8 ms·

Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their re

• jesse_dot_id 4mo ago
  If there is ever another depression, which seems highly probable at this point, the meme stocks will be the first ones down the toilet.
• jld 4mo ago
  While gold has industrial uses, isn't most of its value based on the fact that people like it and believe that it has value?
  • infinitewars 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • interstice 4mo ago
    I'm not sure if this means gold isn't powered by memes or whether it's just one of the most long lived memes of all time. Aside from other nice properties like lasting a long time, being pretty, and not requiring electricity to exist.
    • Danox 4mo ago
      Certainly, gold is not a meme, nor are all the other rare earth metals. This principle applies most to the other elements found on the periodic table. In fact, they have become more valuable due to research and development in today’s modern world, as numerous useful discoveries are made daily. Cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, is undoubtedly a meme. If given a choice, one would prefer to possess any of the rare metals, rare earths, or any other elements that can be obtained in sufficient quantities, whether on land or in the ocean. Bitcoin or cryptocurrency is beneficial only to insiders and not to the general public. In essence, they are akin to modern tulips with a cherry on top, and like Tesla in 2030, one should avoid being caught with the bag.
  • jimnotgym 4mo ago
    I was once told bitcoin was a 'pet rock'. Thing is people pay a lot of money for rocks when they have no planned industrial activity for them. Diamonds, for instance. I think you are spot on. The problem comes if SpaceX goes out of fashion, not its fundamentals.
  • jpadkins 4mo ago
    What you are describing applies to all forms of money. It has value because people believe other people will use it as money. If that belief drops, the value drops. People comment on gold and Bitcoin, but don't realize the same principles apply to US dollars and bonds.
    • chriswarbo 4mo ago
      > the same principles apply to US dollars Currencies are a little different, since they are required to pay taxes; and payment of taxes is enforced (to varying degrees) by state violence. Hence if you believe you will be taxed ("death and taxes" being the only certainties in life, etc.) then the currency associated with that tax has value, in that it avoids imprisonment, etc.
• dist-epoch 4mo ago
  When you invest in TSLA and SPCX, you don't invest in a car and a rocket company, you invest in Elon Musk. So revenue, assets, are irrelevant.
  • fofoz 4mo ago
    You basically buy an asset whose risk is tied to a man's life.
    • cbeach 4mo ago
      General Electric was just fine when Thomas Edison died in 1931. And Apple was fine after the tragic early death of Steve Jobs. Companies like this become bigger than their founders. And I'm sure many on the Left would argue that Tesla and SpaceX would be healthier companies without Elon Musk. Although I tend to differ on that, having owned $TSLA for a long time. Never bet against Elon!
    • alpineman 4mo ago
      And not the healthiest man alive
• rapind 4mo ago
  > Can this be maintained forever? Obviously not. It’s all about timing your bail so you don’t get left holding the bag.
• jtbayly 4mo ago
  I saw that one wealthy individual had purchased $1 billion of SpaceX at the IPO. Does that count as a retail investor?
  • andsoitis 4mo ago
    > I saw that one wealthy individual had purchased $1 billion of SpaceX at the IPO. Does that count as a retail investor? There were two individuals who each bought $1B: Ron Baron and Gina Rinehart. While they are individuals, they executed these billion-dollar investments through their massive corporate entities and investment firms, rather than personal brokerage accounts. A retain investor is an individual, non-professional investor who buys and sells securities through brokerages using personal funds.
• stetrain 4mo ago
  The current market cap of SPCX and TSLA combined (~$3.8T) is about 3 times the total value of all BTC (~$1.3T).
• ozgrakkurt 4mo ago
  > BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes This is not true. BTC is way more sane than SpaceX as can be seen by it's history so far.
  • misiti3780 4mo ago
    neither of them are sane. BTC is useless, unless your trying to buy child porn, buy illicit drugs on the internet, or someone who bought it before the value exploded. eventually, the world will come around and it will go to zero, if quantum doesnt kill it first. im looking forward to that day.
    • throw310822 4mo ago
      BTC's use is being bought and sold. So it's not useless. If I offer you one BTC for $30k, will you buy it?
      • tcp_handshaker 4mo ago
        If I offer you a tulip for $25,000 would you buy it?
        • throw310822 4mo ago
          Sure, if there were a stable enough market in which I can fetch twice that amount for that tulip, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Wouldn't you? The point being: BTC is a an abstract good, of no practical use except that of being transacted. Has whatever value the people are willing to pay for it, and has had a value in the tens of thousands for long enough that buying one with the intent of keeping it for a while is not such a stupid idea. I don't currently own any but there is a price at which I would buy one, and that price is many thousands of dollars... For an alphanumeric code in a distributed ledger.
          • tcp_handshaker 4mo ago
            Being transacted is the least usable thing for BTC. He you tried to transact on it? Its so slow its funny people claim it a use case for it... I know of only one use case, and its to anonymously bribe politicians who have their own coins.
• throw310822 4mo ago
  As long as there is someone around who is very good at keeping the price inflated (and that in turn also because he did actually deliver extraordinary things, it's not just smoke and mirrors). On the other hand, the fact that BTC has absolutely no intrinsic value can be an advantage over a real company, as it makes it more insulated from reality. Supply chain shock? No problem. Competition? Same. New technologies, political change? Neither.
  • jimnotgym 4mo ago
    USD has no intrinsic value either
    • catlikesshrimp 4mo ago
      At least that one is backed by a military.
• DanielHB 4mo ago
  The limits are when companies and institutions start to default on their loans. Or, in the case of governments, trigger hyperinflation by printing money to pay off the debt. Of course it can collapse before that, but if it gets to that point it is guaranteed to collapse.
  • jimnotgym 4mo ago
    But that won't happen while the share price keeps going up no matter what. Borrow more, secured against the massive unissued equity, or issue more shares.
• petilon 4mo ago
  Michael Burry, a hedge fund investor featured in the book “The Big Short” for his predictions on the 2008 financial crisis, said in a Substack discussion last month that any increase in SpaceX’s stock after its I.P.O. would “be on hype and technicals.” Here, “technicals” means technical analysis signals rather than the company’s business fundamentals. In other words, Burry is saying the stock could rise because of chart-based trading, momentum, and market behavior—not because investors think SpaceX is truly worth that much based on revenue, profits, or other fundamentals. How long can the hype be maintained? TSLA is still maintaining its hype, judging by its P/E ratio.
  • Der_Einzige 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    • tcp_handshaker 4mo ago
      The market will stay irrational for longer than Michael Burry will stay correct.
  • darth_avocado 4mo ago
    Technicals are the star signs of stock market.
    • root-parent 4mo ago
      Funny, the European Central Bank just made life even harder, by raising interest rates purely on that, and the FED is preparing to do the same...
      • darth_avocado 4mo ago
        Fed is not raising rates because of technicals. It’s because of economic numbers. The two aren’t the same.
        • 4mo ago
• drakythe 4mo ago
  The saying "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" exists for a reason. In short, the answer to your literal question is "no" because nothing remains forever in this world. The practical answer is "yes" because the TSLA stock has been irrational for years already and it shows no sign of stopping.
  • runarberg 4mo ago
    That saying assumes a rational market, and while there is some evidence that the average human behavior trends towards the rational there are plenty of evidence against individual behavior being rational (see homo economicus). As more and more wealth get distrubuted to fewer and fewer hands, and as fewer and fewer extremely rich individuals control more and more of the market, My gut feeling is that if the market was ever rational (which btw. I am not entirely convinced of) that very much no longer holds true.
    • grey-area 4mo ago
      In the short term it’s a voting machine, in the long term it’s a weighing machine (Ben Graham). The current episode of irrational exuberance will pass, as others have.
      • runarberg 4mo ago
        The before ones have had outside influence which forces the irrational episodes to pass. A spectacular collapse is usually fallowed by mass protests and labor actions, strikes etc. which forces the market to change its behavior. Most of the time these will result in a change in government policy which imposes regulation onto the market, and only then does the market go back to being rational.
  • georgeecollins 4mo ago
    Or the way I would think about it is (I think this was a Krushchev quote): You don't convince people there is no imaginary river, you convince people that you built an imaginary bridge across the imaginary river. So you are never going to convince people that Tesla won't make a fortune on humanoid robots or SpaceX won't colonize Mars. The fever will break when people decide flying robots (or whatever) are a bigger business then humanoid robots or some other company than Space X will colonize the ocean before Mars. You aren't going to convince people to price these things reasonably but eventually the heat will wear off.
• mixdup 4mo ago
  The thing is fundamentals really don't matter. TSLA and SPCX aren't paying dividends so there's no real performance they have to hit, no one is going to miss a dividend payment and dump the stock. The Elong vibes can carry it as long as people keep smoking what he's selling The real question is, when does that run out of steam? When do we wake up to the charade that has built up around us? That's a much bigger thing than just Elon and his businesses. Like someone else said, when the next crisis/downturn/depression hits the house of cards will fall. Unfortunately it will hit all of us not just people in the meme stocks
  • criddell 4mo ago
    Would you say the same thing about Bitcoin? Will that house of cards all fall in the next crisis/downturn/depression?
    • lokar 4mo ago
      Hasn’t it crashed in every economic downturn and financial panic so far?
      • criddell 4mo ago
        Not really, no. A decade ago it was under $1000 and has never been that low since. It's peak price is only about 2x the current price.
        • lokar 4mo ago
          Isn’t a 50% reduction pretty bad? And being higher over 10 years has little to do with it if acts counter cyclical to stocks and other assets.
          • tasuki 4mo ago
            Is it bad? Isn't 60x in 10 years still kind of ok? The things I invested in ten years ago didn't return 60x since.
• somenameforme 4mo ago
  The overwhelming majority of SpaceX holders are institutional. They had planned to allocate 30% to retail, but it ended up in the 20% range as a result of institutional demand. [1] No clue what's going on right now as their stock is going to the Moon. But in any case, I think the people that don't understand why it's doing well are mostly those who are unfamiliar with the space industry. SpaceX has already revolutionized space by dropping the cost to orbit by multiple orders of magnitude relative to the Space Shuttle, which it replaced. And it looks set to do that again with the Starship. The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space. SpaceX brought that down to about $5000, and then further down to near $1400. That's a massive reduction in price, but you're still left with the problem that it costs $1400 to get a liter of water to space, which is why we still can't have nice things, yet. Starship has the promise of bringing that down a couple of more orders of magnitude where the goal is to get it within the $10-$20 range. If they succeed, then you've just opened the doors to an entire new frontier of expansion and growth for humanity which is practically infinite. And right now there's no real reason to think that they won't succeed. And more importantly than this is that nobody seems to be able to compete on their level, or even remotely close. Their closest competitor is probably China who remains technologically well behind. And so SpaceX today is akin to being able to get a piece of some sort of super-ship making monopoly, just prior to the Age of Sail. The downside risk is basically zero since they're still making rapid progress - the only question is how rapid. And upside potential is basically infinite. [1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/11/spacex-cuts-retail-ipo-allocation-to-low-20percent-range-source-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/11/spacex-cuts-retail-ipo-alloc...
  • cjrp 4mo ago
    > The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space. Am I naive in thinking that we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit?
    • andsoitis 4mo ago
      > we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit? Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning.
• yousif_123123 4mo ago
  At least as long as Musk is the CEO, perhaps. I don't think it's easy to find another charismatic figure to keep it going. It's a different kind of hype than Nvidia has, which is showing very high and fast growing revenues (which may not continue, but they're real now). Jensen I think is not as critical to the AI hype as Elon is to his companies. All these major tech companies eventually get leadership changes. Apple, Google, Amazon, have all done well because they're real companies and go beyond their original leadership. Tesla and SpaceX I think would surely go down the moment Musk is no longer in leadership.
  • functionmouse 4mo ago
    you think Musk is charismatic? https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-polls-popularity-nate-silver-bulletin https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-polls-popularity-nate... majority view him unfavorably.
    • SketchySeaBeast 4mo ago
      I think we've all seen by now that the majority doesn't much matter if you have a rabidly zealous minority.
      • functionmouse 4mo ago
        suppose you've got me there
    • ben_w 4mo ago
      > majority view him unfavorably. Indeed, but for general stock market purposes it's one dollar one vote, not one person one vote. Possibly even worse. Short-sellers got burned on Tesla (and perhaps now also SpaceX), which may mean the marginal buyer and seller consists only of people who already buy into the hyper and by trading are sharing price info with each other rather than with a single person who doubts the man. I sold my Tesla stocks a while back; the people who kept them don't care what people like me think.
    • yousif_123123 4mo ago
• kamaal 4mo ago
  >>Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit I mentioned this in other thread(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514481), we are at runaway intelligence already. Mostly because we are looping AI to fix problems, and then the same data is used to improve AI. There is no upper limit to this. Taken to its logical conclusion, this process needs a hardware scale that might even look laughably huge at this point. Its fairly obvious space is going to play a big role in the coming times. I could be wrong, and I humbly accept it when Im proven wrong. But it does feel like a lot of people in top places know we are going to need all the energy and resources space has to offer to run this runaway intelligence.
  • petesergeant 4mo ago
    > we are at runaway intelligence already. Mostly because we are looping AI to fix problems, and then the same data is used to improve AI. There is no upper limit to this. I'm an AI booster, but this really doesn't follow. There's absolutely no guarantee that the marginal improvement from this continues to hold.
    • kamaal 4mo ago
      Its not marginal improvement. Validated data coming out of LLM(Itself generated from a recursive/loop process, used to incrementally arrive at solutions) being using to improve the very LLM is a very powerful loop. And there is no real upper limit to this, at least not in the near future. Like most exponential processes, the start is slow, but it gets fast very rapidly. This is also what Anthropic has said, the ones training these models today(i.e 2025 - 2027) will be impossible to catch up with, let alone beat. So we are at a kind of runaway AI already today.
      • petesergeant 4mo ago
        Economics meaning of marginal, not the qualitative one. > there is no real upper limit to this This is what you need to cite for your argument to hold together.
• instalabsai 4mo ago
  This is why I think Elon buying Twitter was one of the most strategic decisions he ever made: he quite literally bought the meme machine that upholds the valuations of his companies.
  • ceejayoz 4mo ago
    And the government that helps fund and regulate (or not) them.
  • ben_w 4mo ago
    I still don't think it was strategic on his part, he did try to back out after all; my guess is that having bought it, he tried to maximise the value it produced. And given the financial statements in the SpaceX IPO, to the extent X still has any value at all, it is almost all just influence of one kind or another, not actual money.
• Grombobulous 4mo ago
  Bitcoin isn’t valuable solely through memes, it’s also deflationary by design.
• tim333 4mo ago
  It's down to the balance between buyers and sellers. If you've got more selling than buying it'll go down but Musk has been remarkably good at keeping the buyers there.
  • _DeadFred_ 4mo ago
    Don't forget the amount of shares released to the market. That impacts the price dramatically as can be seen be all the 'stock buyback' manipulation of stock prices.
    • tim333 4mo ago
      Indeed. There's bit of a funny effect just now because the various index funds are having to buy into SpaceX so their funds match the index and apparently that's ~$14bn of forced buying at a time when there are not so many sellers.
• pjc50 4mo ago
  Notably, it looks like the meme power is gradually being redirected from BTC and cryptocurrency in general towards AI and SpaceX in general. Now that people have found a means of consuming vast amounts of computing power that occasionally emits useful output, rather than just a hash and a colossal waste.
• alpineman 4mo ago
  Sure until retail are forced to sell in an correction. Wealth destruction can happen very fast
• bilsbie 4mo ago
  Everything is ultimately valued by memes.
  • jpadkins 4mo ago
    money is just an idea that spreads (a meme).
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• otterley 4mo ago
  On what grounds do you believe the value of BTC is meme-driven? Another (and arguably more plausible) explanation is that the price reflects the vast amount of criminally-obtained wealth stored in it. It’s a far better store than burying cash in mountain caches.
  • Stevvo 4mo ago
    BTC is a terrible place to put criminally-obtained wealth. Public ledger and all that makes it very difficult to hide anything.
    • otterley 4mo ago
      That ship sailed long ago, before there were viable alternatives to BTC. There are plenty of ways to launder BTC (i.e. hiding in plain sight) and the existence of hoarded wealth in BTC isn't necessarily exclusive of other cryptocurrencies that are better fit for purpose.
  • observationist 4mo ago
    All money is meme driven. Money is fundamentally a meme itself. Seeing lots of people who seem to be making some sort of implicit distinction between bitcoin and USD and so on, but they are no different. They serve the function they serve because of what people believe about them, like any other social, cultural, or economic abstraction. Bitcoin has the feature of a verifiable ledger, but its value and function are in our heads, just like the USD or GBP.
    • 8note 4mo ago
      tax payment is kindof a meme i guess, but one with force behind it
• brachkow 4mo ago
  > BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes Like everything else in finance... Saying this is not to defend all sorts of crypto-bros. The economy, especially one overly focused on publicly traded companies like the Western, and especially the US economy, is a meme economy. Coffee, flats, healthcare, military spending, etc., of comparable quality in the abstract East, cost multiples less than in the EU/USA because they and their currencies are weak on memes.
• teekert 4mo ago
  Someone invents something that is digital, but can't be copied. Quite brilliant as it is the first digital asset that can store value without centralization and trust, based on market demand. Someone on HN: "BTC is valueable solely through the power of memes".
  • throwaway894345 4mo ago
    Bitcoin doesn't "store value", it has the value that society assigns it, which is what the parent means when s/he says "BTC is valuable solely through the power of memes". It's not a fiat currency, nor does it have any intrinsic utilitarian value.
    • teekert 4mo ago
      Age old argument: money also has no intrinsic utilitarian value. And yes, btc does store value, it is doing that for me now. I stored some of my value in it and it has held better value than fiat.
      • throwaway894345 4mo ago
        > Age old argument: money also has no intrinsic utilitarian value. I didn't claim money had intrinsic value, I claimed that money is fiat currency--it's backed by a lot of people with a lot of guns. BTC is not. > And yes, btc does store value, it is doing that for me now. I stored some of my value in it and it has held better value than fiat. Currencies (BTC included) don't "store value", they are assigned value by society esp via markets. Sometimes society decides one currency is more valuable than another, or that its change in value differs from that of another, but neither currency stores value.
        • teekert 4mo ago
          You mean like gold?
          • throwaway894345 4mo ago
• throw0101c 4mo ago
  > Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes? The "value" of something can be a bit of a meta-game: > A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest Plenty of folks may think these companies are garbage but are 'playing along' because it's not necessarily what they themselves think that is important, but what others think. This idea was put forward by Keynes in his General Thoery publish in 1936, so human nature has hardly changed since then.
• throwaway894345 4mo ago
  At least some of TSLA and SPCX value is derived from Musk's ability to purchase politicians to ensure the tax dollars keep flowing to them. Essentially, these ticker symbols are backed by the US government's ability to force us to give Musk's companies our money.
• grey-area 4mo ago
  It seems like that during a bubble (things can never go down!) but the market eventually does correct, even if it can take years or even decades to do so, and usually overcorrects when it does.
• _DeadFred_ 4mo ago
  SPCX only floated a small amount of shares, and made the stock exchanges compete so that it would get to rig the system in a way. If funds have to buy SPCX + small share amount, it's going up. This is the reason stock buyback used to be illegal. It's purely market manipulation of share count, not market based on actual value.
• jayd16 4mo ago
  Pump and dump only has to meme hard enough for the pump part.