I didn't watch the whole video, but the quick summary is that because of passive investing (index funds in 401ks, etc...) lots of regular people will end up owning SpaceX stock even though they didn't explicitly buy it.
It also complains that the indexes changed their rules to make SpaceX eligible to join sooner than would otherwise be the case.
Critics who allege that SpaceX is overpriced complain that this effectively allows insiders to dump it on price-insensitive index investors. The indexes' defense is that their job is to give index investors exposure to a representative slice of the real economy, which includes big high-profile stocks like SpaceX whether anyone likes it or not; they're not in the business of guessing whether those stocks are overpriced.
> I think the hate about this idea is unwarranted.
I doubt the hate is about passive investment funds owning SpaceX stock. If the rules weren't changed and the index funds ended up owning a lot of SpaceX anyway, no one would care.
The hate is because the index funds used those indexes because they avoided including partial IPOs like this, I guess because they could be prone to manipulation. The funds apparently never imagined the rules controlling how the indexes would be changed. The rage was triggered because not only were they changed, but how the change came about.
To wit:
- NASDAQ owns both an index and an exchange.
- SpaceX said "we will list on your exchange, if you change the rules of the index".
- The rule change they wanted looks allow the very manipulation the index funds were trying to avoid. The indexes aren't meant to be speculative, they are a way to follow the average of blue chip stocks.
- This is speculative, but it looks like SpaceX is hoping to manipulate the index funds into purchasing large quantities of their stock, in order to give the early investors a plump exit. If true, the stock would then crash, leaving the index funds holding the bag.
- The NASDAQ allowed themselves to be bribed.
It's possible of course the IPO won't go as planned, or the market will look at the 54 P/E and run away screaming in that initial 15 days, causing the price will plummet. Or it's possible the early investors will throw money at the stock until the 15 days it up to sustain the price. Who knows. Interesting times.
The hate is far less than is warranted. This is purely a transparent transfer of wealth from working people to the richest people on earth.
Elon Musk demanded the right to dip into average folks retirement funds for himself and his investors as a condition for listing on the Nasdaq, and he got it. There's no innocent explanation for this rule change and it is not a coincidence that Elon Musk is the first beneficiary of the rule change.
No one who understands anything about the business honestly believes the valuation it's launching at is reasonable. The only way the investors will be able to cash out at a huge profit at the end of the lock up period is if it gets propped up by a massive investment by indexes soon after listing, before the hype wears off and people start realizing SpaceX revenue is comparable to companies valued an order of magnitude less and the realistic growth story is far more conservative than Elon Musk has pretended (data centers in space? c'mon).
It's really not a replacement for Google cast. It requires actively encoding video to send over wifi. If it's anything like wireless Android Auto it will eat a lot of battery. Google cast is usually a tiny payload to the device to start playing some URL from the Internet.
I swear there's a video of Joe Armstrong et al. presenting part of this on stage and laughing along with it. I tried to find it last week but couldn't figure out which talk it was. A few years ago I think I watched every Erlang/OTP talk in existence.
Starship has never met claimed specs and capabilities. It is so far behind schedule that it won't meet specs in time to remain relevant. Which is a generous way of saying it never will.
I've seen it suggested that the IPO they're targeting (plus the similarly-timed ones from OpenAI and Anthropic) may be so high as to break the financial system. Investors need to have a trillion dollars available to invest if the stuff being added to the market is going to be worth a trillion dollars.
(Phrased that way because while I hear they're targeting 1.5T valuation that doesn't mean they'll be selling 1.5T of shares).
Will demand for computing ever go down from where it is now? Even if the AI bubble temporarily pops, in the long run I think the demand for computers will be practically infinite.
Market forces will probably bring the price of hardware down in the next decade. Whether it is in a form that is useful for regular people/hobbyists is another question. If not, then hopefully the "cloud" starts to look a lot different.
I think it's possible (10-15%) that the AI bubble pops and we all live without 50M token/day OpenClaw installs and running Opus to do things that should have been done by a shell script to the point that it causes a dip in total compute demand. I think it's likely (75% likely if the AI bubble pop causes a dip in compute demand) that this dip extends longer than the median lifespan of the hardware currently being installed in datacenter.
Of course in 20 years we'll be using more compute than today (99% likely).
EDIT: Of course cryptocurrencies provide a floor compute pricing.
Because you need batteries then.
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