It's the reverse. The purpose of AWS was in 2011 was financial internal Amazon use. They had never invested in proper communication between the (many) parts of the Amazon webstore so everything was ad-hoc (like it still is in essentially every other company). If the website talked to an (internal) payment provider, that was one protocol. Another internal payment provider? Different protocol. Mail customers? SMTP (and not transactional like now, unless your website code implemented the transactional part).
That's what the first version of AWS was like. A standard set of interfaces. (you offer compute to the company? You implement these methods. You offer payment? You implement these methods. You offer ... etc)
They hadn't (yet) settled on a single RPC method but that's what it was. Then, as a financial innovation they started offering as many as possible to outside parties so they could use that money to pay for buildouts without loans, and a tax rebate on top. That's how AWS came to be. It had quite a few uses: it would simplify the amazon website, but most of all: it would allow for financial innovation in hosting the website (people still don't understand that when using AWS they what they are fundamentally doing is give Amazon better interest rates on loans to build datacenter hosting for their other activities. People still don't understand that the core of Amazon is not selling, is not AWS, it is financial innovation).
It was very much not a company selling to itself because it couldn't find outside buyers. It was a company selling to outsiders screaming to buy their internal products so the internal products would essentially be built for free and Uncle Sam would even provide tax rebates for building them (think about it: without AWS, Amazon datacenters are for internal use and tax is due on the equipment. With AWS Amazon datacenters are built to rent out and you can deduct any spend on building them ... smart, no?)
(that's also how Google cloud came to be, with very different emphasis and timeline)
It signals to me that they like money and people are willing to give it to them at unprecedented levels, and probably still have plenty of capacity for themselves afterwards. Why would you not accept billions of dollars per month?
"Buying time" is an ordinary phrase in English but, it doesn't make a lot of sense here because there'd be some activity SpaceX is doing to "buy time". If you're just waiting that doesn't "buy time".
The plan is simply for insiders to offload their bags (overvalued shares) to retail investors, like the folk who frequent the wallstreetbets subreddit and do all their “investing” on Robinhood. This speaks to the larger trend of the lower and middle class apparently giving up on any plans to retire- and it’s understandable as the federal minimum wage has never been so disconnected from the cost of living, plus inflation, plus the current job market being universally terrible (even for software engineers), et al.
It’s worth noting that this is nothing new. I’m reminded of Virgin Galactic, another “space company” that was heavily speculated on. Predictably, insiders like Richard Branson himself sold a large number of shares (well into the millions of dollars) ahead of the inevitable “dump” where the share price fell around 75% in a matter of weeks. Virgin Galactic (SPCE) entered the Nasdaq via SPAC - Special Purpose Acquisition Group - essentially a company whose sole purpose is to acquire a private company, thereby effectively making the company public. Why wouldn’t Virgin Galactic just go public? Why go through a SPAC? The short answer is “to bypass regulations.”
OpenInsider is an excellent website that makes it easy to see when insiders buy or sell a stock, and the most common pattern is insiders dumping their shares in overvalued companies. We saw it when Zoom and Crispr and a few others shot up several hundred percentage points during COVID. C-suite and board members made out like bandits. Those weren’t even SPACs, those were just companies that people were foolish enough to speculate on.
Finally I want to bring attention to Robinhood, the stock trading platform that eliminated commission on trades from all brokerages - Schwab, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, et al- by making it incredibly quick and easy (and free) to buy and sell stocks. They opened this Pandora’s Box, though I suppose it was bound to happen eventually- brokerages charged $7 per trade (sometimes more) and obviously for the college student who wants to throw $20 at Amazon stock… losing $7 in and then $7 again on the way out makes no sense. Now for anyone giving Robinhood the benefit of the doubt- their evil was (I think) absolutely confirmed when they unveiled a new feature- you can now trade OPTIONS with your retirement account. Options are essentially gambling, so to enable people to throw away their retirement on gambling is truly vile.
Gambling has always been a mechanism for transferring money from the poor to the rich. Platforms like Robin Hood just finished transforming the entirety of the stock market into a casino that preys on the poor (oh the irony about the company's name).
True investing, which in theory could be done even with Robin Hood, is boring and incompatible with gamification. Warren Buffett famously said that the reason people don't often become rich with stocks is because nobody wants to get rich slowly.
> Now for anyone giving Robinhood the benefit of the doubt- their evil was (I think) absolutely confirmed when they unveiled a new feature- you can now trade OPTIONS with your retirement account.
While I think robinhood has done some shady practices, this isn't one. I can trade options in a Fidelity IRA just as well.
Most if not all brokerages allow you to do that. I just opened up my fidelity and etrade to check.
That doesn't make it right perse, but your moralisation at the end becomes more weak. Robinhood is only as "truly vile" as all of wall street.
And anyway, options can play a decent role in financial strategy, most retailers don't use these instruments appropriately. To quote The Big Short, "this is wall street dr bury, if you offer us free money we're going to take it."
Agreed. More importantly, this long documented history of massive recurring multi-billion dollar fraud and theft – mostly from domestic and international retirement funds – indicates that America is essentially, for all intents and purposes, a plutocratic dictatorship with the illusion of democracy. Ticking a box every few years, when all your options are pre-positioned to continue a criminal status-quo, is neither "democracy" or "by/for the people". This systemic corruption did not materialise out of thin air recently. It has arguably been present all of history (in every economy). It's just accelerated to psychopathic levels of obscene gratuity over the last 2 decades.
This is why I've voted with my wallet the only way I can, by moving all of my investments (including retirement) out of the American market. The rot is far too deep. The few bad apples have entirely spoiled the bunch. I'm not under any illusion other markets will be safe from the fallout, or that I'll make better returns long term, but I do not care. I'm voting the only way I can given the current system. If I'd moved my investments earlier, when I came to this conclusion, I would have actually made significantly larger gains over the last couple of years.
I've always thought americans had an amendment specifically for situations when voting does not work
I think it's a great illustration of complicated cybernetics at work, i.e. its not enough to give people the right to enact change and own the instruments for it: homeostatic forces will preserve status quo no matter how many firearms are circulating. Can't really think of a clean approach to this predicament though
Options is gambling only for the vast majority who're inexperienced with them or don't have a sound theory for them. I can trade them in my setup with over a 95% success rate, perhaps even 99%. Of course I am not going to type out my theory here.
Such an overgeneralization ruined your otherwise reasonable comment. Always stop when you are winning.
Explanation 1: You're lying / delusional about your success rate.
Explanation 2: Your trading "theory" is sound, but your theory requires specific and rare conditions to be met before you trade, so your 95-99% success rate only achieves modest gains.
Of course I require specific conditions and I limit the amount at risk. I don't know who doesn't. Regarding me lying, no, but I accept that the pattern can change in the future.
Don’t talk about fair valuations. Some people will say “who decides what anything is worth anyway”? Let people do what they want. If they lose their money they signed up for it.
I think the bigger issue is that oligarchs have gotten so powerful that they can just write down the valuation they want and the market will just agree with it blindly.
The issue isn’t that investors will lose their money, the issue is that in some cases like Tesla they never do. The oligarchs are propped up by their own power over the behavior or the market — a power which is disproportionally larger than the objective value their companies bring to the economy.
SpaceX is a company with the same revenue as Dick’s Sporting Goods.
I don't get the complaint about Tesla. It's profitable, has little debt and 40 billion in the bank. What sort of "Power over the behavior of the market" do they exert? Like they can force people to buy their cars.
Space X has the most sophisticated vehicle ever created by man. Dicks does not. If you are only looking at revenue then sure, but that would be silly, you have to look at what the potential in a company is not it's current revenue, if not then looking at Blockbuster in 2008 would seem like a great investment compared to Netflix which didn't have much revenue.
One theory is that Elon Musk ends up being able to build AI datacenters faster and more cost effectively than anyone else, which seems plausible given the success of Tesla Gigafactories.
Datacentres are close to being a commodity, though.
There's some stuff you can do with Combined Cooling & Power or other cogeneration schemes, and potential for cost-cutting: removing fire protection, doing without redundant power, reducing security, that sort of thing. But that's all fairly marginal in the grand scheme of things.
The more experimental stuff like running with extreme temperature gradients, extensive liquid cooling, or maybe using CO2 or He instead of air is certainly worth trying out, but unlikely to make much of a difference either.
SpaceX are claiming that they're making a big profit on their deals with Anthropic and OpenAI but that seems to assume that the cost of the compute is zero. I'm not a forensic accountant, so maybe it's okay to have written the value of that down already, but it's not a trick they'll be able to pull off more than once.
Really, the best thing you can say about them is that they've got a big pile of money so can finance capital expenditure cheaply. That gives them an edge of a few percentage points over the likes of Equinix (worth $14.2bn), but not much more than that.
This is pretty normal for tech stocks. Most have a big pop on the first few days of IPO and then they drop. After 180 days, insiders can start selling shares so there's another drop around that time due to a higher supply for shares on the sell side.
This happens witch such predictability and not only in IT stocks that I started to wonder, if that is not illegal? I mean, illegal in a spirit of insider trading laws, not literally illegal.
Tl;dr it’s still above the IPO price so the favoured investors still at a profit and Musk is still a trillionaire.
As with Tesla, Musk will keep coming up with ‘profits suck but we are doing x new shiny project so don’t worry’ announcements to keep retail investors believing…
SpaceX + Twitter + XAi + Cursor is the perfect combo to collect government contracts. You want exposure in social media? Use Twitter. Civil servants want AI? Use Grok. Developers want AI? Use Cursor. All space heading business? Contact SpaceX. All under the polished (!), totally unblemished (!) PR image of Musk.
Someone please wake me up if this is a fever dream.
I think this has been Musk's play for more than a decade. Except the Twitter purchase, which was just weird. It's possible the AI play is for data center subsidies/tax breaks. TBC didn't go too well in terms of California rail expansion contracts, I think, but perhaps he can get some Pentagon money for building military DCs.
On paper. The actual number is how much cash banks will lend him using his SpaceX holdings as collateral. Maybe that is a trillion dollars. Smarter money though? They know that if things go south and they need to collect that collateral, in that situation SpaceX will be worth a lot less than a trillion dollars.
I basically said a similar thing in another comment, but this is the real problem.
The ultimate power of the modern oligarch is gaining far more wealth than the value their assets bring to the market.
It would be healthier for our society if Tesla’s stock came back to earth to a valuation that made some level of sense for the business that they’re in. Musk would not be so astronomically rich in that case. The same story goes with SpaceX.
We don’t really need to be concerned that mom and pop are going to lose their life savings in their index funds to SpaceX. It’s actually the opposite: it’s more concerning that stocks like SpaceX and Tesla don’t crash down to better reflect reality, and their continued overvaluation serves as a massive transfer of wealth to major shareholders at the top.
I don’t bet on SpaceX stock crashing down anytime soon because the oligarchs who own it have so much soft and hard power to prop it up. Only the salaried employees are going to sell shares, while the biggest owners will just borrow against the collateral.
Technically it never ceased to be an oligarchy just like all western countries are oligarchies too. People elect some a few of the people on top and then they act on their own absolutely unchecked, plus all those other unelected people ruling us with them. It's a definition of oligarchy. The only partially democratic country in the world is Switzerland, where people actually can vote on a country governance directly and government must comply with results (and not only take it into attention), which is a definition of democracy.
What do they think is gonna come from this SpaceX + Twitter + XAi + Cursor amalgamation? Sexbot agents vibe coding on Mars?
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