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This is a datacenter REIT bolted onto a social media company bolted onto launch business bolted onto a niche ISP. The expected price to sales is ~100x. The best datacenter REITs trade at ~10x and pay a dividend, which SpaceX does not. Meta trades at ~7x sales. Comcast is one of the best-run ISPs, and it pays a 5.5% dividend on a stock trading at < 1x sales.
To say SpaceX is overvalued is to even beginning to convey the magnitude of the situation. It's going to be very painful when the valuation normalizes.
It fills me with a bit of dread about the future of the market. I am 10 years out from retirement, have a bit over 1M sitting in that market, and I wonder if it will implode in the meantime. I am fairly committed to the "invest like a dead man" (i.e. index funds, no touch), but the world we live in today makes me have real doubts that the next few decades will look anything like the last few.
To point, the economic uncertainties around geopolitics, AI, and war, plus irresponsible debt spending by governments and the prospect of QE (and higher inflation), is pushing long term rates steadily higher. There’s a reasonable chance that 30y treasuries are nearing 6% by the end of next year. Remember that rates and bond prices are inversely related. Anyone who holds bonds in this market will likely lose money. Holding to maturity won’t help much either because if inflation continues to rise, as is a major concern, most or all of that 5% yield gets eaten.
The market of a good leader is a lack of chaos. We are seeing the effects of a chaotic mind untethered from an accurate view of reality. Buckle up
So, the optimists all swim in the cash while your contrary position fails to keep pace with the bull market; and then the bear market hits and you all get obliterated equally.
https://youtu.be/p25PPBgMiEk
Amazon's PE in 2013 was 3000+, but you'd still be up almost 20x if you purchased their stock back then.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/markets/markets-ne...
That doesn't mean Tesla or SpaceX are good buys though. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't.
Other than that I’m just not over investing for retirement and instead making sure the money is spent today on family growth and experience.
I eventually just got tired of everyone with an opinion on what doing it right looks like or how to predict the market.
Stocks, bonds, etc are effectively NFTs of "you own a monkey image". That monkey image can go poof on a 'market correction' aka 95% of investors lose everything.
With precious metals, you own the material. And silver, gold, platinum, palladium, rhodium and others have innate usage for a variety of industrial and jewelery uses. Their prices may change, but catalytics arent just going to bottom out.
We still have stocks, cause 401k's. But we also have a sizable metal buffer now.
from my research I know that in years where SnP500 drops too much (recessionary periods), BRK-B would soften the blow as Value stocks tend to do well in such times. And usually that works for me.
google invests in anthropic and spacex - and shows appreciated values as earnings. Then it turns around and rents tpus to anthropic to show it as revenues. The main buyers and sellers for all of this are the hyperscalers, openai and anthropic.
It is a game of musical chairs while the party is still on.
You mean the company with such a bad reputation that it had to aggressively rebrand? I take it you've never had the displeasure of doing business with them.
That said it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to learn that it was one of the most profitable ISPs for investors. That would fit quite well with the general theme of prioritizing the interests of investors over all else.
This isn’t hypothetical. SpaceX is increasing Starlink revenue by like 50% per year. And their current Starlink constellation, about 10,000 satellites, has been launched entirely by Falcon 9. They’ve been waiting to launch much larger satellites on starship (in fact they had versions of these ready for several years now, and recently did suborbital tests of some of them on recent starship flights). Starship is about 5-10 times the capacity of Falcon 9, is fully reusable, & has larger diameter allowing much larger satellites. They asked for approval for roughly 40,000 of these larger satellites (~3 times the size of current ones, each about 10 times the bandwidth… and half of the 10,000 are even older designs), and they may eventually do about 100,000 of them & further increase the size and reduce latency (by operating at lower altitude). It’s not an exaggeration to say SpaceX intends to increase bandwidth by at least 100x, maybe a lot more. They intend to use a lot of this extra capacity to expand into mobile coverage as well. They are leveraging their platform for incredibly important national defense capabilities as well, and they operate as their own backhaul using on-board laser links. They can service anywhere in the world that will let them, including lucrative sectors like aviation. I do think it makes sense to value SpaceX as a rapidly growing business, not as a dividend-giving, plateaued ISP like Comcast.
This is all before even mentioning the idea of orbital datacenters.
That had to be 20 years ago? Not that anyone likes the cable company.
As a comcast customer, their core internet service seems really solid. It comes in through some sketchy 1980s cables installed by some company who got bought by some company who got bought by Comcast. So occasionally a router in the back of a gas station blows up, the cable system wasn't exactly built to AT&T standards.
If you ignore data caps the core service itself does seem to be much better these days than it was 10 let alone 25 years ago. But then again my sample set consists exclusively of locations where they have one or two FttH offerings as competition so it's not as though they could have remained in such markets without upgrading.
Somewhat tangentially I find it surprising how fast MoCA is when you consider the cables it runs on top of.
It's not a "general theme", it's right there in the name of the economic system.
It's the swiss cheese model, hidden behind curtains.
This is like a giant sign saying you can buy $2 for a $1.
They seem to believe the over valuation can be hidden if the shares get picked up by the public quickly enough or that the it can be a quick exit that leaves the public holding the bag.
When the indexes get in -- watch out!
They will have to buy so much SpaceX, that it will force them to sell everything else.
It's still quite some money but it won't crush the market by itself.
Conventional wisdom is that building datacenters is easy, but maybe the CW is wrong on this? If it were easy, companies would not be talking about spending $1500+/kg to put datacenters in orbit. Note that they assume they can get the chips either way, they just need somewhere to run them and they are saying it will be easier to get them orbital than to literally do what Digital Realty does now.
Once the SEC got defanged, retail investors once again became the primary target.
The scale of corruption in trying to use Index-Funds and Retail investors as the exit liquidity to bail out the VCs who were pumping the AI hype is unheard of.
It's become so damn brazen! I'm surprised Musk's image hasn't crumbled in front of his fan-bois.
Furthermore, dividends are approved by the board once per quarter or once per year. A dividend on a stock is not a contractual guarantee like it is on a bond. Therefore, it cannot be a basis of value.
With your logic, Berkshire Hathaway is a long-running greater-fool tulip bubble whose shares are only bidded up by finding more shmucks.
If I knew for certain (big if) that a business would never have a liquidity event and I couldn't transfer my ownership then it's dead capital for all intents and purposes and you could consider its value essentially $0, right?
Even if a company doesn't currently pay dividends, it will eventually do so or be purchased by a company that does. That's the theory at least.
“Underlying value” is a meaningless word btw
Which for most investors with Class C/D shares is... the square root of zero.
They assert no control over the business, the only way to benefit from the stock is to find another shmuck to buy it at a higher price.
Apple, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, Alphabet, Meta, Salesforce, and Qualcomm all pay dividends now. It's not unreasonable to expect Uber and Tesla to pay in the future. However, the median time after IPO for similar companies to pay a dividend is close to 20 years. So we could expect Uber to perhaps wfstart paying sometime around 2039. Tesla...is Tesla so who knows?
It is a way to distribute the money to the investors, that their tax system favors.
You are correct that stock buybacks are another way that companies reward their shareholders.
The big difference is you pay taxes of dividends - you don't pay taxes on the stock going up year over year. Unrealized gains compound much faster than realized ones.
Painful for everyone except the grifters who are engineering this and can get out early enough with their stolen millions and billions. Musk's companies are just a giant pyramid scheme.
https://x.com/i/status/2061808563979251857
Google purchased 10% of SpaceX over a decade ago. After dilution they probably own around 5%.
SpaceX is valued at a whopping 94x revenue. This deal increases SpaceX's revenue by $11 billion per year. If SpaceX maintains this revenue multiplier, then this single deal boosts SpaceX's valuation by 94 x 11 billion = $1 trillion dollars. Google owns 5% of SpaceX, so they make 50 billion dollars. Google spends 10 billion and makes 50 billion, $40 billion profit.
The even better part is that because of this deal, SpaceX is now profitable. The S&P requires companies to demonstrate 12 months of profits before they can enter the S&P 500 index. SpaceX lobbied to have this profitability requirement removed, but S&P said no and refused to rewrite the rules.
Now with this incredible deal, SpaceX is now GAAP profitable under the existing rules, and they get to join the index next year without a rule change.
Truly a brilliant deal for everyone involved.
As far as I know they really will be paying $11 billion annually in liquid cash to SpaceX (not a small ask) starting this year, and all they get in return is more money on paper?
What incentive do they have to help SpaceX out like this at great cost, if they're not actually buying something valuable? Why are they incentivized to do this if it's just an empty deal and financial engineering? Genuine, good faith question: what are they getting out of this?
And this deal protects Google's investment. Google owns close to $100 billion of SpaceX stock. This deal increases SpaceX's revenue by 30%, and pushes SpaceX into profitability. With this deal, SpaceX is eligible for S&P inclusion. Assuming $6-7 trillion in S&P 500 tracked funds, and a 1% SpaceX weight after a year, this is $600-700 billion in demand for SpaceX stock. It means Google now has someone to unload its position off to. This play directly protects Google's investments.
You keep saying this even though you don’t present any evidence that it will make SpaceX profitable. Where are your numbers?
Perhaps they only need to pay $11B, or $16.5B, before exiting the contract.
Plus, instead of getting nothing for these $11B/year, they surely get some compute power that should have some value.
from the linked article
>After this year, the agreement can be terminated by either party provided they give 90 days’ notice.
The explanation that this is just financial engineering (which to me, means neither Google nor SpaceX is getting anything out of this other than looking better on paper) doesn't make sense to me. How does this financial engineering benefit Google?
Even if they have an exit option, why is Google (a private, separate, self-interested firm) giving a single dollar to SpaceX if the deal isn't mutually beneficial?
This site is turning into conspiracy central
Either way, 500% return on the spend would be amazing
Off the top of my head, there is a very well established business involving buying expensive things and leasing them to the companies that intend to operate them so they can sell services: aircraft leasing.
AER is the biggest player and they have a P/E ratio of, drumroll please, 6. And I expect that GPUs, despite currently looking like an appreciating asset, will actually depreciate faster than aircraft in the long run.
Sidenote: 3 is actually high. 94 is absolutely ridiculous.
Do you mean low? AAPL has a ps of 10.
It’s almost like the future we were promised in the 1960’s would immediately materialise the moment launch costs drop. Starship will be revolutionary if it pans out the way we expect (as the shuttle would have been, had it kept the low cost promise), but that’s not enough to warrant that 94 number.
It's not clear if Musk (SpaceX/X.ai) is really pursuing AI any more - I expect he hasn't necessarily given up on it, and he hasn't said he has, but it seems he's rented out almost all of his GPUs to Anthropic and Google, so that's not going to be much of a revenue generator, at least for time being.
It was in the news not too long ago that Musk was looking to use Samsung to fabricate "AI chips", presumably either for X.ai and/or Tesla, so perhaps he's basically put X.ai on hold until he can reboot his efforts with his own chips (& perhaps a new datacenter)?
It will very likely be valued much, much higher. The SpaceX IPO is, in itself, a marvelous piece of financial engineering (requiring co-operation among multiple actors) which has been a long time in the works.
- Right out of the gate nearly all retail investment platforms have dramatically reduced requirements for purchasing an IPO, most notably Fidelity, which previously required $500,000 in your account to participate in an IPO reduced (on Friday) this amount to $2,000
- Retail investment, despite being quieter in the post-WSB era, is at all time highs.
- Reports are that the SpaceX IPO is already highly oversubscribed, meaning there are many more retail investors interested than there are shares available.
- SpaceX has a wildy low float of only ~4% which means price discovery will be much slower then normal, especially with aforementioned demand
- All of these retail platforms enforce some sort of "soft lock-in" whereby you're excluded from future IPOs if you sell your shares within 15-30 days. So if you want to get out you're not going to be able to participate in Anthropic/OpenAI IPOs in a few months.
- Coincidentally, most of the major indexes (thankfully excluding the S&P 500) have adjusted their rules to require only 15 days post-IPO before inclusion and have no profitability requirements. Many also adjusted the rules so that low float IPOs have their weight multiplied despite the low float.
- Many retirement accounts, in one way or another, are required to track these indexes and will be forced to buy these SpaceX shares at a very likely frenzied price and further drive the price up.
SpaceX will very likely open with far more retail demand than shares, the insiders (VCs, employees etc) will still be legally locked from selling, retail investors are penalized if they sell, and so the demand will be high and supply very low.
If they can keep this demand hyped for just 3 weeks, price will still be elevated when retirement accounts are forced to buy... roughly the same time retail investor start seeing the penalty for selling expiring (meaning it is not irrational at all to be in the IPO, but it is irrational to sell before being listed in an index).
Fun fact: the other fascinating thing about this IPO is the terms for insider lock-in. At first earnings (Jun 30) inside investors unlock and can therefor liquidate 20% of their shares... but if the stock performs well, they can unlock and additional 10%. There are additional rules for continued unlocking of more shares depending on performance as time goes on. So everyone on the inside has a very vested interest in a spike in stock prices: not only will their stocks be worth more, but they can realize that value faster.
I would be surprised if SpaceX price doesn't explode in the first few weeks because for everyone involved this would make sense. It's only in August that we'll start seeing the really interesting things start happening.
Not at all surprising that the US in 2026 has degenerated to the point of turning the equity market itself into a bucket shop.
e.g. with https://www.nordnet.dk/kampagner/ipo/spacex for Denmark.
The minimum is 1 share (~$135), the FAQ on "when can I sell" says "Once trading begins in SpaceX, you can sell your shares at the current market price, which can be both higher and lower than the IPO price."
I understand the gist here, but come on. This is a generational company. It’s the only relevant space launch business, and has its tentacles deep in AI infrastructure as well. Maybe the AI bet is foolish — I don’t know — you should short it!
It’s possible, and common, for one large company to have multiple business lines, each worthy of a very different P/E multiplier. In principle you end up with a weighted average of some sort.
edit: Matt Levine has some great articles about this phenomenon and how some companies try to juice it.
It’s another misdirection.
All of Musks business stuff highly depends on first mover advantage.
If people now selling it as a 'generational company' than it becomes even more stupid.
He didn't invent an unkown solution he is hiding to transform something into gold, he only put a lot of money into rockets.
And the rockets right now don't even have enough payload to have unlimited potential. If Space-X knows how to build a rocket very efficient, 10 years later other companies can do that too.
That final number doesn't make sense: if you're trading shares at $X revenue, increasing the revenue by $Y multiplier doesn't increase the share price by the same multiplier.
And the bigger play is this deal pushes SpaceX over the finish line for S&P 500 inclusion. That's worth tens of billions for everyone involved.
This deal is part of that revenue growth. So the new revenue would be already partially or even fully priced-in.
Perhaps it reduces uncertainty around the growth rate, but expectations were already sky-high, as shown by the multiple!
But your point stands, ain't no way xAI competing in that game.
The wrinkle is that they are planning to deploy those GPUs in space. That’s what people are most skeptical about, I think!
Otherwise a dump works too. There's plenty of money to be made from carefully timed shorting.
The entire AI field has been plagued by circular financing deals, so this is not new. But it's new in aerospace, and the market institutions appear complicit.
Otherwise, why is this IPO getting such unique treatment on such flimsy fundamentals?
This isn’t how valuations work. The PE ratio isn’t fixed. It doesn’t scale with revenue. It’s based on projected future growth. This kind of deal is expected, meaning this deal likely won’t move SpaceX’s market cap much. Certainly not by anywhere close to $1T. That’s +60% of the entire pre-IPO market cap.
Google is doing this because they need more compute and TSMC is booked out for years.
That's not how valuations work. Also, it is not unlikely that SpaceX's valuation drops post-IPO (tech was 6.65% in the most recent trading session) due to its very rich valuation and a long tenured investor based that is probably looking to get liquid.
Google is renting compute from SpaceX because they need GPUs and SpaceX owns a huge supply of them and has excess capacity bc no one uses Grok. Google has stated that this is a temporary arrangement while they continue to build out their own capacity.
What is the alternative?
> Isn’t that the entire point of a capitalist economy?
> What is the alternative?
If the point is to be cancer, then the alternative is to kill it.
Things are getting so out of hand, this former-libertarian is getting to the point were he'd support any market regulation that makes libertarians cry.
Same thing they used to say about Lehman.
Google’s investment in SpaceX is completely orthogonal to the analysis. Equity investments aren’t revenue for the issuer. (Gains on sale would be revenue to the investor, in which case, this would be Google, not SpaceX.)
Google's purchase sends cash to to SpaceX, which they report as revenue, and which they earn a profit from.
You don’t know what you’re talking about and are way out of your lane. Stop now. In fact, you should retract your parent comment and apologize to the community for leading them astray.
Did you even try to ask even ChatGPT or Claude about this first?
This is a huge claim for which we have no evidence.
$920mm/month at 30% datacenter margins yields $3bn in gross profit. Less in net income. That doesn’t cover SpaceX’s losses.
I don’t think google would spend this money if they did not need this compute, and who know what will happen with SpaceX valuation over the course of a few yrs.
Most things like this are more straightforward than we want them to be - this feels like google paying market value for compute?
There may be more to it than buying compute but what you're saying does not make sense for Google. More likely Google wants a good relationship with SpaceX and possibly to buoy the stock, but it's a bad NPV trade
So at most they lose like 200M each month. Peanut compares to the potentially gain of the IPO.
assuming google sells, the stock tanks, nobody wants to buy next year
is this masterful? more like a scam
Didn't they also run up against a "minimum free float" rule?
==> Those facilities are being leased because Grok is failing.
Space X does not want to lease away it's competitive advantage to a primary competitor.
It'd be like Tesla leasing factory space to Toyota and Ford.
'GPUs, Energy and Data Centres' are a hugely critical resource in the AI race and SpaceX is now leasing it away.
Will it make money? Sure.
But this is 'Strategic Fumbling'.
The cash flow happens to help them leading up to IPO - that's a side show.
They have rapidly depreciating assets in GPUs and they can't use them.
Because Grok is failing.
They are licensing out their unused capacity.
XAi is not strongly related to Space X - they were folded into one thing because XAi was losing money and failing (the Social Media part is worse).
XAi isn't really some kind of strategic advantage for Space X and even though revenues from the data centres may be positive - it's a 'stop gap' - it's probabaly not a 'net positive' thing to do.
The best thing for Space X would have been to never merge wht XAI.
The second best thing for Space X would have been to close XAi/Twitter lines of business a long time ago.
The 'Wrench in the Logic' is that by putting these things together, EM is able to dupe so many people into so many ridiculous concepts.
Data centres in space, 1M people on Mars, all sorts of crazy things.
It's a bit like Putin's and Steve Bannon's Media Strategy: 'Flood the Zone' with nonsense, and people speculate as to all kinds of things.
The Space X IPO is a 'retail push' meaning he needs to get all the Dentists in America and their Private Bankers to want to 'Hold the Bag' and then keep holding it for a long time.
Space X - at it's core - is a decent company, wrapped in layers and layers of hyperbolic nonsense.
All it takes is a bit of rational thinking to wade through what is plausible, and what is not, and we can see how overvalued this is.
Note: this is different than the other 2 AI IPOs which have some sketchy economics - but the premise is not far fetched, 'that people will want AI in large quantities'.
Would you really expect a company to increase proportionally in value when they increase their revenue?
Not brilliant meaning something actually positive for humanity in any respect at all.
You seem to have ignored the 50% float rule. SpaceX is proposing to go public with about 5% of the float, but S&P requires 50%.
Do we think that the market will absorb the release of 45% of the shares? I'm dubious.
And while SpaceX is IPOing with 4% float, after the 6 months lockup many more shares will release and float will increase to 40-50%.
So after 12 months, SpaceX meets the S&P inclusion requirements.
Let’s just call it what it is. It’s just basic fraud. They created a very temporary revenue injection right around the time of the IPO to defraud investors as much as they possibly can. Some businesses do this kind of thing just before they die because…why not?
We'll need to see audited financials, but if this part is true people are going to be upset. I wonder if all the people who have been acting like the S&P rules came down from the mountain with Moses will start lobbying to change them to keep SpaceX out?
And to be clear, I think SpaceX is way overvalued and I wouldn't buy it stand alone. But there are a lot of companies in the S&P 500 I wouldn't buy stand alone, yet I still own a a lot of an S&P 500 ETF. /shrug
Apart from the peasants of course.
And gets a datacenter.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/alphabet-to-raise-80-billion...
Except for people who have pensions/investments in whole market class investments who become exposed to an over valued company with a propped up value.
If you want to start picking and choosing which companies are overvalued and which are undervalued, don’t invest in whole market funds. But most people are not good at that!
The Nasdaq 100 and FTSE Russell made a rule change that allows SpaceX to enter index without mormal time for price discovery. Most index funds have rebalance day just 5 days after IPO. S&P also made rule change for S&P Total Market Index and Dow Jones US Total Stock Market Index, but left SP500 intact.
Nothing wrong with SpaceX or Anthropic getting into indexes with fair rules, this rule change is pure creed+corruption.
SpaceX could rise to be a major winner that makes people a lot of money. And then what? You missed out and underperform the whole market.
Based on "sane"/traditional metrics that and much more is already priced in into the IPO valuation.
e.g. Google had a many times lower P/S ratio at their IPO and was actually profitable (and software companies usually have higher valuations than capital intensive ones like SpaceX anyway). SpaceX is already valued at more than Google was 10 years after its IPO while barely making a tiny fraction of its revenue.
Back then, it was "day trading" that was one of the warning signs that a bubble was ensuing. There are certainly shades of the day-trading phenomenon in the "r/wallstreetbets" gambling, and wildly overvalued meme stocks like Tesla. And this mad rush to relax the guardrails for what appears to be wildly overvalued IPOs.
Bubbles, and their inevitable collapse, are generally not as big of a problem for younger passive investors, but they can be for older ones. (Hence why I've got a "bond tent", value tilt, and other diversification. I'm at the stage where "underperforming the market" is less of a concern than "mitigation". :) )
Love how we assign positive adjectives to unethical practices by corporates
EDIT: Downvotes? Not sure why. I would say Darth Vader is masterful of the force, and even that Donald Trump is masterful at being provocative. Masterful is not definitively positive or negative, it just describes being very good at something.
You are google. I am your friend who wants to sell lemonade.
You have invested in my stand and own a piece. You propose a deal, You'll buy $11 of lemonade from me every week.
Does my stand look like it sells way more lemonade, than it would in reality? And since you own a piece, your own piece has appreciated. You ran the numbers and that spending of yours helps appreciate it considerably more (feel free to plugin the actual spaces-google numbers here and change the analogy).
Are the people who invest in my business after you, on its new valuation, aware that you are the one buying most my lemonade? And are you going to keep buying or will stop buying soon (probably as soon as you can unload your investment on strangers). So the fraud and lie as you said, is the behavior is not as real as it looks.
Am I thinking this through wrong, what do you think?
Edit: my definition of fraud is simpler and different from yours. a "lie" need not be there. fraud is any intentional misrepresentation (i.e. misrepresenting income to the public).
Simple, money.
When Billions of $ are in the picture, people really don't care about ethics.
AI is really a pioneering engineering field
I'm picturing a teenager blowing a bubble gum bubble bigger and bigger. I assume it can go on forever!
We will hear projections soon, in a few months, but my guess is that the big 3 (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) will get of the order of $10 billion per month in AI inference revenues. And it will only go up from there.
At my work, after the GitHub price hike, we all got the option of 1. Keep using Github, but with the same total spend as before. i.e, use 1/20th as much since the dollar cap isn't changing. Or option 2, use as much self hosted DeepSeek v4 Pro, Qwen 3.6, Gemma4 as you want since it's almost free. (to be fair, we already had the GPUs)
If the Chinese keep releasing open weight models that are "close enough" to the big 3, I expect many orgs to make the same choice. I think we will see VPs and higher start saying "you better have a good reason for using Opus 4.8 or GPT 5.5 Pro, do you have metrics showing ${cheaper_model} isn't good enough?"
Most businesses don't have the GPUs, or the knowledge necessary to do self-hosted inference. So, they'd have to rely on OpenRouter, or Ollama, or some other inference provider, but there are lots of problems with that. With Microsoft, people could get comfortable with the compliance side of the problem. They already use Outlook, and Office365. Copilot is just one more point where things can go wrong, but it's less scary than your emails being captured and held for ransom, and you already think Microsoft can take care of that. But with Ollama or OpenRouter, you have no idea what is happening with your data, and you also are not sure if they are serving the real models, or quantized versions.
To be sure, there will be plenty of people finding alternate solutions, but 80-90% of the businesses will just pay the higher price to Microsoft.
They can’t measure ROI, and it will start costing more than their staff. You might be right, but I can’t think why any competent C suit would agree to this..
Every developer (we have about 100) has Github Copilot, and interestingly some barely use it while others use it a lot (about 70% of usage comes from a handful of devs), and the dashboard shows you exactly who is using which models, and how much
I definitely don't think they will just go along with paying 10/20x more than before without seeing some sort of return on that investment
We've already had the we're spending all this money on AI, why aren't we shipping software faster conversation multiple times
My prediction is that those high users, costing the most money, will be watched carefully (one colleague even suggested half-jokingly that whoever tops the leaderboard should have to give everyone else a presentation on what they spent all those AI credits on)
The sweet spot is to have good competent developers who users AI when it actually makes sense, but aren't dependent on it
But one or two years from now, many more people will have learned how to be productive with AI. Knowledge will percolate.
And for all those people, the companies will ask themselves: is this guy's 20% increase in productivity worth $200 per month? If that increase in productivity is actually worth $2000 per month, then the answer will be an unequivocal yes. Not only that, but the need to switch to lower cost AI providers, so the $200 is lowered to $20 will just not be worth the extra headache of having to go through all the approvals to onboard a new vendor.
That is the Copilot's moat.
Elon had the foresight to buy all that in advance and now Google, the datacenter company, has to rent datacenter space.
MU went 1000% in one year and it's still one of the cheapest companies on the NASDAQ.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/musks-xai-is-being-sued-ov...
And
"Shit why did we agree to buy so much hardware if i can't even use the current one fully?"
to
"Ah fuck it, who cares if i indirectly pivot to selling this compute. It brings money and my Fanboys probably think its some magic smartness and not just ignorance"
Actually that seems to be fairly logical? Hardware is what xAI has, and it's in great demand. So sell what makes you money. The real story here is that that xAI hardware is going to be running Gemini and not Grok. Which is to say: Grok basically failed as a frontier AI and they need to pivot to a business model which makes money.
Obviously not everything Musk did was wrong. xAI bought a ton of compute when it was possible to get it. But the product they were going to build with it failed and so now they're deciding to be a landlord.
This IPO is just insane. No way do you justify a $trillion+ valuation based on what amounts to a bunch of commoditized rent seeking endeavors. Datacenters are buildings and chips, and everyone can build those. Starlink is just an ISP with lots of competition at scale (they have the high bandwidth mobile market cornered, but that's a very small market!). Mars is at best a grift on public funding. Even satellite launch services are commoditized and competetive these days.
Thing is though, Anthropic was really against the wall with lack of compute pre xAI deal. And tbh, Gemini reliability has been abysmal which probably points to real compute shortages.
And nearly _every_ major DC project is really up against it with massive delays, etc. Stargate UAE has been badly affected by the Iran conflict.
So maybe long term this isn't a great business, but _right now_ I'm not convinced it's all financial engineering. There is a enormous shortage of compute and xAI has a load of it _available now_.
Exactly! "Maybe not a long term great business" is exactly the opposite of what you want to buy in an IPO.
This is a "private equity can squeeze out a ton of cash from this asset portfolio" situation, and very much not a "in a few years this will be a trillion dollar business competing with the biggest companies in the world" bet.
That being said, ISRO focuses more on research and scientific world as compared to the commercial world but they were the least expensive option out there before SpaceX and the only differential which causes the pricing is actually re-usability aspect of SpaceX rockets/launchers and ISRO is actively working towards that too.
And another thing as brainwad said here but Space part of SpaceX is just 10% of the claimed business according to their S-1
But otherwise yeah SpaceX one that one for now. Only issue with this: We don't have enough payload for SpaceX to expand that much more.
They can just run Grok as a local AI inside Tesla cars. It's actually really efficient as a compute platform because the Tesla cars are in motion at highway speeds, which gives you lots of free airflow for shedding waste heat via the car radiator. Way more efficient than trying to run AI on space satellites.
If they could train using Teslas they wouldn't have needed Dojo.
Even if their model is competitive or even surpasses e.g. Deepseek (which is far from given) how would that justify a huge valuation?
Elon likes money and power.
The future needs more AI compute. No one has enough AI compute.
Memory chip vendors are betting hard on this being a temporary state of affairs that doesn't last, and doesn't warrant commissioning a shitton of new memory foundries.
Musk is betting hard on this staying that way, and is putting the next Colossus into the last place not corrupted by NIMBYs... SPACE!
also google: renting capacity from a data center powered by 27 methane gas turbines on trailers
https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2026/4/whitehous...
Edit: seems I'm just a bit behind: "xAI — now part of SpaceX ", seems really strange for a space company to buy an AI company, but I guess rather that, than the other way around.
https://youtu.be/IHD8BDFYyGI?is=dnpBeOoxH7LUJknm
And you don't have to deal with any of the site selection stuff you have for terrestrial data centers. No NIMBYs. No politicians trying to extort bribes. No water problems.
In space there are no earthquakes, tornadoes, or floods.
I'm still skeptical. It's hard to believe it costs so much to build a data center on the ground that putting it into orbit is an economically viable alternative.
That's about $8,400/month per "component" is that in the ballpark at all with what a month of dedicated/exclusive access to an NVIDIA GPU would go for?
[1] Probably, there could be undisclosed clusters owned by other companies.
SpaceX/xAi/musk are currently in a good market for “happening to own 100k cards we have nothing to do with”, and are exercising that control as hard as they can.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that this is like Google agreeing to buy a billion dollars of lemonade from Tim's lemonade stand, Inc, and Tim is 8 years old.
I don't see how this provides any cover to xAI/SpaceX as far as SEC rules go for getting into the top 100 stock index.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
Is this the same Memphis data center notorious for burning jet fuel nonstop for power?
For the sake of a reality check:
IPO is raising approx $75bn of new equity
SpaceX has negotiated substantially below market fee of 0.75%
Total fee pool = ~550mio USD
Fee pool will be split between 23 banks, so average of 23mio per bank, likely skewed heavily towards Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the lead bookrunners.
Clearly everyone has incentives for spaceX to go up, but important to keep in mind the order of magnitudes we are talking about, the monthly google compute spend in the headline totally eclipses the one off banking fees
I do not know, but I wonder if someone can tally the bankers from twitter buy, twitter merge into xAI and the new spaceX launch.
I'd be interested in how large the range is here across company and region and specific data center and how it relates to companies like Hetzner if at all.
[0] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
Well considering that ~80% of the price is hardware deprecation, I don't know why they'd be considerably worse than anyone else at negotiating hardware deals.
Typically when you buy in bulk, you have more sway.
Companies like Google also have in-house chips like TPUs that are substantially cheaper for inference for them to make than anyone else can get through Nvidia.
Google and MS may be close behind.
Not sure about Meta but they are also renting from Amazon so...
Anthropic mostly rents from Amazon, Goog & MS.
1. Building datacenters takes time. Months, if not years. They take billions of investment.
2. AI revenue is highly unpredictable. Sure, you can make predictions, but maybe your competitor releases a better model 2 weeks after your release, maybe the new model you built isn't as much better, maybe the chinese models steal your show, etc.
3. AI revenue grows a lot. Anthropic's case is 10x per year.
4. So if you are off by just a year in terms of how much GPU you actually need, then that means a 90% of your compute capacity is wasted, and you go bankrupt.
As a solution, companies buy compute from each other! If one company's model did well, they can buy compute from the company whose model didn't do well (like in the case of grok). It's beneficial for both sides, so positive sum game. So deals like this aren't something bad in itself.
It's nothing new either. In SAAS deals, you often commit to a certain revenue and then pay extra if your revenue exceeds that amount. And power market is cut in two as well: longer term deals plus spot markets. Spot prices are way higher than the longer term deal prices.
Given it's SpaceX of course there is financial engineering involved: the GPUs aren't actually owned by SpaceX but a daughter company, and it's been financed via loans that are backed by pension funds. So it's already the case that pension funds back bear the risks associated with SpaceX's operations.
Right now, the bulk of the AI bubble sits in such debt statements and not in public markets.
I think a more accurate phrasing of the Valor GPU deal would be something like this:
"SpaceX’s AI compute buildout relies in part on off-balance-sheet or lease-style financing vehicles. Valor-owned vehicles purchased Nvidia GPU infrastructure and leased it to xAI/SpaceX subsidiaries, with Apollo providing debt financing and SpaceX or subsidiaries guaranteeing some obligations. That creates indirect exposure for institutional and retirement capital, though not necessarily direct pension-fund ownership of SpaceX operational risk."
> As part of that deal, Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through 2029 to rent all the available compute from its Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee, that xAI — now part of SpaceX — originally built for its own artificial intelligence efforts.
I don't get why SpaceX is going public. But anyway, well played, the whole crypto mining that dried out GPUs back in the day seems tiny now.
Liquidity for investors. They raised everything they could from private markets, government contract, debt, the remaining source of financing is from the public
> After this year, the agreement can be terminated by either party provided they give 90 days’ notice.
Circular financing at its peak for the IPO. There has to be some regulatory body to not allow such shady things
Circular financing would require SpaceX to buy a similar quantity of stuff from Google. (Or invest in Google.) We have no evidence of that. Instead this looks like Google taking advantage of SpaceX’s desire to print revenue today versus a month from now.
(If the agreement is terminated with no exchange of goods, it might be market manipulation. But still not circular financing.)
1: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/alphabet-s...
Not what circular financing means. Buying from a company you own stock in can be a conflict of interest, but it's only circular if you invest in the company and then they use those proceeds to buy your stuff. A past investor buying services from a company they are affiliated with is pretty par for the course in business.
If the SpaceX IPO bombs (or even merely underperforms), the expectations for the Anthropic/OpenAI IPOs collapse, and with that, everything else AI.
AI companies can't afford to let any AI company go down.
How come its not a circular deal where google is investing little bit more money to make a whole lot more money
Who's taking advantage of who?
Keep in mind, Google has a 6% stake in SpaceX, so this is more like exchanging millions to gain billions.
And seems silly to ignore that the Google founders and Elon are buddies, or were, based on which gossip rag you believe in, and there's zero chance these types of deals are being made independent of those guys talking (when are they ever, of course, but it's even more obvious in this case given the players and their histories).
Still doesn't make it circular financing. If SpaceX issued Google a dividend right after Google paid SpaceX, that would be circular.
(I thought for sure the title was backwards - it's a strange world)
everyone understands cuda well enough anyway
But $12/hr is probably quite accurate. SpaceX' datacenters are horrifyingly expensive, and regular GPUs are being rented below cost in many cases.
Just the gas turbine power alone is horrific. Doubles or triples the power bill and adds a big chunk of depreciation.
Elon is pulling financial engineering black magic to make this happen.
They’re in good company, competing with Amazon, CoreWeave, Google, Microsoft, Nebius, and many other players for the same business. They just invested (through the X.ai acquisition) in more capacity than they could take advantage of to get there.
Even if they manage to make a profit selling this capacity to Google, Anthropic, and others, it might not be enough to push them into profitability as a whole. That remains to be seen, and you keep asserting without evidence that it is true.
I just dislike that it is now harder to avoid giving Musk money directly or indirectly.
Yeah, if a ridiculous premise is given you'll reach a ridiculous result.
xAI has such a shitty AI, that he makes more profit renting his Compute instead of making profit directly from it as the companies doing who have better AI then him.
Space-X is a limited business and he tries to make it unlimited by selling stories of Mars and dyson spheres (literaly), no one will ever finance or need as long as we have still desserts everywhere. In parallel his Starlink business gets competition left and right and despite this, he only has 10 Million customers AND increased prices for STarlink just last month or so.
And the payload, most payload increase is only Starlink. He has to sell us a story, that suddenly even with Starship, he can send so much payload up there to make Space-X this mega trillion company.
He can't even scale Starlink. Its expensive. The satelites work for 5 years and have limited capacity. He NEEDS Spaceship to be able to send up Starlink Server v3 and he hasn't even prooven he can get his ship back which he needs for the payload price.
Twitter/X? Yeah he tanked that one.
Optimus? When did you see the latest non faked demo? And while he works on it, we already have the market cornered here.
Go argue with the entire market. I'm just the messenger.
Quite the abstraction.
So yes, ridiculous things like that happen and markets are very often not rational at all (short and medium term at least).
Nortel, Sun, AOL, Cisco were all very innovative and rapidly growing companies. Until reality kicked in.
I don’t know if I would put Cisco or Nortel in that category, either. They were like gold rush pickaxe companies. The pickaxes themselves weren’t particularly innovative in their case.
A lot of the innovative companies from the dot com era are still around.
I can't understand why xAI charges 50% more per month for Grok over competitors when it doesn't even gracefully downgrade to a cheaper model when paid subscribers hit the limit.
Also, although I've never used it for this, I believe some of the paid models produce some of the best "adult" content, and I know there are even subreddits which do nothing but praise Grok and "content" produces who use it.
that was only because it was free
Claude accuses me of hallucinating events that happened the day before, and it's quite annoying.
Grok 3 and Grok 4 have a 2024 knowledge cutoff. https://docs.x.ai/developers/models
One potential read is xAI knows Grok isn't going to be a Tier 1 model. So while SpaceX focusses on infrastructure, Grok bets its users like its model enough that they'll pay a premium for it, even if this curtails growth prospects.
Claude has tons of throttling already. Chat GPT is not as accurate at computational problems despite less throttling. Gemini has fewest restrictions but worse quality. Always a tradeoff.
[1] https://counterhate.com/research/grok-floods-x-with-sexualiz...
Their stupidity with AI and buying X mostly seems to be about scamming investors to make Musk even richer. Like this particular deal is just them doing what CoreWeave does at a SpaceX valuation.
If they start running Starship anywhere near the way they do Falcon 9, it'll flip into profits. A lot of big bets SpaceX made ride on Starship coming online. I'm honestly surprised Starlink is already so profitable without it.
One of their big named bets includes: orbital datacenters. Which puts this specific deal into perspective.
Wasn't starship supposed to be funded by the NASA contract?
It is other things Musk has gone with Twitter and SpaceX which are shady.
Becoming a broader infrastructure company with xAI.
Obviously Starlink can and will growth. I'm just pointing out how insane the market cap is, when compared to similar scale "connectivity" businesses.
was just answering the question.
An entire one-hundredth of their proposed valuation!
With a light sprinkling of space.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
It’s only to boost the IPO price. The agreement will last only a few months on paper. I doubt it is a real transaction.
The whole thing looks rather desperate. I wonder what SpaceX's margins are on these contracts.
If you buy into that business model (or pretend to), it makes sense for SpaceX to start selling compute early. Their "earthside compute" clients of today are "skyside compute" clients of tomorrow.
A part of Musk's old pitch for Starlink was: space-based solar makes perfect sense for powering space assets, and no sense whatsoever for powering Earth assets. So you have to find a way to use that power in space to do something economically useful. Comms were the only scalable way to do that, so Starlink it was.
I can see how space-based datacenters would follow the same logic. If SpaceX can make them economical, that is. There's no guarantees of that - but if anyone at all can make space-based datacenters economical, it's SpaceX.
Let's hope burning ten thousand tons of toxic e-waste annually in upper atmoshphere never becomes economical. Or mankind gets to senses and bans externalizing your e-waste problem by burning in atmosphere...
In the Anthropic deal they have to be negative; Anthropic's announced higher margins during the deal.
Given extreme supply constraints, it's very unlikely that Google or Anthropic will just suddenly cancel right after the IPO unless their own demand collapses. And even if this were true, what value would that provide Musk? Could you imagine if your newly public company suddenly received termination notices from your two largest compute customers? Disaster.
Try logic.
What's desperate is announcing a temporary (allegedly) doubling of revenues days before an IPO that has been criticised for being overpriced at 93 times sales.
These data centers were supposed to serve xAI. Now suddenly they get rented out to others. Why the sudden change of plans?
It's either an emergency accounting gimmick or the effective shutdown or repurposing of xAI.
Of course this is a real deal. Compute is the most valuable resource in the world for these companies at the moment.
Suppose tpus were theoretically a million times better, but cannot be produced due to supply chain constraints, this action would still be rational.
My personal take is that this really shows how bottlenecked the entire supply chain is. For such an important commodity there are shockingly few players ready for scale.
1. Indeed, Google is compute-constrained, and is ready to buy any it can.
2. xAI (now SpaceXAI) has a lot of idle compute, which it resells to Cursor, Anthropic, Google, probably others as we speak.
In other words: Google is training models, xAI is not.
"Both SpaceX and Google have the option to terminate the agreement with 90 days’ notice after December 31, 2026"
In other words, this is a fake IPO booster
Great work by Musk and his companies to be in a position to sell billions to cloud vendors. I'd have probably missed that opportunity while trying to build great rockets or AI models.
Maybe with the corp token spending limits and the rise of codex, Anthropic saw steep deceleration in usuage?
Or I guess juicing the numbers for IPO
Lately, like the past few months, I've noticed Google services (search, gmail, drive, maps) running very slowly to the point where, at the moment it happens, I always think it has to be my connection and not Google, but sure enough every time I check a couple of speed tests and they're... fine. And then I don't seem to be having the same latency from other sites/apps. Is there any chance that the commingling of the AI snippet and then directing users into the AI funnel through the text box is actually causing material performance impacts in other Google properties? Probably a dumb question because I can't imagine they would allow performance for broader properties to suffer for AI prompts/chats, but then again all this talk of compute starts making me think otherwise, like the prolific amount of prompting and chatting is causing massive across-the-board performance issues.
Somewhat related, but does anyone use Gemini and end up with the experience where you have a chat and it's obvious, to yourself and to Gemini, that you're trying to find a product to purchase, but Gemini doesn't even link you to what you would think would be the obvious place to purchase the product? This happens daily where I interact with it, it suggests some products, but won't even provide a link to that product or, if it does provide a link, it's to some no name site that wouldn't come up as a highly-ranked paid or organic result through regular Google search. Keeps making me think this is a Google performance problem where they have not figured out how to take the entire AI chat and engineer it back into a simple short keyword phrase to get an acceptable search result.
Btw, if anyone's thinking "why are you using Gemini because it's the worst?" I think that's fair and right. I have... reasons, but they're not super sensible ones.
Yesterday the Gmail virus scanner stopped working. For a while I couldn't download my attachments. A few minutes later it said the virus scanner was offline and download at your own risk.
Meet audio seems to be having a particularly bad week. It just doesn't work with headphones. Their testing tool indicated everything was fine. It's worked after I logged off and on. Audio quality issues are getting more common as well.
On a serious note I feel the same. Google is slow these days and the slowest and least reliable service of them all is Gemini. Sometimes I don't even know if it hang already (no error messages) or if it's still "thinking".
https://x.com/BullTheoryio/status/2061029970236133554
Elon is the greatest capital allocator of all time.
Does this mean that SpaceX are the only company that really did build some datacenters to put all the million of GPU/TPU/whatever they all talk about everyday?
I mean, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft told investors they spent more than $1B per day last year in CapEx... why on Earth do they (well, Google and Anthropic at least) need to rent compute to SpaceX, of all companies?
xAI built data centers, and products that are mostly good for nonconsensual porn and confirming a small group’s biases. So they have a lot of excess capacity, and might as well rent it to the adults.
Fellowship of the Ring.
As of today the gamblers seem to win, demand even for A100s, H100s is high prices are even rising.
Did Musk blindly order humongous amounts of GPUs years ago before any of us had any sense of the scale this was going to reach?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)
So will SpaceX lease Colossus 2 to Google? If both Colossus datacenters are rented, will xAI have any compute?
There are other companies besides Google and Anthropic that are considering renting capacity in xaispacex's datacenters.
Global capacity for GPU hosting is tight at the moment. That TN DC is the only one not totally 110 percent already allocated for five years in the world .
This is a ridiculous amount of money.
Have to believe a non-tech company could hire an entire team/company to build datacenters for this kind of money.
Make no mistake - this has to be “do evil” territory.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
> This article was amended on 16 January 2026 because a megawatt is a unit of power, not energy as an earlier version suggested.
He’s the richest man on the planet and doesn’t have a track record of not paying for shit he buys. If you want to reliably offload your chips, he’s safer than e.g. OpenAI who might or might not have the money when the bill comes due.
x not paying bills: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/24/musks-twitter-has-been-sued-...
spacex not paying bills: https://www.fastcompany.com/91124157/spacex-contractors-texa...
My impression was the other way around. The shenanigans he pulled around the Twitter acquisition were just farcical, and at Twitter he repeatedly refused to pay owed rent, etc. (I assume as a ploy to renegotiate terms).
You mean like the time he committed to buying Twitter and then tried to back out of a legally binding contractual agreement to finalize the deal?
Hahaaha. A solid admission of being clueless.
Elon has a strong track record of doing shady stuff to get out of deals.
He moved as fast as he could with known financing
1. AI demand continues to grow. 2. SpaceX's orbital data centers are profitable.
If both of those are true, then their current valuation is absolutely justified. I'm confident #1 will happen.
#2 is the big bet, and IMHO this is just an engineering/execution problem. All they need is (a) Starship to work reliably, and (b) a manufacturing line that can build a data center satellite at low cost.[1]
(a) is the harder of the two, IMHO, but they are well on their way. Once they successfully recover and refly a Starship upper-stage, they will iterate step-by-step until launch costs drop to the level they need.
Now assume that SpaceX succeeds. What if AI demand continues to grow and SpaceX orbital data centers are profitable? Think of their moat: they spent 10 years and billions of dollars developing a fully reusable rocket that happens to also be the largest rocket in the world, and that costs 1/10th of what other rockets cost (per kilo to orbit). Plus, they have an assembly line that can build data center satellites cheaply, and they start fabbing their own AI chips.
How is anyone going to compete with that? There are a bunch of data-center-in-space startups, but none have their own rocket--they're going to have to pay SpaceX to launch them. Blue Origin is developing a rocket as large as Starship, but it's not fully reusable--they will never get the cost down to Starship levels.
What's interesting is that all the AI companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Microsoft and Google, are mostly leasing their data centers from someone else. They think compute is a commodity and the value is the trained model. But if SpaceX has the cheapest data center with the most capacity, they will be able to extract profits from the AI companies or (why not) compete against them with their own model (Grok).
In 10 years we'll see whether SpaceX succeeds or fails. If they fail at this, they will retrench back to a launch company (assuming they are still in business). But if they succeed, they will be a massive company, and the synergy between their businesses will be so obvious that everyone will say, "of course they succeeded!"
----------------
[1] Don't be distracted by claims that "cooling in space is hard" or "radiation is a deal-breaker". Neither of those are insurmountable problems--they are just engineering problems. Crucially, they are problems that are easily solved by getting mass to space. If you can get mass to space cheap enough, those two problems are trivial to solve.
Is the hope that power will be cheaper because solar panels have direct and continuous exposure to the sun?
Terrestrial data center costs are only going up, while space tech costs keep going down. It is plausible (but not guaranteed) that they will intersect at some point.
This will never happen.
So what?
Why on earth would you want an AI datacenter in space? Like what would you gain by doing that at an absurdly higher cost than you could build on them earth?
"Free" energy? lol.. just build nuclear powerplants or loads of solar, wind and batteries on earth. Its still going to be cheaper...
> How is anyone going to compete with that? There are a bunch of data-center-in-space startups
A better question is why would anyone even try?
> are mostly leasing their data centers from someone else
It's really not. Building your own datacentres is very expensive and more importantly takes a lot of time. They need compute now, so it makes perfect sense to rent it from failing AI companies like xAI which bought a lot of chips but don't have anything to do with them since their models are just not very good.
> But if SpaceX has the cheapest data center with the most capacity, they will be able to extract profits
Well.. that would be a first one, since no similar industry works that way. Compute is a commodity so unless your literally run out of space on earth to build datacenters or Nvidia/etc. stop selling to anyone but SpaceX that can't really happen, can it?
I agree. If building data centers in space is cheaper and takes less time, then that's a win and a clear reason to do it.
Costs for terrestrial data centers keep going up and costs for space tech keep going down. At some point, they will intersect.
So you don’t have an argument because everything you are saying is based on some absurdly speculative nonsensical premise?
> costs for space tech keep going down
How do you measure the cost of something which does not and has not ever existed. These data centers are a hypothetical concept nothing else.
I’ll be switching off the Gemini model at work (Composer’s been off since their xAI deal). This is the final straw for me to move completely off Google services.
what a crock
Amazing to think it was once so ingrained in mainstream society.
Not an easy thing to gauge. X/Twitter stopped publishing MAUs after the acquisition.
External estimates vary, some point to growth, some to stagnation. We know that revenue suffered. LOTS of partisan and emotional opinions for either.
Google trends does paint a bleak picture for X but I am also questioning how much google itself can gauge that after LLMs exploded in popularity.
Anecdotally I did notice that references and embeds to X are way less prominent and common than before. My usual news used to be filled with them. My consumption of the platform also plummeted after not being able to read threads when not logged, its much harder for me to get drawn into it.
Still without data, I would be surprised if the changes to verification and logged out access did not massively hurt new adoption. With tiktoks prevalence amongst a new generation I would bet its a matter of time before X gets grouped to tumbler/facebook, not dead, but way past its peak and cultural relevance. If that has not already happened.
Google wants a lot of compute sooner rather than later, and they're willing to pay a premium for speedy delivery of that compute. SpaceX has the capacity already built and ready to go. Hence the high price.
> Google parent Alphabet has made a windfall from backing SpaceX, which was worth $12 billion at the time of its 2015 investment, and is looking to go public at a valuation of over $1.75 trillion