VC

ComplexEntertainer13

> the ones with the roi question aren't the hyperscalers, but the pure ai companies like oai, anthropic, etc. Guess what happens with the investments the hyperscalars are doing if people downstream can't make ROI and end up failing? There is no value in surplus DCs and aging GPU hardware sitting unused. For the providers to make money, their customers have to stay in business. VC money, debt and circular financing can only keep the lights on for so long. Eventually there has to be actual money from consumers brought in somewhere.

finebushlane

I think you're misunderstanding something here. The demand for AI isn't driven by VC spending, you've got it backwards here. VCs are investing in Anthropic and OpenAI because they SEE the demand for AI by the revenue and usage numbers coming out of Anthropic and OpenAI. Anthropic's models are so highly demanded that they cannot serve them without downtimes and unavailability. Anthropic are desperately trying to get hold of more compute capacity due to the demand for Claude. I.e. Anthropic could be making more revenue now but they can't because they cannot fulfill the demand they are getting for their APIs. Again, even if Anthropic couldn't raise capital gain from VCs, it would not affect the demand at all. The demand for Anthropic's API services is coming from pretty much every tech company in the world (including companies like Meta) who use Anthropic's APIs heavily.

AdMysterious8464

Who cares about GCP revenue or profits at this point in time? It matters only where they come from. At the moment VC money is thrown into the incinerator, but that can only go on so long. If OpenAI, Anthropic and all the others dont start posting multibillions in profit soon, the demand for GCP will eventually crater likewise

cookingboy

\> operating at a loss to acquire market share Bro, they get **zero market share** by giving out the market for free. It benefits only the hyper scalers and the customers. Do you even know what the fuck open weighted means? You are literally spreading Anthropic/OpenAI FUD so they can have a duopoly in the model space for the whole world. And what difference does that make where does the VC get their money from? Sovereign state fund is not unique to China. Saudi sovereign fund invested billions in Anthropic. Would you call Anthropic “being subsidized by the billions by the Saudi government”?

johndsmits

Considering it's taken drone delivery, what, 12 years to barely hit a couple cities for $5 items, done "by the book" and well executed by Google Wing and Zipline. Yeah I think air taxis are just as wild west that isn't going anywhere until a company serious addresses the engineering vs VC capital valuation.

cookingboy

I mean the technical papers they’ve published literally focus on how to get the most bang for your buck from GPUs when it comes to training and inference. We forced them to innovate, and in return they did, and they went above and beyond and shared the knowledge with the rest of us. Why is it that hard to believe? Those techniques were literally implemented by both Anthropic and OpenAI as well afterwards. I work in this industry. I’ve a close family member who’s a world class researcher. I know friends at both OpenAI and Anthropic, and nobody, and I mean *nobody* in the industry has any doubt on the R&D talent of the Chinese labs. The consensus is that they’d already be ahead of us now if not for the compute constraint they had to deal with (again, which forced them to innovate). There is no evidence whatsoever that the Chinese government is subsidizing the inferences or R&D cost, why would they? They are gaining market share by giving out the models for free to any hyper scalers that want to host them. The Chinese labs are just burning through VC money the same way our labs have been.

JojoRicardo

opposite, Airbnb and Coinbase among many other smaller YC and VC backed startups ALL favor Chinese models for commodity workloads. This is because the models are open weight and can’t ever link to any third party servers Chinese or not. OpenAI and Anthropic farm your prompts and can steal your alpha like Alex Karp has said. Chinese models can’t if you self host

Dramatic-Morning-100

VC sitting in caves in the jungle...

crankthehandle

Google would be the most successful VC on this planet if it would be a separate business.

eks

> it’s pricing a bet on where that revenue goes in 5-10 years And when that revenue doesn't materializes for the thousands upon thousands of little shitty AI startups receiving a flood of VC money trying to convince your grandmother that they NEED AI to make a cup of tea what are we going to get? A market crash. These bets are not being made on tech giants. This is all just like the dotcom bubble again, only worse.

ex1stence

There is a reason: The bubble is popping. Anthropic still isn’t profitable. It’s buying compute from a company that spent billions on data centers it never ended up using. Anthropic is only leasing compute, so the actual upkeep costs of the data center itself (buying all new GPUs and infrastructure to cool them every three years), still falls to Meta. Anthropic is buying that space using VC money, since it still doesn’t turn a profit. So it’s using equity cash to rent depreciating data centers to run a service at a loss with no clear path to profitability in sight. How you don’t see the writing on the wall is beyond me.

rdude777

>near monopoly on a emerging critical infra layer LOL! In 2025, Starlink was about 75% of SpaceX's launches; an entirely subsidized operation, funded by Elon, VC's and other money. If you remove Starlink, SpaceX is hardly "monopoly". In any case, many other launch providers are competing in the sector and now that SpaceX is publicly traded, the relevant launch services part (not "AI" bullshit) will show its true value.

YoureProbablyAB0t

The only sentence that you can say that is today out wrong is, "the big companies only lose money." Fine. They make profits which then get sent to offshore bank accounts, used to invest in more AI infrastructure [Cloud Loop](https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/ai-bubble-fears-grow-big-131548421.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAMz3i9SDiuiFY8fMLNaoh-qF1RWexuCssiVn6mz_ziGgMKxir38MmQw_BMTMrgWUzTDlijMwd-wqTbaOo7X15MmDBuSWBdBME2aDZrWKlHBt1H0nY5cnIQm-71fd3uFbKwixozjfjcTIX_4_VC8-y0v4hXTX8xGT0NFyAS_51Y4O), used for buybacks or CEO compensation. That's basically a loss to society. Maybe an exaggeration but true enough. But everything else in my original post is correct. These optimistic reports are all over the place when we know that this administration lies about the true numbers [example](https://beyer.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=8633). And this reddit. Going on rants is the only reason I'm here. I don't really need to grovel to an account that could very possibly be a bot mincing details.

Craneteam

grifting VC until that well runs dry

acadia11x

Anything .com was not going to be winner … the companies that were winners from .com understood it was about owning  infrastructure, data, content, and attention.  And I use infrastructure loosely because Telcos own vast amounts of infrastructure but they were a .com loser although it didn’t look that way at first. As it’s not about owning the infrastructure per se but services supporting and riding on top.  But I digress yes slap the word AI in your company name and you can get some VC capital … but you already know the winners of AI era, ImHo. If you are betting on some random AI company then you don’t understand AI nor where the moat happens to be … because it’s so easy to copy someone else if you are just wrapping AI and calling it a product … the very nature of AI which itself can build anything makes that an anti-moat. So with that said again you know the winners.

surfnvb7

Maybe. I think people underestimate how much VC capital and private equity is slushing around out in the cloud after the dotcom bubble, and other big events. While most people lost money on these events, the big VCs and banks made killings. There is literally so much money out there not being actively invested, they are trying to find homes for their cash other than the stock market or bonds.

ng_logic

Remember when food delivery apps were burning VC cash to give us free meals? Now they're doing $15B M&A deals. We were never the customers. We were just the product demo.

cowleggies

???? having a browser, a spreadsheet, a chat app, and a VC app open is “not a use case 99.9% of personal laptop users have”? what are you talking about lmao

hkmadbear

We've gone from "free delivery and 50% off every order" to "$15B acquisitions." 😅 The VC subsidy era is definitely over.

Longjumping_Egg_725

The top panel is every VC pitch deck from back then, just pure swagger and zero substance Funny how the bottom panel is basically reality setting in and realizing nobody actually understood what they were buying

Wide-Contribution-29

Business idea - onlyfans meets linkedin Who has contacts to VC firms? Not gay enough for Peter Thiel though, so probably wouldn’t work for him. 

Spiritual-Will-1586

Space x is becoming the unbrella for their AI, data centres, robotics, and possibly soon Tesla will be absorbed in to it. As much as people hate Elon, the dude is backed by governments, VC, and etc. I personally haven't bought SPCX yet, waiting until insider shares are unlocked in August. I'll grab around 1k shares around 110ish to 125 area.

GeneralBarnacle10

Except that this is random. His son's VC firm invested in a rare earth company that was applying for a loan from the Pentagon.

Novel-Green-2368

Why is it “politically durable”? What are defense contracts for space actually defending? Data centers and robots and VC boondoggles? Because It ain’t you. And people are beginning to realize their tax dollars and borrowed money from the Fed are actually needed elsewhere or need to be eliminated not shot into space.

Altruistic-Gate-7209

No, it is not a steal. The software industry used to have a very high barrier to entry and now it’s gone. We used to have: A) a lot of desire to build great enterprise software, and B) a big shortage of people who could actually do it. C) Hungry VC’s and a capital market that loved software businesses. (Bill gates was the richest man on earth because of it) Resulting in only a couple of software businesses / people being able to get the capital for a long enough runway to create great software that would sell quick enough to potentially become a great software business. That model is now totally thrown upside down, still there is; A) a lot of desire to build great software, but B) because of AI you do no longer need that crazy upfront investment, or in other words take that financial risk. C) because of AI the space is going to get really crowded really quickly and will drive all established enterprise software into a commodity and ultimately this will affect prices and margins. The premiums that all these great software businesses asked for their code is going to be diminished. Reliable global Saas and Cloud services that have business advantage because of their network scale and service area will be affected less.

mistermarpole

Interesting, thanks. How about VC investors? Same restrictions?

NASArocketman

I love Claude it's such a great tool. Makes coding so much easier and more accessible. The question I have is this: What happens when token prices go up? Neither Anthropic or OpenAI are turning a profit right now. They are about to go public and they need to be making more money. Companies are already blowing through annual toekn budgets in like 4 months (look at CFO comments from Uber). As the cost goes up, all of sudden human workers might be more cost effective than AI agents. I work in the sustainability field, where most companies are living off of VC money. I am not sure they are going to allocate millions to AI budgets.

Carmanman_12

If it makes you feel better, that 200k you lost made a SpaceX VC 200k richer :-)

Constellious

An IBM VC came to my local office and reassured that everyone’s job is safe and they’re going to invest there. The next month they laid everyone off and shipped the jobs overseas. I hope it goes to 0. 

RoboticGreg

You have missed the humanoid hype. It was about 12 months ago (CTO of an ai/robotics company heavily involved with VC and PE rounds)

Dudebobski

$PMTRW (speculation only) Perimeter is focused on defense, AI, quantum, aerospace and advanced manufacturing. Executive Chairman Jordan Blashek co-founded America’s Frontier Fund (AFF), a VC firm investing in frontier technologies supporting U.S. national security. If PMTR ultimately announces a compelling business combination, I think PMTRW could have meaningful upside. There are no announced negotiations. A few private companies that appear to fit Perimeter’s stated focus: ● Venus Aerospace – Developing hypersonic aircraft and propulsion systems designed for next-generation defense and commercial aviation. ● Qunnect – Building quantum networking hardware and software to enable secure, long-distance quantum communications. ● Foundation Alloy – Advanced materials company using novel manufacturing methods to produce high-performance metal components for aerospace and defense. ● Etched – Designing specialized AI inference chips built specifically for large language models and next-generation AI workloads. ● QuEra Computing – One of the leading neutral-atom quantum computing companies focused on scalable fault-tolerant quantum systems. Curious what other private companies people are watching for PMTR…?

Tiny_Instruction_557

Is there a more iconic pairing than a MacBook and soon to be worthless equity stake when VC funding drys up?

ImminentDingo

Even if the UX is a net negative because of ads, Google will be offering Gemini for free and built into your phone and browser even after the VC dries up and OpenAI and Claude are forced to charge subscription or token prices.

FullOf_Bad_Ideas

I want vibecoded Exchange and Entra to work. Migrate everyone to Ubuntu and vibe coded Teams alternative while at it. Open source it all and profit. I don't think it'd work with their approach but there should be a startup that gets VC money to Kickstart their own clones of Microsoft software and sell it cheaply to companies who want to profit off of vibe coding without duplicating work among orgs.

unclefire

Oh it’s cyclical. The question is when the hype will die down. Won’t be in the next 6-12 months the unless VC money dries up or consumers of ai abandon much of their ai work.

Leather_Floor8725

IPOs are basically bailouts for VC these days. They leave nothing on the table for the bagholders.

Technically_Tactical

The whole world maxxing 401k/403B/TSP allocations, plus retail money in private brokerages, doesn't move literally trillions in minutes. It's VC leveraged instruments printed in IOUs rhe ratings agencies have designated stable.

soggybiscuit93

I didn't speak on datacenter build outs. I spoke on hardware capex spend, and my statement on that is correct. And also, the article is speaking out of concern that datacenter buildouts are being interrupted due to regulation and an insufficient grid, which is causing shortages of supply. >OpenAI has multiple times said they're burning billions This isn't relevant to discussion on demand. Burning VC funds during the buildout phase is expected at this part of the lifecycle. Cost reductions, and a focus on reducing inferencing costs come later as the market begins to settle, consolidate, and winners / losers of the AI race become more clear.

desturel

Chipotle got sold to a VC and their quality went to shit immediately after. The only way it rebounds is by rebuilding customer trust and increasing quality which is something VCs are notoriously bad at doing. The goal is to squeeze every last penny out of the business, not improve it.

nohandsfootball

I miss my VC subsidized uber rides

trust_it_bb

You want to get rich, you need to look for sub 1b stocks. Things to look for - management, lots of cash on hand, improving financials, big catalysts, industry. Then you hold onto that conviction till the stock goes to 0 or you make it big. The ideal case is you find 5 stocks, and put 20% in each. The VC way. 1 winner will recoup losses of others and 10-50x your money. This method works even better when rates go up.

fourfastfoxes

this is actually genius -- take VC money and go crazy opening stores to show growth, take it public to cash out, then close the poorly performing stores to show improving per store sales, savings, which tricks people into becoming bagholders on the way to zero, and then you buy up the assets in bankruptcy and start over!

psychohistorian8

I was generally disappointed with GTA V compared to GTA 3/VC/SA, even GTA IV was still pretty good and like you said a lot of the people associated with GTA's early success have left the company I'm not buying GTA VI until I get extensive gameplay and feature footage

Sufficient_Habit5091

>When the VC/IPO money runs out It's going to take a long time of dumping on retirement accounts with IPOs / dilution before liquidity runs out. If Fed wants to keep printing like crazy it could take years or more.

CrunchyMage

I think the market in general is trying to figure out how the heck all this AI infra spend is supposed to get ROI and not coming up with good answers. Google and Amazon have the strongest arguments with their cloud businesses. MSFT is a bit weird because most of their demand is OAI and it's unclear if they're going to be able to pay for all that when they're still burning insane money and need a $1T+ valuation just to pay for part of current obligations. OAI and Anthropic are still almost certainly hella losing money on all their current model development, so basically the entire demand is VC fueled. When the VC/IPO money runs out, what happens to all that capacity?

Aggressive-Donkey-10

I opened a short on SPCX, 2 weeks ago when SPCX at $224, via an ETf SSPC is a 2x levered short etf, I 'm adding to it whenever SPCX pops up, I don't think the street has factored in all the shares that will be coming to market over next 3 months, 7% every 3 weeks starting in a couple of weeks, to 35% total, then more later this year. Those long-time employees and early VC-institutions are going to want to sell, and since Elon only leaked 4.5% = 550 million shares for the IPO, when Billions of shares start coming out, SPCX I think could drop to $50-75, and still be the most overpriced tech stock on planet at 40-50X sales. or i'm screwed :)

tragedy_strikes

Shit like SoftBank recently couldn't get a $6 billion loan when trying to use their entire position in OpenAI as collateral, Meta and xAI are selling excess compute because they can't use it all themselves (if running LLM's is such a great product with great returns why are they selling?), 70% of compute demand is coming from OpenAI and Anthropic (from training models) who only exist because of welfare checks from Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon and VC. Go read Ed Zitron to see how fucking stupid this industry is right now.

Tim_Apple_938

? You’re saying expensive VC backed models will win over cheap fast models that are just as good but trailing by a few weeks?

gburdell

AVGO is a VC firm masquerading as a chip company

fallingdowndizzyvr

> The only thing you pount me to is a small page of companies. Ah.... CapitalG and A16Z are not a "small page of companies". They invest in, they represent and thus network a sizable number of companies. There's also that little angel investor Sequoia. Having a VC invest in your company is not just about getting money. It's about networking with all the other companies they invest in.

FOSHavoc

So I was at this VC mixer in Menlo Park last Tuesday—washed down my third $19 artisanal oat milk latte with a craft IPA, hopped into my $140,000 Cybertruck that gets 40 feet to the gallon-equivalent, and had an absolute *epiphany*, bro. What if we take AI—and hear me out here—what if we take AI, and we put it in *everything*? Like, what if my refrigerator can refuse to open until it's verified my emotional state through a fourteen-camera emotion-recognition array trained on a dataset of exclusively white guys named Tyler? What if my toothbrush negotiates a Series C while I'm brushing? I pitched it in the three minutes between my cryotherapy session and my infrared sauna, and a guy in a Patagonia vest threw $400 million at me before I even finished the sentence. He said "this is going to disrupt the entire oral hygiene space" and I said "it will also disrupt my gums" and he said "we'll monetize the bleeding." We're now valued at $6.2 billion. Pre-revenue. Obviously. The product doesn't work. It has never worked. The fridge locked me out for six days because it classified my hunger as "a vibe shift." The toothbrush spent my entire seed round on GPU clusters and now files its own taxes as an independent contractor. But that's the beautiful thing, man—this is *America*. You don't need a working product, you need a *deck*. You need a founder who looks like he could've captained the crew team at Stanford before he dropped out to "solve trust." And now the Pentagon wants in because someone told a four-star general that our toothbrush has "strategic deterrence capabilities," and he genuinely believes an AI toothbrush is going to win the next cold war. God bless this country. We put a man on the moon and now we're putting large language models in air fryers. Same energy. *Same* energy.

mfwl

I wouldn't be so sure. My near-term thesis is that other CapEX spenders have announced dilutions, MSFT might as well. Near-term, are they likely to show increased revenue from renting GPUs out? IDK, maybe. They lost their exclusivity with OpenAI, they're not in the TPU/ASIC space like GCP and AWS. VC funded competitors are entering the market as well.

Key-Boat-7519

I’d push back a bit on calling this “blank‑check” in a good way; to me it looks more like a VC sidecar where you don’t get liquidation prefs, just all the downside if they whiff the AI bet. In my experience, Cake Equity is worth a look here.

gwrichardson42

GENB up 40% over last 2 weeks! Generative-AI Biomed, Feb IPO, same VC as Moderna, Nvidia stake (833K shares).

zoinkinator

IPO’s are how VC’s get their money back once they realize there is little upside left.

USDeerWhisperer

**On June 25, 2026 (TOMORROW**) **28,000,000 shares** will be unlocked for sale by VC’s/insiders. Currently only 30 million shares are available for sale. The company’s first target range was set at **$115 to $125** per share (before being raised to $185 at last minute due to oversubscription).

USDeerWhisperer

**On June 25, 2026 (TOMORROW**) **28,000,000 shares** will be unlocked for sale by VC’s/insiders. Currently only 30 million shares are available for sale. The company’s first target range was set at **$115 to $125** per share (before being raised to $185 at last minute due to oversubscription).

Capital_Bet_6998

Everything is true except for "is about to burst" give it 6 months for VC spcx investors to exit the market. am i right?

SoCallMeDeaconBlues1

They're everywhere, and in every sector you can think of. Law firms, Doctor's offices, supermarkets, tech companies, on and on and on- everywhere. If it's not a publicly traded company with reporting requirements, getting money from private equity is far easier than getting it from anywhere else. Especially if you need a lot of it. It sucks. You get a big win, maybe a big sale or win a lawsuit or invent something the world wants, and the VC's come in and yoink most or all of your cash to pay the investors and themselves dividends while you're left holding the bag to grind on for another quarter or year or whatever. This all can be structured in a zillion different ways (private credit lines being just one of them) but the point is, the capital you generate pays the investors first, the VC's/cash brokers next, and if there's anything left over, you last. Ask me how I know. :( But what are you gonna do. If you can't raise that money the lights turn off. It's just another layer for how wealth inequality keeps getting bigger. There's really only one escape from this stupid game: having assets that can generate cash flows directly is the only way out of this mess. It's why we're all here in this meme-riddled cesspool of self-loathing traders called WSB.

FullOf_Bad_Ideas

> It's a problem because the whole thing presumes that inference is profitable and there just isn't a lot of evidence that's the case, at least not for agentic shit. Profitable for whom and on what models? It's profitable as in some startups that rent hardware use proceeds from AI inference serving to buy GPUs. Not every inference provider is VC backed. And not every model is profitably served at every point in time. Are you talking about OpenAI/Anthropic here? I think Chutes, Phala and Venice didn't raise VC funding and just issued shitcoins to fund operations, so it's financial engineering but they made it profitable for themselves. >switching to usage-based billing, opts to switch to Chinese API's. a bunch of US APIs host open weight models. Chinese are probably a minority. >Assuming they're (the Chinese APIs) serving inference on GPU's at-cost in this scenario, it might be cheaper than US API's but it would still be orders of magnitude higher if the transition to metered billing for Copilot or Claude are any indication. This depends on KV cache caching infrastructure and not GPUs, as kv cache infra is not developed yet but it alone can move costs 10x down for agentic coding.

lordpuddingcup

Fuck them I gave them 4 tries recently at 4 locations they all need to just close Cold fries?!!? Cheese not even melted on the burger??!??!? Chilli that’s omg so bad Oh and did I say cold still slightly frozen cheese on the burger?!?!? Like fuck them dunno if it was new owners or VC or what but over last 10 years Wendy’s went to absolute shit

GunBrothersGaming

Maybe in a few months once VC's can sell. They can't sell or take profits cause they are locked into the stock. That will be the real dip when they come for profits.

Remarkable_Fee_1020

SCAMX. Congrats, you’re VC exit liquidity

Bubble_Rider

Elmo and his VC run out of greater fools. Turns out you were one of the last fools to chase based on trillion dollar pump talk.

Xzlk

0 remorse from any of the CNBC VC regards pumping this shit.

yourmomscheese

I stopped reading at private credit - trend is going the opposite direction. Talk to anyone trying to get that PE or VC money today, it’s getting harder and harder

captaing1

100% he was a fraud but he would still be considered a legendary VC with his track record....

truesy

> Where are the AI results? Where is the AI profit? Where????? Been talking with people about this topic endlessly. I'm an engineering manager at a tech startup in the AI space. The LLM boom really changed things. Agentic features are being shoved everywhere. The software eng use-cases are real. It's completely changed the industry. The gap between software and the other top use-cases is wide. Companies are working on finding footing, but the product market fit is not quite there. The cost of LLMs is also very high. VCs and other investors are flushing these larger companies with cash. To the point that startups cannot get funding like they used to, since all the money is going to just a handful of companies. And forcing startups to shift towards profitability, instead of the typical burn-VC-cash route. Everything is shifting fast, and things won't work like they used to. But the large cashflows these LLM companies have allows them to subsidize token costs. They are building lock-in, which is also why they're gobbling up software tooling companies lately. They're carving out their corners. Because, at some point, they will need to raise costs on token usage. It's currently not sustainable. It's very much like Uber vs. Lyft back in the day. In San Francisco you used to be able to get rides for $5. It's now much more. Same thing will happen with LLMs. All workflows, coding, etc is shifting to being reliant on LLMs. When the costs rise it'll get interesting how everyone responds. Consumer features, though? I don't see much evidence it's working. Lot of companies I know of that used to purchase up AI products are now really sensitive to what they would purchase, and are being extra cautious about their budgets. They are starting to realize that the return is not there. Only clear return right now, with the current token costs, is software eng. So it really depends in Zuck gets some kind of lock-in baked in before too long. They had some decent footing in the LLM space with their models, but that was a while back, and they have slipped. Google really stepped up, but obviously right now Anthropic is in the lead. It could all change in a day, just takes a better model, a better feature, a better workflow. Too soon to tell if he's doing the right thing or not. The meta thing was not right. Was silly then, is silly now. The LLM thing is much more real, but we're at the peak of inflated expectations, and time is needed to tell what opportunities really exist. Everyone is faking it, but some signals are starting to emerge.

Syllabub_Visual

Here’s my BIG BIG realization, there is literally like so much money out there in the world, like HUNDREDS OF TRILLIONS of dollars, probably far more dollars than masturbations that happen. States blow big amounts of money all the time, so do VC’s with all the ai bullshit, and come to think of it an amount of money that could not only change your life but your kid’s and grandkids life is literally a rounding error in the context of the global economy and the influencers aren’t exactly lying when they say there’s so much money out there up for grabs and so many ways to get rich. I think it starts with dropping the victim mindset and thinking creatively because you’ll eventually realize the private equity or vc guys willing to pay sums detached from reality for a website that says AI might be the key to changing YOUR life. The ONLY thing limiting you is your imagination (and it’s true because people get rich from stupid things every single day)…

Lonely_Chemistry60

I believe Bezos was in as a VC investor prior to that. I think he's been in it for a long time.

El_Grande_Papi

I learned recently that apparently Sam Altman is the reason behind a lot of Silicon Valley VC funding in hard tech, and it makes sense why they all seem like projects that are destined to fail.

hotforlowe

Not to mention the average private share purchase price has been like 6-9 dollars. Not a chance VC stats in this past the vesting period.

BVoLatte

Excuse me, do you think VC-backed IPOs don't exist? That's literally one of the main exit strategies for venture capital. Firms like Peter Thiel's Founders Fund invested in SpaceX years before it went public and still held stakes through the IPO. They don't magically lose their shares when a company goes public; their existing equity just becomes equity in a publicly traded company if they don't sell. This is like... super common lol.

mustafar0111

>Blue Origin has done it. NASA did a proof of concept in 1993, but the program was cancelled. SpaceX is the overwhelming leader, though, and has done more than anyone to make launches cheaper. No BO have not. SpaceX does something close to 90% of the global launches. Blue Origin did 5 operational flights with New Shepard in 2025 which is suborbital and can't actually make it to orbit. SpaceX did 165 with Falcon 9 during that same period that did make it to orbit and beyond. The road is littered with the corpses of rocket startup companies from 2009 and onward. Probably 95-99% don't make it at all or never make it to serious operational flights. No one is saying SpaceX is meeting its current valuation. SpaceX is being treated like a VC where its being valued based on the perceived future value of the company down the road. Basically you are paying a tax to get in before the price goes insane. Space launches are constrained by cost. That is it. Access to space is expensive as well so the cheaper access gets the more customers you get. If you told someone a single commercial launch company would be doing 165+ missions a year in 2010 they'd have put you in an insane asylum. >This doesn't matter. If xAI becomes a data center division, they will never justify their valuation. Like I said, everything about the data center is a commodity aside from the GPUs and the frontier AI Models they run. xAI is hopelessly behind on both counts. Its a component of the business not the whole valuation (current or future) and if AI companies can't build the data centers in the US because of all the push back they'll go where they have to go. The real question is what the lifetime operating costs of one of these birds actually is before anyone can determine how viable this is. So they need to fly a mission to figure that out. It maybe profitable, it may not. >When will that be? It will have to get *really* cheap to service developing countries. They would still be limited to rural areas, as urban areas have decent broadband in a lot of poorer countries. >Even if the most optimistic addressable market for Starlink is fully realized, SpaceX doesn't think that will remotely justify their valuation. xAI has to make *hundreds of billions per year*, and they are currently a distant fourth place. >Amazon could partner with Blue Origin (which may catch up to SpaceX if Starship keeps floundering), making them more competitive. More likely, SpaceX/Starlink will have 2-3 years with limited competition. No one has a crystal ball but my guess is SpaceX will get there within 2-3 years. I don't think BO will have an equivalent operational rocket doing commercial missions for at least 10 years, probably longer. They are that far behind and have no proven commercial missions yet. Building even a medium launch rocket is one thing. Getting it to fly reliably, not blow up, land and do a quick turn around is another thing entirely. There is a reason it took SpaceX a decade to get where they are through trial and error. And no one is certifying a vehicle until it has a decent number of successful missions under its belt. >No it isn't. They were supposed to deliver in 2027 and are behind schedule. SpaceX agreed to have Starship ready for a moon mission in 2027. That has had to be delayed. They have already burned through their original NASA funding. >What they are struggling to do is a solved problem (by NASA). Starship is starting to look like a flawed concept. Falcons are great, though. It is still in the early design stages. We are no where near a final vehicle yet. I think the current one is block 3 and the 39th design variation. They keep changing it which is why the heat tiles have changed, the grid fins changed, the structure changed, etc. They want to iron out all the problems and optimize during the design and testing phase before they decide on a final vehicle design. In terms of it being late. SpaceX is always late getting new vehicles and redesigns out, that is just how it is. Falcon 1, Falcon 9 V1, Falcon 9 V2, etc all went through the same thing. They always eventually get there though.

Main-Cheesecake3287

Yeah… what exactly do you think VC stands for? Venture capital does not invest in public companies.

FriedRice2682

No real bear case in the stock market as long as shareholders (VC's) don't need to sell their position to secure cashflows. The GFC was known to insiders at least by the end of 1999. The only thing that brought down the market was the credit downgrade of those loans credit score. And here we are almost 20Y later, where much of those balance sheet are filled with AA+ rating, because rating firms are banking on providing inflated quotes. Nothing has changed, whatever was there prior to the GFC is only being backstopped by removing a layer of scrutinyn trough asset managers who are lacking the same bank rules that was supposed to prevent another Bubble. The bubble will get bigger. There will be an influx of cashflows due to IPO and those AI lord will get the cashflow it needs to keep their valuation high enough, either by buying assets (lmao SPCX), or doing stock buybacks, so that the quiet market makers can quietly exit, as retails hold the bags.

sbmellen

Thx for this info. I am completely unfamiliar with the VC world.

NoAlternative4213

All due respect to Elon he’s accomplished some cool shit and made some awesome stuff… but I agree he’s always said we’re gonna do XYZ by year 202X, and it never really happens… pretty sure space x said they’re going to start colonizing mars in 30 years with 1mm + people… I don’t see it… and even If we made it… who says there’s any chance that’s a profitable business model… I’d see it as more of a publicly traded VC firm to fund rocket building… maybe to acquires Twitter and other businesses along the way.

Hidden_Glit

Sooooo, you couldn't get a loan from a bank or VC? Or did they read right through your scam?

Guy_PCS

The doomers would never make good VC's.

neurone214

I did a PhD and then went into finance. Stop en route at an MBB and industry, VC, then public markets. I wouldn’t recommend anyone trying to copy that though, it’s just how things ended up flowing for me.  Also, vests are tacky. Fleeces from your portfolio companies are where it’s at. 

PoopyisSmelly

Well the QQQ has always been a shitty index because it isnt weighted by free float and because it isnt diversified in any way. But personally I think having indexes include IPOs faster is great, not because I like SpaceX, but because stocks have been staying private for longer and VC and PE have destroyed way too many brands as a result. Making it easier for companies to go public and garner capital where it exists is a positive step in reversing the trend that has concentrated power amongst wealth PE and VC investors

Spyerx

Why do VC / Finance bros wear vests? Because they have warm handshakes and cold hearts.

Sufficient_Habit5091

Last year, California created *Zero* net negative jobs even including tech and Silicon Valley. Government and public spending helped offset some of the stagnation there. But minus that and "AI" it was a huge loss of private sector jobs. The reality is that all VC money is going to AI. All investment dollars are going to AI. Meanwhile, prices keep soaring. Supply and actual output is not increasing. Just endless inflation and worsening affordability crisis with wages not keeping up. https://i.ibb.co/Lhp1Lxqb/G6z-Ls-Tw-X0-AAKWCG.jpg This is classic malinvestment and crowding out caused by loose policy monetary policy by the Fed. I'm a bear until at least Wednesday but I don't know how much longer I can hold onto hope they won't print us off a cliff and the economy truly ceases to function.

dgellow

I thought Patagonia was an SF VC stereotype

VaIentineX

yea fair. but thats literally the point of this fund - to be at the seat of series funding without being a VC or accredited investor

Ahamadrayasbaboon

She did buy as VC. 

EngRookie

elon is a VC nothing more nothing less.

atcgriffin

I agree and I’m sure the majority of VC investments turn out negative. Probably someone else holding the bag or used as a tax write off. The advantage is the asset used to borrow against hasn’t decreased and stayed invested and is usable for another loan.

mrbezlington

Musk has found great value in building first mover companies. However, he's not been so hot on converting those into long term operations, because once you're past the "move fast and break things" VC capital wave, he's not so great in terms of track record. Tesla is pretty much in a sunk cost holding pattern until Musk finds a way to offload his stake, now he has a fresh stock to play with.

heironymous123123

I hope it pulls up big time. Im an investor from my VC days. 

Adii2311

3.3 mil * 135 ~ half a billion 2 billion was the last private valuation round If this woman didnt wanna manipulate the stock why didnt she buy as a VC This half a billion may just be a hedge to protect the rest of her portfolio from crashing

Suspicious_Green8013

First they came for the 1%, and I said nothing because I only had 99% left. Then they came for the next 1%… and another… and another… Passive index investing used to be 'own the market.' Now it's 'own the VC exit

chrisproglf

I feel like it will sell off hard. Lately retail is just exit liquidity for VC, particularly with IPO's.

FONMastr

The interesting signal here is not “Anthropic vs. OpenAI.” That is the scoreboard. The more important question is why some companies are moving faster. Ramp’s data points to something executives should not miss: adoption is being shaped by operating pressure. VC-backed firms are not adopting AI because they read better thought leadership. They are adopting because the expectation system around them changed. Investors, boards, peers, and talent markets are forcing the issue. That is the lesson for everyone else. AI adoption does not become real because a company buys tools. It becomes real when the operating system changes: budget, workflow, accountability, evidence, and decision velocity. The danger is confusing spend with transformation. Paying for AI is easy. Proving that it changes cycle time, margin, customer experience, or revenue is the actual work. From a fusionAdvisory perspective, the winning companies will not be the ones with the most licenses. They will be the ones that attach AI to a business decision, pressure-test the use case, define the proof artifact, and kill weak bets quickly. The adoption curve is now moving faster than most governance models. That gap is where money gets wasted. So the right question is not “Which model are you using?” It is: “What decision got better, faster, or cheaper because of it?”

VirtualArmsDealer

No he didn't. He transferred wealth from retail investors (who work for cash) to early investors (VC and PE). SpaceX is completely unprofitable and has no path to profitability. It doesn't generate any money, it's a vehicle to move money from morons to the already wealthy.

TheSource777

Spoken like someone who's truly clueless about the SpaceX opportunity. You have an increasing TAM or decreasing market share. SpaceX has a monopoly on a geographical area larger than the entire volume of planet early. An economic, geopolitical, and military monopoly. SpaceX has launched more satellites into space than the entire history of mankind combined. No one was even seriously talking AI datacenters 1.5 years ago. What's next? Direct to cell AI phones? Asteroid mining in space? Solar power plants in space? Pharmaceutical manufacturing in space? Who the fuck knows, but owning a 15-20 year monopoly lead on that is uncalculatable. I've owned SpaceX since 2019 and I'm not selling a single share, neither is anyone in my VC circle. So keep that poor man energy up while everyone who actually owns big boy money in SpaceX keeps compounding.

prestodigitarium

For example: https://www.reuters.com/business/spacex-sets-800-billion-valuation-bloomberg-news-reports-2025-12-13/ In terms of the secondary markets, I bought preferred shares (the type VCs get) on Forge, and via a fund that bought a bunch of stakes from early VCs. VC funds don't like to last longer than 10-12 years, so they try to liquidate what they can.

prestodigitarium

They might not, the company's been running regular tender offers where employees could sell stock at the current VC round, so that likely removed a lot of the internal pressure. There's also been a very strong secondary market, so VCs could exit positions, as well.

moorhound

I'm worried that, in one particular moment between the advent of personal computing in the 90s and the popularization of non-anonymous social media in the 2000s, we may have hit the peak of general human smartness. The computer age made people think faster. Think of the system it was modeled after; files, folders, volumes, etc. People used to have to walk to get all that shit. If you wanted to know something and you didn't, you had to either call someone that did (and hope they were at their desk because they didn't have a cellphone), or haul your ass down to a library, ask the librarian what fucking number code to look at on an index card, and find it yourself. It sucked, and computing changed all of that; Instead of digging through a filing cabinet, you could remember some obscure number by looking it up damn near instantly with a keyboard. The internet let us do this over a distance, and share it, which was even bigger. The world was now too slow for people that fucked around digging in filing cabinets for half their workday. Human minds had to speed up. It literally changed the way the human mind works. It's why all these super-rich VC fuckos are accelerationists; they believe that continuing the acceleration of the cadence of global human consciousness is the key to human mental evolution. And then Tom figured out an effective way to utilize this paradigm for an effective social platform, Zuck copied it and marketed it to rich Harvard kids, and it flipped this paradigm from being able to access any information you wanted to being injected with whatever information is thrown at you. Ads, agenda-minded shows, commentary, all literally shoved in your face if you don't use adblocking. Millions of research dollars have gone into the most effective ways to keep you watching content they let you choose from an algorithmically sorted list they chose while feeding you paid content, both overtly and subconsciously. With the advent of smartphones, they figured out how to do this all the time, and also track everywhere you're going and most of what you're buying. Computing evolved the human consciousness, and then tech VC fuckwads highjacked this accelerated human mental cadence, filled it full of trash, spend a ton of money how to make the trash-filling more effective, and are now making the collective whole of humanity dumber. We probably could've had goddamn Star Trek by now if these goddamn tech sphere jackasses didn't fuck it up with greed. Fuck zuck, I'm glad he's not the first trillionaire. Fuck elon too, but at least he's got the excuse of being kinda fuckin dumb and not understanding most of this shit lmao