The xAI piece is the one that stands out to me. $258B for a lab that's burning $1.46B/quarter against $430M revenue, valued almost entirely on a merger anchor from four months ago.

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munk-a 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

xAI's valuation comes from an internal transfer of Elon's. Elon has stated it's worth 258B and that's the only data point to go by.

It's absolutely bonkers and wrong but it's unlikely to raise to the level of actual misrepresentation.

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ddp26 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As I wrote in the piece, I'm extremely skeptical that xAI should be valued as if it is a frontier lab.

But as you say, going back to the xAI + SpaceX merger, analysts consistently seem to value it as if it is, so I predict the public will too, at IPO time.

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mikkupikku 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I assume "extremely skeptical" is you being generous, is there anybody other than Elon who says xAI/Grok are SOTA? The only thing anybody says about it is that it's only good for porn, but local models do porn too so xAI has no moat or edge at all as far as I can see.

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ddp26 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is actually a real bull case for xAI (that I don't endorse), e.g. from people who think that chips & computer is the main determiner of model quality. xAI may plausibly soon have the biggest training apparatus of anyone.

I think talent is more important than compute, as I wrote in my Jan 2026 predictions that Anthropic would end up on top this year: https://futuresearch.ai/blog/forecasting-top-ai-lab-2026/

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

If you don't spend any time comparing models to the point where you don't know about benchmarks, why do you care where people think the line for SOTA is?

	▲	mikkupikku 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The benchmark game is wholly gamed, but the proof is in the pudding. I know people using Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini. Chinese models locally. But who uses Grok for anything but porn? Whatever the benchmarks might say, Grok is just trash in practice. They spent too much time teaching it to be edgy and not enough time teaching it to code.

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ahahahahah 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I assume "extremely skeptical" is you being generous

I'm not sure that's the case. Every value in this forecast is absurd, I actually think the author is sincere in there feeling that they are being extremely skeptical.

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

It’s absolutely ludicrous that xAI is thrown into the mix at that valuation. They’re not even a player in AI other than providing Grok slop for twitter.

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

For $380B you can get both AT&T and Verizon and you pay ~1.55x the revenue. Why pay 38x for Starlink?

	▲	ahahahahah 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What do you mean $380B? This "fair market value" forecast also includes $147B for starlink enterprise and $75B for starlink direct-to-cell. So almost $600B all in.

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jmye 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Even if you think those are standard numbers and you're banking on growth, or whatever, I don't see any way anyone rational (or even a semi-rational AI bull) could convince themselves xAI isn't an absolute garbage company.