What could have they possibly shown to the investors to get that kind of cash thrown at them? Asking for a friend...
Did x.ai just become worth more than x.com? We must be nearing the bubble popping...
Did x.ai just become worth more than x.com? We must be nearing the bubble popping...
Their founder has a track record of making his investors a lot of money while solving really hard, important problems.
Current valuations:
- Tesla $570B
- SpaceX $180B
- Neuralink $5B
- Boring $5.6B
This is both true and irrelevant. When Musk took over, the Tesla Death Watch was running strong because it had made 100-and-something individual vehicles in total and relied entirely on finding more investors to not go bankrupt.
What Tesla needed is exactly what Musk is: a salesman who can sell a dream to both investors and customers.
> Add an ongoing mental breakdown and full on lies (FSD, humans on Mars
Humans on Mars shouldn't be on that list, even if he's wrong about every specific — it's the point of everything else he does.
This is a pretty big thing to overlook, regardless of subsidies, as it's at least in the low hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue.
Hype, sure, that's the lighting every company wishes it could bottle for their product launches. Even the metaphorical launches rather than Musk's more literal use of the word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk%27s_Tesla_Roadster
Is "hype" a dirty word for you? Because my point is, that brought in actual sales, which they didn't meaningfully have before.
> Without credits and customer subsidies they wouldn’t ever have made anything
And? The sole purpose of those things is to convince the private sector to get something done. You're complaining that they worked.
Boring and Neiralink are just valuations with unknown revenue base and future which may be not justified, and weak proof to justify another valuation.
Elon Musk Prada Leather Jacket
Elon Musk Rectangular Sunglasses
Considering the price of e.g. BTC, maybe thinking "People with money can't be this dumb!" is the dumbass move...
That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”
Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.
“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.
“I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.
“YES!!!” exclaimed a third.
What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet.
“I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”
“We were incredibly impressed,” Bailhe says. “It was one of those your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings.”
Humans with money are mostly just humans that are much less likely to face real consequences if they eff it up.