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.

*The US government can remain irrational so you can stay solvent.

I’m pretty sure the market agrees with you.

No, there are a huge number of companies that are valued reasonably for their revenue / profitability / growth.

There's basically two stock markets: things valued on fundamentals and things valued on vibes.

And I don't think there's ever going to be a unified theory of value that can span both, because the former is quantitative and the latter is psychology.

> If you exclude dividend paying stocks, then the entire stock market starts to look like a giant pyramid scheme casino.

Stocks can start paying dividends in the future: MSFT did not in the past, and does now. AAPL did, stopped in the 1990s, and started doing so again.

You should be indifferent to the company's dividend scheme since it's the underlying business activity that drives total returns, and not its distribution policy. There is all sorts of magical thinking when it comes to dividends:

* https://canadiancouchpotato.com/2011/01/18/debunking-dividen...

* https://pwlcapital.com/the-irrelevance-of-dividends-still-a-...

A pyramid scheme can run out of people to keep it going: the stock market is in a sense a 'savings scheme' for future consumption. Younger people work and turn their cash into savings, older people take their savings and turn it back into cash: as long as young people need to think about the future, and older people / retirees need to pay bills, there's a mechanism to maintain this cycle.

True, and it's a common question that comes up: What's the point of owning a stock if it doesn't pay a dividend? How do you participate in the company's performance?

There are other ways for performance to translate to the investors directly. For example, if the company sells itself then all the shareholders will get that payout. Stock buybacks are a thing. And, as other commenters here have said, eventually the company may start paying a dividend

But, you're not entirely off-base in that you're just buying into the vibes of a company. It's just that most of the time (much of the time?) those vibes have been rooted in some semblance of rationality, that there was something of value behind the shares you're buying. That is definitely not universally true anymore

Aren't buybacks the new dividends?

It’s only a pyramid scheme for Tesla, SpaceX or X formally known as Twitter see a pattern there?

I personally think Bitcoin will eventually peter out, and that it's fairly risky as it has definitely been pushed by vibes and promotion and everyone wanting to get in on it

I mean that can apply to anything. There's nothing intrinsic about gold that makes it valuable other than it's rare, but there's plenty of things that are relatively rare that aren't valuable. Yes there's industrial uses of gold but that's not why we as a society and a species treat it as valuable

Maybe bitcoin is the new gold and will hold value forever, and as more serious people get into it, it will lose its volatility and be less subject to the vibes shifting and there being a run on the market. Maybe not

It is different from Elong stocks, though, because the myth of Satoshi aside, it's not exactly a cult of personality like his companies are

Hasn’t it crashed in every economic downturn and financial panic so far?

To me the difference is that BTC's continued value isn't predicated on the actions of one person, who has continually proven himself to be childish, mercurial, and dishonest.

An extreme majority of Space X's self-determined value proposition has nothing to do with space. Out of an overall TAM of $28.5 trillion, $26.5 trillion is based on AI. Personally I believe that number will actually approach zero, but it certainly even in my most optimistic view is a number with a B, not a T

The total addressable market even at Space X's own calculation for space launches is only $370 billion. And, supposedly as the only company that can launch things into space they are still losing money on that business. This is bankrupt-a-casino levels of incompetence

SpaceX are currently losing money on the "going to space" part of their business.

They're making money on telecoms, and may have just started making a profit on renting out the data centres they originally built for the AI that it turned out hardly anyone wanted to actually use.

Even if one assumes this is true, it still wouldn't justify the valuation.

The demand just isn't there, which is one of the reasons SpaceX is pretending they will generate more demand with their cosmic wizard spires.

> Astrology

Exactly, but there are people out there who buy stocks based on technical analysis. It can have an effect if enough people act on it's "signals".

>> that every human being who owns a computer on this planet (1.75 billion) would need to spend over $15.000 on xAI products.

Current US national debt is approximately $39.22 trillion. As we achieve a zombie movie, level of collective madness, lets take all this into the last degree.

Nationalize SpaceX, and with this bright obvious future described on the prospect lets pay US debt :-) Pay US retirement benefits pensions in token credits, pensioners can resell, make an options market for tokens. I am sure Robinhood will open you a margin account for that?

Lets open a futures markets for food goods grown up on SpaceX Asteroids, as they will have free solar energy. They can grow them three times faster than on Earth...

To quote Ron Baron yesterday on CNBC, we are all going to earn hundreds of billions....

Yes indeed.

While this would be conceivable if some future AI gets good enough to actually replace 100% of global paid labour currently done by using a computer, the reference class I have here is that Wikipedia is definitely not valued at [number of people online] * [peak cost of Encyclopaedia Britannica].

Economic displacement on that scale breaks the valuation.

> would need to spend over $15.000 on xAI products.

For perspective - that’s 12.5 years of Tesla FSD subscriptions. I think there are probably about that much cars out there.

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...

I guess now a lot of Elon fans change from Tesla to Spacex.

The market will stay irrational for longer than Michael Burry will stay correct.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

I think we've all seen by now that the majority doesn't much matter if you have a rabidly zealous minority.

SpaceX the company has done and is doing amazing feats of technology.

SpaceX the stock is only in a very small part about rockets and space. In their filing they talk about their total addressable market being $28.5 trillion, of which $26.5 trillion are AI.

That means that they believe the SpaceX stock is 93% about AI.

It's open to argument whether xAI or BTC is crazier - I just wanted to say that when talking about SpaceX stock, it's not really about rockets.

BTC has the layer 2 lighting network that can process more transactions than Visa and MC combined with very cheap fees. I guess HN knowledge of Bitcoin does not go further than 2015

dont think the value of btc comes from its utility anymore

stables are much better for transactions anyway

>BTC is useless, unless your trying to buy child porn, buy illicit drugs on the internet

The market has long shifted to "buy Litecoin with cash, swap it to Monero" for these kinds of activities.

USD is useless unless you want to buy something with it. You can't eat it, it has little fuel value...

...it is also propped up in value by a frankly insane demand for it from other countries...on its fundamentals it would be worth much less

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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?

It is not useless, it is incredibly arrogant to think it is useless at this point. You can do a 10 minute research and see how useful it is

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.

At least that one is backed by a military.

Asteroid mining is the obvious one. That said as part of looking into SpaceX's business I learned that currently the TAM for launching other people's stuff into space is under $10 billion. SpaceX already owns most of that market. Their own focus on data centers in space IMO speaks for itself.

> What's the benefit?

For why we'd want to go at all: there's a lot of resources up there, and pollution is much less of a concern for factories made up there. Also some material processes may be much easier in zero-gee.

But that doesn't mean it's actually worth the effort.

> we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit?

Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning.

A hedge against civilization-destroying events. Meteors, global war, disease.

That has nothing to do with how they have already reduced costs, and how they continue to do so. Before SpaceX, you launched a rocket to space once, and then you discarded it. Imagine how much a plane ticket would cost if each time a plane was flown once, it was then discarded.

The big revolution with SpaceX was meaningful reuse (I can get into the comparison with Space Shuttle if you're unfamiliar there). Landing and reusing rockets is something that Boeing et al thought was impossible from an economic point of view, and actually taunted SpaceX in their early years over it along the lines of 'Oh you're going for reuse. Yeah we researched and trialed that out a decade ago. The economics don't work. Cute to see you trying though.'

Their success there is what helped bring the costs way down. But there's still plenty that's not reused - in particular they currently only reuse the first stage (the big rocket that gets things off the ground initially) while discarding the second stage - the space-optimized payload delivery rocket. With Starship they're going for 100% rapid reuse. So you're looking at this absolutely massive 2 stage system where both parts will be able to be repeatedly and rapidly reused.

Definitely. Humans expand. It's probably an evolutionary imperative in many of us. Africa was essentially an oasis and yet some of us decided to go make our way outward to inhospitable freezing ass places where the environment itself is just constantly trying to kill you in a million different ways. And we knew nothing about how to deal with it, at first.

Or take the early sea voyages. Not only were there endless worries about things that were ultimately nonissues like sea monsters or falling off the edges of the Earth, but there were endless very real dangers awaiting which we had no clue about or how to deal with - scurvy, rogue waves, and much more. In the aforementioned Age of Sail, it was just expected that a significant chunk of your crew would die. Yet somehow we pushed onward and outward.

And the infinite possibilities of space are going to absolutely dwarf all previous frontiers in terms of interest and potential.

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.

And not the healthiest man alive

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!