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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I bet shareholders of SpaceX are thrilled to be exposed to this for no reason

SpaceX owners do not care. If they were risk-averse, they would have dumped SpaceX like it was toxic waste.

In a broader sense, this "I bet Oracle shareholders hate their bad PR" attitude is really zero-sum. It's pervasive on HN, and we rarely ever see bad PR snowball beyond niche discussions. I want $BIGCORP to collapse as much as the next guy, but the outrage-derived comments don't seem to reflect the market's response.

I mean, there's "this is a risky investment in rockets and stuff" and then there is "this is a risky investment in rockets and stuff which has for some reason been coupled to a CSAM generator". One is going to be more off-putting to investors than the other.

I'll actually steelman against this. For the majority of SpaceX holders, they really do not care. They did not sell their stock when SpaceX started taking NRO contracts. They didn't grow a conscience when Starlink usage was limited in occupied Ukrainian territory. They aren't protesting rocket launches that put Israeli satellites into orbit, aiding and abetting a likely genocide of civilian populations. You think fake child abuse imagery will finally burst the dam? After all of this?

Like I said; some companies revel in their bad PR. Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, all of their misdeeds are untouchable. SpaceX isn't going anywhere, and everyone holding their shares knows it.

I mean, even for the completely amoral investor, they would still have to think about whether the magic abomination generator will _make money_. I would imagine that the Venn diagram of people who think that SpaceX will make loadsa money and those who think that whatever-the-hell Twitter is now will make loadsa money is not a circle.

Making money off of the proverbial Torment Nexus is SpaceX' specialty. They do it pretty well; the US fed loves their rockets, and feeds them contracts with margins that could finance a dozen suburbs. If X can pull off a similar pivot to being a federal lapdog, it would cost SpaceX investors nothing and expand the scope of their service contracts.

FWIW, I agree that "fake CSAM isn't real risk exposure" is a pretty crazy line to steelman. But we live in crazy times. SpaceX is an antifragile asset, and anything that enhances it's risk is seen as a value-add. This is exactly what America deserves for refusing to regulate our monopolies while they play the futures trade like Candy Land.

You would lose this bet.

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