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Not just that, but private investors were sold shares that all had the same voting rights. Since just before the IPO SpaceX now has dual class shares, Elon and a few insiders have class-B shares with 10x the voting power, while everybody else (including private investors) have class-A shares with 1x the voting power

I don't think companies expanding their business should be the only reason to sell. Apple was a desktop and laptop computer company when they released the iPod. Nokia was a company making rubber products when they started making cellular equipment in the 1970s. Amazon was a ecomm company when they released AWS. Etc.

Sure, I'm cherrypicking the success stories but I don't think it's the only signal people should use.

It also seems to me to be a very odd conflict of interest given that they must see themselves as primary competitors in the AI space.

Seems similar to me as when Eric Schmidt resigned from the Apple board many years back because their products started to overlap, especially mobile.

I think those long-term holders who 10x their investment are quite happy with that investment so far.

SpaceX is WAY more about space than Twitter.

Twitter by itself is lucky to be worth $15B anymore.

The space portion of SpaceX is easily worth 10x that.

xAI is theoretically the hype machine that makes up the remainder of the value.

Yes I'm sure they are just desperate to get out of their 100x investment.

A huge mistake, I'm sure the relevant parties have been punished appropriately.

Well X is at the end of the name, so first is about Space, then about X, right?

/s

SpaceX, like Tesla, has always been about Elon Musk.

Investors are buying Musk, like they were buying Warren Buffett with Berkshire Hathaway. Long-term shareholders are not buying space; they are buying Musk. This has been clear to everyone since the beginning; it has been well communicated (look at SpaceX governance rules in Texas), and there is nothing mystical about it.

It's very likely Musk will roll everything up into a single Musk conglomerate.

What a find in the archives!

"It's quite amazing how this values SpaceX at 10bn, less than 50% of WhatsApp."

Somebody was wise a decade ago.

Google X was building Loon at least a decade ago to solve internet connectivity with laser-networked high-altitude balloons. They clearly benefit structurally from expanding access to the internet to the unconnected population.

So on that front, while I didn’t guess this, it does sound like a good investment.

Furthermore, while I am skeptical about the “DC in space” thing in the short term, and Musk’s timelines are, generously, something like P99.9 outcomes, it seems plausible that in 10 years it might make sense. And at that point Google will want to put their TPUs in orbit, too.

Presumably Starlink for routing throughout space. Google does under-sea cables and domestic internet access too.

It's telecom infrastructure to increase the number of people who have internet in order to increase the number of people using Google. They might have been considering having satellite internet in Android phones.

    > Data centers in space?

They had a big early investment back when Google was doing more crazy out of scope things.

Low cost payloads to space can unlock lots.

starlink cellular connection for android in future

Similar of SpaceX and Twitter I guess

Google Cloud, low latency cross-continental links, etc.

One would presume connectivity and services in space as industry and services spread there. Asteroid mining, on orbit manufacturing, space colonies/tourism, data centers in space, centers for working outside traditional government jurisdiction.

Google's return of invested capital has averaged 32% since IPO.

This may be a narrative violation on HN, but the quality of Google's management is exceptional.

Pichai will talk about data centers in space again, like he did before the IPO. Then he'll sell SPCX.

Average pre-ipo sale price is $6.xx

Actually, that's the service provided by GS, etc. They have those buyers on the other side of their Rolodex.

Isn't that literally what institutional trading desks are for? One of the reason to use one is that they can execute a large order without impacting the market price

tell me how you dont know anything about dark markets and dark pools. I loveeeee how you average people dont know how they operate at top

Retail doesn't really move stocks like Google too much, and institutions might understand Google and it's finances better than Google...i.e. there are no accounting tricks or mysterious losses that can shake institutional analysts much (besides illegally hidden stuff). They will perfectly understand why Google is taking a "loss" on the sale.

Your comment is difficult to parse. Is Alphabet greedy for spending $900M on SpaceX equity many years ago before the business was built and there was a risk it would not be built?

Or is Alphabet greedy for holding onto the equity instead of selling it for cash? Or is throwaw12 greedy for wanting to sell something after a 100x return?

Which corruption exactly? NASDAQ giving them fast entry so the biggest IPO in history is done on NASDAQ and not on NYSE who was also competing for it? Both are fighting for OpenAI and Anthropic listings as well which likely influenced their choice to get in early with SpaceX

5. A gazillion amount of telemetry data and social media data to sell on the data broker market. That alone is enough to attract another billion dollar of potential investment consistently, especially for training data and intelligence...you know, selling to the Mossad or CIA.

In a world of money, every bit you can earn, you have to earn, while I know it is immoral to sell the data for spying purposes, morality alone don't mean shit now, that I never see any capitalists and corpo dogs have any kind of morality anyway, except when massive backslash, congress hearings and boycotts, which is, ahem, Meta/Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. But given the unique position Musk used to have in Trump's government and his right leaning position he is safe to do so. At least for now, he is immune to holding congress hearing for a scandal I suppose.

And not to mention that Grok is literally trained over X/Twitter, and keep in mind Bluesky is federated and strangely, no one seems to be scraping it over ActivityPub. I believe Thread is also built on the same foundation but it's sure that Meta made good measures for antiscraping, I expected as a data oriented company.

Alas, keep in mind SpaceX merged with xAI and nonetheless don't forget their data side

Much better business instinct that the average poster on HN

If true then they paid under $800 Million for their 6%, now valued at $94 Billion.

They’ll be fine? Dang I wanna be “fine”!

Excluding all the capex from AI this last quarter has been one of their best.

There is quite a bit of information out there as to how Google is achieving short term growth in their core search business. And boy, it is ugly. It does not signal long term continued growth.

Now Microsoft, them I'd short. In a way I have by starting my own company to undermine their various competitive advantages comprehensively

Microsoft is in a better position (as their b2b ecosystem can realistically be made LLM-agnostic), but Google will be fine.

Have you seen Microsoft’s price over the last year. If AI doesn’t pan out they’re going to be the next IBM.

Agreed, and in my opinion he's 100% right. But I'm still invested in both.

The market hasn't been working on fundamentals for a long time. I have a fair amount of value stocks and a bunch of cash lying around, so I'll be ok.

I really feel for anybody trying to invest to grow right now; there's no obvious safer play.

Like?

> Gemini’s integration is, I think, absolutely awesome - it’s completely changing the way I interact with the concept of googling and finding answers,

Oh, me too. The way it writes things that look like they address my question, and then links references that totally don't makes me dread Googling in a way I hadn't yet. For probably five years, I've been doing DDG first and Google when I DDG doesn't work well and usually Google doesn't either, so I already have dread for Google, but this makes it worse.

Nailed it. I didn't state this explicitly, but:

> So your short could work, but it’s not going to work for google’s involvement in an AI-bubble, it’s predicated on the entire market tanking

Is indeed a required assumption. Major return is not going to happen with this, Not losing a big chunk of my money is the goal!

> SpaceX I actually bought at the IPO price because I think the company will be around in 30 years time, so as fraudulent and mispriced as it is, having a small holding over that kind of horizon I believe will be profitable. And I want to be that kind of old-timer who can chuckle at buying it at the IPO and holding through the crash and still holding when they are on Mars and beyond and SPCX is worth multiples of what it is today.

I think that's a fine play as well. The short is more of an "This IPO price doesn't make sense; sell within a year after it settle"

That’s a pretty weird take considering they’re down 21% in the last 2 months. How, exactly, is this early?

Sage advice!. In shorts like these, there's no outcome that "wins big" unfortunately, unless you do it with large amounts of money. (Unlike a long position on an individual stock that 10xs, or options which are much riskier). But... it will ideally make the landing softer after the Fall.

Most sane comment.

Even in the last Elon Musk interview by The Economist, he admited that it's likely China will win at the end.

The gap is so close now. Opinions matter not, the Chinese will have their own GPUs, RAM and everything they need.

Giants like google and spacex are the few that can handle it because their business is not only about shipping the best models.

Accounting goes back thousands of years. It was not made as a tool to show off. Lesson is more that tools can be abused for other purposes than intended.

They don't have to be willing because hiding the losses would be a crime. And it still doesn't matter b/c anyone with a calculator can tell you exactly what the value of their position is on any given day. The $94 billion is 2.4% of Google's market cap, so even if SpaceX goes to zero it will be barely noticeable from the background noise of the stock price movement.