The answer is clearly to buy stocks and then short it.

(/s!!)

The problem is that you ARE buying them precisely at the high IPO prices if you have retirement/pension funds that are invested in market indexes.

Thats not true. For the dotcom bubble people loudly and widely proclaimed them for a couple years until the narrative changed to "I guess this time is different?" ... and then it popped.

Non really, there are a lot of signs. What is hard to predict is "when it will happen", not "if it will happen".

EDIT: Btw, a bubble popping is not necessarily a bad thing, they are necessary for markets, kinda natural fires in big forests.

Is that true? It seemed to me that the most common opinion before the recent Chinese real estate crash was that it was a bubble; architect friends of mine who worked in China said the government had no doubt prices were unreasonably high; the thing they remained hopeful about is whether a soft landing was possible. Similarly it seems like it was by no means an uncommon opinion in the Japanese asset bubble, NFTs, beanie babies, and even the dotcom boom that this is (to use Greenspan’s phrase leading up to the dotcom bubble) “irrational exuberance”.

Secondly, terrestrial infrastructure keeps expanding into the rural areas that Starlink counts on for most of their TAM. Except for ships at sea and extremely remote places, the Starlink TAM is chronically shrinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Twenties

Okay, well who will offer a lower cost-to-orbit than SpaceX?

> It is going to have competition in the future and will lose customers.

Is that not true for everything.

Investors in these companies are going to be looking for revenue and pathway to profitability. I'm not sure anyone needs to see an impact on GDP to invest.

Don't give your money to Elon Musk, he doesn't need more.

The market : As long as you sell for more than you buy, who cares what happens long term

Hence Tesla bubble

Finance bros look to their bonus for the year, not 5 years

Yes. Even if this capital is just rotated out of the equity markets, it would be fine. The bond markets are orders of magnitude deeper.

I think the aim would be to generate at least $900bn of cash flow from those assets.

Most popular passive indexes are S&P 500 and some total markets. Total index, like the one used by VTI, is likely the best spot in this case. They have not changed any rules, as far as I know.

that's what fiance is about after all, capturing the saving of working people :) "It's not finance, it's your pensions" https://theloop.ecpr.eu/its-not-finance-its-your-pensions/

In reality, corporations as a whole are seeing record profits continuing through 2026. Whether or not the average person is doing well is pretty irrelevant to the stock market: if companies are increasingly profitable, stocks go up.

Everything I hear about Anthropic points to a company that is actually closer to profitability and possibly already profitable, unlike many of its other peers.

We don't really look at YouTube as a failure and that product was unprofitable for many years. Nobody thinks the Uber bubble is going to burst even though it has never made back its investment money.

I think OpenAI is undisciplined and poorly run hence the insane burning of cash. Sam Altman is a terrible CEO and a conman. Anthropic is run by legit people.

Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta face essentially no negative consequence for burning cash. They have no urgent need to be efficient about their AI investments, even if they could be.

SpaceX is of course not profitable and has a lot of baggage but they still have a major asset, which is that Starlink prints utility company levels of money and is expanding both customer base and profit margins rapidly. Are they overvalued? Yeah, of course.

in addition to gain distribution, large chunk of population won't see any gains, but only losses: wealth transfer to Elon and similar from their retirement/investment accounts, their jobs being replaced by AI.

So many would say the saw it coming but the truth is only people with inside info really knew when it would happen for sure.

Same happens today. Capital is being heavily allocated towards AI inference and infra because of the promised productivity. Nobody knows if its early or late and also nobody knows how will the state react to a possible bubble exploding. Some people would say maybe AI is too big to fall already and its better if we save it when it falls. Some people would say its better to let it blow up but again nobody knows what will truly happen until we get there.

The rest of your article is complete bogus and the economic equivalent of climate change denial.

Only about a third of American stocks are held by passive capital [1]. Out of that, index funds are about 16%, and most of those in America reference the S&P 500, which has not yet announced whether it is changing its rules.

[1] https://alexchinco.com/double-what-you-think-it-is.pdf

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364986 and marked it off topic.

And for starlink. There is some market. But if terrestrial options got their stuff together it is not that big either. Userbase is marginal. As they operate in areas that are not served by other options. And that market has real limit in size.

90 days or 5 days, it doesn't really matter because the float will be tiny due to the 6 month lockup. What kind of price discovery are we expecting that would happen in the other 85 days?

I think what is happening is that OpenAI is racing to IPO before Anthropic because their growth isn't as impressive. If you are the weaker company, you should IPO first to lock up the cash.

> Although Nasdaq has already shortened the “seasoning” period before index inclusion to 15 trading days and FTSE Russell has slashed its waiting time to five days (and S&P Dow Jones is reportedly considering something similar), most share indices weight firms in proportion to the value only of shares they have released for public trading (the “free float”). For SpaceX, this means just the $75bn or so of stock it intends to issue in June—so its initial weight in the S&P 500 will be around 0.1%. The NASDAQ 100 is an exception, and has changed its rules to weight companies at up to three times their free float, in an apparent effort to woo Mr Musk. Even so, SpaceX’s probable initial weight in this $40trn index will still only be around 0.5%.

So people who hold ETFs that track the S&P 500 probably don't have too much to worry about. People invested in the NASDAQ 100 probably have more to be outraged about - but then again I suppose if you're invested in the NASDAQ 100, you may be consider more exposure to SpaceX to be a good thing.

Also: All of those numbers you use to scare people are way, way off.

  The U.S. Treasury publishes a daily total of the national debt, which as of May 2026 was $39 trillion.

  a little less than half of the total national debt is owed to the "Federal Reserve and intragovernmental holdings"

  In December 2020, foreigners held 33% ($7 trillion out of $21.6 trillion) of publicly held U.S. debt

No sympathy for people and institutions who make deals with the devil and expect the government to forever enslave taxpayers to honour those deals and pay back with interest.

This isn't true of AI companies...yet. But these are companies entering the market with pre-IPO userbase (including lots of B2B) numbers that Meta and YouTube would have dreamed of before their acquisition/IPO.

I think this whole situation is very sleazy and corrupt, but ultimately my prediction is that nothing serious will come of it. Even the exposure of index and passive investing is overstated.

https://polymarket.com/event/anthropic-ipo-closing-market-ca...

Every single fund autodumps billions in shares and is forced to buy slop. The dumping triggers the algorithm traders who dump. The dumping triggers manual traders to dump. The crashing causes retail to dump. Everyone dumps their treasuries and gold because they’re both crashing and they want cash.

And there’s no capability to raise money in any western country, because everyone is already loaded up to pay welfare bills.

2. There's a potential to optimize a lot of economic activity in there.

$ value of equity purchased in indices:

- total market cap of those 3: $3.6tn

- index inclusion weights is based on free float, not full market cap

- free floats ~5%

=> 5% * 3.6tn = 180bn of these stocks in MV weight in the index

$ value of index funds: $18tn

$ value of market cap that is tracked by these index funds: $57tn

=> index funds are 18/57 = 31.6% of the market value

=> 180bn * 31.6% = $57bn of stock included in the index funds

so $57bn in sales in other companies => 57bn/18tn = 0.32% of all other stocks sold

Now for the assymmetry here:

- 57bn in sales is about 7% of daily volume for all incumbants combined

- 57bn in purchase is about 15-30 days of volume for typical stocks (hence Elon's eagerness to get them included asap)

The more dollars there are, the more deeply in debt we are. If these were interpersonal debts where we all owe the dollars to each other such that they go away when whatever promise is eventually kept, that would be a tight knit society. But instead we're all indebted to the banks, so instead we have a lot of collateral at risk, and a lot of uncertainty about whether it's a stable arrangement.

If there isn't enough money to satisfy the asking prices set by the owners of these abstractions, then we can always go deeper into debt until there is. Or we could have a debt jubilee and let the prices re-settle to something more in tune with reality.

Stored in pension funds in the hope that by the time the current working class goes to pension age, there is enough left.

The rollout relies on Starlink V3 sats, which can only be launched Starship, but Starship progress is going well and is already able to deploy satellites from orbit. SpaceX is capable of launching Starlink V3 on the current iteration of Starship, but they want more testing. We'll probably see Starlink V3 launching late this year or early next year.

In this age of AI marketing taking over the minds and imaginations of most of our businesses leaders in the name of greed and fear, I’ll hold to the more likely truth given the circumstances, regardless of this appeal to some invented tale of uncorruptable corporate governance. Have you never seen decisions being made?

I think that better matches the original spirit of this forum. The progenitors have become the people they once disrupted.

These wives were yoga teachers and socialites. And I say that as a man that is a feminist and upmost respect for the amazing women I have worked with that were absolutely world renowned professionals. The bankers wives were not in that category and were shells to eliminate the “conflict of interest”. The CEO of Goldman Sachs did this. You can find the records if you want to be on a government watch list.

If Ant, OAI, etc. aren't able to make 20-30% improvements on Opus 4.6 in 2026, does the music stop playing altogether? It seems like they'd lose their ability to charge >10% gross margin on inference in a span of 3-6 months.

Anthropic/OpenAI really need to train ever-bigger models to keep their moat. But that assumes there isn't a law of diminishing returns and also that a compressed model isn't sufficient for what many people need.

You mihgt say that the training is a barrier. And it is, kind of. Notice how it's Chinese companies coming out with open-source models like DeepSeek and Qwen? That's no accident. As soon as DeepSeek came out I knew what was going on: China is going to make sure no single Western company "owns" AI. It's in their national interest for that not to happen.

I wouldn't be surprised if the rush-to-IPO is motivated, at least in part, by getting ahead of Chinese AI commoditization.

The "bureaucracy and regulators" are at most engaged in passive corruption.

For passive corruption to exist, you need massive active corruption effort.

Why is everyone focusing on vilifying passive corruption while completely ignoring active corruption? I mean, I'm hearing lots of conspiratorial remarks directed at regulators but... Who stood to benefit? Aren't those responsible?

I mean, why was regulation required to begin with?

The vast majority of the price rise is mainly due to AI companies sucking all the air out of the room and everyone investing in "AI" regardless.

If China gets their process down to match US/Korea/Taiwan and they decide to flood the market to drown out competitors then hardware is going to be an order of magnitude (or two) cheaper than it is today.

Not really: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/spacex-allow-early-...

I personally have moved my retirement accounts to bonds while being more aggressive with my personal investments.

In terms of AI, we've seen even here on HN everything from mathematical problems that remaind unsolved, being solved, mathematical proofs being used to disprove theories, heck we even learned more about alzheimers, new antibiotics, precision targeting in oncology, using AI to flag healthcare anomalies in imaging. The benefits are easy to miss, but they're snowballing into place, there's definitely an explosion of useless crap, but you have to look for the real things and you will come to find, that AI is giving us things we otherwise either might not have discovered or wouldn't have within our lifetimes.

All infrastructure is not created equal. It requires a lot of mental gymnastics to argue that datacenters are public good with net positive externalities.

Actually, you could argue that these are anti-infrastructure since they strain the electric grid for everyone and reportedly make the surrounding area unlivable with noise pollution.

Keep in mind that inflation ran over 7% annualized in April [1].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm

Final sad note about Starlink: It is helping Ukraine to win the war. It makes their mid- and long-range drones almost impossible to jam. (Most short-range drones use fibre optics these days to avoid jamming.)

I am skeptical that Anthropic and OpenAI can defend their dominance for long enough to make meaningful gaap accounted profits

S&P has not finalized a rule change yet.

And more importantly forces them to sell the rest of the market.

Who will be on the other side of these trades? I suspect the stock market is not sufficiently liquid for all of that to happen in a single day without the rest of the market seeing a significantly depressed price, and index holders effectively gifting value to everyone else by effectively pre-announcing their large trades.

What is reasonable value for all it does? Clearly it is not what it is now projected at.

Turns out it was a scam and shares fell on the first day. Soon after the entire bubble burst.

That said, I don't even see "huge demand" for the AI triocorns right now. Unlike in 2000, most people are skeptical.

1) The short lifespan is intentional. There is no reason to keep satellites beyond a few years because older satellites quickly become obsolete. The first generation Starlink sats are now 4 generations old, and are practically ancient at this point. SpaceX wants older satellites to fail, so they can be replaced by updated ones.

2) SpaceX could easily increase the lifespan of Starlink satellites to 10-15+ years, but they don't want to, because of (1), and because they are waiting for Starship to launch larger satellites at 10x lower cost.

3) Despite continually replacing satellites every ~5 years, Starlink is operating at a very profitable 40%+ profit margin.

4) Starlink is expanding to direct-to-cell 5G at speeds up to 150Mbps, which vastly expands the TAM from just broadband usage to all cellular data usage. Rural areas may never get a terrestrial cellular buildout, since it will be cheaper for companies to partner with SpaceX for coverage than to build their own towers. A single cellular tower can cost upwards of >$250k.

30% above the average. Households bought $1.6 trillion in Q3 of 2025, for example. (Foreigners bought a further $650 and $700 billion in Q3 and Q4, respectively.)

American capital markets are ridiculously deep.

Where did you get spending? That's net buying of stocks by non-financial Americans. It's the new money that has, on average, gone into the U.S. stock market from that section of investors every year. A third of it going into these new issuances doesn't need to break anything.

It’s depressing as hell, and it’s going to go out with the proverbial whimper, but at least we’ve got to be close to rock bottom, right?

Buy MSCI World, enjoy the 0.04% p.a. fees and minimal idiosyncratic risk, and relax.

Index rebalance traders will reduce your annual returns by less (probably much less) than 0.1%, but there is no better alternative for you at this moment in time.

1. Exchange your market-cap funds for S&P 500. Afaict, even with their own rules changing, they will wait up to 6 months (as opposed to 12) to let SpaceX in. This is the simplest solution that buys you time without losing other gains in the market, assuming your existing funds were broad market-cap funds. The idea here is to wait for ~5 months and see if you still want/need to exit S&P before they let SpaceX in, or pick another option.

2. Exchange your market-cap funds for RSP, an equal-weight fund. This is also simple and reduces your risk, as SpaceX's allocation of the fund would only be 0.2%.

3. Exchange your market-cap funds for a selection of different funds in order to replicate the previous allocation. Buy small-cap and mid-cap funds, and buy ETFs that cover the market without including tech. This is more complicated, but not really that complicated once you learn how to exchange funds. Still mostly passive, you're just actively managing your allocation into different indexes. Downside is you lose the gains from tech.

4. Exchange all your index funds - temporarily - for a money market fund or other low-risk, low-return investment vehicle, until SpaceX price settles down. This is the absolute simplest option, least risk, least reward. You lose all the gains from the market during this time, but a percentage of your fund doesn't disappear overnight. If you're nervous, it's safe to do this by June 11th and sit on it until July 5th and see what you'd like to do then.

You probably DO NOT want to do this for non-retirement funds, as you will get hit with capital gains taxes. You would have to estimate how much you think your portfolio would drop due to SpaceX's overinflated price falling, and compare that to your potential tax bill from rebalancing. It's almost certain that your tax hit would be higher.

https://etfdb.com/etfs/size/large-cap/

You could switch to one that focuses on stocks which pay dividends, for example. That should provide a bit of protection against an AI market crash:

https://etfdb.com/etf/VIG/#etf-ticker-profile

So-called "smart beta" ETFs are also interesting. https://etfdb.com/themes/smart-beta-etfs/

Here are some factors I would expect to rule out the frothiest stocks:

"Quality Factor ETFs are made up of securities deemed to exhibit strong fundamental characteristics. These ETFs screen for stocks that have healthy balance sheets, encouraging growth prospects, and consistent improvements in their earnings."

https://etfdb.com/themes/quality-factor-etfs/

"Value-centric ETFs invest in securities deemed to possess value characteristics, including those operating in stable industries with relatively low price-to-earnings ratios."

https://etfdb.com/etfs/style/value/

"Low Volatility ETFs invest in securities with low volatility characteristics. These funds tend to have relatively stable share prices, and higher than average yields."

https://etfdb.com/etfs/investment-style/low-volatility/

Be sure to check the expense ratios on smart beta ETFs. Generally, the more sophisticated the stock screening, the more they will charge you in management fees.

As long as you're thinking about your portfolio, you may wish to consider international diversification in case the US economy implodes somehow: https://etfdb.com/themes/international-equity-etfs/

Personally, I keep my portfolio extremely conservative. My bet is that if the singularity arrives, we will all either die, or get UBI. I don't particularly care about having more moons than the other guy: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-have-only-x-years-to-es...

Groupon got to pretty much 100% penetration, still crashed and burned right after IPO. I think Zynga followed a similar trajectory.

I’m not necessarily expecting a crash any time soon. (But we average a major correction, what? every 8 years? So if you keep predicting one long enough you will eventually have been right all along.) But I do feel comfortable saying OpenAI and Anthropic are overpriced. For more or less the same reason Cisco was overpriced in the late ‘90s. It’s not that what they were making wasn’t valuable; it’s that we got out over our skis a bit over how much of it the world could actually manage to consume in the immediate future.

The bubble can't pop until after an IPO, and that doesn't mean "immediately after".

You can't have a run on a privately held company.

im not a finance guy, can someone explain to me why the nasdaq would want to "woo" someone specifically? what benefit would nasdaq get? or, alternatively, what harm would befall nasdaq for not woo-ing musk?

With the right policy and legislation, this level of investment should be welcomed rather than opposed in most sensibly run places.

For example California and Germany have a lot in common when it comes to the locals blocking all forms of large scale infrastructure for mostly selfish reasons. Both places have broken energy infrastructure, high energy prices, high taxes, very bad roads, etc. Both have decades of backlog in terms of outdated infrastructure in need of major upgrading/fixing. Everybody is wringing their hands about fixing these issues because there is no money and tax pressure is already too high.

And here are some of the wealthiest companies in the world looking for places to spend their many billions. Surely, that's something that could be mutually beneficial. All states need to do is set some sensible terms and conditions for this. But instead you get people campaigning against this. I really don't get that negativity.

Typically, you IPO when your private funding is drying up and/or some of your early lenders want to cash out.

1) I would expect anyone close to retirement to have a fairly balanced portfolio.

2) if they don't include SpaceX and the stock does >10x in the next year, they'll end up doing terribly on the benchmarks. SpaceX is big, but if they invest early, it won't be a ridiculous % of the portfolio. Even if one overpays by 2x, since it's under .1% of the total portfolio. If it went to zero nobody would lose their shirts, they'd lose <.1% of their portfolio.

Don't get me wrong. I love LLMs and use them myself. But the biggest gain for me is easier context switch and text manipulation. It's not the: replace X with a bunch of LLMs every CEO is dreaming of. So yes, you have higher productivity, but is the eval of those companies legit? x doubt.

What a story this is

Were we struggling to do this before? Was the overall percentage reduction in costs? Was some other achievement held back because we couldn't accomplish this? What is now enabled?

> to get any payload into space.

A limited set of payloads into space. No vehicle can get "any payload" to space at a fixed price.

> The benefits are easy to miss,

You've listed a bunch of reasons to publish papers. What is the actual ground level change that's occurred? Are those antibiotics produced? Do they actually work just as predicted? Why is that first world problems are exclusively listed but basic problems like world hunger are never even approached?

> or wouldn't have within our lifetimes.

And your life, your actual life, benefits, how?

It's frustrating people who parrot it think they're smart by saying it to others with no basis and finally when it does happen they're like SEE SEE!?

> Until then, history teaches that we'll just keep going up and up

And this is the more important part. As long as you're <40 you SHOULD always buy SPY or VOO, even at the very top.

People have been saying the crash has been coming since 2022. If you believed this and acted on it, you would've missed 3-4 +10%/yr returns.

As Buffet says: You can't time the market; be in it.

Stock prices don't have to crash. They can just stagnate while profits catch up and multiples compress.

Debt binges, on the other hand, tend to go bust with a bang. But after the recent private-credit scare, the AI build-out has been predominantly financed with stock. (I think.)

Google seems to have a good B2B and internal leveraging AI to make $. OpenAI/Microsoft seems to have squandered an early product lead.

And then you have the Muskiverse, where we have an rocket ship company that buys surplus cyber trucks, operates a space ISP, an AI company that produces virtual fetish porn and makes money renting GPUs to Anthropic, a rando dying social network and a tunnel company to cock-block public transit.

I may be underestimating the market for AI anime porn, but I think Anthropic is probably the best in class product right now. Google and AWS are probably the best positioned sellers of AI. SpaceXAI is the dark horse because they are likely enriching the dear leader more. OpenAI is fucked.

Do you have evidence to substantiate this claim? My brief research has shown the wealthier the investor, the likelier they are to use a passive strategy.

One thing that isn't going to happen is to magically extend the life of low Earth orbit satellites. You can have low latency, which you need for a telephone network, or you can have long lived satellites. But not both. You also need propellant to avoid collisions.

$250k is plausible for a high capacity cell site for an urban area. A small site with wireless backhaul can be $10k, or even less in some cases. If I am to believe the optimistic numbers, a Starlink bird costs about $500K and putting it into orbit cost of another $500K per satellite. But that means be believing that SpaceX can launch a used F9 for just $15 million, when the retail price of an F9 is $75 million.

EBITDA is the wrong yardstick when you're talking about space rockets having to deliver your infrastructure.

Other than it not going somewhere more productive. Are you willing to just bury 1/3 of your income in the back yard?

You can’t imagine a scenario where he goes lunatic and does something wild (again)?

and remember the best way to make a small fortune is to start with a large fortune.

Second, its critical that treasury bonds are denominated in USD. The us gov controls the monetary policy and can choose to inflate away the debt over time. This is in contrast to EM debt where they get trapped with foreign denominated bonds. See also the tensions around EU debt, greece, etc.

The powerful people holding the debt will seek to change the government to one that obeys them

To be clear, S&P hasn't announced a decision on this yet.

American market valuation is more than twice the entire US GDP. So ridiculous is a good description of what's going on.

These indices aim to replicate the market. They’re not trying to pick stocks.

There is a serious argument for saying they fail to replicate the market if they structurally exclude trillions of dollars of it.

What I find odd is that the comments are critical of how the police didn't caught thieves, but there is absolute silence towards thieves and the fact they have been engaged in thieving for ever.

Another comparison is people blaming the fire department for not inspecting sprinklers after an arsonist torched the place. It seems to me that the arsonist is the root cause, isn't it?

You need to vote for the next several years, no matter what, because you still have a chance.

Once corruption becomes the default, then you are REALLY screwed. Because it kills hope and the faith in the future in the most corrosive way possible.

The death of morale is a far worse and insidious fate that will make today look like a high point.

    > The only major cliff will be Elons shares

Remember also: index funds are some of the participants most keen to lend out their shares to short sellers. It's one of the rare ways they can boost returns above the raw index they follow.

What's the evidence for Anthropic stagnating?

It's a liability because the U.S. has promised to pay it. We haven't committed to a level of military spending backed by our full faith and credit.

EDIT: Never mind! Apparently we can just cut social security payments.

High levels of debt only signals high demand for this product.

This is super-counterintuitive, but the debt has little to do with the deficit. We could run a surplus and still be in the same level of debt (in fact, this would be a tremendous place to be). We could run a deficit and have no debt (just print money, duh). The decisions that go into column A generally do not impact the decisions our leaders have to make in column B, though there are of course convenient relationships between the two.

Argentina is doing fine. The real constraint would be that defaulting on the debt would cause a credit crisis and bank collapses.

> "There's no way you'll hurt yourself walking to the living room"

> "Read history: people always think everything is fine ... until it isn't."

So just buy the dip if it actually crashes.

At .1% they'll have the same weight as something like DoorDash.

Once they are in, they will catch most of the opportunities.

Personally, I do think SpaceX is overvalued at these proposed IPO numbers and I will trade accordingly. So should anyone else who is confident and competent at taking appropriate market positions.

1. https://www.investmentnews.com/practice-management/spacexs-i...

If the unit economics look great (my understanding is they're at least fine-to-good), then they should not be taking profit because it is very much in their interest to do capex to grow their capacity so that they can continue to grow.

It's a knife's edge because if they invest too aggressively it could lead to bankruptcy, but so far they've actually been quite conservative and given their unit economics they can afford to pay $$$$ for expensive inference compute (and indeed that's why they've inked a bunch of deals in the past month or two)

That has worked in the past for tech infrastructure, so there is clearly a gamble that it does that again here.

Can't they just be printed and massive funds borrowing money to buy shares?

I haven't found anything out of LLM's that has improved my life. It was a fun little toy but could never find a use case. But clearly, your mileage varies greatly from mine. That's cool.

I just personally don't the use in more when what I think many need is less. But that comes from essentially this point of view - “Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.” ― Buddha

I wouldn't say it "significantly improved my life" however. Everything AI has done for me right now is a "Nice to have" but it doesn't fulfill my needs.

Let me rephrase that to you: The vast, vast majority of people, even in the western world, even the white-collar part of the population, are not whales or power users of AI models.

I use ChatGPT daily. And I never spend more than $25/month. If I lost it, it would suck, but it would not affect my life significantly. I then see people spending $100 / day on Claude Code tokens, programmers in startups / tech companies rack up thousands a month in bills. These people are literally spending 100x more than me, a casual user.

Yeah, I suspect they follow some sort of whale economics - where a relatively small userbase (in the big picture) and providing them with a huge chunk of their revenue.

But still these companies are being valued as if they're some omnipresent companies which humanity simply can't live without.

What is _the proof_ if all the proofs are not _proofs_?

I don't babysit my LLM based services which are used by coaches and clients around the world. One of my LLM based solution get 30-4k daily hits and I have users coming back on the regular to use it. without babysitting, doing things that would take them hours of manual work and research.

I don't babysit the developers I work with and our clients, which both use LLM's themselves and at scale with their clients, serving all kinds of LLM powered services to millions of users worldwide.

You are not "seeing" the large adoption because:

- The technology is "a few years old" in its usable state - The corporate adoption cycle is slow - You have to understand the technology to use it in a good way, which most corporate devs and PM's do not

So it will take a bit for the "obvious" adaptation on large scale.

But you won't "know" when the large adoption happens.

Silent inference is growing every day, and that is what real adoption looks like - not an LLM being in your face chatbox, but running in the background, sorting, finding, fixing things, aligning data, figuring out analytics, tuning the ads, cleaning the datasets.

Is this not just "It's different this time" thinking? I remember it being used all the time during the dotcom boom

You mean 0DTE babies?

Even if all signs point to impending doom, at the end of the day if people are still buying, stocks will hold their value.

But why? The US population is set to dramatically shrink in the next 30 years. Where does all the money come from?

The faster your cash loses value, the stronger your incentive to trade it for something else. That something else can be financial assets.

> It's not got loads to do with large-scale, institutional investments

For investors, particularly retail investors, the consumer price index is most relevant. But for whatever it's worth, producer prices are up over 16% in April (7% excluding "foods, energy, and trade services," which jumped over 50% annualized) [1].

To be clear, I'm floating a hypothesis here. I have seen no evidence linking inflation to demand for these companies' shares. (If anything, it should be the inverse.)

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ppi.nr0.htm

Everything else is up around 3% YoY. And if energy and transportation are up double digits, and producer prices are up double digits, other consumer prices will follow.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Almost certainly, to some degree. But that doesn’t mean anything has to drop. Just not rise, or not rise as much as it would have. Or potentially some other company that would have gone public or sold shares doesn’t do it now.

History is also replete with people constantly predicting collapses that don't come. Timing the market is very hard with numbers, it's total nonsense if one is just going off vibes.

It's worse for the new investors. (If it crashes.) It's great for the old investors. They got an opportunity to sell if they wanted. If they didn't, they still own their shares, except in a company that has that IPO cash sitting in its account.

1. Twitter is purchased with debt

2. Debt is transferred to xAI via acquisition of X/Twitter

3. Debt is further transferred to SpaceX via acquisition of xAI

4. SpaceX IPO offered at extreme valuation

5. Index fund inclusion rules waived for SpaceX IPO: profitability requirement, inclusion period cut from 90 to 5 days

6. Index funds are largely held by passive investors such as pension funds.

7. Index fund managers are not incentivized to exclude a SpaceX from their indexes. (?)

8. Holders of original X/Twitter debt (banks) incentivized to support the rule waiver since post IPO, SpaceX will have liquidity to service/pay the debt.

9. Passive investors are unable to rapidly respond to these types of changes because liquidating portfolios will incur capital gains taxes. (?)

10. SpaceX is in Texas jurisdiction, where shareholder lawsuits are not possible and must instead go for arbitration. (?)

which is exactly why public markets have always been a superior price discovery mechanism in comparison to private markets

Like if both these stocks become penny stocks what happens to the indices?

Isn’t the whole point that they are hedged across the whole market?

You can take small profit now or much larger profit later. Insisting that companies need to be profitable even when growing revenue rapidly is failing the marshmallow test.

* For now, when they don't have to compete much against companies like DeepSeek who supplies inference at 1/10th of the cost

What’s the long term plan? Make it up on margin? 100% tariffs on Chinese open weight models?

I don’t plan on pulling from my 401k for decades, so the long term plan is the part I care about.

How come? On the books or they're actually selling internet cheaper than they source it?

> xAI is a money burning furnace

So far in the AI business, it looks like only Anthropic might be profitable in the near future. On the other hand, a lot of nonprofitable companies have IPOd for billions with the hopes that one day they will become profitable.

  World Online IPO

Meanwhile, Anthropic is adding ~$10-$15b ARR every month.

  That said, I don't even see "huge demand" for the AI triocorns right now. Unlike in 2000, most people are skeptical.

By the time you see the applications, the market will have moved on to value the next set of future cash flows.

If the market only valued the obvious, investors would jump in to buy the price up, until it met the average expectations.

The market might be wrong, but the question is not: "Have you yet to see?", but rather, "What do you see in the next three to five years?"

Otherwise, how could investors ever invest in a startup?

Startups never have revenues to justify their initial valuations.

It's a bet on the future.

Investors are future looking.

Consumers are present looking.

We didn't see LLM harnesses coming even two years ago. Now they generate billions per month.

Investors can't wait until reality materializes to make their estimations of the future.

That's why investing is hard.

You have to try to predict the future.

Also, keep in mind that a stock price discounts expected future cash flows. Is it likely that SpaceX will have a near-peer competitor within a few years? No, it's not, and that market share is being priced-in.

We literally couldn't.

> Was the overall percentage reduction in costs?

Starship will bill NASA 1/20th what SLS does.

> What is now enabled?

LEO. Artemis. Out of all of these companies, being confused about SpaceX is super weird.

Post 08 crash, all sorts of conspiracy websites like Zero Hedge were popular saying how the world economy would keep crashing.

while going with the tried&true makes some sense, I think we have to open our eyes to a different reality of our stock market… and this market concentration into few companies is going to get a lot worse…

Is there is historical evidence for that? As someone who used to follow Jeremy Grantham a lot (he considered himself a "bubble historian"), IIRC every bubble he studied always mean reverted, and it usually (maybe always, can't remember) overshot on the downside during the correction.

Also some EU pension funds are already in the process of divesting from US markets...

However, I do see a bit of reduced demand for hardware and datacenters which could reprice these companies to more sane multiples. There will be winners and losers.

Current system: Work until you die.

New system collapses: Work until you die.

New system lucks out: Probably get returns (pension).

Stock versus flow.

Amazon is worth $2.81T right now and only represents 4.03% of the S&P500.

So a $1T share would represent less than 2% of the S&P500. This is significant for a single company, and 6% for 3 shit-tier companies (SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic) is even more significant, but we're far from "losing retirement if they go bust"-levels.

Repayment to $0 isn't a reasonable goal but there are a lot of problems with your argument.

The biggest question is about sustainability. Is the debt-to-GDP ratio stable/manageable and is the interest rate on the debt below the economy's growth rate? If the answer is no, you have a problem.

> High levels of debt only signals high demand for this product.

This is backwards. The amount of debt is set mostly by government supply, which is driven by deficits. The demand signal is the price, which in this case is the yield. If the demand was high, yields would drop as the amount of debt grew. Instead, we have rising debt and rising yields, which means supply outstrips demand.

The US no longer has a AAA sovereign credit rating for a reason. When Moody's (the last agency to downgrade the US) stripped the US of its AAA rating, it cited "rising debt and interest costs 'that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns.'"

The biggest issue at this point isn't the principal, it's the interest. Interest is the fastest-growing line item in the federal budget. It's almost at $1 trillion/year now and expected to nearly double by 2035. You either have to cut from other spending or borrow more to pay the interest.

Your comment implies that this doesn't have a real cost, which is silly.

Pension operators are not typically passive. It's a different story to say that maybe they should be given that their returns don't always match up with index funds.

Also: SpaceX debt is $20 billion.

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citigroup

They all know how idiotic Tesla investors are, and they all want those idiots to pick up their bags.

On what grounds? What tort have you suffered?

If you want change (and who wouldn't?) you need to talk to your representatives, not the courts.

There is no source for this. Amodei just pulled a hypothetical explicitly distanced from Anthropic out of his ass and kickstarted some citogenesis when people half-remembered that number and started quoting it as truth.

The only material claim of Anthropic is that they would "turn an operating profit of $559 million in the June quarter ... The company might not remain profitable for the full year as it plans spending increases due to its vast computing needs." with an explicit disclaimer that: "It is unclear what accounting methods Anthropic has used to book revenue and costs, as the company isn’t yet required to follow the financial-reporting requirements of a public company."

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...

This is the exact same quarter where xAI is giving them deeply discounted compute, as such the numbers cannot be projected out to the later quarters once Anthropic has to actually pay xAI for the compute they use.

Finally, there's the reality that were the revenue numbers any good, Anthropic would just publish them and leapfrog OpenAI. That they do not provide clear GAAP numbers suggests the numbers are bad.

Gemini also told me about some obscure procedures to fix my wedding paperwork after it’d been submitted with typos.

"If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."

Of course, some special souls are excluded from blackouts lol.

The good news is that these folks seem to be in possession of a vibe-rator.

I don't think open weight models are likely to overtake or match frontier models in the next year or so when it comes to doing the most difficult tasks, but I do expect a lot of people who are currently funneling wheelbarrows of money to Anthropic to realize that they can achieve the vast majority of things they are doing with LLMs just as well with much cheaper open weight models.

Correction: index funds don't have a choice. They must follow the index, and so must buy the stock.

side effect: they'll have to sell other stocks, pushing their prices and weighting in market cap weighted indexes down.

> Passive investors are unable to rapidly respond to these types of changes because liquidating portfolios will incur capital gains taxes. (?)

For some active investors, yes. For passive investors (say you through your employer's pension fund), the tax isn't the problem. It's that the market has such a short time to adjust the price of these companies before indexes are forced to include them--and so might buy them at wildly inflated prices. Then, not too long after, the early investors can sell at still-high prices as soon as their lockup periods end. It's a massive transfer of wealth from pension funds and index investors to the early investors in those companies.

7. ETF managers that track an index aren't allowed to put discretion into what they buy. They offer much lower fees because they don't have to do any thinking, just executing on an algorithm.

8. SpaceX servicing the X/Twitter debt isn't really a question. The total amount of debt is equal to about one year of revenue at the moment, and it's under 3% of the expected market cap of SpaceX. It's less than a third of what SpaceX's IPO is expected to generate selling new shares to the public. It's a non-issue. On the other hand, the fees the banks will get for the IPO could easily convince them to support the rules waivers.

9. This is true of some passive investors. It is not true of pension funds (which are usually not passive) or 401ks or other tax-advantaged retirement accounts. It is likely to be partly true for any individual depending on how much of their assets is in a tax-advantaged account vs a regular account.

10. Yes to Texas. It seems like the arbitration part is likely to be true (SpaceX is certainly claiming it in the prospectus), but there is not the certainty of having a long history of litigation.

Returning to 2+3: The rolling up of all other private Musk companies into SpaceX certainly impacted the investors in those companies, and how much Musk owns vs other people. But the equity adjustments there would be interesting, not the debt.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/03/25/openai-a...

https://youtu.be/sYA-z0Y8WRQ

There is video explaining the process

Nevertheless it is part of a pattern of weird deals in Elon’s companies. He’ll do anything to move the goalposts and turn his failures into successes. There is no norm he won’t violate, no boundary he won’t cross.

What Spacex/Elon are doing is sketchy as hell. But the numbers involved here are not terribly meaningful for your portfolio.

At IPO, $75B of Spacex shares will be bought/sold. The S&P 500 uses float-adjusted weightings, and the current float-adjusted total is $54T. If you are 100% invested in SPY, then about 0.14% of your holdings will be spacex on IPO day (75B/54T~=0.14%).

Obviously Musk and friends will start dumping some of the locked up float (~1.65T) when they can. But they definitely will not be doing so in a way that crashes the price or the market. That's in nobody's interest.

If you assume that half of the shares end up as float eventually (post-lockup), you'd end up owning around 1.6% of spacex in your S&P 500 etf (875B/~55T~=1.6%). That's not nothing but it's not significant enough that you should consider liquidating your 401k.

I'm picking on Spacex specifically because they are the biggest and imo, have the sketchiest/worst finances of the 3.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500

What you should do is have an Investor Policy Statement[0].

This should contain at least two things:

- your desired Asset Allocation (e.g. 30% U.S. stocks, 30% International stocks, 20% U.S. bonds, 20% International bonds) which should be decided upon based on specific, personal goals and risk tolerance

- your strict policy rules for if and when to do anything, if ever, e.g. (don't sell anything ever, or... rebalance your portfolio if one of your allocations is more than 2% from the desired goal)

Now... if say U.S. stocks took a big dump in the next 6 months (while other asset classes either grew, held steady, or simply didn't drop as much), when it would drop below 28% of your allocation, and you'd open a spreadsheet and figure out which other asset classes to sell a few percentage of, to buy the reduced price U.S. stock funds. (This is a policy-driven buy low, sell high strategy.)

[0] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Investment_policy_statement

If you give me $100, I will give you back $101, funded by equity raises.

Very high growth, very high revenue, huge customer satisfaction.

We hope to be profitable one day, already foresee a mechanism to double profitability per transaction and also double the number of transactions our customers perform.

Please let me know if you are keen to invest.

SpaceX gave em discount for the pre IPO quarter so they can show profit

Anthropic signed a deal to lease compute that is the bulk of SpaceX revenue

Not particularly. When I posted the request for comment to HN it got crickets [1].

Not enough people care about this. And the "safe" option has kind of shifted with the other index providers having moved first. That said, there were a lot of proposals and I'm not expecting all of them to be adopted.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054324

S&P has historically been more conservative. My personal guess is they won't adopt all of the proposals.

Then why IPO? Isn't that even shorter term thinking?

The suckers who have their retirement savings in some kind of index fund because all the experts have been saying, "Buy index ETFs and forget about it" for decades are gonna get fleeced, and the wealthiest get wealthier.

* S&P500: 0.08% – 0.12%

* NASDAQ-100: 0.47% – 0.70%

* Russell 1000: 0.1%

B: but what about your emotions

Very glad to see HN stereotype being upended :)

An LLM correctly diagnosed it, and figure out that we could treat them with Nutri-drench Sheep Supplement, since Tractor Supply was sold out of the chicken version, and they are very similar.

Of course it then immediately recommended we use hemp bedding that would kill them a different way, but the saleswoman sanity checked all of the above,

100% survival rate.

Everyone’s thriving. Chickens would follow the medical advice again, I guess.

- Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer.

- Using it daily for Chinese-English translation. Significantly better than pre-LLM translation software. Also, great at teaching grammar, nuances, etc.

- General Q&A. Like "Googling" but much faster. This is probably the most common use case for me.

My bad, the satellite business is profitable. It's the space rocket division that operate at a loss, which they state clearly in their IPO filing.

> xAI is a money burning furnace

Even Mistral is earning more revenue than xAI and the french seem well on the way of having a sustainable business who becomes a key player in Europe.

But I might be biased, my information is mostly based on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI

I'd like to see how creative their accountants are before thrusting any numbers like that.

Sir, this is a casino/Keynesian Beauty Contest.

Markets value what the market participants think the other participants will value. On occasion, this intersects with reality.

Essentially the cutting edge reaches up to 99% of human performance on the task it is trained, which is good enough for triage but not for a final diagnosis. However, magic sometimes happens when you train a model to detect something, which you already know is there, on an examination that is cheaper, faster or less invasive than the human"gold standard". Conveniently, this dataset exists since it's common to first do a cheap examination like an X-ray, and then escalate if nothing is found (or if something is found that you want to see better, or a number of other possibilities).

Examples of AI outperforming humans like this includes AI detecting sacral fractures on x-rays better than radiologists (who normally take a CT to conclusively exclude it), detecting potential precursors to pancreatic cancer on non-contrast CTs (where contrast or an MRI is usually required) and detecting an occluded coronary artery on an ECG without the archetypical "ST-elevation changes".

See the link below for references: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9478257/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02640-w https://rebelem.com/a-winning-hand-in-cardiology/

So AI, as a general rule, doesn't usually match or exceed the upper bound of the "gold standard" medical performance. But it tends to carry the quality of the upper bound downwards towards the faster, less expensive and invasive methods. In some cases, like in the case of EKGs, that's huge. In some cases it saves time, in some cases it decreases miss rates from tired radiologists or triages their review feed. And in some cases it's not very useful.

LLMs doesn't come close to specialized radiology models at the moment, because LLMs are more about applying knowledge than creating new correlations. Of course that's also hugely useful, but that's a bit of a different topic to unpack.

- You can't blindly trust the US, or US businesses. Even less when it comes to critical infrastructure.

- You can't rely on underwater cables to be safe.

Starlink is a proven technology. They were the first major mover. But they will not be the last.

It'll be sort of like Tesla cars. For a long time they completely dominated the EV market, but now others are catching up. Yet Tesla is valued more than all other EV manufacturers combined. Some of this is of course from their vertical integration, but most of it is just hopium.

Same will happen with both Starlink, SpaceX, and other products under the Musk umbrella.

A whole lot of doctors, if not most, didn’t pick their profession out of an interest in medicine…

does "das man" know they are part of the crowd?

But other than that, yeah - outside of China, progress has been horrendously slow & Blue Origin, the only other US company that demonstrated a partially reusable rocket just had a devastating pad explosion, destroying one of their 2 rockets and their only launchpad.

This can't be treated as meaningful, given other projections and goals (Mars colony, etc.).

But now he's also trying to get the indexes to pay for the giant cash fire called X.ai and the far right huddle Twitter too.

I have zero interest in owning anything of either of those companies.

Is that before or after the program achieves profitability?

Unfortunately, the US Government continued to run themselves into the ground spending-wise and may have a difficult time with another bailout, unless everyone pretty much agrees that we cannot have a USG failure, so they all pretend like nothing happened.

Eventually the merry-go-round stops, I'm just not sure what the catalyst will be, and it might be 100 years from now.

So why not just stick to the roles we agreed on when buying in?

The tiny float and just a few days before the index funds buy means they have to buy without any more revenue / earnings info than was already published pre-IPO. 90 days is a quarter, so there WILL be more price discovery before a 0 day index fund seasoning period.

I know very little about markets, but: aren't the short-sellers just going to provide liquidity for the big index funds? Like, if the funds HAVE to buy SpaceX, and the funds are enormous, wont every single stock sold short be immediately gobbled up, as well as pretty much anyone else wanting to sell? Even if everyone else is selling like mad, it wont affect price much at all?

Maybe this is naive, but if these enormous funds are more or less forced to buy SpaceX, it seems impossible that "actual price discovery" is going to happen in any reasonable amount of time, and the short-sellers will be screwed.

I can’t find any because the admin is so horrendously corrupt.

Interpreting reports, avoiding drug interactions, or knowing when to seek medical care. And before people object- I can literally use the same LLM my doctor does to check these things, without waiting 2 weeks for an appointment.

I helped my parents work through bacterial culture results when my dad was hospitalized with sepsis, and had them ask their doctor for specific follow up tests.

I rebuilt my gas furnace and fixed my dishwasher with AI as an assistant.

Those aren't the fun parts tho. My favorite is touring art museums ancient historical sites with an LLM guide. It can give me a short academic essay about every artist, painting, or artifact. It can pull out details quirky stories about the history that I specifically would find interesting.

I cant recommend this enough. Its like visiting with a 10 PhD docents in art history.

No body who has a choice is using Grok

> Is Grok solving Erdos problems?

Mēh! At a slower rate than models a fraction of the price

I don't understand this. It increased productivity of every developer in the western world, so it didn't really give you an advantage. Your output is more valuable, but your colleagues' output is more valuable too, and your competitors' output too, and so on. So you're doing more things at the same salary and it's not like your company or your employer is making more money than usual or awarding you more eoy bonus. If your "life-change" is "I'm writing more code" without any other advantage (and with the possible disadvantage of your role changing, or being at risk), why is it desirable?

I am a radiologist and researcher predominately focused on AI.

I find it interesting that using lines of code as a metric is making a comeback.

A self driving car doing better than a drunk on the freeway doesn't reassure me that it'll do better than sober me in a snowstorm.

If there exists sufficient demand for the product of space launches then it's probably reasonable to expect their to be a near-peer competitor soon, but that's only if SpaceX were to be profitable, which it isn't, even with the subsidization by Starlink on the order of many billions.

Edit: I should add the AI bubble can absolutely burst but there is no reason to believe these IPOs are the end of the ride. If I knew I would be…

S&P has not announced a methodology change yet.

A small number of companies have always driven most stock-market gains. Betting on size isn't fundamentally a bad bet. But it is a bet against value and the historical tendency for small companies to be higher risk and higher reward.

Police are only useful so long as they are effective as policing. It’s insanely difficult to put a price on a cost center which doesn’t add value, but only has a chance to reduce the loss of value if they do their job well.

The problem with the fire department analogy is that there’s a lens through which the fire department IS the arsonist here, or is at least pouring accelerant at the future site of the arson. If you don’t know why I would call the bankers at S&P, Nasdaq the arsonists in this case, you aren’t equipped with the background info about SpaceX’s fast track + goalpost moving to index funds.

I guess we should be thankful there aren’t more Luigi jokes in the comments.

S&P hasn’t changed any rules yet.

Of course I’ll vote, and be more active in protests and campaigns, but TBH the general vibe is that it’s already too late. It’s that bad.

No, it depends on the index in question.

So we’ve got a combination of signs that they’ve been inflating their revenue growth, and signs that their customers are losing their appetite for contributing to that revenue growth. I suppose it’s not a slam dunk, but it feels to me like as strong an indicator as one could hope for a private blitzscaler startup like this.

Whatever Anthropic is paying is too much, since it means xAI will get to observe Anthropic's software, weights and operations in detail. It's probably contractually prohibited from doing so, but I doubt that would stop Musk, given what's at stake.

In the alternate timeline they would have held shares in a private company. They're still not really getting burned other than getting a tax bill.

> ETF managers that track an index aren't allowed to put discretion into what they buy.

I detect a contradiction here.

Right, if they've advertised as an S&P 500 index fund, they have to robotically follow the S&P 500, stupid inclusions and all. Changing that strategy would require ... a lengthy process involving input from shareholders.

However, someone can still start e.g. a "classic S&P 500" fund that follows the old rules for inclusion, and I suspect we'll see that in response to these recent decision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI

Unfortunately, if you really start digging in to what is going on in the financial world, you will find he has violated no norms here. This is not a defense of Elon; this is a condemnation of the entire financial industry.

The whole thing scares me, honestly. It has never been a clean happy market where lots of honest people get together and are just honestly trying to make a better world for each other, there is no golden past where people were just nice or anything, but damn if computers don't let people build some structures that the robber barons of old could only have dreamt of. I'm really concerned that "index and chill" doesn't just have a "best by" date but that the best-by date could be in the past; I've heard of an awful lot of ways of exploiting it and other retirements schemes we have, this is just one. I find it implausible that these ideas exist but nobody is doing them.

IF SpaceX is actually worth 400-500bn and it's a few hundred billion dollars of fleece, sure, that's a "small" amount (still.. lord almighty it is never enough for these people). But the hazard is that it is a fleece. That would shake confidence in the system, the bear case is basically unlimited at that point.