181–190 of 344 posts
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How is Alphabet the modern Berkshire Hathaway?
Google's return of invested capital has averaged 32% since IPO. This may be a narrative violation on HN, but the quality of Google's management is exceptional.
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Which corruption exactly? NASDAQ giving them fast entry so the biggest IPO in history is done on NASDAQ and not on NYSE who was also competing for it? Both are fighting for OpenAI and Anthropic listings as well which likely influenced their choice to get in early with SpaceX
I was primarily referring to the acquisition of musk's ai company. But the more general (and unfortunately widely accepted practice of) government contracting culture certainly applies to OpenAI and Anthropic as well. EDIT: cleaned up my comment; removed a more inflammatory claim about corruption in the private sector.
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Love the typo. I think Musk's luck is running out, he's been too political this past year and he seems to also have run out of geek "street cred". Remember youtubers visiting (whatever the Tesla trade show was called) were more perplexed than impressed with what has been shown. Similar sentiment seen across trade shows (like CES) where everything was AI and no one seemed to ask themselves "why are we putting AI in th…
It’s so weird to see people actively try to criticize arguably the most successful person in the history of Earth.
If only some billionaires (trillionaires?) could strike a better balance between successful and human. Especially since most wealth is actually wealth transfer from the poor and from taxpayer coffers to the rich.
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Remember this was also when SpaceX was actually about space, instead of mostly AI and Twitter. Long-term shareholders that were sold on the space, have to be thinking about how to get out once their lockups expire.
I don't think companies expanding their business should be the only reason to sell. Apple was a desktop and laptop computer company when they released the iPod. Nokia was a company making rubber products when they started making cellular equipment in the 1970s. Amazon was a ecomm company when they released AWS. Etc. Sure, I'm cherrypicking the success stories but I don't think it's the only signal people should use.
Companies generally don't just jump into a totally new market unless they've already got some experience.
The SpaceX acquisitions of xAI and X have absolutely nothing to do with space. While I'm sure SpaceX software engineers benefit greatly from cheap access to Grok, it and X have no relevance to the core business of SpaceX. It's the same level as "huh?" if Boeing decided to buy up an AI company and social media platform. The only reason xAI and X are even part of SpaceX is because Musk fucked himself with being forced to buy Twitter and he decided to bundle them with an actually profitable company.
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> Any shareholder is buying in fully aware of the governance structure. This is laughable. Many shareholders don’t even know they own stock in these companies.
That’s an indictment on them. You should know where you’re putting your money and why. If you delegate this to a professional or influencer, you do not get to blame them. After all, you could just buy something you think you understand better like real estate or keep it in cash.
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Yeah, I have put my money where my mouth is, but I think it is. Extraordinarily so, and I think the Musk hate has clouded people’s judgement. For what it’s worth, I get it. I have found Musk insufferable for the last decade since he attached himself to the right and got into drugs, however I think SpaceX is undervalued right now. 1. They are literally the only company on earth with a reliable partially reusable launc…
5. A gazillion amount of telemetry data and social media data to sell on the data broker market. That alone is enough to attract another billion dollar of potential investment consistently, especially for training data and intelligence...you know, selling to the Mossad or CIA. In a world of money, every bit you can earn, you have to earn, while I know it is immoral to sell the data for spying purposes, morality alone…
All these come together with orbital data centers…
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SpaceX had adult leadership for a long time. I suspect there was a tacit agreement with Musk about a bit of separation. He broke through that professional firewall when he merged xAI with SpaceX and then pushed it to go public as he did. I also posit that Gwynne Shotwell is weirdly undervalued for what she's accomplished and what she's put up with, and I think that will show up some time in the future. There was enou…
>'Gwynne Shotwell is weirdly undervalued for what she's accomplished and what she's put up with, and I think that will show up some time in the future.' Gwynne is fiercely loyal to Elon. I don't expect to see significant strife between them.
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$8.7B in losses over the last 5 quarters sounds bad, but that is also with $20.4B capital expenditure in the period and double digit percent increases per quarter in user metrics. By traditional business metrics it looks toxic but compared to a typical tech unicorn it's not really outstanding. Considering it's a tech unicorn with strategic and financial leverage like no other (their own global Internet infrastructure…
Did I miss something? When did Spacex get into the fab business?
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Original HN thread, 11-years ago (220 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8914956
What a find in the archives! "It's quite amazing how this values SpaceX at 10bn, less than 50% of WhatsApp." Somebody was wise a decade ago.
Since then Starlink has succeeded, reusable rockets are a reality, ISS crewed spaceflight restored to US.
I expect all that had an impact on the valuation. Personally I wouldn't invest in Elon because his stock is a wild ride but space x has achieved a lot.
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