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Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

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Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#91
post #11

The stock market doesn't operate on long-term principles anymore. So, in some sense, it is immaterial that the rosy scenarios where AI is responsible for >$30 trillion in the next decade are unlikely. If you bet against the hype and it goes on for a few more months/years you lose as much or more than if you went along for the ride. Burry is well aware of this, he has written about how passive investing is contributin…

> The stock market doesn't operate on long-term principles anymore. It has been broken since ~2008 (ZIRPs, etc.) and has really gone off the rails since BTC and memestocks have taken off. Now everything's a memestock. It's all vibes-based.

I don't think there is a single thing that explain the absolute joke that is the current market. Algorithmic trading, high-frequency trading, deregulation, passive investment, “finance” influencer pump and dumping ... But in general, I do believe it has the same issues that you can say about anything these days. It's not like those things didn't exist into a form or another in the past, but it's just so, so much faster these days.

To make a parallel, it's not like disinformation didn't exist in the past, but nowadays with social media, llms and image gen tools and a few armies of bots, you can spread whatever bullshit you want at lightning speed.

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#92
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this time the boooom has a larger blast radius than all the previous booooms combined.

The largest so far. We have always been in a boom/ bust cycle. The difference is that they are coming faster and faster. I need to figure out the next one. The famous quote, "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent," is widely attributed to the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946

Keynes died 50 years before this started being a saying. It was made by Gary Shilling.

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#93
post #35
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people can't get past the kind of logic that declares Facebook doomed for 20 years because Myspace.

Beyond GenX and Boomers who is still using Facebook? We don't live forever.

A lot of people use it for Facebook marketplace

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#94

What's the rationale offered by NASDAQ for their new "15-days and you're in the index" rule for these massive IPOs? Seems equivalent to removing road safety rules for the least-tested, most-powerful new vehicles only.

They want the index to be representative of the top stocks listed on the Nasdaq, even if they are brand new. The Nasdaq 100 in particular is a marketing tool for the stock exchange, it's not a particularly principled index.

Yeah, indeed. See (march) https://www.reuters.com/business/new-nasdaq-rules-include-fa...

Quote from Cameron Lilja, Nasdaq's global head of index solutions:

"It is not necessarily representative to have a company that's big and could have a sizable representation in the index to keep them out for that long," Lilja said in an interview. "We're seeing share and corporate structures change - and companies that are staying private considerably longer are thus growing to be truly mega-cap companies before they even come to the public markets."

There's been fewer IPOs recently so Nasdaq and competitors are all racing to woo the few big ones to list with them.

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#95
post #56
post #11

The stock market doesn't operate on long-term principles anymore. So, in some sense, it is immaterial that the rosy scenarios where AI is responsible for >$30 trillion in the next decade are unlikely. If you bet against the hype and it goes on for a few more months/years you lose as much or more than if you went along for the ride. Burry is well aware of this, he has written about how passive investing is contributin…

Can you elaborate on how passive investing contributes to this?

Simple. Most "passive investors" are ETFs and pension funds that sometimes by law, sometimes by statute/sales prospect are limited to being low-risk, i.e. the monthly contributions go towards "safe" asset classes, and in addition retail customers prefer low-fee (and thus low-management) funds.

That in turn means that a lot of the invested money goes towards ultra-safe stuff like government bonds, which is about the only thing keeping the US government afloat (if there is always a healthy amount of buyers, you can go into debt no matter if it is sustainable), and what remains of the hundreds of billions of dollars that flow into these funds each month (and [1] is just pension funds, not 401k and other forms of privately-held retirement assets) and is not earmarked for such safe asset classes spills onto the ordinary stock market, i.e. S&P 500, NASDAQ et al.

And here comes the trap with low-fee investment funds... when the ETF or pension fund's policy is "we'll track NASDAQ 100" and SpaceX enters NASDAQ 100, they have no choice than to shift billions of dollars worth of assets into SpaceX at whatever is the market price at that point. No matter if the fund managers think that the valuation is excessive, if SpaceX has a long term viable business strategy, nothing can prevent this.

To make it worse: once in NASDAQ 100, you as a company have no incentive to behave. You cannot be punished by free-market means (aka going under), simply because your inclusion in the NASDAQ 100 means that any significant loss in value would wipe out way too much value in pension funds.

The US' idea to completely tie pensions to the stock market will fry the US economy alive. We've already seen this during and past Covid... first, lockdowns got relaxed because it fried the stock markets too heavily, thus giving us four massive waves until vaccine distribution caught up, and then remote work that was allowed in many countries by law got slowly axed because REITs (real estate investment trusts) got screwed by companies quitting expensive rental contracts for office space. But that pales in comparison to what we'll see when the AI bubble pops.

[1] Q1 20: 23T, Q1 21: 26T => about 3T/y, 250B/mo, per https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL594090005Q

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet absolutely went bust. That’s what the dotcom crash was. Same with a lot of physical infrastructure. The UK has a robust railroad network today, but it was built during a bubble that was so insane people would take loans from banks to invest in railroad stocks.

> The internet absolutely went bust How does it matter to you? If you had invested in Internet broadly, you would have been WAY better off in the long term. Meaning: your strategy had been to keep investments tied to Internet first companies, you would have done better than pretty much any other person. Things go up and down but broadly internet went up.

Unless the investment was into worthless paper from those companies, tied to pension funds and similar.

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#97
post #47
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond GenX and Boomers who is still using Facebook? We don't live forever.

The last time Facebook reported its monthly active user base they were at 3 billion. [1] So I guess the answer to your question is… everyone? [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680124...

How many of those are real people?

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#98
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The internet absolutely went bust How does it matter to you? If you had invested in Internet broadly, you would have been WAY better off in the long term. Meaning: your strategy had been to keep investments tied to Internet first companies, you would have done better than pretty much any other person. Things go up and down but broadly internet went up.

Unless the investment was into worthless paper from those companies, tied to pension funds and similar.

The strategy should be to put money into AI broadly and not necessarily tie to a certain company -- something pension companies already know.

So evidence that internet was a bubble is wrong, it in fact shows that pensions did the right thing by putting money in the internet.

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#99
I'm noticing a sort of mass hysteria and performative concern over AI's fundamental economics coming from grief/cope.

I believe that Anthropic is worth $1T. I believe it won't go below it (inflation adjusted) for the next 2+ years. How do I make money with this?

Re: Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T

#100
This is a very interesting comment. Companies like OpenAI or ChatGPT sell hardware hidden in tokens, and the token is different for each company depending on the tokenizer. The concern is this: when you have an Opus 4.7, Sonnet, or GPT 5X with an Nvidia H100 or H200 GPU, what will happen to this cost when, if not Nvidia, another Chinese company enters the market and starts running these models? The point here is that as long as Nvidia is the provider, and limits access to the machines and the number of data centers is also limited, these companies can be worth whatever they want. But the moment this starts to expand, the value will surely decline, because what you're selling isn't the model itself, which is ultimately just a 1 TB file that you have replicated across machines. What you're selling is access to a software program on a specialized machine. As long as you control the resource, which in this case is that machine, you'll have value. The moment other machine manufacturers enter the market, your value will decrease.
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