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Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago"The pitch deck, he revealed, describes Manas as “an AI drug discovery factory for creating monopolies” legally permissible, he notes, because pharmaceutical IP functions as a sanctioned monopoly by design."
- epistasis 4mo agoWhat a weird way to describe what is just another drug company, exactly the same way every single drug company functions.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo agoHe's got it all figured out, like Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures
- 6stringmerc 4mo agoFantastic insight! I take his opinion as having the most merit possible in this context. Why? Because LinkedIn is also a train wreck and game recognizes game.
- winfredJa 4mo agolinkedin is not a $3T company though.
- jordanb 4mo agoThis shows how out of touch people like Reid Hoffman is. He thinks it's a daming accusation that SpaceX is "not AI" but in reality "not AI" means rockets and satellite internet. The parts of the business his class cares about is the garbage, not the substance Agree that X.ai is a tire fire.
- fluidcruft 4mo agoThe problem is that SpaceX financials supporting the IPO say SpaceX is a major AI company that has a minor side-hustle of making rockets that sell satellite internet.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- spwa4 4mo agoThat's the total picture of SpaceX, right. Does SpaceX as a whole make financial sense? No. Everyone knows the SpaceX "value story": AI means that a company that makes a minus 5 billion per year really makes plus 200 billion per year! IN SPACE! But, uh, about those Space parts? Surely those are cashflow positive ... right? RIGHT? Well, no. SpaceX it is the 50th or so rocket company. The previous ones did not fail because they couldn't get rockets working or couldn't improve on the state of the art in rocketry. The ones not supported by nation-states failed because they couldn't get the financials working. To be fair some of them failed because they couldn't get to earth orbit. But that's not the common case. More common: "New rocket type works! We demonstrated it succesfully! No launches ... so no money. We're publishing our work and shutting down. Bye". Irritatingly quite a few of these new rocket companies are theoretically more efficient than SpaceX will ever be. Also irritatingly most of these companies, through financial necessity, demonstrated a working rocket in one try, in contrast to SpaceX. (my favorite? Aerospike nozzles. Aside from their great "Wiley E. Coyote" potential should launch fail they look absolutely incredible) Did Space part of SpaceX get the financials working? No. Not even with Starlink (their debt repayments still drag it into the negative). What is their fix for too small a market? Make Spaceship, an even bigger rocket ... for a market that sees no use for the existing Falcon 9 launch capacity ... Starlink: same. It's not even the 10th satellite internet company. The previous ones all failed, because the market was too small, and had to be bailed out by nation states, famously Iridium. Did Starlink solve the financials? No. The most irritating bit of this is of course Elon Musk himself. Why did he succeed? Well he keeps mentioning himself and "starting from first principles". As illustrated above: he started from first principles, he failed (private, ie. profitable access to earth orbit? SpaceX doesn't do that), then he got incredible amounts of money somewhere to pour down a black hole (using artificial demand like Starlink) and so everything is still moving. Obviously Elon Musk's achievement is 100% finding this money and 0% practicing science from first principles". That's also Elon Musk's great redeeming quality. What's his achievement? Convincing, first himself, then humanity, or at least enough humans to get ~300 billion in cash, that Space exploration is worth doing despite the fact that it's unprofitable. The actual technical Space exploration side he ... frankly didn't do particularly well, though well enough that it (eventually) worked. But the result is still fantastic: we're in space far more than before!
- mbmbn 4mo agoI mean, I can see some issues with SpaceX valuation, but I find it really funny that we are now taking advice from the LinkedIn founder on HN. Ideology is truly blinding.
- rob74 4mo agoSorry, that's a typo, it's not SpaceX, it's SPAC X - as in, Musk is using SpaceX as a SPAC to absorb other AI companies. Cursor is the first, but will certainly not be the last. So, if it's not an AI company yet, it will be soon. I mean, the humongous total addressable market from their IPO filing has to come from somewhere, and Grok will definitely not cut it...
- youngtaff 4mo agoA TAM that’s equivalent to 20% of worldwide GDP is just nonsense
- deadbabe 4mo agoNot an AI company? You don’t have to keep selling me on SPCX, I’m a buyer now.
- philipwhiuk 4mo agoUnfortunately for you, it's priced like one.
- cj 4mo agoSpaceX: "Not an AI company, but priced like one" Tesla: "Not a tech company, but priced like one"
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- drob518 4mo agoCareful. I don’t have anti-Musk bias, but it can both be true that SpaceX will be quite successful in the long run and the stock is still overpriced in the short run.
- deadbabe 4mo agoWhen it falls I’ll just average down.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- ryno364 4mo agoReid Hoffman hates Musk. Think what you will of Musk (we all have our opinions), but Hoffman criticizing one of Musks companies is the equivalent of Steve Jobs criticizing Windows. Its a personal quibble and therefore not really news worthy.
- expedition32 4mo agoThat's like saying nobody should have listened to MLK criticising segregation because he hated the KKK.
- trollbridge 4mo agoI think that’s a pretty inappropriate comparison and you should withdraw it. Please edit your post?
- EdwardDiego 4mo agoThe faux outrage is odd.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago> faux outrage Less faux than a bit silly. Their outrage isn’t fake. It’s just misplaced. The comparison doesn’t work because the KKK’s violent racism isn’t comparable to commercial competition and the relatively-polite quibbles of two San Francisco billionaires. That’s less insulting than just wrong.
- stackghost 4mo agolol, far more odious things get posted every day on this website.
- fourseventy 4mo agoridiculous comparison
- deleted 4mo ago
- AJRF 4mo agoHow is Reid Hoffman relevant? Someone like Elon being asked for their opinion on tech - I kind of understand - was at least at the coal face of SpaceX and Tesla for a time, seemed to understand the tech and was not terrible when it came to direction. Zuck I'd get, Bezos, Dario, Sam - but I don't actually get why Reid is always in the conversation - he's never been in front of anything
- otterley 4mo agoAs the article said, Reid Hoffman is on Microsoft’s board and is an investor both in OpenAI and Anthropic.
- AJRF 4mo agoI read the article - and many articles touting what Reid said - but my question remains - why in the name of god is he relevant. He is connected and gives money to people - why should that mean anyone should listen to him about any of this. He's not actually a do-er is he? Is there something I am missing? The amount of coverage he gets seems massively disproportionate to his skill, talent and insight.
- otterley 4mo agoI truthfully don’t know the answer, but if I had to guess, his connections and positions provide him with an unusual amount of knowledge and perspective. Another might be that his opinions often are correct in hindsight.
- mschild 4mo ago> He is connected and gives money to people Thats why. Not that we should listen to him (no clue who exactly he is) but thats why he gets attention.
- N_Lens 4mo agoSir this is Capitalism.
- dwa3592 4mo ago
- randusername 4mo agoThis article encouraged me to look at the investor materials [0]. The 55th slide "key metrics" wording stood out to me: > AI: "Nameplate Compute Draw" Total number of GPUs installed in the data centers at the end of a period multiplied by the respective all-in power draw, reflecting installed capacity and not actual power consumption or utilization Close to $15 billion in losses since 2023 and not much clarity on actual usage or impact. TIL the plan of record is AI satellites assembled on the moon. [0]: https://ir.spacex.com/investors/default.aspx https://ir.spacex.com/investors/default.aspx
- HumblyTossed 4mo ago[flagged]
- rvz 4mo agoOpenAI investor Reid Hoffman says competitor xAI is a "complete train wreck". Why listen to these people when they have a clear vested interest in talking nonsense about their competitors? These comments from investors are predictable and it is obvious why they keep doing this.
- sixothree 4mo agoDid you not see literally every other top level comment in this thread?
- rvz 4mo agoLook at the time I posted my comment. I commented 51 mins ago when there were around two comments here that were not talking about Reid's bias against xAI. 5 more comments appeared afterwards in roughly the same timeframe when I posted my reply and that was the first mention of Reid being an OpenAI investor which is enough to explain his obvious bias here.
- Havoc 4mo agoThe key part - Reid being invested in both OpenAI and anthropic should have been higher up in the article. Pretty crucial context to him trash talking XAI. Not that I disagree with his assessment…
- kylemaxwell 4mo agoIt was at the very top just now when I looked. That said, the site has so many distracting pop-ups and other interruptions it's hard to see anything there.
- nailer 4mo agoNope, it's just: > Reid Hoffman has watched the AI industry from virtually every vantage point—as a founder, lead investor, and decade-long Microsoft board member. Nothing about him being an investor in 2 direct competitors.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4mo agoMaybe he invested in the competition because xAI is a train wreck?
- outside1234 4mo agoI wake up every morning amazed that there were enough people foolish enough to buy a company with only $18B in revenue and no profit at basically at the valuation of Microsoft (a company with $300B in revenue and $100B in profit).
- fourseventy 4mo agoShort it then
- neogodless 4mo agoThere are more than those two options, both of which are "take unnecessary risk on a hugely uncertain investment."
- the__alchemist 4mo agoIf you were reasonably confident the stock was overvalued and/or would go down, why would you not short it, (Or similar)? "Talk is cheap" and "Putting money where mouth is" are both trite, but applicable here. In the short term, this can misfire, but as a consistent mindset long term, it would expose whether there is value in these assessments. To help you understand my mindset here: Picture a simple game or bet. RNG/dice etc. 55% chance for a $10 payout; 45% chance to lose $10. You would keep on rolling that die, right? I believe this is is close enough of a comparison. Stated another way: Someone else who has no confident predictions about the market and is in index funds or similar, would love to be able to make confident statements about a stock (SPCX or w/e), because it would be an effective edge. They wouldn't just post about it on the internet; they would take appropriate positions.
- thinkharderdev 4mo ago> 55% chance for a $10 payout; 45% chance to lose $10. You would keep on rolling that die, right? The answer is that it depends? If I have $1B then yeah I would roll the dice and keep rolling as long as they let me. If I have $100? Maybe not because you can go very easily go broke even if each bet is positive EV.
- globalnode 4mo agoWhat a terrible world to live in. Of course hes trying to convince Gen Z of the "opportunities" they have. Opportunities for him and his oligarch friends to make a load of $. Cant wait for this AI bubble to crash and dissolve a bunch of undeserved wealth.
- Fricken 4mo agoLast week Yann LeCun called xAI a "failure" https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/18/yann-lecun-elon-musk-xai-failure-ai-labs-bubble-risk.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/18/yann-lecun-elon-musk-xai-fai...
- zulux 4mo ago>>LeCun, who was previously Meta chief AI scientist, Well, I guess he should know.
- trollbridge 4mo agoSeems very relevant that SpaceX’s primary AI offerings are: - Cursor - Lots of data centre capacity being rented to Anthropic and Google and others That seems very much like being an AI company.
- verdverm 4mo agoRenting GPUs doesn't make you an Ai company imo, colocation data center is more accurate. One might expect that line of business to commodify within five years.
- trollbridge 4mo agoYeah, like how AWS has “commodified” Cursor is obviously an AI company and the main problem Cursor faced was not really having their own model and being forced to buy expensive inference from other providers. Cursor + their own data centres + the ability to train their own models is pretty big. Definitely an AI company.
- verdverm 4mo agoDoes Cursor have any meaningful market share? I cannot seem to find them on any lists. Would your requirements also make Atlassian an Ai company? They have data centers and have trained their own model and have Rovo. I certainly do not because it's not their main line of business and their "ai" sucks hard. SpaceX seems to be closer to this category than Anthropic/OpenAI
- trollbridge 4mo agoNo, because Atlassian hasn’t designed self driving cars (which is xAI’s heritage), built a near frontier model, or opened data centres so in demand that Anthropic decides they need to host there. Cursor probably had the steepest penetration in corporate markets and has a good sales organisation. They also have a great harness for beginners with a softer learning curve. (Disclaimer: I don’t use Cursor, rarely use Grok, don’t drive a Tesla, and am not invested in SpaceX.)
- nevf1 4mo agoWhilst nobody can dispute the inordinate success Hoffman has had in building and scaling LinkedIn and his work on Greylock, his associations with the Epstein files, previous spats with Musk, and his warped political views makes me question anything he says. In this instance, I see it as nothing more than a self-serving and politically motivated diss against Musk, even if the substance of what he says is true.
- BluSyn 4mo agoCompared to what? All the comments seem to agree, but I curious if people here have actually used Grok. I rotate between major models frequently. Grok has been up there in accuracy and research for some time, trading places with Gemini IMO. Latest 4.3 release has been solid. Composer is pretty good and now they own Cursor. Don’t count them out yet. So.. it’s bad, compared to what? Claude from 2 months ago?
- vorticalbox 4mo agoi jump about a lot, for coding gemini and grok are definitely not as strong as gpt 5.5/opus/sonnet/composer. composer 2.5 is actually very good and use it for a good chunk of tasks.
- lxgr 4mo agoGemini has been atrocious, in my experience. Not sure if it's the harness or the model, but it hallucinates much, much more than GPT (via ChatGPT) or Claude, and weirdly assumes it can just answer complex, knowledge-heavy domain questions without doing a web search.
- brazukadev 4mo ago> All the comments seem to agree, but I curious if people here have actually used Grok. you got your answer already. Nobody actually uses Grok.
- uyzstvqs 4mo agoElon Musk's companies launch rockets, build the most high-tech electric cars, host the world's most relevant social network, deploy high-speed internet to most of the world, build one of the world's leading LLMs, I could go on... Reid Hoffman runs a social network for spam.
- breve 4mo ago> build the most high-tech electric cars Teslas aren't the most high-tech these days. They have fallen behind on the hardware side, particularly in charging and batteries. Here's a charging speed comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cy46Ag0djjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cy46Ag0djjk
- excalibur 4mo ago> The timing of Hoffman’s remarks is pointed. SpaceX went public on June 12th, with AI central to its IPO narrative. Within days, the company announced it was acquiring Cursor, the AI coding tool. Hoffman’s read: that’s not proof of AI capability, but evidence of its absence. “You could almost think of it as the IAC of AI,” he said, invoking the serial acquisitions roll-up strategy of Barry Diller’s internet-era conglomerate. “Use the market cap to buy AI companies and try to buy your way into relevance.” Sounds like securities fraud to me.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- eethrowaway 4mo ago[flagged]
- kklisura 4mo agoSpaceX renting out their compute to competitors is what crashes the "AI company" notion. They are either datacenter company or an AI company - but it cannot be both.
- nr378 4mo agoArguably Google is both (with GCP and Gemini).
- gurjeet 4mo agoFrom GP's point of view, Google is not a data center company because they're not renting out data centers to other companies; they're using them for their own usage.
- andsoitis 4mo ago> They are either datacenter company or an AI company - but it cannot be both. why not?
- Ekaros 4mo agoYou can be both but you probably are not very good AI company if you have significant amount of extra computing to rent. Or you calculated your own demand significantly wrong somewhere. Which again does not make you great AI company...
- LightBug1 4mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- himata4113 4mo agoThe "Tell Gen Z to stop booing AI" is crazy to me. Are we living on the same planet, every argument is dismissed even though it's backed with real data.
- alpineman 4mo ago>> “I’ve been thinking about writing an essay on the kind of mistakes that are made by college graduates booing or otherwise dissing AI,” he said. As if speaking to all of Gen Z, he added: “You guys have the opportunity to be generation AI—where you come into the workforce saying, ‘I know this a lot better than all of you" Quite patronising. Maybe they really do know it a lot better than you, Reid, but not in the way you think. Maybe they see through the hype and hustle culture and are more interested in working towards fulfilling lives and jobs.
- vonneumannstan 4mo ago[flagged]
- malfist 4mo agoCollege students totally have the capital to gamble all day on kalshi.
- vonneumannstan 4mo agohttps://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics
- drunner 4mo agoDid we blame the kids for smoking back in the day too, or recognize the harm and regulate it out of their lives?
- jedimastert 4mo agoFair, the youths very much much get blamed for smoking and gambling back in the day as well. Sort of pivotal to the story of Pinocchio, for example
- vonneumannstan 4mo agoNot blaming anyone just pointing out how the idea that that generation is actually focused on living more meaningfully is farcical.
- jadar 4mo agoOkay, random dude says something -- everything completely behind paywall. Guess it wasn't important.
- nova22033 4mo agoHow many people use grok professionally? Compared to claude code/codex?
- Flingerthing 4mo ago[dead]
- cmiles8 4mo agoGuy who has enormous personal financial interest vested in xAI being a train wreck says xAI is a train wreck. Fascinating thought leadership.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4mo agoThe only objective information we really have is SpaceX's pre-IPO S-1 filing, which breaks down their revenue into Space, Communications and AI segments, with 2025 revenue for each given as. Communications (i.e. Starlink) 11.3B Space (i.e. launch services) 4.0B AI (i.e. Twitter, Grok) 3.2B According to Google's AI summary, Twitter 2025 revenue was 2.9B, and Grok was 0.5B, so the 2025 "AI" revenue is basically all Twitter, although at least temporarily going forward there will also be significant datacenter/GPU rental income from Anthropic and Google, and now we also have Cursor with an ARR of 4B. The only significant "AI" revenue here is from Cursor. Datacenter rental seems like it will bring in a lot of money in 2026, but that's hardly "AI".
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago> The asymmetry—Anthropic penalized while OpenAI was not—is what troubles him most This isn’t the asymmetry that worries me. Anthropic was penalized, which makes OpenAI (and xAI and every other American company) theoretically subject to the same class of penalties. DeepSeek is not.
- moralestapia 4mo agoI wish there as chrome extension that surrounds pdf file names with something like the infamously misused (((...))). So that you are reminded, as you read about them, that they were one of Epstein "associates". Nothing wrong with that, of course, I'm sure it was only business deals, etc...
- yashthakker 4mo ago[dead]
- shadowtree 4mo agoPolitical and personal attack, no substance. Reid is a mega-donor for the Dems, Elon for the Repubs. Billionaires fighting, plebs on HN getting riled up.
- groan 4mo ago[dead]
- pixel_popping 4mo agoxAI complete train wreck maybe, however their models are really great, in conversational Grok 4.3 is my favorite recently, followed by Opus 4.8. It's not that great for coding purposes tho.
- maipen 4mo ago> It's not that great for coding purposes tho. I found it to be otherwise, but it was not a complete hands off experience. Which is ideal for me, I like to be specific and grok 4.3 and composer are great code monkeys. Opus and GPT are the models you want right now, for "I have no idea how to build this, so figure it out".
- maipen 4mo agoI've recently used grok build and grok is really competent at coding. Composer is slightly better IMO, but it's really close. It's not Opus or GPT 5, but that's fine, I don't need the AI to vibecode, I need it to follow my instructions and avoid producing slop. I think the next models will change everyone's pessimistic minds.
- dburkland 4mo agoWhy is this news? Reid isn't relevant.
- Kavon2992 4mo ago[dead]
- childofhedgehog 4mo agohttps://archive.is/qhW3h https://archive.is/qhW3h
- eboy 4mo ago[dead]
- perarneng 4mo ago" And it should be an opportunity, not a threat.” This pisses me off actually. How detached from reality can you be. AI makes the job market place very unpredictable and smart people predict it won't be so good. Then you expect young people to be super excited about AI. I like AI and im an AI Engineer but I hate the fact that AI is used to destroy jobs. It would be fine if jobs disappeared if there were alternatives but it's not. It's straight to unemployment. The worst hasn't happened yet but its coming.