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thetrb

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SpaceX S-1 2 months ago

how much did SpaceX / xAI pay for these GPUs? After 3 years they'll probably be mostly deprecated.

People expect interest when they park a large amount of money in a bank. Where should that interest come from when the money just sits there? The bank will have to invest is somewhere (ideally somewhere very safe like in Government bonds) where they can then collect interest.

So it looks like in this case SVB chose MBS with a pretty low interest rate and long maturity, which they now have to sell due to the bank run you mentioned.

I don't think that's the main issue. I think it's that the general assumption is that Moderna vaccine is about 90% effective and AstraZeneca about 60% effective.

I don't know how well you can actually compare these 2 numbers and if those are even the most important numbers, but that's part of the problem: Most people only look at these numbers and that's why they would prefer the Moderna vaccine.

What also comes into the picture here is the extremely high cost of living in the Bay Area. Even startups have to offer $200k in non-"maybe" compensation to make sure people can afford living here. Even a relatively small size startup with 50 people now already has $10 million in salary costs per year (not even counting taxes, benefits, etc.).

So overall the balance is tilted very much in favor of the big companies that can afford paying people that much. I'm wondering how that changes where startups get started. Is the Bay Area still the dominant place for this?

I tried to look up the Skype acquisition since this seemed crazy and this is what Wikipedia says:

"In September 2005, eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion.[13]

In September 2009,[14] Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board announced the acquisition of 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from eBay, which attributed to the enterprise a market value of $2.92 billion. Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion."

Looks like Ebay paid 2.6B for Skype, then got 1.9B for 65% of it and presumably another 2.8B for the remaining 35% once Microsoft acquired it. Doesn't sound like such a bad acquisition.

I recently read an article about the unit economics of Uber. It doesn't work out. Uber, in it's current form is based on leveraging free VC money to subsidize and incentivize somewhat artificial demand.

I don't buy that argument. By that logic no taxi service could ever work out. It might not work out at the current price levels, but once they squashed all competitors they're free to raise their prices (similar to what Amazon does).

I was a Dell employee at the time and the consensus feeling at the time was that Michael Dell got the company for very cheap. Just compare the Dell stock price with its closest competitor HP. You'll see that between Dec 2012 and Dec 2013 HPQ doubled its stock price while Dell just went up by the ~35% premium that Michael Dell paid.

Same here. I "trust" the Google algorithm to show me the most relevant search results first, but know that ads are not part of that ranking. So if I'm looking for the most relevant result I'm clicking on the first results after the ads.

I think his point was that you CAN buy a $7 beer in a bar, but you can also buy a $1 beer at a grocery store like Trader Joes. So $7 is the high end here, not the "frugal" option.

I don't necessarily think the threat is "rights-holders suing Netflix for a negligently insufficient blocking system", but instead right-holders keeping their content away from Netflix if there's no working mechanism to restrict the content to the geographic region they negotiated.

In the end the right holders sell their content multiple times, often even multiple times within a single market. Now if everybody in the world can get US Netflix content the right-holders are the ones who will have problems selling content in other markets.