[Grombobulous]

I share your feeling that LLM-based AI is a high-potential technology.

The issue is the objective dollars and cents financials of the situation. It’s literally the technology that is the money-losingest at this time.

The commercial utility of the technology can’t become viable just by being really useful.

There’s a good accounting argument to be made for AI IPOs happening out of a serious need for capital.

I wouldn’t bet money at a casino on this, but if OpenAI went completely out of business or was absorbed into irrelevancy within a calendar year, nobody with a finance background would be surprised. They objectively cannot exist in ~18 months without massive spending cuts or additional cash infusion. And they can’t make their models better and serve more tokens to build that future potential that justify their present valuation without additional capital, which becomes decreasingly efficient as data center build costs skyrocket.

AI has wonderful potential but no amazing product is guaranteed commercial viability. If Uber spends $1500 on tokens per employee they might as well spend $0 on AI and hire more real people to compensate.

I think about how the railroad barons went through a somewhat similar process. By the end of the American railroad buildout, numerous lines became financially unviable within a few short years or decades, some not even really making it into the automobile era. The only railroad business that ended up with any sort of long term profit viability was freight.

[Schiendelman]

The economy gets bigger every year. Therefore, any similarly proportioned large "thing" becomes the largest of all time. Uber lost tons of money for years, I remember the complaints about them. Investors made lots of money because they believe in future value. You're not being forced to make that bet - "money losing" is great for us if we aren't invested!

[Grombobulous]

IPO investors in Uber didn’t actually make a lot of money. The stock has only gone up by around 7% per year since going public. I can make over 4% guaranteed by putting the money into a CD.

Ironically, we are being forced to make that bet, thanks to NASDAQ’s new indexing rule changes made just for SpaceX.

I think what you’re describing is essentially a form of “inflate away the debt.”

Sure, if we wait enough decades SpaceX will be legitimately worth trillions of dollars.

Uber looks like a little baby loss leader compared to AI companies.

[Schiendelman]

I wasn't thinking about IPO investors - the funding rounds before that are where the real money is made.

I am not describing inflating away debt. I'm talking about returns.

[Grombobulous]

I figured you might be speaking about the pre-IPO investors.

Uber’s post-IPO stock performance has been a lot like “inflating away” the mediocre performance of the company. Its growth since IPO hasn’t been able to beat out any of the major indexes. Gaining only 7% value per year means that Uber’s valuation peaked at IPO in terms of real value against alternative corporate assets and considering currency inflation. There’s no real reason to have bought their stock on the public stock market in retrospect. The only winners are pre-IPO investors.

The problem is, pre-IPO investors are just a small group of people that aren’t really relevant to the long term viability of a company or the success of the economy that surrounds that company. Their success doesn’t really impact anyone else outside that small group of people. They have figured out a system for personal profit that doesn’t rely on building a viable company at the most basic level (and, at least, Uber eventually became viable, but the new wave of AI companies doesn’t look to be in the same financial realm).

The end result is a wealth transfer to the pre-IPO investors from post-IPO investors, employees, customers, etc.

When I say “inflate away” what I mean is that SpaceX leadership has pulled unusual levers in the IPO system itself to manufacture a high valuation to maximize wealth transfer from post-IPO investors to pre-IPO investors, and as a result the long-term best-case scenario is probably that the valuation will come back to earth slowly over time via below-market returns, with the worst case being a huge correction. If the stock was more fairly valued at IPO, there would be more actual investment potential for post-IPO investors. Instead, that potential is being captured almost entirely by pre-IPO investors, and not in the usual and more sensible way (higher risk = higher reward).

In other words, the usual formula is inverted: pre-IPO investors are shouldering the least risk for the greatest returns.

Tesla has been able to sidestep this dead economy theory by at least shipping a lot of cars and being a reasonably profitable automaker. They at least ran a real business. There wasn’t any pressing reason to sell your shares. Fast vehicle shipment growth at a profit was able to at least give Tesla some level of justification for their valuation.

[Schiendelman]

I'm not worried about any of that. I don't care whether SpaceX is successful or not, or whether those investors make money or not.

My only comment is that as time advances, "largest of all time" is common, because our world grows in population and both realized and potential value.

[Grombobulous]

I see what you mean now, although it’s a little confusing to me against your previous comments in the thread.

It seemed like you were trying to say that companies like uber looked pretty insanely overvalued until they’re not. Everyone kept saying that because they didn’t think about how the current number is always the biggest number.

That’s why I pointed out that, well, yeah, Uber is a big successful company, but they haven’t actually been a particularly good investment relative to the market since they IPOed.