• UnderpantsWeevil
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    20 hours ago

    In 2-3 weeks the Q2 report will release at which 20% of stocks held by employees will be unlocked, which has hit even profitable and not-fantasy-based companies hard in the past.

    When you consider the kind of life changing amounts of money even a few thousand shares sell for at current rates, they’d be crazy not to.

    My guess is fElon wants the stock to stay high until next summer when he can sell, but he NEEDS it to stay high until November when early investors can cash out

    It’s fallen maybe 12% since the IPO. You’re talking about shares that were trading for a few bucks during the original debt offerings. Marc Andressen has something like a 6000% ROI on his holdings even at current prices.

    If this company dropped by 50%, it would still be worth in the $800B range. There’s no world in which current shareholders don’t make fuckoff amounts of profit. The only question is whether we’re talking nine figures or ten.

    • Folstar@lemmus.org
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      19 hours ago

      50% might prove optimistic. The rules that were bent for SpaceX exist for reasons. The August dump will be 4X the shares already in the wild. You are right, employees would be crazy not to sell at current rates. SpaceX employees are probably smart and/or educated enough to read the white papers on all these science fantasy projects and know they are pure fantasy. Cool stuff to fire up investment bros, but not the kind of thing they want to be tasked with trying to make reality. Point being, the floor for what an employee would not sale is going to be really low. True believers might hold, but anyone who smells the BS or just likes money will gleefully sell at 50% of current.

      Meanwhile, China is making great strides in VTVL and much cheaper, open source LLMs. The EU is eager to find home grown or at the least not-American tech solutions. Every headline makes SpaceX look less and less likely to make ANY profits, let alone completely dominate supposedly multi-trillion dollar markets.

      • wewbull@feddit.uk
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        19 hours ago

        SpaceX employees are probably not happy about being used as a dumping ground for an AI black hole company. I expect many are counting the days until they can leave.

      • UnderpantsWeevil
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        18 hours ago

        The August dump will be 4X the shares already in the wild.

        So, from 1% of market cap to 2%?

        Spread over shareholders who still hold north of 90% of the company?

        Meanwhile, China is making great strides in VTVL and much cheaper, open source LLMs. The EU is eager to find home grown or at the least not-American tech solutions.

        China (and India and Brazil, among others) are all making huge investments in aerospace. The EU is certainly making a lot of noise, but because everything is privatized to fuck, what you’re left with is guess like Richard Branson paddin wallets while programs like the FCAS flounder.

        Every headline makes SpaceX look less and less likely to make ANY profits

        Starlink is still the modern word in satellite communication. That’s worth a few hundred billion on it’s face.

        Will this advantage last? Idk. Probably not, but maybe.

        At a minimum, if you want to be friendly with America, you’ll need to buy from Musk.

        • Folstar@lemmus.org
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          14 hours ago

          Starlink, which is nowhere near worth that much even under a best case scenario (compare to other comm companies), can make money and SpaceX still not make any profits because of the the xAI money pit. Also, no, the advantage will not last. The last 30 years of satellite communications have been one seemingly promising idea after another that fizzled out or was made obsolete. No reason to think that trend will change now, especially not when the Starlink model is extremely resource intensive.

          • UnderpantsWeevil
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            12 hours ago

            Starlink, which is nowhere near worth that much even under a best case scenario

            The existing network plus whatever Elon Musk can launch in the next twenty years, assuming an absence of competition could be a trillion dollar company. When you’ve got a monopoly on military satellite technology in a market full of warring super states, that’s a lot of economic leverage.

            I’m deeply skeptical that he’ll have that edge for long. But I can at least interesting someone who thinks it’s worth a gamble.

            • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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              10 hours ago

              Who is going to pay the money for there to be a reasonable return on that value? I don’t have Starlink, I have no need for it, since there’s a cable coming into where I live. Sure there’s people that live in remote places that it’s useful for. But that’s not a lot of people.

              There are military applications, but Musk is a flake not military wants to be dependent on him. Every country in the world is spending a lot of money to end their dependence on the US defense industrial complex, so there will be alternatives for military purposes.

              Maybe it can work in vehicles? But if the price is too high people will just use 5G or just go without access for a while.

              Starlink is just a product to fill in some edge cases. It will probably make a steady profit, but there will be competition from Europe and China before too long.

              • UnderpantsWeevil
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                9 hours ago

                Who is going to pay the money for there to be a reasonable return on that value?

                Government militaries, mostly. The Pentagon and it’s NATO allies, militaries across the Pacific Rim, Ukraine, etc.

                • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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                  9 hours ago

                  Yeah, so everyone is moving away from dependencies on the US. Not likely anyone will want their comms dependent on a system a US President (or Elon Musk) can shut down for leverage in a trade deal.