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this_user 5 hours ago

I am very curios if OpenAI's IPO attempt this year will turn into WeWork 2.0 where all the air suddenly comes out of the valuation once the market acknowledges that they have no moat and lack a clear path to profitability that would make these huge investments worthwhile.

paxys 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There’s a reason OpenAI and Anthropic are both trying to accelerate their IPO while still being wildly unprofitable. There is still unlimited AI hype in the market. If they go public this year the entire world is going to blindly buy them without looking at their books.

burnte an hour ago | parent [-]

> There is still unlimited AI hype in the market.

I've observed a very different state. From what I've seen the sky-high expectations of AI have come down quite a lot.

nolok 17 minutes ago | parent [-]

I agree, but I still think is overall point is correct: they need to do it now while it's still smoking hot

onlyrealcuzzo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are at least plausible scenarios where OpenAI is a VERY valuable company in the near future.

There were not with WeWork.

The SpaceX/xAI IPO will be more interesting.

SecretDreams 4 hours ago | parent [-]

All of these things are vastly overvalued. Only one with tangible value is SpaceX because that's actually a moat-space. OAI holds no moat, has not done a good enough job to entrap their users, and has poor cost structure.

xAi isn't even a point of discussion.. it's just a scheme to rip off investors.

WeWork.. hard to take anyone seriously that ever invested in this bad boy.

altairprime an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Wework was a valid long bet that office properties would re-appreciate once the pandemic stopped — but now that AI is pulverizing the job market, any hope of that long bet paying off will require one of three things: a free-market boom in workers that require commercial property for success (e.g. physical invention companies like e.g. Saildrone due to not being able to homelab resins for safety reasons), and/or a market-wide rehiring event due to AI’s failure to deliver, and/or regulatory shifts in profit taxation and new business investment that trigger the above-described boom.

I know some commercial property owners in my hometown let their lowest-desirability storefronts sit vacant for twenty or thirty years (!) in order to prevent commercial property rent from falling across their entire portfolio. Turns out you can pay a lot of property taxes with not much revenue, and there hasn’t historically been regulatory pressure to pay an escalating “empty tax” to compel landlord pricing to behave according to supply and demand pricing models. Wework is still a terrible investment for an investor, but if you’re looking to bet long with no call and have the patient of decades, it’s not the worst plan. (There are certainly worse ways to gamble your money on the commercial property market!)

danny_codes 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

No land value tax == wasteful speculation. It’s been known for 120 years but obviously rich people have done a good job suppressing that understanding

luke5441 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

SpaceX valuation is also going to be interesting. Talking about CapEx, SpaceX has deorbiting assets on top of depreciating ones. And without Starlink the space launch market size is pretty small.

bgirard an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> SpaceX has deorbiting assets on top of depreciating ones

The deorbiting part is redundant. Their satellite are just that, a depreciating asset. Their lifetime seem to be 5 to 7 years. The important claim is if the total cost, including the launch, can be recuperate over that lifetime or not.

testing22321 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> And without Starlink the space launch market size is pretty small.

The EV market was mighty small when Tesla started too.

Skate to where the puck is going.

Ectiseethe 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> WeWork.. hard to take anyone seriously that ever invested in this bad boy.

Masayoshi Son may not be providing returns for its investors but he is providing entertainment for the rest of the world.

whizzter 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yep, SpaceX actually has a track record as an actual leader and innovator in it's niche (that's very CapEx intensive to enter), it's not really a moat but it's a lead that no other entity seems to be closing in on (on the contrary many would-be competitors seems to have almost given up).

As for OpenAI, I'm not sure if Altman is an idiot or fraudster, claims about reaching AGI/ASI with scaling and investing in that fashion was always delusional at best or fraudulent at worst, maybe he just hoped to divert enough money to engineers to make actual breakthroughs or that the hardware would become a moat but competitors have kept pace, and I fully agree that they are mostly now only hanging on with an insanely bad cost structure now.

overfeed 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

> on the contrary many would-be competitors seems to have almost given up

maybe the smaller ones; Blue Origin succeeded, and French and Chinese nu-space companies will continue to get funding for decades - national governments are capable of footing the bill of large CapEx projects. SpaceX competition is irreversibly tied to US foreign policy, and only scientific amd commercial launches are price-sensitive

sourcegrift 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Twitter is already dead as everyone on Hacker news knew. Nobody I know uses X or whatever it's called now, xAI? I'm looking at Musk going bankrupt and as soon as that happens Trump will be Impeached.

zerosizedweasle 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai... I hope so

jcgrillo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm super curious to see if Nvidia turns out to be Enron 2.0..