Right, like running a sanitation department for a city. Who wants to do that? No one, but it's pretty important and everyone will raise hell and almost riot when it's not working.
Totally. I’m in insurance. So much is unsexy but critical. And that’s where you see a lot of folks churning on core systems, process, etc that makes insurance actually work vs any headline tech/investment/AI stuff. Don’t get me wrong - wins there too. But 22 year old Harvard grads aren’t going for underwriting assistant jobs (to use an example)
Yeah I thought that was extreme. An engineer going to the board of any corporation let alone Microsoft is not normal or customary IME. That could explain why they got no response.
When you see significant risks to the org and its value, and they go completely unaddressed by management, the board is the final step before going to the public. It is the board’s duty to the public owners to make sure management isn’t driving the company into the ground.
It would be interesting to see this raised in the next shareholders meeting as a question of whether the board and exec team are actually competent and doing their work.
A man can dream anyway. When there is this much money on the line, sometimes people actually get held somewhat accountable.
It's a baffling flaw in human nature. The board should have cared about these issues, but in practice communications to and from the board are tightly controlled, and communications outside of those constraints are discarded.
This occurs whether or not it makes sense. Machiavelli actually warns about the specifically: if someone else controls access to you and communication with you, they have real leverage over you.
since the astronauts are asking about it i'm guessing it wasn't snuck onboard. Sneaking stuff on to spacecraft to play with on the moon was a thing, i think one of the Apollo astronauts smuggled a golf club and balls to hit on the moon.
(I realize this mission is to only orbit and not land on the moon)
what i'm saying is retail investors don't care about the valuation and will trade on what they see. So expect a lot of ups and down in the price because of retail investors.
for retail investors every failed engine test, pressure test, or anything else is going to be a sell event. Every succesful launch, engine delivery, installed pane of glass is going to be a buy event. The youtubers like Nasaspaceflight and the others who stalk Spacex's every move with livecams at every site are going to add the stock price to their streams i bet.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, the other thing Google has is Google. They just have to spend the effort/resources to keep up and wait for everyone else to go bankrupt. At the end of the day I think Google will be the eventual LLM winner. I think this is why Meta isn't really in the race and just releases open weight models, the writing is on the wall. Also, probably why Apple went ahead and signed a deal with Google and not OpenAI or Anthropic.
I don't know why I am downvoted but Google has data, expertise, hardware and deep pockets. This whole LLM thing is invented at Google and machine learning ecosystem libraries come from Google. I don't know how people can be so irrational discounting Google's muscle.
Others have just borrowed data, money, hardware and they would run out of resources for sure.
> a) we opened a club house called the internet in the early 1990s, just after the time of BBSs
"we" is doing a lot of work here. No clubhouse got optical switching working and all that fiber in the ground for example. Beyond POC, the Internet was all commercial interests.
"we" paid ISP's ... which in turn, paid for infrastructure. Some of "we" pay cable providers for internet service, which in turn paid for (in my case) fiber-to-the-curb. Advertising basically supported social media, search engines, etc.
> it was first and foremost a military enterprise, just like GPS
This is sort of like arguing cutlery is a military enterprise. Like yes, that’s where knives came from. But that’s disconnected enough from modern design, governance and other fundamental concerns as to be irrelevant. The internet—and less ambiguously, the World Wide Web—are more commercial than military.
This is moving the goalposts. The commenter above is talking about the enthusiast-populated internet of the late 80s/early 90s, at which point it still wasn't even clear if it was legal to use the internet for commercial purposes. If all you mean to say is that the internet is currently commercialized, yes, that is obviously true, in much the same way that a disgusting ball of decomposing fungus may have once been an apple.
> commenter above is talking about the enthusiast-populated internet of the late 80s/early 90s, at which point it still wasn't even clear if it was legal to use the internet for commercial purposes
Source? Not doubting. But I have a friend who was buying airline tickets through CompuServe in the late 80s/early 90s.
Compuserve was NOT the internet. Compuserve / Prodigy / GEnie were early versions of Facebook. They also inter-operated (email) for some period of time. IIRC.
Tandem! Now there's a name i haven't heard in a long time. A college friend of mine worked with some of their stuff right out of college and I still remember him telling me about it. It seemed like magic, we were both floored with the capabilities.
/we were in our early 20s and the inet was just taking off so there were lots of "magic" everywhere
The thing i'm not looking forward to is SpaceX will now be beholden to Wall Street. With Startship testing being so public, there's a whole cottage industry of youtubers watching their every move, there's going to be lots of ups and downs on the stock price.
I get the feeling investors are going to watch Starship explode and explode while it's being developed without understanding the trial/error, hardware rich, approach SpaceX takes and not like it. That's going to hurt the stock price and therefore hurt the company. Before, when Starship exploded people just pointed and laughed at Musk but SpaceX kept going. For better or for worse it doesn't really bother him, don't forget he got literally laughed out of the room when he proposed a re-usable orbital booster. Now those people actually matter because they'll sell/short and kill the stock price and therefore materially hurt the company. I replied to a sibling about Tesla, remember the shorts nearly killed Tesla before it even had a chance. The technology was there and the concept proven but the shorters almost killed the whole thing. IMO Tesla went public way too early and it almost cost them everything. idk what SpaceX has to gain by going public, are they hurting for cash? Based on the pace of development in Boca Chica it doesn't appear so.
/not a finance or investment expert just my observations and feelings
> get the feeling investors are going to watch Starship explode and explode while it's being developed without understanding the trial/error, hardware rich, approach SpaceX takes
Investors have been doing this since SpaceX first raised outside funding. American capital markets are not that risk averse.
tbf those investments weren't traded on a liquid market, and I suspect Founders Fund are less worried about short term setbacks than your average mutual fund or mug punter.
But of course we also know that Musk-run public companies are immune to normal dynamics of worrying about next quarter's returns (or even worrying about the CEO publicly torching his brand equity) so the very last thing I'd imagine happening is SpaceX becoming risk averse and profitability focused
Those funds have more capital to allocate to profitable publicly traded companies than they did to speculative bets on unicorns, and more importantly now have an easy offramp if their investment thesis isn't as aligned with the Kardashev scale as the true believers.
The risks they care about will be more "Starlink growth slows" or "orbital datacentre has horrible operating economics" than "Starship launch anomaly" though, and I agree it'll make zero difference to how SpaceX operates both because Elon isn't afraid to tank valuations and because retail loves him unconditionally. And the bull case for SpaceX is still stronger than the bull case for Tesla which happily trades at valuations north of $1b.
I expect that the amount of "good influence" institutional shareholders can exert on SpaceX leadership and operations is about zero, and the amount of "bad influence" is more than that. Thus, the only way this can affect SpaceX's leadership is negative.
A big part of how SpaceX did what they did is that they weren't beholden to institutional pressures. They could afford to take major risks. This may change when a pool of investors who don't care about space and just want the line to go up end up being stakeholders.
None and that's the problem, the shorts almost killed Tesla for no other reason than being short. I think watching Starship after Starship blow up while being tested when investors don't really understand what they're looking at is going to be bad for the stock price. In a public traded company so goes the stock price so goes the business.
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