short sale, I will buy the name of the broker off you. I'll also let you know why I would pay for this (although you may already know anyway, hah). I spent a week researching this talking to fidelity, schwab, IBKR, and Robinhood, none would allow it.

Why would anyone let you do that? What's their incentive? I assume you're offering something as security for that money (shares?) but why would people complicate an already risky proposition further or go into the money lending business that they're not in?

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#132

Post by croes »

asadotzler wrote: post #105
jacobgold wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually not a concern I'd have, because hardware that has been sufficiently tested and burned in tends not to fail for a very long time. I've done builds that ran for 5+ years with virtually no physical attention, just continual degradation as hardware is taken out of service. There's also not much money to recover from 5+ year-old hardware. I used to run AI inference GPU servers in road vehicles, which is pr…

5 years is a Starlink's typical lifetime. Data center satellite lifetimes will probably be shorter. Demise sooner, replace more often. GPUs get more energy efficient every year and leaving the slower, hungrier chips up there much longer than 3 years seems wasteful given the cheap cost of launch. I think this could be done at an interesting scale even on Falcon 9 alone. If Starship does even 20% of its early design go…

Starlink rushed when they put the satellites in orbit, AT&T did the opposite. They did the bare minimum. So terrestrial was faster without really trying

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#133

Post by croes »

nkrisc wrote: post #92
vlovich123 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Microsoft design of filling an airtight submersible structure with argon and dropping it to the bottom of the ocean floor is the alternative design - you’re not looking to do repairs but amortize the low cost of failures across the value you extract. The biggest issue with space is not repairability but heat - when you’re in a vacuum the only way to disperse heat is through black body radiation and that’s horribl…

It’s not an unsolved physics problem. Every satellite in space has to deal with it and even the ISS deals with it by having massive radiator arrays that face perpendicular to the sun. The problem with data centers in space is one of materials science and engineering: how to make radiators large enough and effective enough to cool it while also being economically feasible, both in terms of construction and getting the…

Nobody said space data centers are impossible, it’s just wasteful and ineffective.

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#134

Post by [deleted] »

olyjohn wrote: post #87
markasoftware wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat dissipation isn't as big a concern as it seems: the weight of the solar panels is significantly larger than that of the heatsinks you'd need per typical modern gpu

The cooling is not an issue for their current designs. Look at their AI1 Satellite specs. They clearly have the cooling figured out. The thing is that it's not a datacenter, it's a single rack. A single rack that weighs multiple tons. You can figure out the weight of the thing based on the total power output, and "power to weight ratio" from SpaceX's own diagrams. Then look up how much it costs to launch per ton, and…

[deleted]

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#136

Post by lifeisstillgood »

eldenring wrote: post #114
metalliqaz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from every perspective but cooling, radiation shielding, and cost/ease of installation. Oh is that all? Those are major data center concerns. Don't forget the biggest one: an ocean-based system could be pulled up and serviced without the need for a human-rated rocket. Oh, and bandwidth/latency. The ONLY benefit of space is that it doesn't require siting a major construction in a town full of angry residents, and it…

Cooling is relatively easy, you just need radiators which are passive, and essentially reduce to a launch cost penalty. You are right that they can't be serviced, but that is missing the point of orbital data centers. The whole point is that you can build hundreds of thousands of these in a factory and launch them in a scalable manner. The power, cooling, etc. comes for "free". In the long run, as the cost of the chi…

My back of the envelope maths:

Suns energy at ISS is about 1.4KW/m2 Solar panels about 35% efficient but let’s say 50% for fun

700w/m2, or about one H100 worth per sq metre (hey, I could run my own H100 off a roof top panel !!)

We want a small 70MW data centre - which is 100,000 times the size so 100,000 m2 or an array 316mx316m or 15 football pitches

Then as it’s energy in and energy out you need radiators on dark side of same size

The ISS is ~ 2000m2, so that’s fifty ISSes

I mean it’s physically possible. But the engineering, the space launch costs they are staggering. And the upside is … Im not sure

All the win seems to be is free sun energy, but a data centre in Texas or Nigeria just needs about twice the solar panels and some big ass batteries.

Im not costing that out but, honestly it seems like a marketing pitch or a really obscure need to put compute beyond the reach of governments.

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#137

Post by inigyou »

dyauspitr wrote: post #55
inigyou wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken like someone who's never actually done it. Hedging to limit max loss is extremely expensive.

I have done it before. How is it expensive, most brokers offer commission free trades now. It’s just another long order.

You have to pay money to buy those options

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#138

Post by Ekaros »

ck2 wrote: post #45

it is just so weird to me that nearly $9 BILLION can be created out of nowhere for nothing how can that be healthy for civilization

It really is not from nothing. Someone just overpaid by 9 billion for bunch of stock certificate... Not exactly common scenario in other places but could happen on smaller scale.

Now debt is money from nothing...

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#139

Post by hiq »

mikestew wrote: post #29
t1234s wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also sell in the money call options in anticipation the stock will go down. You keep the premium the call buyer pays.

But to sell the calls, you should own the stock first. Puts can be bought w/o owning the stock. Granted, the put buyer pays the premium, so you don’t get guaranteed money in your pocket like you would selling calls.

I think you're referring to covered calls, but you can sell naked calls as well, meaning without owning the underlying.

Re: Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price

#140

Post by [deleted] »

nijave wrote: post #103
jacobgold wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I have no doubt that it's possible to put GPU servers in space. The Starlink satellites are servers in space. The question is whether it's even remotely profitable to do this for AI training/inference servers.

Training, no. Latency is too high. Inference the latency becomes trivial. Other things, I suspect latency is too high again.

[deleted]
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