Right, I mean Tesla had generated lifetime revenue of 150mm, SpaceX did >18 billion last year. They have a monopoly on cheap space flight, just signed a big data center contract with a big user of compute (and built that data center quickly), have good internet service, etc etc
Seems worth at least 100x, and it doesn't seem surprising that it gets an extra 10x
Revenue is not a basis for valuation otherwise Walmart would be more valuable than Nvidia, Apple and Google combined. And I agree that SpaceX would be correctly valued at 180b.
Space TAM is not so large. Starlink ARPU is decreasing fast as well. And they rent the data center because Grok doesn't have enough usage, overall it's a bad usage of capital.
> Revenue is not a basis for valuation otherwise Walmart would be more valuable than Nvidia, Apple and Google
This is a confused take
Revenue is an excellent basis for comparison of valuations if the growth rates are similar. Nvidia is worth what it is because of its vertical growth rate
If company A makes a 100U this year and I think it's going to double by the end of the year (to 200U) I would rather hold shares of that than company B which makes 150U per year and it's growing 10% yoy.
Next year I'll have a company making 200U, whereas B will only be making 165U. So I would pay more for A today than I would for B.
As an aside, Apple and Google sum to more revenue than Walmart and have better growth. So your claim was correct five years ago and the growth rates have literally shown you why Apple and Google have higher market caps
I haven't even gotten to explain the space TAM, but suffice to say black car tam was small before Uber. (What % of black car cabs did Uber provide in their first year offering the service)
No you are missing the point. Walmart doesn't have the tech premium because Walmart has low margins, whereas Apple and Google have high ones. This is why unit economics matters.
Growth is important, but only if you can keep a high margin on the products you sell : it's not the case with Starlink (the main profitable activity), ARPU is down 23% yoy, at 66$ in 2026. Compare it to 99$ in 2023.
Last point, growth in market caps have diminishing returns, and it's obvious that it's easier to do a x100 if you start from 1b than 1750b. SpaceX runs the classic strategy of "high MC, low float" that has ruined many altcoins in crypto for the benefit of insiders who will want to sell to realize their gains.
It's not a very good point. Yes, obviously margins matter. In tech and startups, growth tends to matter more (often because these are high margin businesses, but also because growth compounds)
Like, yes, Google has 55% margins to Walmart's 24% (and the operating margin gap is similar), but Google is also growing 17% to Walmart's 5%.
Google will _gladly_ take a hit to their margins as they emphasize Cloud revenue because that unlocks growth
SpaceX is leaving enough float, it doesn't matter, indexes are float adjusted anyways, I hate that I have to defend them against bad takes
Google is well positioned to earn from this service, especially if they can prove that their search service is superior to competitors. While they lose some of their moat, they are well positioned to dominate the market, just like they did in the consumer space.
People asking any AI chat interface for ideas for their honeymoon will trigger some kind of search.
SEO is still relevant and Google might still be able to sell top spots in their search so LLMs will pick it up.
exactly. Claude is in a niche. It's a high-value niche right now, but a niche nonetheless. Normies don't use claude much based on the numbers I saw. Search is still highly relevant and Google seems well positioned to capitalize on it.
so the argument here is that its too niche for google to care ? i dont belive that they made explicit decision to make a lame version of claude code that their own devs dont use.
Of course that's not to say that the advertising situation will be identical to that of pre-LLM search engines, and the differences may lead to radically different economic models and user experiences. But I was just correcting your statement.
In other sectors, juniors are paid a subsistence wage for a few years, so they are still profitable for the company during training. A plumber still needs a cheap pair of arms to move around a bathtub.
So then the European ones should join with European copyright holders to sue OpenAI/Anthropic and watch them trying to BS their way around what they train on.
Training a model on copyrighted material is fair use and copyright holders already operate a mafia-style extortion ring in Europe, so I don't think that's a good idea.
It's not just a narrative and has been proven true, at least for (2).[0]
For (1), I think that a good discussion with any business owner in a migrant-dominated field will tell you that hiring foreigners is done to keep costs low and avoid Baumol's law. As a result, locals don't want to work in such fields, reinforcing the need for migrants.
So what you're saying is that people arriving in a country don't earn as much as people with established ties there? Cool. I wonder how that could be? /s
> people arriving in a country don't earn as much as people with established ties there
Not true as Europeans are not concerned.
> how that could be
It doesn't have to be like this; for instance, you could require that migrant workers earn at least 2x the median salary to get a visa. It would avoid the whole exploitation of third-world workers paid a subsistence salary to save on costs.
The issue is that if you import all of skilled workers you need, salaries won't rise in the branch, and students or workers in adjacent fields don't have any incentives to learn the skill. If you can hire Syldavian photonics engineers for 50k$/y, no one is incentivized to learn photonics.
This is why in the modern world some sectors are always crying about "worker shortages" while asking always more migrant workers to come in - salaries are compressed as a result, and locals have no incentives to enter the branch.
Hence importing workers may be useful for needs that are limited in time and space (say, install a specialized foreign machinery in a power plant), but systematic importation leads to dequalification of the local workers, who flee the branch that has now low salaries.
>The facts show that just like the amount of labor is not fixed, neither is the size of the economy (fixed pie fallacy) and as more work is done, the economy grows
Your reply is a glib thought-terminating cliche strawman that doesn't address their point at all. Interesting!
Those theories are based mainly on the effect of Cuban immigration in Miami, however they lack a control so you can't really conclude anything.
Besides, yeah, if you hire people who will work for any salary, the amount of jobs will increase, but salaries will decrease, for locals as well. After some time, locals will flee sectors where the migrant workers are brought in, creating further self-inflicted "labor shortages"...requiring more migrants!
The main winners are capital owners, who, thanks to the migrant workers, can now acquire a larger part of the added value generated by workers.
"Being able to parent" is something you don't know about before you have your first child, and each child increases exponentially the difficulty. You can manage ok the first one and be overwhelmed when the second one is born.
Also not everyone is a trust fund kid that works at a FAANG: people get sick, lose jobs, divorce, change homes, and so on.
I'm really happy that you found the perfect antifragile optimum in your life, but this kind of "vae victis" thinking will only make parents more miserable and decrease birth rates.
love that not having kids when you can’t actually afford your own existence at that time is a hot take that no one could know in advance that they shouldn’t do. Also love that I SPECIFICALLY called out your argument, almost like you couldn’t even finish reading before needing to get in your super well thought response. That’s sarcasm, figured I’d make sure it was clear since the reading thing is up in the air.
I think that you should try to have kids (plural) before trying to make grand and contemptuous theories about parents.
All of the people who say you should have kids if $X... will be quite happy in their old days to have the other irresponsible parents' children to wipe their ass and bring them food in the fridge. I really hope that public pensions get scrapped for this exact reason.
I think that you should try to have kids (plural) before trying to make grand and contemptuous theories about parents.
All of the people who say you should have kids if $X... will be quite happy in their old days to have the other irresponsible parents' children to wipe their ass and bring them food in the fridge.
Banning phones at school has nothing to do with freedom to use phones. You are not restrained in your freedom because using you smartphone while driving is forbidden.
Kids go to school to learn, not to watch modern cable shopping network (aka Tiktok/Instagram).
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