A weekly thread to discuss financial matters - from personal all the way up to global.
Ground Rules
- Remember that we're all just Internet randos. Don't bet your life savings on a hot tip from this thread.
- Keep culture war in the culture war thread. Yes, global events may impact our personal finances, but that does not mean we have to incessantly harp on culture war aspects here. If you are going to discuss it, please stick to the practical impacts of it on an individual level.
- Be kind. Remember that everyone here comes from different circumstances. We all have different resources available and different risk tolerances.
- Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Better is better. Celebrate people when they take a step up and work to move their finances in the right direction. Don't flame out because they haven't followed what you consider the optimal path. Everybody has to start somewhere.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The conspiracy parts of the internet (i.e. the most entertaining parts) are freaking out about the SpaceX IPO and changes to various market indices that will be Bad News. This seems to the background. The S&P500 is not one of the indices, though, according to that link. Anything to it, or usual internet financial panic?
SpaceX is an overpriced unprofitable business and the type of fuckery Musk has done to push it into big indices is incredible, but the fact that literally everyone and their dog is aware of this makes me think it will be a non event. Some people are predicting SpaceX IPO to be a liquidity vacuum and the claim is not baseless, but again - literally everyone is aware of this and is salivating for things (ie semis and other shiny stuff) to go down because SpaceX is gonna print like 100 new billionaires and thousands of millionaires in the next 6 months thanks to insane valuation and fast unlock schedule. What's more likely to happen is all these guys waiting for a dip get left on the sidelines, coping that next big IPO, which I think is Anthropic, is what tips the market and gets them a good entry
The only reason Musks can do fuckery to push it into indices is because a lot of people want to buy the stock and will let him IPO 50+ billion at a 2 trillion valuation.
He personally will likely not cash out much in the IPO. And it really is a great company I would love to buy at some point. I am likely hoping that the mess up the IPO like Meta and I get to buy it between $500b and a trillion. Starlink has potential to be a cash flow machine. xAI is interesting but I have no idea if frontier models will be profitable and it’s going to burn a ton of cash. And SpaceX innovation is insane.
I won’t buy the IPO though unless I see an opportunity arb the indexes but I would really like to own it someday.
The bigger issue isn’t the etf inclusion it’s an issue that our biggest companies don’t go public now because of regulations (complicated). It should have been listed years ago. Valuations on it are tough but it’s obviously a very valuable company.
Looping in @Mantergeistmann. My pet theory is that the whole thing is a massive cash grab to bootstrap xAI while the funding dries up for Claude and ChatGTP. The latter two keep saying they want to do IPOS soon, even though the CFO of xAI said the company is nowhere near ready, and there's talk that venture capital is pretty much tapped out. Meanwhile, these companies have contracts requiring them to spend eye-watering sums over the next few years, mostly on data centers that are already behind schedule. In the AI space, ChatGTP is the one everyone knows and has the top because of inertia, Claude is the "better" one that all the smart people use, and Gemini is the one backed by Google that everyone uses all the time without realizing it. The others are all bit players with no real path forward, xAI included.
If Musk can turn xAI into a barnacle riding the hull of another IPO, he can secure a lot of cash that would keep the company afloat. Since he's a true believer, I doubt he cares whether SpaceX suffers that much because he'd rather be the AI guy that he currently isn't. Claude and OpenAI are pushing for their IPOs out of desperation, where he at least has a legitimate one. Why else bundle xAI in with it when it was already part of another company? The other suspicious thing is that I've read reports of Grok getting progressively shittier since the merger was announced. There's some discussion that it's because of NSFW stuff, but that doesn't explain why people on the Heavy plan are getting rate limited to hell (it used to be practically unlimited image generation, now I've seen reports that it allows as few as 15 per day, which is less than you used to get on the free tier). The explanation I see is that since he already has a bunch of subscribers under opaque ToS that allow arbitrary limits, he needs to cut monthly compute costs to make the company look better to investors than it is, and can do so without losing too much revenue since only a small number of subscriptions will come due and not be renewed.
So I looked this up and apparently this is the coldest take out there, though I'm always proud of myself for coming to the same conclusions the experts do on my own. It could still be a shrewd business move if OpenAI and Anthropic run out of cash in the near future, but he could have just bought Anthropic outright.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link