11–20 of 40 posts
Believe it or not, elite universities are reaching similar heights. MIT is at roughly $20M endowment per faculty member. All caveats apply. 20≠100, employees might include staff and grad students, etc. Still, I would never advise anyone to donate to any institution like this.
Believe it or not, elite universities are reaching similar heights. MIT is at roughly $20M endowment per faculty member. All caveats apply. 20≠100, employees might include staff and grad students, etc. Still, I would never advise anyone to donate to any institution like this.
If you ran MIT, what do you think a good endowment amount per faculty member would be?
I’m not sure $20m is far off from optimal.
I might go down to $15m, with an annual draw down $750k so (5%) per year to cover burdened labor rate of average professor and certain percentage (half?) to go to “support” (i.e., everything else, including libraries, staff, maintenance, maybe grad student funding, etc.). Even that seems sort of on the tight side.
Believe it or not, elite universities are reaching similar heights. MIT is at roughly $20M endowment per faculty member. All caveats apply. 20≠100, employees might include staff and grad students, etc. Still, I would never advise anyone to donate to any institution like this.
How can you write "employees might include staff" and keep a straight face? Yes, they do, how is this even in question? MIT has 1089 faculty members but 17,180 employees total. That's a 15x difference.
Nvidia is clearly overvalued, but betting against it is too risky. Nobody knows when its price will return to a reasonable value. It could be months or years.
Believe it or not, elite universities are reaching similar heights. MIT is at roughly $20M endowment per faculty member. All caveats apply. 20≠100, employees might include staff and grad students, etc. Still, I would never advise anyone to donate to any institution like this.
> Believe it or not, elite universities are reaching similar heights. MIT is at roughly $20M endowment per faculty member. If you ran MIT, what do you think a good endowment amount per faculty member would be? I’m not sure $20m is far off from optimal. I might go down to $15m, with an annual draw down $750k so (5%) per year to cover burdened labor rate of average professor and certain percentage (half?) to go to “sup…
TSMC apparently doesn’t charge nearly enough for their services.
Brilliant. Thanks for posting. Actually quite a good metric for thinking about valuation, ie it’s 5x what it should be right now.
I think about it the other way. Businesses with high $/revenue per employee, high margin, etc. tend to be fundamentally better managed and more robust. I'm not claiming that applies to Nvidia either way specifically, but it's a good sign in the generic: 1. They're efficient. 2. They've avoided the curse of overhiring (hi, Google!) 3. They can stay afloat even if business drops a lot.
Check this https://airleasecorp.com/press/air-lease-corporation-announc... they made 753.6M in 2023 with 163 employees or 4.6M per employee. No one comes even close. No one.
I believe Fannie Mae is the second who made 17400 with 8100 people or 2.17M per employee.
To compare, nVidia made 4368 with 29600.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Believe it or not, elite universities are reaching similar heights. MIT is at roughly $20M endowment per faculty member. If you ran MIT, what do you think a good endowment amount per faculty member would be? I’m not sure $20m is far off from optimal. I might go down to $15m, with an annual draw down $750k so (5%) per year to cover burdened labor rate of average professor and certain percentage (half?) to go to “sup…
$20M might be optimal if tuition was $0 and they didn't receive any research grants.
https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...
I couldn’t find the number quickly, but tuition is not a big funding source for the university. They are quite generous with tuition grants. This might not be true for the MBA program, but probably is for many/most other programs.
> … and they didn't receive any research grants.
Yeah. This is where I think one needs to look at exactly where expenses go. Grants don’t go as far as some folks think they do.
Anyway, what’s your number with things being as they are?
I’m still ok with $15-20m, and I am not particularly fond of university admins and the way they run things.
TSMC apparently doesn’t charge nearly enough for their services.
TSMC can charge as much as the market will bear. Nvidia already moved their production once to Samsung for the 3000 series GPUs just to call TSMCs bluff. TSMC are the best in town, but they're also not the only game in town. Pretty sure Intel and Samsung are constantly tempting Nvidia with good offers, which Nvidia can use as leverage in negotiations to keep TSMC prices in check.
If TSMC doubled or 10x what they charge Nvidia on Monday, Nvidia can’t switch suppliers overnight, and it would crash Nvidia’s valuation, leaving TSMC to say “ok we have the capacity for anyone who wants to take on Nvidia”.
Another side of that, while the whole “China invading Taiwan thing” isn’t exactly on the cards, there’s now $1+Trillion at stake shorting Nvidia stock alone if China felt like putting a few boots on the ground for a week.