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.

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.

You could say the same about AWS circa 2011 though.

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?

It’ll be at least a year before they are eligible to join the S&P500. They also need to become profitable.

In the next 6 months another 45%-50% of Space X stock is unlocked, increasing the amount of shares on the market ~10 fold.

Although many will be long term believers who won’t sell. I can’t see how this couldn’t deflate the share price further

Nit: the phrase is “biding their time” FYI

I agree with your statement overall.

If you add up GE Aerospace, RTX Corporation, The Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics put together you get a market cap of about 1T btw.

Until MAGA is out of power

So? It’ll never pay dividends..

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 think most people signed up for it by just having some money in their pension funds.

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.

That doesn’t justify the valuation in any way

A few Chinese companies build both batteries and cars faster and more cost effectively than anyone else including Tesla though.

I would not put it past Elon.

Most stocks are. The price to earnings ratio almost never justifies the value.

Yeah. I love how the guy behind DOGE has benefited more from US federal largess than any other person on Earth.

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