Nvidia discloses $21B stake in SpaceX at end of second quarter | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia discloses $21B stake in SpaceX at end of second quarter

cnbc.com

47 pointsjohnbarron31 comments

When NVidia unravels from the current state of the market I'd gather it's going to be a phenomenal source of data to study with respect to the questionable economics propping all of this up today. Curious if Jensen actually believes he's going to outrun this train or if he thinks that spreading his chips out keeps him from a worse demise.

Yes. All these companies making "investments" in each other, where company A puts 10 billion into company B and company B buys 10 billion of company A's products can't work out well in the end. This is separate from the concept that AI has real value. Pointing out the likely doomed to fail huge mutual investments is a separate issue. We can have two ideas in mind about something.

I am worried about the damage when this ends. Sure, there's way over exuberance in my opinion about the value of all this vast amount of spending and infrastructure (datacenters, billions or trillions more in training hardware from nvidia etc). But there's this other completely bonkers level where it's just normal to give some billions for some stock and they turn around buy billions of your stuff.

This has to run into reality at some point.

Does it, though? Tesla stock hasn’t run into reality yet. All that’s required to avoid reality is for enough people to keep believing believing the lie. If a bunch of big companies all invest in each other and never sell, then wouldn’t it prop up the whole thing and the valuation stays high? I’m open to ideas

Valuations are not value.

There’s a point where if you ask to be paid a billion dollars for something that is worthless, people just laugh at you.

Until the next transaction you can keep pretending the old inflated valuation is real, but you can raise capital, not without popping the bubble.

At some point people will stop giving Tesla and NVIDIA more money.

The Keely Engine continued to get investors until Keely died.

Sometimes, a conman outruns the con. They just die of old age before it falls apart.

It's the 1880s all over again. Conmen can outrun the press and overall information space. Back then you took investor dollars and shoved them into wagons that traversed the West selling stock.

Today, you can accomplish the same with a few Facebook campaigns.

> This has to run into reality at some point.

Reality will likely be a "bailout" tax.

I wonder how much Jensen has managed to liquidate. For me currently obvious strategy would be to pump things as high as they can while unloading stock holdings as is possible without looking too bad.

It’s funny watching people trip over NVIDIA name. So many keyboard gymnastics.

They do what everyone in their position would do. What matters are the boxes leaving the warehouse. Dozens of thousands of them.

at this valuation there's literally no other option than to spread it around. it's literally the only sane move. otherwise it would not only take balls of steel but also board's approval.

For all the young people - you can find near exact clone copies of this comment every day, every month, from the last 20 years. Different poster each time, different company name each time, always the same great doom and gloom predictions. They're even remotely correct maybe 0.01% of the time. Heck, half of the time lately they're not even authentic people posting their thoughts, often they're foreign agents using the internet and anonymous communication to intentionally spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about a rival country's economy, to weaken it.

What companies was this said about?

We had the dot com crash around 2000. Tons of companies died, but plenty of that infrastructure was still used, we built better internet connections across the country etc, that was good later. But so many companies died like pets.com. The investors in those companies lost a lot - and also, a book company survived and became one of the most valuable companies and a tech leader - I'm talking about amazon.

So some of these companies will surivive but a ton will die or at the very least their investors will lose a lot of money.

My favorite thing right now is watching people repeat the same stuff I heard about the internet as a teenager about AI.

Did those predictions involve companies investing in eachother in a circular manner? i only remember similar rethoric in retrospect about repeatedly repackaged and resold debt in retrospectives about 2008 but those weren't wrong.

Have you actually looked at p/e and forward p/e? Why do people insist nvidia is overvalued?

Because we believe the revenue is artificially inflated

Mostly because people want to believe that things are about to come unglued to support whatever worldview they have.

I remember my conservative pals all through the Obama admin (and then again during Biden) constantly talking about how the market was about to have the biggest collapse and we'd all go back to the gold standard because Company X was over valued or because Company Y had DEI or some other such nonsense.

Almost all of the comments on this is "feels" and very little of it is actually thought out. I get it, you don't want people you don't like to "win" or whatever, but with the NIMBY stuff I keep seeing I suspect we'll see SpaceX datacenters with NVDA chips in sun synchronous orbit in a few years and people will keep yelling, "it'll never happen, it's impossible! it can't be done!"

Signal to noise ratio on this sort of thing is pretty low typically and for whatever reason everywhere is Reddit now.

It's hard to dismiss a lot of what's going on right now. Many of us have lived through the dot com bubble as well as 2008.

With respect to SpaceX / Tesla Musk has always been a charlatan at varying levels. He sold FSD for over a decade claiming: next year the entire time. He also made similar claims with DOGE. If accountability mattered Musk wouldn't be where he is today, yet here we are. But, I can't wait for our space data centers that surround our planet with more garbage!

But beyond Musk I don't think many people actually pay any attention how bleak things look on the credit side in the US [0]. Again, if you experienced 2008, the dot com bubble or both - well, I don't think this impending train wreck is going to be any less painful.

[0] https://chartive.org/visualizations/us-federal-debt-percent-...

Ignore musks projections which he always says are wildly optimistic, and look at the actual progress. SpaceX should be a marvel everyone is cheering for.

Calling him a charlatan is just not accurate. Charlatans never deliver anything that works. Musk and his companie have delivered results more than any single person on earth, always behind stated schedule, but still delivered(1). Also failures, yes. He's just not a charlatan, it's not an accurate description.

(1) Except maybe fsd with his idiotic vision only bullshit which is the opposite of his proclaimed first principles. I'm guess he'll lose that one in the medium run if he doesn't change his mind fast

Asking what is the true forward p/e is a very valid question. Especially if demand for products go down if the investment dries up. Significant correction feels inevitable for me. Not that it can be timed.

True, I agree on forward projections. But overall by metrics people have applied to tech companies in the past, nvda is not preposterously valued

The current state of the market is primarily funneling VC cash to Nvidia. NV is also holding lots of stock in various companies, most of which is probably going to go to zero, but that won't hurt the company in any meaningful way.

After the bubble pops, NV will not be valued anywhere near where it is today, but JHH has put a lot of work in to make sure that at the end of the day, he is not the person holding the bag. At the end of last quarter, the company had 16B more cash in the bank than the sum of their liabilities. All this weird financing is on top of that. If the market collapsed today, and all AI companies stock went to zero, and all existing AI GPUs became worthless overnight, NVidia would take a >$100B accounting loss, but their balance sheet would remain tens of billions on the positive, and on the following quarter they would again be profitable as a gaming GPU manufacturer.

What NV is doing is extracting as much of the VC investment aimed at AI into the company as possible, and preferring to take a portion of the sale price of the GPUs (on which they have 75% gross margins, which is, well, gross, given that it's a physical product that contains a lot of very expensive components that came from third parties) as stock of the company they are selling to in a circular financing deal, just to have the lottery ticket in case the customer wins big.

Honest question, because I am not sure: could they become a gaming GPU company again in a quarter? Or have they restructured manufacturing away from them to produce data centre GPUs?

I’m so tired.

> ... sheep are counting me.

This fugazi economy is all too crazy.

"The AI boom has echoes of Enron"

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-boom-enron-tech-stocks-de...

At this point they’re just giving each other money to pretend like they’re actually making it.

That's about 25% of all the money raised in their IPO! The circular financing here should give everyone pause. We're at Enron levels of financial engineering, and the outcome is likely going to be worse.

Hrm.. Data centers in space?

For those confused, this is just the logical thing to do in any case. SPCX is also the biggest position Google has. And they were in early.

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