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Tesla’s market cap is entirely about Optimus vaporware hopium.

Similarly Space-X’s IPO valuation is about “data centers in space” vaporware hopium and “timeshare all the GPU time that Grok isn’t using”.

There’s a trend with Musk’s companies.

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And ten years of full self driving being ready in mere days.
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Yes and. The new FSD is $100 /month and actually works
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I used it. It doesn’t work as FSD. A driver has to pay attention and intervene. Can’t sleep. Can’t read a book. Can’t look at the scenery going by. It’s still super neat and I like it. But it’s not FSD, and I suspect why fewer than 10% of tesla owners pay $100/month or bought it.

Waymo is actual FSD.

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Still needs a driver. The F in FSD is supposed to stand for "full." It's not there yet.
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The problem is the stock market is more divorced from reality than we have ever seen. For instance, why does Tesla stock still sit where it is? How could it possibly not be going down at this point? So many undelivered promises, major setbacks in sales, massive decreases to their sales forecasts… literally nothing has gone well for them in years and yet the price is still outrageous. It really feels like I’m just out of the loop on something.

Jack Barker’s rather blunt monologue in SV about how the stock is the product is more true than ever. It felt very heavy handed at the time but it’s only proven to be more the case than I thought.

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This probably illustrates my disconnect from reality, but I’ve never understood why a company would care about share price once they’ve left the door. I get that the co still owns its own shares and can conjure new ones for sale, but why would those very infrequent events interfere with the day-to-day operations. In my (wrong) eyes, it’s like pro-baseball players trying to increase the value of their trading cards via their participation in the game. The team doesn’t matter any more, it’s al about what the card owner wants.
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Selling more stock is usually a lever a company can pull when they want. So even if a normal company in normal times doesn't have a reason to do so often, they can if circumstances change. Tesla and some other meme stocks have been extremely aggressive about selling more shares into crazy valuations, and have raised immense amounts of money doing so.

Plus as others have said, usually all of the decision makers have a bunch of stock exposure and will prioritize their own financial gains over pretty much anything else.

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Company itself really shouldn't. Everyone involved in management from board to executives do. Board operates behest of stock owners, executives operate behest of board. Such to keep their job they have to do what stock owners want. And stock owners either want dividends or growth in some term.
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> Board operates behest of stock owners, executives operate behest of board

These are often both weak signals, though. They'll govern very high level decisions, but all the day to day is inside the company. Just as I want a return on the money in my bank account (as I was promised) investors want a return on their money too, and as you say, the executives and board should care about making sure the people who put money into the company are getting a decent deal out of the arrangement.

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People have always way overstated the power and scope of “fiduciary duty.” It doesn’t mean you have to redline your company at all times to maximize every single penny in the short term at the expense of all other considerations. That’s just a cultural thing we do in the US by choice
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AI in space, for all that sweet sweet latency.
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More like for all that sweet sweet cooling capacity.

EDIT: guys, it's sarcastic... since the parent was talking about latency, cooling is something that is even worse in space than latency

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It is not easy to radiate heat in space. You need a significant extra mass budget to radiate heat from hardware that is easily cooled in less volume on the surface. These will also be too large of a capital investment to operate as disposable satellites at the bottom of LEO. They will necessarily be higher up.
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I'm bad at sarcasm apparently.
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Well, unfortunately, it's not such common knowledge that it would be considered sarcastic by default. I have learned to be explicit by appending "/s" or "/j" so it's clearer.
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If putting data centers in a vacuum is a good idea why not just put them in a thermos bottle here on earth?
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If it made the energy free, we’d take a very good look at it.
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This has been debunked countless times. You can't cool things efficiently in space.
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Space is not far away at all.
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Do data centers in space still depreciate GPUs over 6 years if the datacenter falls to Earth in 3?
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It's not only Grok, but also the robotics applications.
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So... The US GDP in 2024 (the last one I found) was $27.8T...

They are planning to capture 100.7% of it?

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Or a bit of everyone else's.

To quote a message I wrote on a finance channel on telegram:

  The TAM for "enterprise applications" at 28 T sounds both too much and too little: by the time the tech (and/or overall economy) allows it to reach that number, that number itself will look unimpressive, and this kind of scale seems to be reachable with ground-based more easily than with space based (at current energy prices, even that TAM is only about 2% of being Kardeshev 1).

  Feels like Musk did vibe-economics for "how big is the global digital economy?", much like the claims about factories on the moon making data center satellites looks like he prompted grok with "if I tile the moon with solar powered factories and mass drivers to launch them, how many TW can it launch per year?"
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> Or a bit of everyone else's

The world's GDP is about 100T. That would mean more than 1/4 of every expenditure in the entire world would go into buying AI or by AI providers into their consumables.

That number is just bullshit.

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While I essentially agree Musk is BSing, TAM doesn't imply "we can actually get this entire market". The TAM for the food sector is *all food*, not what one particular alcopop manufacturer can sell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_addressable_market

AI today can't do all desk jobs, I don't know how far we even are from that given the spiky nature of ML, but it smells like this IPO is using that as the justification for the claim.

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