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Comment by khurs | Hacker News Reader

Musk's 'capital power' is spread thinly, as both xAI and SpaceX need ongoing enormous funding and have debts.

Google raised the same amount as SpaceX IPO at the same time, it just didn't get as much attention outside of financial and tech press

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/03/alphabets-record-breaking-...

The other big players (MS/Goog/Meta) have solid businesses already and both OpenAi and Anthropic are IPO'ing soon.

Musk over bought compute and is renting it out, many of the co-founders of XAI have quit, so doubt they will dominate any time soon.

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SpaceX is cashflow positive.

Buying compute that others pay a premium for is not over-buying. Note that $85b GOOG raise is for … building compute they don’t have.

The SX bond issuance reportedly has $90b in demand; they took $25b.

With all of those in mind, it might be worth updating your take on the relative capital power. I’d term it significant. Knowing Musk he will be investing aggressively where he thinks matters over the next few years.

Space-X invests a lot into R&D for Starship which they need to make starlink scale.

They also need it to at least show that in theory they can put a datacenter into space (which is stupid because it would take 300 starship flights to bring up their small colossus dc into space which is only 200MwH).

They also increase the price of Starlink, have to shell out money for cursor.

They overbuyed because it clearly shows that Grok is not frontier or people don't like to use it for other reasons.

Of course Musk has to invest, if what he thinks matters and is susccessful is another story like Cybertruck or his Datacenter idea or his dysonsphere 'idea'.

Musk didn't become the richest man in the world by accident, he is a formidable talent with deep connections.

But no indication that XAI will lead the field any time soon.

I cannot comment on the likelihood of xAI being competitive as an AI lab in the future.

However, their "overbuying" of compute means they can now rent it out for $2.32B/month.

That seems like solid business to me, and raises the question whether your claim of xAI needing 'ongoing enormous funding' is accurate.

Most of that is from Anthropic which is IPO'ing?

Prior to IPO they want to show the best growth numbers possible, so how long they continue with the deal post IPO remains to be seen.

54% is Anthropic.

Considering their models had outages with the message 'model overloaded' just a few days ago, I doubt that their compute demand is ending soon.

It clearly shows that the billions investedin xAI are not returning what they should with the product they invested in.

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