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Comment by rapsey | Hacker News Reader

Vision Fund is probably pretty dead. I can't imagine anyone giving them money in the future.

Think you'd be surprised.

One bad quarter for a guy that talks about 300 year timescale.

Who's this guy and where his money come from? If it's based on fossil fuel revenues seized by autocrats, please explain how his plan can be sustained for centuries.

He's a Japanese investor. While a significant amount of the funds he invests originated from oil money, his actual investments are in technology companies, so the future revenues and valuations of his investments are not based on oil.

Well if he doesn't get too fussy about investing revenues specifically from fossil fuels and diversifies into simply investing money seized by autocrats regardless of its source then it is a plan that can be sustained for millenia.

"This guy": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masayoshi_Son

> If it's based on

Not really. Son himself got most of his money from investments into Alibaba.

What you are probably referring to is that the Saudis are large investors of the vision fund. I don't share your optimism that there won't be insanely rich people with little accountability in the centuries to come.

NPR Planet Money podcast recently did an episode all about it:

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/04/767379358/episode-943-unicorn...

In my view 300 year timescale and technology investments are antithetical.

Not if the initial thesis is correct - which I think it is in this case.

If you corner a market space that is key for future tech then it'll be very difficult for anyone else to catch up - even if tech moves forward.

that's a lot of bad quarters.

Vision Fund has an investment horizon in the decades. So the idea that it is dead is just ignorant.

And there is plenty of capital and not many decent investment vehicles so expect Vision Fund 2 to do just fine.

You can have an "investment horizon" of whatever arbitrary time period you want to make up but if your companies continue to lose money and continue to require additional capital raises just to operate, your "investment horizon" might get cut a bit short.

Why? Could you elaborate on this?

They invest in lots of crap companies:

https://www.ft.com/content/25f76710-fbde-11e9-98fd-4d6c20050...

I don't think that FT is still a reputable company / source to quote.

How come?

They have substantial investments in ARM and NVidia which seem more reasonable...

They sold their entire stake in NVidia early this year and the total amount paled in comparison to the amount of losses/capital injections they did on WE.

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