It's the reverse. The purpose of AWS was in 2011 was financial internal Amazon use. They had never invested in proper communication between the (many) parts of the Amazon webstore so everything was ad-hoc (like it still is in essentially every other company). If the website talked to an (internal) payment provider, that was one protocol. Another internal payment provider? Different protocol. Mail customers? SMTP (and not transactional like now, unless your website code implemented the transactional part).
That's what the first version of AWS was like. A standard set of interfaces. (you offer compute to the company? You implement these methods. You offer payment? You implement these methods. You offer ... etc)
They hadn't (yet) settled on a single RPC method but that's what it was. Then, as a financial innovation they started offering as many as possible to outside parties so they could use that money to pay for buildouts without loans, and a tax rebate on top. That's how AWS came to be. It had quite a few uses: it would simplify the amazon website, but most of all: it would allow for financial innovation in hosting the website (people still don't understand that when using AWS they what they are fundamentally doing is give Amazon better interest rates on loans to build datacenter hosting for their other activities. People still don't understand that the core of Amazon is not selling, is not AWS, it is financial innovation).
It was very much not a company selling to itself because it couldn't find outside buyers. It was a company selling to outsiders screaming to buy their internal products so the internal products would essentially be built for free and Uncle Sam would even provide tax rebates for building them (think about it: without AWS, Amazon datacenters are for internal use and tax is due on the equipment. With AWS Amazon datacenters are built to rent out and you can deduct any spend on building them ... smart, no?)
(that's also how Google cloud came to be, with very different emphasis and timeline)
It signals to me that they like money and people are willing to give it to them at unprecedented levels, and probably still have plenty of capacity for themselves afterwards. Why would you not accept billions of dollars per month?
"Buying time" is an ordinary phrase in English but, it doesn't make a lot of sense here because there'd be some activity SpaceX is doing to "buy time". If you're just waiting that doesn't "buy time".
Don’t talk about fair valuations. Some people will say “who decides what anything is worth anyway”? Let people do what they want. If they lose their money they signed up for it.
I think the bigger issue is that oligarchs have gotten so powerful that they can just write down the valuation they want and the market will just agree with it blindly.
The issue isn’t that investors will lose their money, the issue is that in some cases like Tesla they never do. The oligarchs are propped up by their own power over the behavior or the market — a power which is disproportionally larger than the objective value their companies bring to the economy.
SpaceX is a company with the same revenue as Dick’s Sporting Goods.
I don't get the complaint about Tesla. It's profitable, has little debt and 40 billion in the bank. What sort of "Power over the behavior of the market" do they exert? Like they can force people to buy their cars.
Space X has the most sophisticated vehicle ever created by man. Dicks does not. If you are only looking at revenue then sure, but that would be silly, you have to look at what the potential in a company is not it's current revenue, if not then looking at Blockbuster in 2008 would seem like a great investment compared to Netflix which didn't have much revenue.
One theory is that Elon Musk ends up being able to build AI datacenters faster and more cost effectively than anyone else, which seems plausible given the success of Tesla Gigafactories.
The plan is simply for insiders to offload their bags (overvalued shares) to retail investors, like the folk who frequent the wallstreetbets subreddit and do all their “investing” on Robinhood. This speaks to the larger trend of the lower and middle class apparently giving up on any plans to retire- and it’s understandable as the federal minimum wage has never been so disconnected from the cost of living, plus inflation, plus the current job market being universally terrible (even for software engineers), et al.
It’s worth noting that this is nothing new. I’m reminded of Virgin Galactic, another “space company” that was heavily speculated on. Predictably, insiders like Richard Branson himself sold a large number of shares (well into the millions of dollars) ahead of the inevitable “dump” where the share price fell around 75% in a matter of weeks. Virgin Galactic (SPCE) entered the Nasdaq via SPAC - Special Purpose Acquisition Group - essentially a company whose sole purpose is to acquire a private company, thereby effectively making the company public. Why wouldn’t Virgin Galactic just go public? Why go through a SPAC? The short answer is “to bypass regulations.”
OpenInsider is an excellent website that makes it easy to see when insiders buy or sell a stock, and the most common pattern is insiders dumping their shares in overvalued companies. We saw it when Zoom and Crispr and a few others shot up several hundred percentage points during COVID. C-suite and board members made out like bandits. Those weren’t even SPACs, those were just companies that people were foolish enough to speculate on.
Finally I want to bring attention to Robinhood, the stock trading platform that eliminated commission on trades from all brokerages - Schwab, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, et al- by making it incredibly quick and easy (and free) to buy and sell stocks. They opened this Pandora’s Box, though I suppose it was bound to happen eventually- brokerages charged $7 per trade (sometimes more) and obviously for the college student who wants to throw $20 at Amazon stock… losing $7 in and then $7 again on the way out makes no sense. Now for anyone giving Robinhood the benefit of the doubt- their evil was (I think) absolutely confirmed when they unveiled a new feature- you can now trade OPTIONS with your retirement account. Options are essentially gambling, so to enable people to throw away their retirement on gambling is truly vile.
> Now for anyone giving Robinhood the benefit of the doubt- their evil was (I think) absolutely confirmed when they unveiled a new feature- you can now trade OPTIONS with your retirement account.
While I think robinhood has done some shady practices, this isn't one. I can trade options in a Fidelity IRA just as well.
Gambling has always been a mechanism for transferring money from the poor to the rich. Platforms like Robin Hood just finished transforming the entirety of the stock market into a casino that preys on the poor (oh the irony about the company's name).
True investing, which in theory could be done even with Robin Hood, is boring and incompatible with gamification. Warren Buffett famously said that the reason people don't often become rich with stocks is because nobody wants to get rich slowly.
Agreed. More importantly, this long documented history of massive recurring multi-billion dollar fraud and theft – mostly from domestic and international retirement funds – indicates that America is essentially, for all intents and purposes, a plutocratic dictatorship with the illusion of democracy. Ticking a box every few years, when all your options are pre-positioned to continue a criminal status-quo, is neither "democracy" or "by/for the people". This systemic corruption did not materialise out of thin air recently. It has arguably been present all of history (in every economy). It's just accelerated to psychopathic levels of obscene gratuity over the last 2 decades.
This is why I've voted with my wallet the only way I can, by moving all of my investments (including retirement) out of the American market. The rot is far too deep. The few bad apples have entirely spoiled the bunch. I'm not under any illusion other markets will be safe from the fallout, or that I'll make better returns long term, but I do not care. I'm voting the only way I can given the current system. If I'd moved my investments earlier, when I came to this conclusion, I would have actually made significantly larger gains over the last couple of years.
I've always thought americans had an amendment specifically for situations when voting does not work
I think it's a great illustration of complicated cybernetics at work, i.e. its not enough to give people the right to enact change and own the instruments for it: homeostatic forces will preserve status quo no matter how many firearms are circulating. Can't really think of a clean approach to this predicament though
Options is gambling only for the vast majority who're inexperienced with them or don't have a sound theory for them. I can trade them in my setup with over a 95% success rate, perhaps even 99%. Of course I am not going to type out my theory here.
Such an overgeneralization ruined your otherwise reasonable comment. Always stop when you are winning.