Any other ostensibly AI companies that have just gone public?

Wanna refuse? No problem. Of course you can. You're outside the US jurisdiction.

But every USD transaction you do is subject to, IIRC, 30% tax. Unless the US decides to block it altogether.

I suppose this 1bn people are spread around the world, but the water use is extremely concentrated. The few sites of DC might cause real localised issues even if per-global-user number is small.

Maybe the better comparison is Uber? I.e. a commoditised product (taxis on an app), burning money to directly subsidise and gain market share. I always thought it was utterly insane and a waste of money... But you'd be hard pressed to have not made money on Uber.

This is my understanding anyway. A LLM-generated summary suggests that anyone who invested pre-IPO got at least 8-10% annually compounded. Even Series G investors made 2.3x since then. It's not an Eldorado and has to make up for all the losers in the VC portfolio but it's money made, not a smouldering crater of losses.

And after going public, return from IPO is 9.4% compounded. Price is 40% below all time high in October 25 but hey that's a harsh criterion for a long term investment.

The reason why I think it's a good point of comparison is that there's no moat, plenty of competition, heavily subsidised for years by literally burning cash, now seemingly profitable and a reasonably sane PE ratio of 17.

Of course one difference is that a major cost item for LLM companies is building genuinely new, cutting edge engineering/science products whereas for Uber, I never understood why they need the 1000s of technical staff to deliver a taxi app.

I don't know about the ins and outs of the business models of either LLM providers or Uber but keen to hear from people who have insights.

One argument against Scottish independence vote just 2 (!) years prior was that Scotland would lose membership in the EU. And they really like this one it seems, with 62% voting to remain.

But since they're only 8% of the population and apparently don't count, they instead got Brexited against their will. Similar with Northern Ireland and, I suppose, Good Friday agreement.

Wales voted to leave, for some reason. Maybe they hoped one of the weekly hospital builds would happen there.

The average person earns an average salary doing something very different to the stuff we on HN stress about.

I'm all up for defence spending in Europe, but if you had anything to do with British state education or healthcare, you know what a desperate move this is.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-07/uk-plans-...

Sad as it was, at least the incentives were somewhat aligned with a healthy social life. Seek out cool things in life, preferably with friends, share.

This has its own downsides of course too, but is a world away from going on Facebook today, full of people definitely shutting down thekr life businesses, turning wood into MacBook cases and incoherent AI generated videos of 300m waves. I seriously can't remember the last time I put something on Facebook, certainly not in this decade. Never mind any of the other ones...

But hey Pokémon cards and meme coins and NFTs don't generate any revenue and yet you can make money buying and selling. Up to a point typically.

Toyota, NASA, many people have done it many times. They have also failed many times. Failure happens, even after successes.

Starship has come a long way but it can still fail on so many ways. They may simply not progress. The rockets may prove too expensive to reuse, or not reliable. The market might not be there.

But the valuation is as if they have already achieved it and will definitely make a fortune out of it.

> How much of the index fund manipulation concern applies to any mega-cap IPO, vs. something unique to SpaceX?

Fair question. Index inclusion typically happens when stocks have reached some equilibrium, in particular they have been trading for a while and have a fair price. Also they need a substantial amount of shares trading in public, not held by insiders.

SpaceX will be neither. The concern is that the IPO price is hugely inflated (which is possible to rig but only short term) inflating its market cap and thus it's weight in the index. Then all these index funds will be forced to fight over the small amount of shares inflating the price further.

This happens in micro scale when normal stocks enter indices, but nowhere near to this extent, and it's typically for a established, well priced securities.

The point is, it's completely irrational - like winning lottery 3x in a row. Tesla's PE ratio, depending on how you look at it, something like 200-350. That means that if nothing changes, the expected return of earnings on your investment is 0.3-0.5%. You'll struggle to find a riskless fixed income instrument paying this little.

Ok, so clearly that's not why people buy this. They hope the earnings will increase, and/or the value of the stock. Seeing as you can lock in 4.5% riskless yield for 10 years, you'd hope for at least this much from a stock - realistically much more. Let's call it 7% - still low methinks but so be it. That's 14-25x more than it earns now.

You could say you don't care about earnings - just about price increase. Sure. But even to maintain the meagre PE ratio, earnings would have to double over 10 years. But realistically - this PE seems crazy for anything other than a crazy-high-growth stock. Which maybe Tesla is now but can't be forever. If it crawls down to a meagre 50x PE in 10 years time, to make your 7% return, earnings would still need to increase 8-14x in that time.

Maybe they can do it. They now sell, apparently, about 2% of all cars. No idea if total car production is stable; if it stays the same, and their margins stay the same, Tesla would need to increase their market share 8-14x too, to 16-28%. Maybe they can improve their margins and sell fewer cars, yet make more money - but typically increasing market share comes with lower profit margins as you lower the price to sell more stuff.

This is a veery bullish scenario. This is something an investment analyst for any other stock would need to sweat blood to argue. Yet this is what youre committing to when buying Tesla today.

Of course none of it really matters at the end of the day. Prices can levitate forever given enough believers. Wars can apparently be declared won with tweets with nothing to back them up - repeatedly. But if you think reality will come at some point, this is what is needed for Tesla to make sense as an investment.

You could say, and I wouldn't disagree, those people shouldn't be on the team. But equally it's often not that easy. Also good people are hard to find and the mediocre one might be the best you have.

It strikes me that the Google statistical results might be getting the wrong end of the stick. The teams where the leader is hands off and empowering are full of people who can be trusted which is basically the same as them doing the job themselves. The teams where the leader feels the urge to descend to micromanagement are the ones where people don't get things done.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/67897/i-dont-wa...

https://serverfault.com/questions/293217/our-security-audito...

I hope they stay with us. I don't much care for the company or what's left of the community.

"How do I do this thing in Django 6?"

"This is an excellent question, and shows a real attention to detail! Let me walk you through it in detail, with a particular focus on Django version and the evolution of the semantics there.

[...]

Bottom line: it's exactly the same as in Django 1.3 back in August 2011. But by anchoring to a specific version, you make the question unambiguous and much more insightful.m"

A while back we ran out of .com domains and that burst the bubble. Or something like this.