31 ms·
The criticism seems politically motivated. Considering what happened to Blue Origin, SpaceX's success is commendable. Although I agree $1.8T seems crazy.
by throwfaraway135 4mo ago
The criticism seems politically motivated. Considering what happened to Blue Origin, SpaceX's success is commendable. Although I agree $1.8T seems crazy.
- gbil 4mo ago>Akademikerpension also said the governance structure of SpaceX was "extremely deficient", adding that Elon Musk is expected to control more than 80% of the voting rights while simultaneously serving as chief executive officer, chief technology officer and chair of the board. Their skepticism seems pretty valid to me
- adamiscool8 4mo agoZuck was in roughly the same position and they didn’t put out a statement skipping that IPO. The valuation criticism is more valid but this line belies political motivation.
- close04 4mo agoMusk appears far less predictibile, more volatile than Zuck. Musk also got directly involved in US politics aligned with of a man who singlehandedly butchered US relations with almost everyone in the world. A man who threatened Denmark with taking their territory by force. You’re calling it “political motivation” as some sort of blind hate or vendetta out of principle, cutting off the nose to spite the face. But you can no longer separate Musk from politics and aggression towards Denmark. The pension fund’s assessment looks entirely valid, objective and justifiable to me. But for anyone who personally favors Musk and his political views any dismissal will look politically motivated. It’s easy to cry foul. In this light your shallow dismissal might be just as politically motivated.
- spacebanana7 4mo agoGoogle too, and this was in the long term best interests of shareholders. Imagine in 2010 if investors had real transparency into how much money YouTube or Maps was losing, along with the governance structures to enforce their concerns.
- gbil 4mo agoMore than 10times higher (possible valuation), 10+ years of Musk showing what kind of liability he is and at that time Zuck didn't have all the main CxO positions. I don't think it is similar therefore.
- vrganj 4mo agoThe political motivation is on Musks part. There's no unpolitical view of a man who ransacked the US government and is propping up far-right movements all over Europe.
- SwellJoe 4mo agoThe company is wildly overvalued. It'd be funny if Musk wasn't about to walk away with a bunch of money stolen from retirement accounts.
- spwa4 4mo agoI think you'll find the whole valuation of the S&P500 is built upon retirement accounts. Yours. Mine. In other words, look one level deeper and you'll see it's not the S&P500 that's overvalued. It's you and me and 100 million other people desperately attempting to make sure young people pay for them for 20-30 years when they're old. And then you calculate it out ... and see it's not happening. No matter what the number on the account says.
- SwellJoe 4mo agoThere's the normal level of... optimism. And, then there's SpaceX, a scam on a scale the world has never seen.
- zamadatix 4mo agoMost of the 1.8T hype is not at all related to the rocketry business. Well, I suppose if you buy the "AI DCs in space" pitch they could be somewhat related.
- johneth 4mo agoIf you buy the "AI DCs in space" pitch, you deserve to be parted from your money.
- Forgeties79 4mo agoI am baffled by how many people are buying in
- SwellJoe 4mo agoWhat's political is a policy change to "fast track" companies into the Nasdaq 100. Spacex is the first to benefit from this loophole that allows them to be added to indexes almost immediately after listing, which likely is a license to steal a bunch of regular folks retirement money. Elon Musk doesn't need more ways to steal people's money. The unfortunate thing is, a lot of people have no idea this rule change has gone into effect, and that they're about to get fleeced by a bunch of professional investors. https://www.kiplinger.com/investing/what-the-nasdaqs-new-fast-entry-rule-means-for-investors https://www.kiplinger.com/investing/what-the-nasdaqs-new-fas... It's legalized theft, and the victims are people least able to defend themselves from it. Most people have no idea what's in their retirement accounts, or track very closely what's being tracked by the index funds they've been told for decades was the safest way to invest in the stock market for non-pros.
- cryo32 4mo agoNot even remotely politically motivated. It doesn't matter if it's successful or not. Their space business is worth virtually nothing on paper and the funding structures and profit/loss accounts are scary.
- bluescrn 4mo agoWhile the Starship project may be struggling, Falcon 9 is still a massive success, with a successful launch every couple of weeks, making up most of humanity's access to space/LEO right now. And Starlink is a pretty big deal, particularly in a time of conflict where undersea cables are very vulnerable. If Elon hadn't shifted so far to the right, these threads would be near-universally praising SpaceX despite Starship's struggles.
- techpression 4mo agoBut it’s at the whim of someone who I think nobody can describe as stable or trustworthy. Starlink the technology is great, Starlink the company has a massive weight attached to it.
- Forgeties79 4mo ago> If Elon hadn't shifted so far to the right A symptom of his fickle nature and erratic behavior, as well as general poor impulse control, all of which rightfully make people skittish with their money and question his judgment.
- watwut 4mo agoI dont think he was fickle with this one. He was remarkably consistent. He had period where he though he can become hero for the democrats due to green cars. It did not worked, neither democrats nor left accepted him as unconditional hero. The racism, the villingness to cause harm to get more power for himself were there whole time. He was far right the whole time, just became more extreme and open when it stopped being disadvantage.
- Forgeties79 4mo agoHe also loudly proclaimed support for trans rights and called out people on Twitter who didn’t, as well as other progressive issues. It wasn’t just “green cars.” So either he was just being a cynic/lying, which is bad. Or he suddenly became a bigot, which is also bad.
- 4mo ago
- whatevaa 4mo agoElon achived this valuation by merging xAI into SpaceX. The future of xAI is questionable, and without it SpaceX is very overvalued.
- MrBuddyCasino 4mo agoSpaceX has the potential to be the most valuable company ever if the space economy expands. Starlink will be a tiny puzzle piece by then. How is this even debatable.
- jiggawatts 4mo agoThe "space economy" is not yet a certainty, other than in the mind of science fiction fans. (Unsurprisingly, hard to reach irradiated rocks of undifferentiated boring minerals in a cold vacuum are of negligible value to humans here on Earth.) Even if the Star Trek utopian future materialises, it is very likely to be a long time from now. 1. SpaceX has competitors. Most are making reusable rockets. 2. SpaceX has no moat. 3. The concept of money itself might change dramatical by the time SpaceX becomes a multi-planetary mega corporation. Investing now may not return returns in any meaningful sense.
- copx 4mo ago>The "space economy" is not yet a certainty True, and that's exactly the reason why people want to buy this stock now. If future returns were already (almost) certain, they would have been priced in and you couldn't make any money with this stock. This is a classic high risk / high reward stock. IF the space economy takes off you might 10X your investment. If it doesn't, you might lose most of it. Rich people (who own most of the stock market) can afford to make such high risk bets, because they can afford to lose the money and thus many will make that bet.
- MrBuddyCasino 4mo agoThis is the only sane reply so far, and being on HN (notably a VCs platform) this is rather sad.
- YawningAngel 4mo agoI don't think it's politically motivated at all. My impression of this IPO is that it's designed to inflate SpaceX's perceived value by offering very limited float and aggressively seeking to capture passive money by bargaining for inclusion in indices it would not otherwise be eligible for. Speaking as a passive investor myself, I want my money nowhere near this company until it meets the old eligibility criteria.
- turzmo 4mo ago[flagged]
- Geezus_42 4mo agoThey've been simmping for Musk for at least a decade. Doing it for AI is only few years old.
- KingMob 4mo agoThink so? I feel like HN has always had a high level of simping.
- tomhow 4mo agoHN is, at the time of writing, over 48 million posts over nearly two decades. Whatever you want to notice, you'll notice plenty of examples of. So, sure, I guess there has been plenty of "simping" over the years on HN. There has also been plenty of the opposite of it. As someone who reads the comments (particularly the most emotionally charged ones) every day, the sentiment towards prominent tech companies and leaders has been leaning decidedly negative on HN for several years.
- KingMob 4mo agoIf you're focusing on emotionally charged comments, then you're looking at a biased data set, yes? I have you tagged as an admin; have you ever thought of blogging statistical/ML analyses of HN sentiment?
- tomhow 4mo agoYep I'm a moderator and we're reading all the threads all the time, so we get a sense of the overall sentiment. Yes we read the worst comments because they're the ones that needour attention with respect to account penalties and bans. But we still read over all the threads, so we'd see it if there was a large "simping" contingent or tred. But we don't see that; what we see instead generally aligns with HN's reputation for being critical, skeptical, cynical and, at times, curmudgeonly. Much that has its roots in HN's "hacker" ethos, which is anti-establishment by definition. There is a good amount of positivity and enthusiasm too, but barely ever for major companies and rich/powerful figures it's most commonly for small teams and freelance/indie developers who have built a cool project or useful tool. We are thinking about what kind of data analysis would be good to publish.