> I saw that one wealthy individual had purchased $1 billion of SpaceX at the IPO. Does that count as a retail investor?
There were two individuals who each bought $1B: Ron Baron and Gina Rinehart.
While they are individuals, they executed these billion-dollar investments through their massive corporate entities and investment firms, rather than personal brokerage accounts.
A retain investor is an individual, non-professional investor who buys and sells securities through brokerages using personal funds.
While I am *extremely* skeptical, I've heard people talk about space-based solar. I mention this only so nobody adds an "and also" for that.
Ditto anyone talking about lunar He-3. This is a bad idea, "why" is long enough to be worthy of a blog post.
But if you were committed to expansionism for whatever reason, then you'd want some way to get industrial quantities of steel from mines already in space, to make the factories themselves cheaper. Possibly megastructures like an orbital ring, too.
It's not about the "Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning."
Since you are right. All of these things are available on Earth for far cheaper, with better ROI and with far less risk of dying or getting early cancer from cosmic rays.
The real benefit is a commanding lead over geopolitical rivals in the domain of satellites and satellite platforms for hosting devices in orbit, thus securing an insurmountable national security advantage.
The hand waving is probably reasonable for a couple of reasons. The first is that you can't really math things out yet when costs are shifting by orders of magnitude on relatively short timeframes. What seems impossible in one year is a casual achievement in the next. If we go back to 2002 (when SpaceX was founded) and I told you that within 2 decades they'd have lowered the cost to get stuff to space by more than 97% relative to Space Shuttle, it'd have sounded somewhere between unreasonable and impossible, yet that is exactly what happened. And Starship is set to send prices plummeting yet again.
The second reason is that the notion of economics becomes kind of odd when you start introducing space. Space has practically infinite resources of every type imaginable. For instance one single asteroid, Psyche 16, is thought to have orders of magnitude more gold than has ever been extracted in human history. But I mean, what does this even mean economically? Obviously if you start bringing back hundreds of thousands of tons of gold, the price is going plummet. And even the viable possibility of this happening would probably send the price of gold plummeting. So... it's weird. We're in uncharted waters.
And then on top of this access to space will mean we will start expanding outward - colonies, vastly larger stations stations, and so on. And these expansions will develop their own parallel economies with their own needs/production/etc. This is all kind of like trying to predict the economics of the internet before the first cable had been laid.
Most people I see online freak out at the idea of normalizing living in an apartment/condo and slightly higher density. I don’t see them lining up to live in space :)
As far back as the 60s NASA had already laid out technical plans for how to get humans to Mars. The Moon was never meant to be the destination, but a brief stepping stone to greater things. So we can thank Nixon for setting humanity's progress back by half a century. The ISS and Space Shuttle both were driven largely by these initial plans.
But the current claustrophobic nature of the ISS was, again, not the destination. There was a grand scheme of in-orbit refueling, fuel depots, and much larger scale space architecture. Something of the ISS scale was intended as a short jumping-off point, a workers' tent analog. But our progress stalled out and the workers' tent is what we were left with.
The point I'm making here is that space in the era we're stepping into is very unlikely to look much like the one we're leaving. This is even more true as the price drops because private industry will be able to play a major role. There will be no Nixon to just cancel everything out of concerns for his political career.
Depends on the timescale, and what other tech is the prerequisite to this and what other things can be done with that tech.
Even with cheap rockets, Musk was talking about 6-digit-dollars for becoming a Martian, I don't see more than a few million people wanting to spend that much for that outcome.
If we get self-replicating robots or whatever, big space stations aren't that expensive, but also Earth is huge and you can extract minerals from seawater electrolytically and PV is already cheap, so perhaps we'd just get a load of seasteads instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
Really hard to say. Everyone who does space stuff talks with the same level of optimism as Musk but historically they deliver less.
But for what it's worth, I don't think Musk's going to reach Mars except in an urn, baring some surprise development in anti-aging medicine. Even though their progress is rapid by the standards of the industry, they are still slow in terms of natural human lifespan and his age.
> Have you sketched out the net present value calculation for an investment in spacex today based on that?
IMO, their market cap should be around $200bn at the moment. That's mostly Starlink, so if there's a Kessler cascade *or* if China makes a competitor that goes down to about $80-100bn
The long-term stuff about Mars or turning the moon into a factory for modular data centres is too far into the future to be worth considering.
The only argument for space is because you're so set on capitalism that you'd rather destroy the earth than stop trying to continually grow profit. If you're that sick and deluded, then space gives you a way to escape the consequences of your own foolish hubris.
those of us who advocate for mega-cap or broad stock exchange index funds would say: of course Asia is buying America; it is where you are going to make the most money.
They have been wrong in a way that's bad: underestimating the speed and size of progress. So if the "experts" claim a timeline and magnitude, it would be safest to assume an even faster timeline and a bigger impact.
not philosophically, but certainly practically. To double down, if all lisps are roughly equivalent from a language POV, then you'd want to pick the one or two that will give you the most practical advantage (libraries, documentation, dev environment, etc.)
A component of intelligence is self improvement of the system on which you build and improve mental models. The capacity for this capability is a spectrum.
For a crude observation of this, watch interviews with people where they’re exposed to factual information and see if they update their mental model accordingly. Some can, some err out (and reject reality). Humans are tricky.
In a parallel universe where we have Biden (or Democratic Party) administration, how different do you think the regulations / approach would be for this fast moving and unpredictable technology?
Refusing to enact new laws around a thing most people don’t like, don’t want, and don’t care about (oh and is used for scams often) is quite different than a secret back door war.
Liking or not liking has nothing to do with it, this is literally the job of the government. Why do you think states started enacting their own crypto regulation laws (NYDFS) because the administration did 0.
At least their is clarity on what is allowed or not. As much as you hate crypto, the jobs of the gov is to enact these laws and enforce them. Biden had a secret war, that is not how you run a Gov.
The crypto "industry" had a series of multi-$B scams, seems like strong regulation would be called for. On the other hand, Trump executed a rug pulling token for himself and his wife days before his 2nd term and sells pardons to fraudsters and money launders. I know that inspires confidence.
And Biden ran a secret covert war using the banking system which is also questionably legal. At least with the current you know what is happening and what is allowed.
Amazing, have you checked the tariff situation? The war in Iran? Killing people in boats in South America? The personal slush fund? Knocking down the white house? Hiring and firing felons for the cabinet?
The list goes on and on for things that defy understanding what is happening and what is allowed, you are genuinely not credible.
They probably would have been in line with Executive Order 14110, the Biden administration's detailed description of a principled approach to regulation of the AI industry. It would have been aligned with the Trump administration's stated goals as well, but a coalition of rich VCs successfully bribed him to rescind it as one of his first acts in office, because the primary principle of Trumpist government is that people who pay Donald Trump a lot of money get what they want.
The ideal case is a statutory agency with regulatory authority that sets very clear standards for what model capabilities can and cannot release. Those are set ahead of time and well known by frontier model providers.
Most normal regulations are managed through the administrative procedures act process. That’s a legal requirement that involves deliberation and public comment.
I’d argue you could pretty easily enumerate most capabilities that have been obvious concerns for a while. For example, cyber security.
This structure can last decades and reassure players they can operate in the market without rules changing suddenly without warning.
Some kind of sudden, temporary action like this export control tool is legally fragile. Even if sometimes necessary in exceptional cases. But if the administration sees this as a permanent way of working, they won’t be helping anyone (but maybe themselves through grift).
If the administration truly cares about functional regulation (which maybe they don’t) they need a sturdier legal structure that lasts past Trump. Not flimsy edicts that change with the wind
I wholeheartedly agree with what you’re saying in general. I do wonder though, given how rapid advancements in AI are occurring, if even an agency with statutory authority would be able to establish a predictable regulatory environment, let alone do so while maintaining a lengthy public comment period and a whole of government approach. There are obvious flaws with the current administration’s approach to, well, almost everything. But I’m not sure if this is even a tractable problem with the governance structures we have been employing over the last 50 years.
Nothing being talked about with Mythos wasn’t a known AI risk 12 months ago. Those rules could have been established to guide frontier labs.
But yes crazy things happen. Maybe it won’t catch everything.
The right answer are giving the govt / this agency explicit legal, short term model pause capabilities to let the rule making process happen if something completely out of band happens. Or let the agency study/approve models prior to release.
Not sudden, unexpected application of export laws.
Yet in this case, for Fable, cybersecurity risks have been well know for some time. A rule created years ago when we knew this would happen could have given frontier labs and the market predictability.
> Nothing being talked about with Mythos wasn’t a known AI risk 12 months ago. Those rules could have been established to guide frontier labs.
Is there a jurisdiction that HAS created legislation or regulations that takes it into account? I would think that if it is super easy to foresee and formulate practical and effective regulations for AI, then it must already exist somewhere.
There were two individuals who each bought $1B: Ron Baron and Gina Rinehart.
While they are individuals, they executed these billion-dollar investments through their massive corporate entities and investment firms, rather than personal brokerage accounts.
A retain investor is an individual, non-professional investor who buys and sells securities through brokerages using personal funds.
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