VC

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

extrabigbrain

imagine being a VC bro and just schmoozing your way through life.

DazzlingAnimal581

VC firms made more than 80 billion today?

Frosty_Promise8050

Let's all remind ourselves, that Elon may have made money. VC firms made more. The real winners today.

SirAccomplished9940

It's a relatively modern, VC-led phenomenon (the public markets as liquidity aspect)

ThinkBigger01

It will certainly go down once locked up VC's will be allowed to start selling in tranches.

Curious_Olive_5266

It is very believable. That's just how VC works.

tradematesHQ

The real kicker isn't SpaceX itself, it's the precedent. Once Nasdaq showed they'll bend rules for a cash-burning unicorn, every VC with a dogshit balance sheet is lining up. OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe - they all see the same exit. "Just 1%" adds up fast when you've got a dozen of these things bleeding value into your QQQ. The 'insider tax' comment nailed it: you're paying PE firms via dilution, and your expense ratio is the least of your worries. Passive funds are turning into a dumpster for private equity trash.

Reaper_1492

This isn’t really true. It’s partially true - but also there’s a ton of VC capital tied up and they need an exit path, it’s not bad or good, it’s just the lifecycle of financing a pre-IPO company.

GunBrothersGaming

I was offered sharea pf SPCX at $165 a share toget in. Fuck my VC for trying to make a few bucks.

ExtruDR

I am all for having a polite discussion, which this is. I very much appreciate your demeanor and patience. \- this is r/stocks, so I know how out of the pocket I am with what I have below. If the debate is whether you can make money on the IPO or not, then I don't care how you gamble with your money. For me, personally, I still have to be skeptical and dismissive of this BS and an investment in Elon's companies is just the same as placing a bet in a dog- or cock-fight. I might make money, but I am contributing to a morally wrong activity. To be clear: I WANT a better future, I want space travel and exploration, I want to get resources from space and have better sources of energy, better computers and many other ways to improve humans (ALL HUMANS') quality of life. I also know that these are deep-futurist goals and that these will not happen within my (and your) lifetime. I believe that we have a responsibility to help advance things in the right direction and to improve things here while and where we can. Having made a statement about my personal values and beliefs, I want to continue by saying that I do not think that Elon or his companies share these values. These are land grabs. Elon IS a supremacist of some sort... he does believe that some people are more deserving that others. That some are worthy and some are NPCs or chattel or whatever. This is incompatible with my personal values, but also with what it means to be in a modern society. I am old enough to remember the hype when a company was going to release "something" that was going to revolutionize personal transportation for ever. Wired and every other magazine and web site were hyping this iPod-era unveiling like mad for WEEKS. A silicon valley company with great VC funding run by a genius founder and innovator. That was the Segway. That also feels like the Boring company or that electric company that put some batteries and motors into some Lotus cars for rich people.

FroggyMcTerrison

"VC: 'What's your moat?' Juan: 'The grass grows back.' VC: 'You son of a bitch, I'm in.'"

DONNIENARC0

Ran out of VC money? The same Anthropic that got $65b in a series H like a week ago?

Tim_Apple_938

That is true. But they don’t really matter Enterprise market penetration is largely measured via “what percent of F500 is locked in” VC startups funneling money back into the labs from their portfolio companies *already happens.* And that’s not enough revenue to make a difference empirically

bzl33

Claude Code revenue isn't durable, I think it's already passed the hype period. That said every single prominent VC thinks Anthropic is God so maybe the market stays irrational longer.

shtoops

OpenAI isn’t a random VC-backed startup. It’s arguably Microsoft’s most important strategic partner. “Anthropic buys OpenAI’s IP for pennies” scenario is pure regardium. Microsoft will be the one to pick up the pieces.

k3t4mine

I've called the top 5 times this year already, I have no idea. But for the first time since 2003, net equity supply is positive. [Good Bloomberg chart.](https://ibb.co/6cZHVSTX) It actually makes economic sense too. Companies think now is a good time to sell shares. Debt markets have been gobbling up issues from the hyperscalers so far, and SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic have had no issues getting VC funding. So why raise equity now? Because they think this is peak froth.

GreenerThanYou

Capital G has talent on par with top VC/IB’s

teahugger

That’s the VC strategy. Invest in dozens of losers but one big win can make up for it.

Rachel_Paigefe

$852B valuation before IPO is wild. If they hit public markets at that, it’ll be bigger than most FAANG companies on day 1. Big question for me: can the cash burn justify it? Data centers + training costs are insane right now. Microsoft’s 27% stake is looking like one of the best VC bets ever though. Curious if they’ll do a direct listing vs traditional IPO. As a private company they can move faster, which is probably why Altman said timing isn’t set yet.

usrnmz

Now add in VC and insider selling.

RoboticGreg

US companies are 100% using Deepseek. I'm guessing my company is switching over to it soon. Every VC funded company has basically required 100% ai code support and now that we are heading into the "extract" phase of "subsidize, addict, extract" almost all of the board of every VC and many PE backed companies are looking for ways to salvage their companies that are ALMOST ebitda positive so they can exit them. Granted that's not the powerhouse of the American stock market, but they out number the powerhouses 10:1. If 10% of those small companies make it with engrained Chinese AI support, it will be very very hard to dig it out. I really feel the next 5 years is going to be a ridiculous power struggle that will influence what happens in the world for many decades afterwards depending on who wins up controlling the major ai support models, because it's REALLY getting dug in in very invisible ways: managing order goes, coding support, research, copy editing, unsexy services everyone vaguely knows happen, but they don't pay attention to and are actually quite a big chunk of bottom lines. The OPEX reduction ai offers is too rich to be walked away from, and generally, AI is best served as large infrastructure where access is a service. It's a scary situation, imho

nohandsfootball

I think the reason the AI companies are already talking to the govt about being partially govt owned or whatever is because the govt is a more reliable bail out than the free market. I know everybody is, "OMFG no one has ever built ARR this fast" but VC subsidies are running low, so *cheap* AI is already disappearing which is going to bring revenues and valuations back to earth. Overvalued yes, a bubble, not sure about that.

beanawalla

I have not heard anyone defend the valuation of this IPO. Who the hell is supporting it and buying the stock at the IPO? I am former VC and this is bat shit crazy valuation.

Hairy-Preference-824

So Tax money and 401K money bailing out VC

redhouse_bikes

Around legalization time I got into a weed company early by giving a buddy a stack of cash, so he could give it to his buddy, who knew a VC that could get in pre IPO. Very sketchy but it worked out and 10x my money from that. 

tragedy_strikes

They've been getting hundreds of billions of VC money how are these technologies so great if they need this much welfare?

Guy_PCS

Spcx is a long term play for investors that want in on the VC fund. You want MoonShots this is the play.

foo-bar-nlogn-100

But US government is investing in AI labs at 1.2 to 1.4 T valuations not when they are small companies. So US gov is providing exit liquidity for VC using the public purse not helping make national champions.

livingunique

Nah, I have faith the banks will prop themselves up on Monday so more VC can escape the big bust It's not a huge bet

CHENWizard

Probably something different than whatever most people think it will be, especially the apes on WSB. If you’re concerned, hedge or hold cash. If you’re trying to predict it, you’d better be Michael fucking Burry or Bill Ackman. Right now, it’s so hard to predict because many of these AI companies are pre-revenue and not publicly listed. Hardware companies are making money hand over fist and seem very financially healthy. Their valuations may be slightly high, but right now, there’s no reason for them to dump. What could potentially cause a crash, in my personal opinion, would be high natural gas prices, but really only after AI companies go public. Maybe you see VC’s pull funding and that could be a signal, but I personally don’t think that will happen. If they’re paying much higher prices to run their models, then they will have to charge more for tokens or reduce the session limits on their paid plans. They will hope for subscriber companies to be so reliant on AI by then that they will pony up and pay whatever the AI companies request. Maybe some will, maybe some won’t. If the majority decide not to pay and instead cut AI budgets, then AI companies will start faltering and will be the first domino to fall which will propagate all the way back to the material suppliers. My prediction, if there is to be a crash, is this: AI companies go public, energy demands cannot be met, model costs become unsustainable. I’m not sure what the energy cost ($/kwh) would have to be to cause this though. There’s also a chance that there is no bubble and we are just witnessing a time where many of the largest companies in the world are not mature, but rather growth companies.

Zipski577

SpaceX investors are not buying stocks they are private equity and VC investors primarily

santambroeus

NBIM has fairly limited private company exposure. Nicolai tangen (CEO of the fund) has been pushing to get approval to invest in PE/VC however this would require approval by Norwegian Parliament, which so far has voted it down

kanzaki1234

This smells like the subprime mortgage. This guy is really regarded but can borrow from VC

rioferdy838

I mean, how the fuck are you allowing a loss making company into the s&p 500 or anywhere near these types of indexes.  Fuck that. I don’t want my pension to be some dipshit VC and Elons exit liquidity. 

Zernfix

SpaceX wouldn't hit VTI as hard as you think regardless of whether it's worth $1.75T. Both indexes are float-adjusted, not full market cap. SpaceX is overwhelmingly insider held (Musk plus early VC not to mention the dozen plus share classes), so only the publicly tradeable float gets weighted, not the headline number (CRSP p. 12). It also needs at least 12.5% float just to be added (CRSP p. 10-11). So a $1.75T company with a small float is a much smaller index weight than $1.75T implies. And nothing gets added at full size on day one anyway. CRSP has a seasoning rule (\~20 trading days before ranking) and an IPO lockup rule where locked shares stay out of the float until the lockup expires, using conservative registration statement estimates for the first 180 days (CRSP p. 10-13). The initial weight is built off that and not the full cap. Like I said, VTI tracks CRSP Total Market which has no cap on constituents and just adds names by float cap, spreading the impact across the whole market (CRSP p. 14). VOO and SPY track the S&P 500, a fixed 500 count, committee picked index with extra screens like positive GAAP earnings (S&P p. 8, 12) so a new entrant there actually displaces someone unlike VTI A partial float of even a $1.75T company lands as a single digit percent name at most, not the drastic shift you're picturing for VTI. [https://www.crsp.org/wp-content/uploads/guides/CRSP\_Market\_Indexes\_Methodology\_Guide.pdf](https://www.crsp.org/wp-content/uploads/guides/CRSP_Market_Indexes_Methodology_Guide.pdf) [https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/methodologies/methodology-sp-us-indices.pdf](https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/methodologies/methodology-sp-us-indices.pdf)

Limp-Negotiation5790

I love how it used to be that IPO investors were getting in on the ground floor for the ride up the price elevator, but now are just bag holders for the VC and banks to dump their shit.

cuteman

> Look at anyone's credentials who is hyping it up... They're all VC investors You could say the same thing about the inverse, reddit malcontents

Eazy_DuzIt

Look at anyone's credentials who is hyping it up... They're all VC investors (bought in long ago and waiting for an IPO). A couple have been on CNBC today and they are all talking about how they got in SUPER early and "it's about the long game". Read between the lines: Pump and dump, they want SpaceX to IPO fast before these other $trillion+ AI IPOs these next few weeks. SpaceX will do fine regardless of what their "fundraising" does. They have performance and contracts locked in. But they're also IPOing at 90+x earnings which is insane. That being said I'm up 1,500%+ on TSLA but NASA and other space fairing agencies aren't putting all their eggs in one basket, it's too risky for the programmes and they need to fund innovation. For both growth AND value investing, I'm investing in the aeronautics industry as a whole

SirThaddeusGumdrop

Wake me up when AI can build affordable housing or provide child care. In the meantime, it’s just a way for me to use PE/VC money to make photorealistic images of 12th century Venetian orgies.

allgoodhere_100

If I had 80k, no debt, and a LT investment horizon, I would probably keep the majority of the portfolio in broad mkt index funds and only allocate a smaller portion to risky investments I understand well. Personally, I am interested in the energy sector because growing electricity demand and infrastructure investment could create attractive LT opps. If I wanted additional LT upside, I might allocate a small part to private mkts through platforms such as AngelList, StartEngine, Republic, UseLegion, or Wefunder. These platforms can give retail investors access to private investment opps that were historically available mainly to VC funds and HNW investors. There are tons of platforms out there nowadays so it's worth doing your own research. I would make sure the portfolio is well diversified before taking on additional risk.

Xinlitik

The Uber of AI… ie get people hooked on VC subsidized rates then pull the plug when it’s time to IPO

Ill-Dig8519

The Morningstar gap isn't really the story for traders. The more interesting setup is the forced buying window. QQQ and other ETFs have to absorb the float on inclusion — that's a mechanical pump with a known timeline. The trade isn't "is SpaceX worth $1.8T?" The trade is "how far does it run on forced institutional buying before the VC unlock starts?" For long-term investors, avoid. For traders, the entry and exit windows are actually pretty well-defined. Those are two completely different conversations that keep getting mixed up in this thread.

TheMadFlyentist

Yes, none of the AI-exclusive companies are profitable, and a significant number of them are expected to fail. There is no clear path to profitability for them. Many economic experts consider the AI sector as a whole to be a bubble propped up by overly optimistic speculation. Not the argument you think it is... But it is certainly true that many companies are unprofitable for years prior to finally making a profit. It's especially true of startups that receive a lot of VC funding (gambling), with AI being a prime example. Space X has been a company for **24 years** and has never posted an overall profit. The only branch of the company that has managed to turn a net profit is Starlink (literally first profits last quarter), and that business model has very little long-term potential as fiber networks continue to expand and physical connectivity in disconnected areas is growing exponentially. So their primary customer base is shrinking, they already suffer from severe latency issues, and within 5-7 years their speeds will be bottom-barrel without significant investments in replacement satellites. So there is no clear path to long-term profitability as the window of relevance for satellite Internet is arguably already at its peak. It's genuinely hilarious that you would ascribe concerns about the profitability of Space X to "hivemind" when the *ridiculous* IPO valuation is entirely the product of masses of clueless investors blindly frothing at the mouth just because they're afraid to miss out on the next big meme stock. If you could even *spell* due diligence then you'd run the other way. Lastly, you should look up the term "straw man" because you appear to have no clue what it means.

Pleasant-Shallot-707

Opportunities for VC exit liquidity you mean

sm7196

AI money printer only has so much ink regard. Google saw SpaceX about to ask for giant bags of cash and said “lol no we’re taking ours first.” Not screwing Elon. Just grabbing the money before every VC is broke and crying.

Master_Enthusiasm410

The index inclusion pump is the most predictable part of this. QQQ and SPY have rules-based buying — they have no choice but to absorb the float at whatever price. That mechanical buying is the exit liquidity for early VC holders. Classic setup.

Adjective-Noun-nnnn

I've been thinking of it like the self driving car hype. Remember the self driving car hype, guys? Every truck and cab driver in the country was supposed to be unemployed by last year according to the hype artist con men. Did that come true? Are there Waymos operating in every city on Earth? Are they doing so with no human supervision? Huh gee I guess the edge cases were numerous, difficult, and unacceptable. Now look at ChatBots and LLMs. A lot of progress made quickly. Hype clowns telling us it will lead to mass unemployment in every profession. Take a deep breath. They're neat but they're not *revolutionary* and they take a lot of resources--electricity, water, infrastructure, stolen IP, reddit slop, and of course silicon--to run. Is it worth it? We won't know until companies are actually paying--paying full price for what it actually costs so the AI companies can profit and pay back their VC investors.

moorhound

Even worse; they're gonna utilize the new Nasdaq fast-track rules to make muti funds and retirement accounts be the bagholders, *then* crash it. They're realizing this CapEx isn't going to have a short term payoff, and the VC guys that they sold on this shit early want their payoff now. The common man is about to get fucked on a scale most of them can't comprehend, and that most of them never will.

CrunchyMage

The issue with AI company valuations is not that LLMs are not an unbelievably transformative technology. It's that they're an incredibly expensive technology to develop the next generation for, and there's basically no moat around any of these frontier AI companies. Revenue is growing now while token usage is extremely subsidized by VC money, but the VC money has run out, and only IPO is left. After that the party's over. So when people have to pay for the ACTUAL cost of using the models, is there going to be positive ROIC on data centers and frontier model training? I really don't think there will be. People will probably just rather use a 5-10% worse Chinese distilled open source model for 100x less cost.

ClearValue1994

“The VC lockup and forced liquidation point is legitimate and often underappreciated by retail investors. But the Morningstar valuation at $780bn being treated as gospel is worth interrogating — they’re almost certainly using a DCF on current revenues which completely ignores optionality value on Starlink, point to point travel and defence contracts. That doesn’t mean the IPO price is right, it almost certainly isn’t, but the gap between $780bn and $2tn isn’t purely irrational exuberance either. Lynch had a rule about avoiding IPOs almost entirely — the company chooses when to go public which is nearly always when conditions favour the seller not the buyer. The index inclusion pump you mention is real and documented, happened with Tesla. Probably the honest answer is nobody knows what SpaceX is worth because there’s nothing comparable to value it against, which is exactly why retail investors should be cautious.”

eetsumkaus

Google is a leader as is Quantinuum. The thing is, even with all these technological developments in the past few years, the field is still in such a state that no one group can take full benefit of their research as a product. So the ultimate benefactor of one company's development may be someone else. Most everyone in the field, including the VC-funded startups, is doing something closer to basic research than industrial R&D simply because most people just won't believe you if you keep too many details tucked away under IP walls. Microsoft's recent majorana claims come to mind. People immediately found their claim of a majorana qubit non-credible due to how many details they kept close to the vest.

corruptbytes

bro has been in A LOT of VC meetings about all these things - he constantly says everyone is all talk but no build i personally don't believe him, and constantly try to nudge him back, but i think he's mentally checked out after spending years in New Mexico

CelebrationNo1242

Why do poors always think wealthy people are unicorns or something I'm a swe at Google and I know so many SWEs/PM/VC/PE/IB worth 7, sometimes 8 figures that post on reddit

Autobahn97

100% this. Getting in early on an IPO today is not so great since it goes up on initial demand/hype but then tends to settle as the reality of the 1st quarter numbers are reported to wall street. Then later tends to drop a lot in value after insiders begin to dump their pre-IPO shares after a lock up period passes (often 90-180 days). The multiple rounds of VC for a prolonged pre-IPO time has already extracted a great amount of the value in the company then the IPO finds public investors to pay out the later/last rounds of VCs that got in on the last rounds of funding. Mag7 are going to be lower risk and more solid companies, better weather any storm as compared to a recently IPO'ed company. When index funds need to dumping MAG7 to buy into Space X, Anthropic, ChatGPT, and whoever is next presents a decent opportunity to buy into Mag 7 with the additional supply of Mag7 companies for anyone interested.

CramerWasRight

Crypto feels kind of cooked imo. Capital is being reallocated to things that actually serve a purpose now. The crypto craze was enabled by a time in which money was basically free. All it would take was some bozo with vague ideas about crypto to lock in millions in VC funding the environment was so loose. Priorities have shifted for the better.

Thevsamovies

They had an ATM a little while ago that was like 2.5% of outstanding shares - and then some early investors (VC, not CEO or anything) sold shares to offload ownership %. But no, nothing actually happened in terms of company messing anything up. They actually just won a big nasa contract leading into this.

Silentkindfromsauna

Not exactly, it’s belief in your vision of the future that matters. If the combined entity’s vision of reality comes to fruition you get rewarded. The stock price weighs on the likelihood of that future existing. We see this with the money losing VC companies bleeding into the stockmarket as they have ran through all the private money available. Tesla shareholders being gullible idiots is another obvious topic that this leads to, but fundamentally the price is not irrational, it just counts into account a very ambitious future.

xesttub

TLDR - Create a company, and make the public shares (the float) as small as possible. Behind the scenes - have your friends and subsidiaries buy up as much of the public shares as possible (this is somewhat illegal). And even better if you somehow manipulate a bunch of indexes to include a float multiplier (ex> NASDAQ ) Index funds aren't part of price discovery. They buy at whatever the stock trades at. As long as the value of the stock keeps increasing, and people keep buying index funds, then index funds will never sell shares. If you can get to a point where index funds own nearly 100% of the float. You basically create the mother of all short squeezes. The price climbs uncontrollably. A pretend example would be - Index funds are structurally forced to buy some amount, based on the float, market cap and market cap of the rest of the index. Let's say day 1 there are 100 total public shares available. And 30 are bought up by index funds. The other 70 are bought and sold by normal traders. So price discovery happens for those 70 shares. The price is set by the 70 people (for this example we can only buy 1 share) that think the company is the most valuable. The stock goes up and down. But it's already not the consensus price of the stock, it starts to get skewed. But what happens if - some middle east company that rhymes with Saudi Arabia buys 50 of them. Or some subsidiary of some other company? Ok - now there's 20. Price Discovery starts to break down, because now, the people who think SpaceX is worth the most starts to hold those 20. Ok - what happens when there's only 3 shares? What happens when there's 1 share, and insider 1 sells it to insider 2 for 100x the real value? Well the stock goes to the moon (pun intended). This isn't a threat to just NASDAQ - it is much bigger. Some hilarious background - I did a big senior "capstone" project in college about how to hijack index funds. I even tried to do a startup and pitch to some VC folks in the Bay. SpaceX is doing almost the exact same thing (but bypassing a bunch of the safeguards I didn't think could hypothetically be bypassed).