While I agree with the sentiment that SpaceX today is not worth anywhere near 1T+, it's worth understanding that:
a) SpaceX is currently trading at ~>1.5T in secondary markets
and
b) most of what the market is reacting to is the _chance_ that SpaceX goes on to become one of the largest companies in the world.
Remember the reaction when Facebook IPOed? It was hilariously overpriced (at the time, on paper, based on existing revenues) and yet here we are. A 1% chance of earning a trillion dollars is worth 10B - SpaceX can more accurately be thought of as a 10% chance of earning 10T rather than a nominal everyday business.
Facebook's IPO was something like ~20x revenue and 100x earnings. If SpaceX IPOs at $1.5T, that's nearly 80x revenue and if you buy their 'adjusted' EBITDA figures, 230x earnings. Not quite an order of magnitude, but substantially 'worse' financially.
Feels risky to push the S-1 a day before the latest starship launch. If there is a catastrophic failure OR a perfect success it feels like it would be material here.
Also I’m concerned that if AI “works” (ie: country-of-genuses-in-a-box) that the moat of reusable rockets decreases substantially. What would stop Northrop from vibe coding their own starship?
That's an interesting use of the word material. The problem with the IPO is that it's vibes based. There's already a lot to doubt about starship. If there is some large failure on this flight, it won't change the actual material value, or lack thereof. But it would shift the vibes.
Because their job, definitionally, is to increase profit. If you increase efficiency, you've done your job well. The people who hire and fire CEOs care primarily about this metric.
There's no need for insults. Have you considered that "the boot" in this case is the structure of market capitalism itself and that this structure has benefited humanity immeasurably? It could be argued heartless bankers have done more to reduce human suffering than any other group of people to have ever lived. If bootlicking means "maybe its not so bad that humanity allocates resources rationally instead of based on some arbitrary sense of fairness" than show me the boot and I'll lick. At least this boot generates excess grain and beef.
All that said, of course it was highly stupid to say this in a place that would be heard be people outside the capital allocation system and whose feelings would be hurt by the unfuzzy truth that banks exist to make money.
Obviously a stupid thing for a leader to say about his own employees but I think getting emotionally upset about this statement is also pretty silly.
Having employees represents deployed capital. Some of that "human capital" is lower value than others. Obviously AI will replace the lowest segments first. Call it heartless or accurate, you're correct either way, but these are not words that cut deep into the heart of heads of banks - its more or less their entire job to be heartless and accurate.
I've worked for companies who have kind, sensitive, and inaccurate leadership. The result was everyone was out of a job, rather than just the low performers. Pick your poison.
This is the kind of thinking that has resulted in an economy where losses are socialized and gains are privatized. There is strategic business value in managing your company in a way that doesn't contribute to the collapse of the middle class.
> This is the kind of thinking that has resulted in an economy where losses are socialized and gains are privatized
Socializing losses is definitionally a byproduct of government action, not of a private business.
> There is strategic business value in managing your company in a way that doesn't contribute to the collapse of the middle class.
I genuinely don't know what this means, and I'm not trying to be snarky. People, and Americans in particular, are considerably more wealthy today than they were in some imagined golden age of the middle class. If you want to keep your capital in a bank that is out for some imagined social restructuring, by all means go ahead, but I do not think a compelling banking product that will make.
It is demeaning, obviously (sorry to be blunt). Some people have jobs that involve speaking about people in a demeaning way - that doesn't make that terminology not demeaning. It just makes those jobs inherently demeaning to humans in the operations of those jobs.
The human condition is inconvenient for people who benefit from speaking in this demeaning way for efficiency. It's better to accept this and adjust than to try to convince yourself and others that we can somehow stop being human (much better, considering how people react to being treated inhumanly...).
By that measure anyone who manages employees must be a psychopath. You must consider employees as a resource, in both the positive way (these are my teammates and owners of my company and human beings with lives of their own) and in the resource allocation way (how can I make my business survive and prosper).
If you think anyone who employs people is a psychopath and deserves ire, you're more or less condemning capitalism itself. If that's the case, well then my defense of the banking CEO is strongly justified and I'll sleep well at night knowing _at least some jobs exist_ because of capital allocators who can make tough decisions.
no no no you have to ignore that people like the product, its more important to mock production manufacturing from the armchair.
I personally don't like the cybertruck and wish they made something much closer to Rivian, but getting upset about a product you don't like is a small man ting
I think you have to squint pretty hard to think that's the case in software engineering. LA Times suggests there are 6.9 million job openings (1). I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that anyone who wants a job in tech should get one otherwise its a humanitarian crisis. In fact, I'd say it's beyond unreasonable to suggest that.
Still, I do feel bad for younger folks trying to break into the industry - but "work for cloudflare or go hungry" is beyond a stretch.
Edit: Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026, imagining this is a case of people going hungry requires some very serious ideological capture.
> LA Times suggests there are 6.9 million job openings
Yeah sure. I've seen literally dozens of job openings in certain companies that match my resume pretty much perfectly. None of them ever bothered to respond when I applied beyond "nah, better luck next time" (even that is not guaranteed, some just ignore you). I have no idea what those millions of job openings are, really, but the fact is, when you're out of a job, you don't feel like you have millions of employers lined up to invite you. Especially after you spend a couple of months submitting resumes and getting no interviews.
> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026
This is pretty generous, usually a couple of months is all you get, sometimes people don't get even that. With that kind of approach, working for Cloudflare becomes even more decent option, comparatively.
I hope people don’t gaslight you into thinking it’s something wrong with you. That was exactly my experience this year - and that’s completely new compared to 4 years ago. It’s the market that’s changed.
No, I have been in the field long enough and done enough things that I know I maybe not the best ever, but I am pretty good. I appreciate the kind words though. And I am lucky to have a good job too, now. But that's what happens in the field, and it's not only me - I have heard the same you are saying from multiple people over the last years. It's just how it works now. Maybe there is some super-elite level where you can just sit on your Herman-Miller throne and the unicorns come and bow to you and beg you to take a job with them. I know I am, while being pretty good, not at that level. And many, many other people aren't either, while still being pretty good. All those people don't always have a luxury of refusing a well-paying job just because they get a slightly wrong vibe about what could happen with the company years from now.
> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026, imagining this is a case of people going hungry requires some very serious ideological capture
We were talking about the people interviewing and picking jobs in general, not specifically ones that had been laid off from CF.
> I think you have to squint pretty hard to think that's the case in software engineering.
Maybe not right now (though I imagine that varies a lot even now). But I've been there. I've gone from making plenty of money to 100k+ in debt and having less money in the bank than I need to pay the rent + buy food next month. Admittedly, that was after the dotcom bubble; but it left me with a mindset of not assuming everyone has a choice to work at the company they want to. Sometimes you need a job, and being picky about which one you choose isn't always an option.
Huge gulf between "sometimes you need a job" and "employees are pigs to the slaughter".
"I've gone from making plenty of money to 100k+ in debt and having less money in the bank than I need to pay the rent + buy food next month" is pretty intense. I'm sorry you went through that, but if you get ~7 months of paid time to job search and still wind up 100k in debt, there are definitely other problems. I don't think it's at all fair to characterize getting laid off from an extremely highly paid job as a humanitarian crisis.
Should tech companies hire more slowly and carefully? Yes, definitely. Does that actually help employees? I'm not sure, in this case they're getting paid more than they would have had they not been hired at all. Are there plenty of jobs available outside of software? Yes.
Though it’s ridiculous to entertain the thought that one would pivot their career at the drop of a hat. Even just bumping into a tech stack will chain one to it as recruiters stare at yoe in a specific one and completely ignore anything adjacent, imagine doing anything more radical.
One can do it, but it’s a life changing, irreversible and likely damaging event nobody sane would take lightly. Absolute nonsense.
"I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that anyone who wants a job in tech should get one"
I understand your point, but this is the least bad world we're in. If you mandated no-firing or mandated year-long compensation for laid-off workers, you would be crushing the small business economy and destroying more jobs than you were trying to save.
> Cloudflare is paying out terminated employees thru the end of 2026
That's great that they're doing that, but it's absolutely not guaranteed, either in this particular case (prior to this announcement, i.e. when these people were hired) or in general.
But all of this ignores the more general point, which is that--for reasons which may or may not be their fault--some people are not in a good situation financially and for them being laid off is a big deal with very real risks. Just because that's not you doesn't mean it's not a real thing.
Most job openings are fake. Ghost jobs are a real and growing problem as dishonest businesses use it to signal growth without the actual intent to hire.
Awesome project! We need more eBPF projects, and congrats on launching.
Assuming I hijack a production pod, can I not just make an http call to myself with the `kloak:...` secret and get back the real secret? Is there a way to validate destination?
The initial modern flat earth movement was absolutely trolling, no doubt about it. But as the myth grew, enough grifters and actual idiots glomed onto the idea that it became what it originally mocked. Poe's law and all that.
Similar to the "I fell in love with an AI!" folks, it's largely undercover salesmen hawking their goods to the gullible.
Genuinely: regulation. Every other benefit is conceptual at best. If SpaceX controls the entire heavy launch market _and_ they control data-centers in space, then absolutely no one on earth is in a position to control or regulate such a data-center except SpaceX themselves.
I'm not arguing that it's a good idea, but that is the idea.
a) SpaceX is currently trading at ~>1.5T in secondary markets
and
b) most of what the market is reacting to is the _chance_ that SpaceX goes on to become one of the largest companies in the world.
Remember the reaction when Facebook IPOed? It was hilariously overpriced (at the time, on paper, based on existing revenues) and yet here we are. A 1% chance of earning a trillion dollars is worth 10B - SpaceX can more accurately be thought of as a 10% chance of earning 10T rather than a nominal everyday business.
reply