"This obscenely wealthy weirdo has the ability and means to blow up the moon if he chooses and also to put a lot of other people's money in his pockets. You know, SpaceX, it will enter the stock market so highly valued a lot of 401ks will get triggered to invest in it automatically.... Wasn't he supposed to be going to Mars? Can't we chip in to help speed that up? It's a trillion dollars. It's hard for our brains to conceptualize that. I mean, we know trillion is a number, but it's so large... we can't fathom it. The same way we know like Elon has a lot of kids, but we can't fathom him getting laid, right?"
Expressing contempt for Musk because you see him as weird — and unfuckable — reads as a careless cruelty against people who are on the autism spectrum.
Musk came out very openly — 5 years ago — as a person with Asperger's syndrome:
ADDED: Remember when the Democrats' chose their candidate for Vice President based on his use of "weird" as an insult against Trump? They seemed to really think that could win the election.
let's play the What If game!! WHAT IF Musk was a HUGE Kamela supporter? WHAT IF Musk HATED Trump? what then? what would Kimmel (and the rest of the MSM) be saying then?
I Wonder IF maybe, just MAYBE, the thing about Musk that they think is "weird" is that Musk will NOT OBEY COMMANDS?
Compared to Jimmy Kimmel, I know more people have been employed and made millions thanks to Elon Musk. More people also have free speech, thanks to Elon.
I know next to nothing about Elon Musk so I watched the SNL clip which I enjoyed very much but now it's clear I know next to nothing about Asperger's Syndrome because Musk seems perfectly normal to me.
Anyway, the nice thing about making fun of Elon Musk is you can only punch up.
Dude lives in California, so at least half that income goes to Newsom and Bass. You can’t make $700,000 in a government job to keep reservoirs empty without someone like Jimmy Kimmel touting Marxism every night. So yeah, insane.
Our federal government spends a trillion dollars every seven weeks. I'm guessing Jimmy has no problem with that.
Bill Gates is still one of the richest men on the planet, also thought to have Asperger's, but is all in with leftist causes, so no problem there either.
Also according to AOC, “probably one of the most unintelligent billionaires I have ever met or seen or witnessed . . . this dude is not smart.” Now he can be the most unintelligent trillionaire she has ever met.
@leland— dude lives in Austin! He said nighty night to cali years ago. Now there’s a new city of tech entrepreneurs springing up in the Austin exurbs near Muskville. I just love the guy.
Most of his audience thinks that, like the old cartoon character Scrooge McDuck, Musk has a warehouse sized vault somewhere with bags of cash and bars of gold worth a trillion. The reality of course is that it is a hypothetical based on his share ownership times yesterday’s closing share price. If he tried to sell, or they tried to confiscate, or worse, Musk got hit by the proverbial bus, that trillion would largely vanish.
The subtext is interesting: he's so rich he could blow up the moon, so we should all band together and get rid of him because who knows what he'll actually do with his wealth?
Very definitely, to me, a move toward wealth confiscation and/or imprisonment of the rich. People who have more than they need might do something nefarious with it, you see. The only defense against them is for no one to have more than they need.
Humperdink said... Musk made several hundred of his loyal employees millionaires.
I think the count was more than 1000,
As for the additional 10s of thousands of well paying jobs, and the impact on our lives, he may turn out to be the greatest creative genius since Da vinci
Back on 7/30/24, 10:46 AM, I note that resident Leftist Mark assured us that, in regards to the word "weird", "If you look at how hard the right is trying to push back on this term, it clearly has them spooked."
Bankers convinced investors to believe in a sci-fi strategy, overlook steep losses and hand full control to Musk -- whom I consider one of the greatest financial engineers of his generation. The IPO succeeded spectacularly on hype, Musk's track record, and AI/space enthusiasm — shares popped ~19% on debut. Whether that justifies the price is debatable.
There are many investors who appear willing to back almost anything Musk puts forward, driven more by loyalty to him than by traditional company fundamentals
Starlink is the real moneymaker — essentially Comcast in space. Yet it’s dragging along xAI, a massive money-losing furnace being valued at over 100X revenue.
The under-reported story is that Musk’s influence with Trump reportedly led to a call to SEC Chair Paul Atkins, urging regulators to waive previous rules and fast-track SpaceX into the Nasdaq-100. This is expected to generate an additional $30–50 billion in forced demand for a company with only about a $100 billion public float.
When you factor in the incremental buying from major indices like QQQ and MSCI trackers, which will now be required to purchase a company that could represent 4–6% of the index — it means a significant portion of their capital under management must flow into SpaceX stock. All of this is happening despite the company having just ~5% of its shares available in the float, after longstanding rules were waived. In my opinion, this represents the greatest case of manufactured scarcity in IPO history and it could become the largest transfer of wealth from retail investors since crypto.
IMO -- a free float of less than 5% should not be allowed on public stock exchanges, period.
From the Berkshire Hathaway letter in 2000….. on IPOs designed to make money from investors rather than for investors …. “But a pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons: First, many in Wall Street — a community in which quality control is not prized — will sell investors anything they will buy. Second, speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.”
“You know, SpaceX, it will enter the stock market so highly valued a lot of 401ks will get triggered to invest in it automatically.” —-Jimmy Kimmel
That’s a familiar alarm going off with multiple economists who’ve referred to it as a Ponzi scheme.
If or when that occurs, I seriously doubt that voters will be rallying behind the victimized Musk because those dastardly Democrats called him bad names.
Jimmy says his brain can't even grasp the magnitude of a trillion dollars. If only his brain was as large as Joe Biden 's. Joe proposed a 7.3 trillion dollar federal budget in March of 2024.
You know, SpaceX, it will enter the stock market so highly valued a lot of 401ks will get triggered to invest in it automatically.... Wasn't he supposed to be going to Mars? Can't we chip in to help speed that up?
Err…uh…err…do Kimmel’s writers actually read what they write before they put it on his teleprompter?
The ratings tell us the value of Kimmel's contribution. The trend is not in his favor. The sales tell us the value of Musk's - the trend is in his favor.
On a lark, I requested 10-25 shares in the IPO from my broker and, for once, actually got some (10 shares). I have a standing order in my margin account to buy 1000 at $20/share. Don't know if it will ever get that low but Starlink alone is worth at least $1 trillion if Musk can successfully compete with Verizon and ATT in cell service which I don't consider too big a stretch. The main risks are a catastrophic Kessler Effect.
If you took Musk's $1 trillion dollars (I don't know the real dollar figure for the value of his financial assets, just borrowing Kimmell's description) and gave every single human being on Earth an equal portion of that $1 trillion, each person would have about $135.
"In my opinion, this represents the greatest case of manufactured scarcity in IPO history and it could become the largest transfer of wealth from retail investors since crypto. IMO -- a free float of less than 5% should not be allowed on public stock exchanges, period."
In the 2004 Google (now Alphabet Inc.) IPO, the free float was approximately 7.2% of the total outstanding shares. The company offered about 19.6 million shares in a Dutch auction, which was a substantially smaller public float than the typical 20-30% average for IPOs at the time. Because the float was so tightly constrained, it limited the initial supply of shares available to trade on the open market, causing the stock to be highly volatile following its debut.
Today, that free float percentage is much higher, with the vast majority of shares available for public trading and institutional ownership.
Kimmel and late night TV hosts are watched by (1) unemployed people who consider watching in the middle of the night to be the best thing they can do with their unemployed lives, and (2) retirees or insomniacs who like to watch TV in the middle of the night.
Many of these people do not have any job at all, let alone a Musk-like tech and innovation job or company. Musk's thinking is 10x, 100x, 1,000x more complex and ambitious. Musk's EMPLOYEES are 10x more ambitious. Sour grapes from lazy losers?
Even during glory days of Johnny Carson, the late night audience wasn't the same as the prime time audience.
Were Trump to ask Musk for the $1.776 billion for his J6 fund, it would just be 0.14% of Musk’s $1.2 trillion net worth. Musk could give it without being asked, and the fact he hasn’t means he doesn’t like cop beaters any more than most of us.
I own a 2023 Tesla Model 3. One of the greatest inventions in human history. Full self driving. It is a marvel of precise and exhaustive engineering. This part doesn’t get much play. It’s a medical prosthetic for the elderly who are suffering from reduced vision and slower reflexes. The coming age of the Optimus robots will also be a boon for the elderly. One of Optimus’ most important uses will be to care for the aged in their homes and keep them out of institutions. I talk a lot to my Tesla. It responds to a wide variety of voice commands.
I ran some rough numbers this morning to put the current valuations into perspective.The Magnificent 7 companies currently have a combined market cap of about $23.6 trillion. Adding SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic brings the total to roughly $27 trillion for this basket of 10 companies.
If you were an investor buying the entire group and wanted just a 10% annual return, a very modest expectation given the risk these companies would need to generate $2.7 trillion in free cash flow every year. Assuming a generous 25% free cash flow margin (after all capital expenditures), that would require $10.8 trillion in annual revenue.That works out to about $1,300 per person per year across the world’s 8.3 billion people, growing with inflation. Most of humanity, however, earns far too little to support meaningful spending on these technologies.
Narrowing it to the developed world (~1.3 billion people) raises the figure to roughly $8,300 per person annually. Since about two-thirds of people don’t work, that equates to around $25,000 per worker. Using the U.S. as a proxy, this would mean the average worker would need to devote about one-third of their pretax income directly or indirectly to products and services from just these 10 companies.
Even if China and India continue growing, their wages remain a fraction of developed-world levels and can’t close the gap anytime soon. On top of that, widespread AI-driven job losses—something many AI proponents themselves predict—would remove income from a large portion of the population. Any profits gained from those layoffs would still need to come from the remaining workers and consumers.
You can tweak the assumptions up or down, but the core implication remains: current valuations assume these companies will effectively capture an ever-growing share of global discretionary spending and savings forever. That’s lunacy.
I’m not arguing that AI and these technologies have no value. They clearly do. But price is what you pay, and value is what you get. The economics simply don’t exist to support today’s prices without implausible levels of spending concentration or sustained high inflation. Either way, the fundamental value proposition doesn’t hold.
It's possible the value is puffed up but the history of these tech stocks is that they increase in value exponentially except for the ones that don't. Anyway, I'd rather let Musk fool around with a trillion dollars than Bernie Sanders........Musk will never be as rich as the OG Rockefeller. Tapeworm used to infect one in four people in the South. The Rockefeller fund eradicated it. Back when Carnegie was putting his millions to work building libraries, the US Government was investing heavily in battleships.......I have more trust in the judgement of billionaires than in the judgement of Congress. Well, not a lot of trust, but more trust than in ELizabeth Warren and such like people.
There is no math that makes the valuation work aside from the index shenanigans.
At a $1.8T valuation for a company with this much risk, you should be expecting a healthy return, despite the fact most investors today are pricing the Mag 7 equity below debt rates. I digress.
If you want a 15% return on your money at a $1.8T valuation, SpaceX needs to generate $270B per year of free cash flow and grow that at least along with inflation forever. Assuming a very generous 25% free cash flow margin, it needs to bring in $1.1T in revenue today, not in decades, and grow that at least along with inflation. 2025 total revenue was $19B. The business needs to grow by a factor of 58x to justify today's price.
If it's a rocket business, at say $30M revenue per launch it needs to do some 37,000 launches per year. 100 per day. The opening scene of Wall-E comes to mind.
Most of its current revenue comes from Starlink. Let's call it $2,000 per year per subscriber. So it needs 550M subscribers close to $200 per month for subpar service. If we get that down to competitive prices it needs over 1 billion subscribers. Roughly 12% of the world's population, most of which doesn't make $2,000 per year in income.
AI data centers, X, whatever other nonsense gets added will contribute as well. But those businesses will also need to generate huge numbers. Just as all of its AI competitors will. Every human on earth will need to be a paying customer.
No matter how you slice it there's no way SpaceX will ever grow into today's valuation. Launches can't possibly do it. AI can't. So Starlink is all there's left. And there isn't a large enough global population that makes enough money to pay Starlink to ever get to the revenue needed, particularly since competition is a thing. AI will become a commodity just as telecom is. Commodity companies don't make 25% free cash flow margins, so the revenue numbers need to be even larger and more impossible.
Left Bank should empty his bank account and pay for the medical care, food, and housing for the less fortunate among us. Pick several families as a start.
“AI data centers, X, whatever other nonsense gets added will contribute as well. But those businesses will also need to generate huge numbers. Just as all of its AI competitors will. Every human on earth will need to be a paying customer.”
I asked Grok: “What’s the monthly annual combined subscription income monthly/yearly of GPT and X/Grok?”
Grok’s answer: “ Combined GPT + X/Grok Subscription Income • Annual: Roughly $21–26+ billion (dominated by OpenAI’s $20B+ run-rate + X/Grok’s ~$1B). This is a directional 2025–mid-2026 figure; actuals vary by exact period and scope (consumer subs vs. all recurring). getpanto.ai • Monthly: Roughly $1.6–2.2+ billion recently.
If ever you wanted a man to have a trillion dollars, it would be Musk or someone like him, to whom money means nothing beyond a way to do shit that nobody else has done. Whereas people like Kimmel, if put in that position would be insufferable, toxic human waste. Not that Kimmel is not already a pile of insufferable, toxic human waste. Call me old fashioned, but what Kimmel sorely needed when younger was a good beating. It might not do him any good at this point in his miserable existence, but I'd pay good money to watch it. Or administer it.
SpaceX is worth $63 according to Morningstar. But sure... $160.95 on Friday. Nailed it.
The pump is supposed to look good on day one. that's the whole point.
And just think. We have $2T + more this nonsense coming with OpenAI and anthropic. $4T for 3 companies that make no money.
Here’s a link to Morningstar's full note on SpaceX valuation: https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/uploaded-files/OneSmallStepForSpaceX_060826-1ff7873c-8c12-4540-b45a-60f3a9051851.pdf
And here’s its note on Starlink market sizing: https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/uploaded-files/Our_Realistic_Starlink_Market_Sizing-915d25bb-5968-4e1f-ae0b-ad5999a9aa87.pdf
Jeez. 40% of our index funds are already just a handful of AI companies. Now add Space X to the mix. Something like 50% of our investments make zero money.
“We have $2T + more this nonsense coming with OpenAI and anthropic. $4T for 3 companies that make no money.”
I just showed you that OpenAI is bringing in very substantial income. GPT is OpenAI. GPT is already producing $20B in annual subscription income, and many billions more for sales to its corporate enterprise users. None of the investors are expecting immediate full ROI on their investment in AI. They are staking out territory in a vastly remunerative future market.
Indefinitely Extended Excursion™️ said... "Assuming a generous 25% free cash flow margin (after all capital expenditures), that would require $10.8 trillion in annual revenue."
As if CapX spending is a subtraction from value, and has absolutely nothing to do with the valuation of a company embarking on myriad new technologies.
The left doesn't understand economics or they wouldn't advocate the sort of policies they do. These are the sort of people whose investment advice is worth what you paid them for it.
Yesterday Musk had a decent day. He created 4 thousand millionaires just among his employees including the cooks and janitors. He did this by convincing millions of people to voluntarily give up their money to invest in his people. Kimmel lost a bunch of money and read words off a teleprompter that his wife makes him read. The people watching him quickly fell asleep. That's not just punching up. That's a mosquito trying to bite through Musk's shoe.
“ Expressing contempt for Musk because you see him as weird — and unfuckable — reads as a careless cruelty against people who are on the autism spectrum.”
“Musk came out very openly — 5 years ago — as a person with Asperger's syndrome:”
Yeah. Aspies often come across as a bit weird. When I first started hearing Musk talk, I was pretty sure that was his situation. And am happy to see that I was right. They often sound a bit disconnected from their brains. And that’s probably because their brains are running a lot faster than their speech. One of the reasons that female Aspies are harder to diagnose (beyond the much higher prevalence among males) is 5hat this is typically much less noticeable among them.
Dr (Sir) Simon Baron-Cohen has theorized that the issue is that with Aspies (and even more, Autistics), the speed governors on their brains is missing, or at least much less effective. There are downsides though - such as shutting down when overstimulated.
Silicon Valley had maybe the highest concentration of Aspies in the world. baron-Cohen theorized that it may be the high density of high math ability pairs mating. Assortative mating. And worried about my daughter in that regard - but she married a biology guy, and not someone in her PhD program. A bit of out-mating.
Say what you will about Kimmel but he was s mart enough to realize he could make himself rich by serving the TDS market. It’s earned him much more than he could have ever made as a comic.
Yes, stock valuations are concentrated in a relative handful of companies. This happens from time to time. The 'value' of the non-growing stocks remains stagnant, but they will be around when routine generational tech volatility returns. Tech is fantastic if you ride a bubble up, but brutal if you catch a crash.
Non-Tech dividend stocks are the retail "bonds" of today. Genuine bonds often pay sub-inflation dividends and are used as a government money sponge. Ordinary people get tricked into holding bonds with de-facto negative returns and much higher risks than simple CDs/Money Market savings.
Yes, CapEx can fuel growth when executed well, but there's a strong case against treating it as automatic value creation, especially at today's AI spending levels.
Empirical studies show the "capex effect": companies ramping up heavy investment (or issuing equity to fund it) have historically underperformed. It's not just theory over-optimism, empire-building, and mean reversion bite hard.
Cash spent on CapEx isn't available for buybacks or dividends, and many investors prefer capital-light compounders with high incremental ROIC over asset-heavy buildouts that require endless maintenance.
In AI right now, the risk of overcapacity is real: hyperscalers racing to spend hundreds of billions (trillions projected) could lead to commoditization and write-downs, just like past infra bubbles (telecom, dot-com). Valuation models require extremely heroic assumptions on future cash flows to justify current prices, often more narrative than rigorous math.
Great companies can make it work. But assuming big CapEx = value creation is dangerous. History, incentives, and data suggest caution.
"It's a trillion dollars. It's hard for our brains to conceptualize that. I mean, we know trillion is a number, but it's so large... we can't fathom it."
Carl Sagan talked about this. The idea that people could not comprehend just how large a "trillion" is. That's why he said his trademark, "billions and billions" instead of the word, "trillions."
And speaking of things too large to understand: Musk cannot "blow up the moon." If every nuke on earth was shot at the moon, it wouldn't blow it up. The moon is just too damn big. The moon has a volume of about 3/4ths of a trillion cubic miles.
Did Musk’s hype suck the money out of a lot of suckers this week? Maybe. But I don’t think so. We are probably beyond the point where there is viable long term competition in certain areas. The race to space is effectively over. SpaceX has essentially destroyed the ability of anyone else to compete, except maybe the Chinese, through rapid prototyping and reusability. Reusability destroyed the market for anyone else to compete in the launch market. The cost to orbit is already down to 10% of what we were paying 10 years ago. And with his big rockets, rapidly approaching use, it will quickly be down to a couple of percent. That is massive.
That alone probably wouldn’t justify a $trillion$ IPO. But that lever age is what justifies it. The possibility of control over worldwide communications helps. Taking over the high speed Internet and cellular phone networks is very possible. Then there is the possibility to dominate the data center and related AI industries, from space. Yes, despite the protestations here to the contrary, cooling in space is well known technology. And you can build cleaner, more uniform, ICs in space. Why do you think that they are dumping hundreds of $billions$ into state of the art fabs in TX? The list goes on. And that is the point.
By nearly every important metric Kimmel is a Lilliputian. In contrast Musk is a giant who employs more than 150,000 people. Several thousand “working people” are millionaires because of this IPO.
Democrat reaction to greatness is bilious resentment. That’s why they elect garbage people. It’s why they hate Musk and Trump who are great men in very different ways.
Some 1920s mogul (Joe Kennedy?) said that when his cabdriver started talking about stock tips, he pulled out of the market. On that basis, I wonder if all the chatter about the SpaceX IPO is a bad sign.
Yes, insulting aspies is not good, but people are going to insult those they disagree with and want to vilify. Take out that and the p0rn out and a lot of the internet would be gone.
It’s worth noting that the Biden administration allocated $42.45 billion for the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program, to bring broadband Internet connectivity to house lids thst had no access to Internet Service Providers. In fact no households were ever hooked up. Space-X could provide that access for a tiny fraction of the allocated dollars. I do not begrudge Musk a single dime.
@loudogblog Carl Sagan worked for the US military on an experiment that involved detonating a nuclear device on the moon. Apparently, cooler heads prevailed. He kept that (and physically assaulting his first wife) a secret for years. So if we want to talk about famous people who were willing to run the risk of blowing up the moon ... looking at you, Carl.
@Big Mike: to bring broadband Internet connectivity to house lids thst had no access to Internet Service Providers
The DEI efforts of that era were driven by pure imagination. There was deep concern about "marginalized" low-income remote workers without broadband...until people pointed out that it's entirely circular. To be eligible for remote work one had to be a computer-based worker (i.e., already educated and typically middle class). There was and is no need business for home broadband among people doing service, field, security, or delivery work.
As usual, and as expected, the trolls crawl out to slam Elon. They said the exact same things when he started Tesla, bought X, and started SpaceX. The lack of ability, lack of imagination, and the raw power of their stupidity is absolutely stunning. Undeterred by reality, they simply keep going, unable to disobey their masters orders.
“Empirical studies show the "capex effect": companies ramping up heavy investment (or issuing equity to fund it) have historically underperformed.”
I had the unique and often hilarious experiencing of working for several start-ups during the 1990s dot-com era. VC investors threw hundreds of millions at start-ups that went bust and never brought a product to market. But a very few did succeed and their investment returned preposterous long term profits. I don’t know how to look at it, but Marc Andreessen says: “It’s the third owner of the motel who makes a profit.”
SpaceX was given special permission to be added to some index funds early.
Why? Because they can’t find early investors who believe in the valuations of this stock, so they want your passive retirement index funds to invest in it instead.
$20 billion of the raise is being used to pay back the banks who financed the Twitter purchase.of Twitter. xAI was also folded into the SpaceX IPO and as we know — xAI is a cash furnace.
I’m glad S&P held the line on Strategy and SpaceX. I can’t think of a higher impact on the public perception of their retirement IRA's and the casino aspect of markets if this were to be allowed.
Investors participating in the IPO will be financing execution that has not yet even started to happen, facilitating the lucrative exit of pre-IPO shareholders, ceding any meaningful levers of control, and enabling underwriting banks to de-risk the exposure they had taken on to secure the IPO mandate in the first place.
$1.75T. Lots of risk. Minimum 15% return expectation. More realistically you should be expecting something much greater. Needs to generate over $260B in free cash flow. That's 16x SpaceX 2025 revenue of $16B.
In no scenario can SpaceX ever support this level of valuation. SpaceX IPO shows Musk’s genius is in myth-making. How exactly the company plans to support its massive valuation is not obvious.
News flash to Rich: The market values growth more than current income. Amazon wasn't making any money back in the 90s but had a large valuation. Turns out it was undervalued.
Humperdink said... Musk made several hundred of his loyal employees millionaires.
I think the count was more than 1000,
Over at Instapundit they say 4,400
This is why the United States is the greatest nation on earth.
The globalists control the rest of the planet and they make sure people like Musk are never allowed to create this kind of wealth for the little people.
SpaceX was given special permission to be added to some index funds early.
Why? Because they can’t find early investors who believe in the valuations of this stock, so they want your passive retirement index funds to invest in it instead.
It wasn't special permission. This always happens.
Oh please. There's absolutely nothing wrong with making fun of Elon Musk because of his weirdness and strange looks and mannerisms. The real crime is Jimmy Kimmel wasn't funny. Imagine Tony Hinchcliffe hosting a roast of Elon Musk. They would go way way worse and everybody would be rolling in the aisles.
I had a lot of fun watching senator Fauxahontas lecturing us proles about how terrible it is that people are “hanging on by their fingernails” while Elon Musk is a trillionaire. Tell me, someone, why it is that so many lefty politicians, economists, university professors, and other such useless consumers of oxygen molecules think that an economy is a zero-sum game? Did not mathematician Steve Nash prove, mathematically, that it is not? The was an effing movie about him, was there not?
I also note that she is speaking from the back seat of a MFing limousine, for crap’s sake.
“Over at Instapundit they say 4,400 (of Musk employees became millionaires).”
Meanwhile, hero of the Commie left, the Oracle of Omaha pooh-pood Musk’s achievements. Warren Buffoon ensured his railroad petro-chemical tank cars were full by guaranteeing any trans-America pipelines were never built. The leftie playbook - eliminate competition (see: Wild Bill Gates)
"those economists are Democrats and/or don’t know what a ponzi scheme is…"
Yes, I'm sure they would not admit that Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme ever. It survives only because we are forced at gunpoint to stay in it to keep it going.
Oh please. There's absolutely nothing wrong with making fun of Elon Musk because of his weirdness and strange looks and mannerisms. The real crime is Jimmy Kimmel wasn't funny. Imagine Tony Hinchcliffe hosting a roast of Elon Musk. They would go way way worse and everybody would be rolling in the aisles.
I would love that sort of thing.
The problem we really have with Jimmy Kimmel is he is an evil propagandist working for an evil democrat party who is trying to build support for a fascist government corporate regime.
Kimmel works for a Billionaire who wants the government to take Musk out for him and they are running the same tribal government protection scheme that every society in history has run with.
I am tired of the Pritzkers and Redstones and Johnsons and the old money running the same reductionist bullshit and Jimmy Kimmel is their catspaw.
I hate the stupid catspaws almost as much as the billionaires that fund them.
Some years ago (before SpaceX was such a big thing) I had interesting experiences doing diligence on a few startups here in Silicon Valley (where Tesla HQ was). I kept running into founders who had held senior positions under Musk, but had left. They all had two things in common: They said Musk was very difficult to work for (Steve Jobs got mentioned a few times), and they had nothing worse than that to say about Musk or his businesses.
Farther back, In The Beginning, there was Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC was a bit like that, or Apple. In fact, the Valley joke was that PARC wasn't so much a business, as a "conspiracy to form new companies".
Were Trump to ask Musk for the $1.776 billion for his J6 fund, it would just be 0.14% of Musk’s $1.2 trillion net worth. Musk could give it without being asked, and the fact he hasn’t means he doesn’t like cop beaters any more than most of us.
I was waiting for the stupidest comment on this thread. Congratulations.
What percent of the people imprisoned for being in DC for that J6 event a while back were accused or convicted of physically assaulting police on that day?
I have not invested in SpaceX, and don't really plan to. It's not my kind of play. The valuation is pretty hard to get past, but the thing that really makes it attractive anyway is that IEE really hates it. That almost makes it a sure thing regardless of the numbers. I expect another name change is on the horizon.
I think it's important to understand what is driving the markets and all of this "investment". I've ranted about it quite a bit in these comments, but I'd like to add some further context for those interested.
What has happened over the last 26 years is purely driven by unprecedented stimulus to support the dotcom, housing, and Covid busts. Stimulus isn't itself bad, but the problem is that none of these stimulus packages have ever been allowed to unwind and they continue to compound on top of each other (we're still running multi-trillion dollar deficits) and most importantly the stimulus has been wildly excessive as the real economy has never been able to absorb it. This excess stimulus has been the primary driver of financial market gains and the "investment" talked about in this article. Let's look at some numbers.
To understand the impact of debt on stock market gains, we need look no further than total market cap, GDP, and debt growth.
From 2020 to 2026, total US market cap increased $58T. GDP + Federal debt increased a combined $55T. Perhaps that's coincidental you say. From 1974 to 2000, market cap was up $14T. GDP + Federal debt was up $14T. Two 26 year coincidences. From 2020 to 2026, market cap is up $31T. GDP + Federal debt is up $21T. Less of a 1:1 relationship shorter-term, but it evens out over the whole 2000 to 2026 period.
Debt is a stimulant. When the real economy can't absorb the extra cash flow, the outlet is the financial markets and the "investment" arena. And that is what we have seen over the last 26 years. See GDP per Capita / Debt per Capita and $ GDP Growth to $ Debt Growth below, which both show that ever growing debt has become increasingly ineffective to drive the real economy, so it gets redirected to and inflates the financial markets.
What does all this mean? It means that if people expect markets to continue as they have the last 26 years, and particularly the last 6 years (irrational exuberance is alive and well), the only way for this to happen is we need to continue to take on ever larger amounts of debt and as a growing percent of GDP. Stop debt growth and you stop market gains. Productivity (AI or otherwise) won't get us there.
Total US Market Cap 1974 = $0.7T 2000 = $15.1T (12.5% CAGR) 2020 = $41.6T (5.2% CAGR) 2026 = $73T (9.8% CAGR) 54% of total market growth over the last 26 years has come since 2020. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/CM.MKT.LCAP.CD?locations=US https://www.longtermtrends.com/market-cap-to-gdp-the-buffett-indicator/
Market Cap to GDP 1974 = 37% 2000 = 138% (peaked in March) 2020 = 149% (Dec 2019 before Covid hit) 2026 = 228% https://www.longtermtrends.com/market-cap-to-gdp-the-buffett-indicator/
US GDP 1974 = $1.6T 2000 = $10.4T 2020 = $21.9T (end of 2019 before Covid) 2026 = $31.8T https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN
GDP per Capita 1974 = $7.5k 2000 = $36.8k 2020 = $66.6k (Q4 2019 before Covid) 2026 = $92.9k https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1WRVs
US Federal Debt 1974 = $0.5T 2000 =$5.7T 2020 = $23.2T (Q1 2020 before Covid stimulus) 2026 = $39.2T https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/debt-to-the-penny
Federal Debt to GDP 1974 = 31% 2000 = 54% 2020 = 106% (end of 2019 before Covid) 2026 = 123% https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
Federal Debt per Capita 1974 = $2.3k 2000 = $20k 2020 = $70.5k (Q1 before Covid) 2026 = $112.5k https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1WRVp
GDP per Capita / Debt per Capita 1974 = 3.3x 2000 = 1.8x 2020 = 0.9x 2026 = 0.8x
$ GDP Growth to $ Debt Growth 1974-2000 = $1.69 2000-2020 = $0.66 2020-2026 = $0.62 Ever growing stimulus measures have become increasingly ineffective.
Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta.These three have printed money: in 2024, together they generated free cash flow (cash profits after investment spending) of over $200bn, four times the level of a decade before.
If you wanted a 10% return on your money, which is quite low considering the risk, you'd be willing to pay no more than $2T for this cash flow and you'd expect it to grow at least with inflation.
The current market cap of these three is $8.71T. That means with a $200B free cash flow you're getting a 2.3% return on your money. You can get 3.9% in a money market.
I think it's important to understand what is driving the markets and all of this "investment". I've ranted about it quite a bit in these comments, but I'd like to add some further context for those interested.
Regarding massive government debt (worldwide): Stay out of bonds. "Safe" bonds are the way that the government strategically underpays interest to adjust for free-money entitlement overspending. Inflation is required to cover its promises and fund fantasy programs, and to mitigate the risk of a market crash. Bidenflation of 2022-2023 proved the bond scam. See Japan's Nikkei crash and decades of stagnation too.
To survive one must latch on to the momentum plays wherever they are (or just Bogle the entire market). You are NOT getting rich in a high spending inflationary environment, but your investing dollar numbers will go up and you won't fall behind.
I'm not saying gold is an answer here, for China, India, and Costco moved gold from the commodity market to the luxury, novelty, and consumption markets. Consider China's red/gold decorations and India's bright and flashy art. The US gold tax laws erode its potential return too.
Left Bank: I've watched your ilk beat cops, first responders, and bystanders merilessly and with intent and planning for decades,. Just stop lying, you piece of antisocial garbage.
In rural America, many people who previously had poor or no internet access now have it provided through their employers with starlink so they can do customer service from home while raising children.
You're utterly ignorant of the working-class workforce. Trust fund baby? Come on, give us your real name if you're a real man.
Fail. You are projecting your fantasies with massive clarity.
I grew up in a tiny small town that was 20 miles from a larger town and 50 miles from the nearest city. My mother had a trashy local ISP with modem-like speeds long after broadband arrived. I maintained her setup every time I visited.
I also completed a literal research project on rural broadband in the COVID era. The remote work market was circular and workers had to live where the broadband was. As such, they started 2020 with good infrastructure and couldn't move off grid if they wanted. Conversely, those without broadband needs in 2020 worked in industries without broadband requirements. The vast majority who need it today still live in places with hardwired broadband. They've got houses, and many were called back to the office.
In simple terms, access to cable TV means access to broadband. The correlation is high and the ROI on expansion (beyond Starlink) is poor. Starlink is making more places viable for broadband employees. Yes.
I'm not a real man. I'm just an enigma. Perhaps AI.
Did he really expect a person with so many accomplishments to be "normal" which is just a synonym for average?
Although I don't own stock in Spacex (that I know of), own a Tesla, or subscribe to StarLink (although I'm considering the later, Comcast sucks), I, for one, have not noticed my life has diminished in any way by Elon becoming a trillionaire.
And if Musk had rah-rah'd Harris in the last election Kimmel would be singing his praises. Keep giving half the country a reason to never watch your show, Mr. Kimmel.
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141 comments:
He's in show business and he's complaining about people being weird?
Jimmy Kimmel sells a product, comedy, every weeknight. No one is buying anymore. Musk, on the other hand……..
A model of productivity. A weird... sister. The queerest of them all? You've come a long way, baby.
Cry, Jimmy, CRY!!!
Fuck Jimmy Kimmel. What a bitter, pathetic little man he is.
let's play the What If game!!
WHAT IF Musk was a HUGE Kamela supporter?
WHAT IF Musk HATED Trump?
what then?
what would Kimmel (and the rest of the MSM) be saying then?
I Wonder IF maybe, just MAYBE, the thing about Musk that they think is "weird" is that Musk will NOT OBEY COMMANDS?
Compared to Jimmy Kimmel, I know more people have been employed and made millions thanks to Elon Musk. More people also have free speech, thanks to Elon.
Blackface kimmel
I know next to nothing about Elon Musk so I watched the SNL clip which I enjoyed very much but now it's clear I know next to nothing about Asperger's Syndrome because Musk seems perfectly normal to me.
Anyway, the nice thing about making fun of Elon Musk is you can only punch up.
Jimmy Kimmel's annual salary is about $16 million, and his net worth is about $50 million.
Gerda Sprinchorn said...
Jimmy Kimmel's annual salary is about $16 million, and his net worth is about $50 million.
That is insane. How does he waste so much income? He must be a total retard.
"It's hard for our brains to conceptualize that. I mean, we know trillion is a number, but it's so large... we can't fathom it."
That was once true for million and then billion ... but we got over it.
'Better check the cables'
How does he waste so much income?
Dude lives in California, so at least half that income goes to Newsom and Bass. You can’t make $700,000 in a government job to keep reservoirs empty without someone like Jimmy Kimmel touting Marxism every night. So yeah, insane.
ABC NBC and CBS need to be removed from public airwaves and apply for bandwidth like everyone else.
Really everyone that works at those networks should be exiled too they are enemies of the American people.
That kind of Kimmel-shit starts and ends with envy, but what sort? I'm leaning toward penis.
So weird. How dare he not think men can be women and get pregnant????
Our federal government spends a trillion dollars every seven weeks. I'm guessing Jimmy has no problem with that.
Bill Gates is still one of the richest men on the planet, also thought to have Asperger's, but is all in with leftist causes, so no problem there either.
Also according to AOC, “probably one of the most unintelligent billionaires I have ever met or seen or witnessed . . . this dude is not smart.”
Now he can be the most unintelligent trillionaire she has ever met.
Guy builds chip that stimulate limbs
What has aoc done but pass gas
^^^ what narciso said.
Elon is only a "trillionaire" on paper. Something that liberals seem incapable of understanding.
If he wanted to cash out his holdings, the stocks' value would plummet, as would my investment fund.
Of course, Elon must be hated because he earned his money by producing things of great value.
He is also hated for supporting Trump. They are both former Democrats and thus, doubly hated.
A guy who entered show business with a bit called,”girls on trampolines” thinks a rocket scientist is weird?
Musk made several hundred of his loyal employees millionaires.
Commies made several hundred of there loyal voters millionaires in Minnesota.
@leland— dude lives in Austin! He said nighty night to cali years ago. Now there’s a new city of tech entrepreneurs springing up in the Austin exurbs near Muskville. I just love the guy.
Most of his audience thinks that, like the old cartoon character Scrooge McDuck, Musk has a warehouse sized vault somewhere with bags of cash and bars of gold worth a trillion. The reality of course is that it is a hypothetical based on his share ownership times yesterday’s closing share price. If he tried to sell, or they tried to confiscate, or worse, Musk got hit by the proverbial bus, that trillion would largely vanish.
One gets tired challenging idiotic arguments
A weird man is a weird man
A rich weird man is a rich man
The subtext is interesting: he's so rich he could blow up the moon, so we should all band together and get rid of him because who knows what he'll actually do with his wealth?
Very definitely, to me, a move toward wealth confiscation and/or imprisonment of the rich. People who have more than they need might do something nefarious with it, you see. The only defense against them is for no one to have more than they need.
I really hate eat-the-rich years.
Humperdink said...
Musk made several hundred of his loyal employees millionaires.
I think the count was more than 1000,
As for the additional 10s of thousands of well paying jobs, and the impact on our lives, he may turn out to be the greatest creative genius since Da vinci
Back on 7/30/24, 10:46 AM, I note that resident Leftist Mark assured us that, in regards to the word "weird", "If you look at how hard the right is trying to push back on this term, it clearly has them spooked."
Just another of his trenchant observations.
We dont know if he doesnt owns a battle suit like tony stark (but he might)
Kimmel is going to Kimmel -- that's his schtick.
I come away with a different take.
Bankers convinced investors to believe in a sci-fi strategy, overlook steep losses and hand full control to Musk -- whom I consider one of the greatest financial engineers of his generation. The IPO succeeded spectacularly on hype, Musk's track record, and AI/space enthusiasm — shares popped ~19% on debut. Whether that justifies the price is debatable.
There are many investors who appear willing to back almost anything Musk puts forward, driven more by loyalty to him than by traditional company fundamentals
Starlink is the real moneymaker — essentially Comcast in space. Yet it’s dragging along xAI, a massive money-losing furnace being valued at over 100X revenue.
The under-reported story is that Musk’s influence with Trump reportedly led to a call to SEC Chair Paul Atkins, urging regulators to waive previous rules and fast-track SpaceX into the Nasdaq-100. This is expected to generate an additional $30–50 billion in forced demand for a company with only about a $100 billion public float.
When you factor in the incremental buying from major indices like QQQ and MSCI trackers, which will now be required to purchase a company that could represent 4–6% of the index — it means a significant portion of their capital under management must flow into SpaceX stock. All of this is happening despite the company having just ~5% of its shares available in the float, after longstanding rules were waived. In my opinion, this represents the greatest case of manufactured scarcity in IPO history and it could become the largest transfer of wealth from retail investors since crypto.
IMO -- a free float of less than 5% should not be allowed on public stock exchanges, period.
From the Berkshire Hathaway letter in 2000….. on IPOs designed to make money from investors rather than for investors ….
“But a pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons: First, many in Wall Street — a community in which quality control is not prized — will sell investors anything they will buy. Second, speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.”
“You know, SpaceX, it will enter the stock market so highly valued a lot of 401ks will get triggered to invest in it automatically.”
—-Jimmy Kimmel
That’s a familiar alarm going off with multiple economists who’ve referred to it as a Ponzi scheme.
If or when that occurs, I seriously doubt that voters will be rallying behind the victimized Musk because those dastardly Democrats called him bad names.
https://x.com/AceofSpadesHQ/status/2065598172416594038
Pretend you didnt try to destroy his property a year ago
Jimmy says his brain can't even grasp the magnitude of a trillion dollars. If only his brain was as large as Joe Biden 's.
Joe proposed a 7.3 trillion dollar federal budget in March of 2024.
You know, SpaceX, it will enter the stock market so highly valued a lot of 401ks will get triggered to invest in it automatically.... Wasn't he supposed to be going to Mars? Can't we chip in to help speed that up?
Err…uh…err…do Kimmel’s writers actually read what they write before they put it on his teleprompter?
Musk is in the arena waging the fight. Commies are in the bleachers chirping, producing nothing but more Commies. Have anyone ever met a happy leftie?
Those chimps wont be writing hamlet any time soon
The ratings tell us the value of Kimmel's contribution. The trend is not in his favor. The sales tell us the value of Musk's - the trend is in his favor.
"..I note that resident Leftist Mark assured us.."
wasn't Leftist Mark one of those here, that Assured us a while back, that Musk (and Tesla (and SpaceX)) were ALL GOING BROKE?
Who?
On a lark, I requested 10-25 shares in the IPO from my broker and, for once, actually got some (10 shares). I have a standing order in my margin account to buy 1000 at $20/share. Don't know if it will ever get that low but Starlink alone is worth at least $1 trillion if Musk can successfully compete with Verizon and ATT in cell service which I don't consider too big a stretch. The main risks are a catastrophic Kessler Effect.
@Yancey Ward -- wait six months for it to comeback down to earth....
If you took Musk's $1 trillion dollars (I don't know the real dollar figure for the value of his financial assets, just borrowing Kimmell's description) and gave every single human being on Earth an equal portion of that $1 trillion, each person would have about $135.
For the record, Musk described Kimmel in 2024 as an “insufferable nonsense propaganda puppet". People in glass houses ...
"In my opinion, this represents the greatest case of manufactured scarcity in IPO history and it could become the largest transfer of wealth from retail investors since crypto. IMO -- a free float of less than 5% should not be allowed on public stock exchanges, period."
In the 2004 Google (now Alphabet Inc.) IPO, the free float was approximately 7.2% of the total outstanding shares. The company offered about 19.6 million shares in a Dutch auction, which was a substantially smaller public float than the typical 20-30% average for IPOs at the time. Because the float was so tightly constrained, it limited the initial supply of shares available to trade on the open market, causing the stock to be highly volatile following its debut.
Today, that free float percentage is much higher, with the vast majority of shares available for public trading and institutional ownership.
https://instapundit.substack.com/p/elon-musk-is-a-genius-and-a-litmus?
Consider the source and market segment.
Kimmel and late night TV hosts are watched by (1) unemployed people who consider watching in the middle of the night to be the best thing they can do with their unemployed lives, and (2) retirees or insomniacs who like to watch TV in the middle of the night.
Many of these people do not have any job at all, let alone a Musk-like tech and innovation job or company. Musk's thinking is 10x, 100x, 1,000x more complex and ambitious. Musk's EMPLOYEES are 10x more ambitious. Sour grapes from lazy losers?
Even during glory days of Johnny Carson, the late night audience wasn't the same as the prime time audience.
First it was price over earnings. Then, price over sales. Now, price over imagination.
Were Trump to ask Musk for the $1.776 billion for his J6 fund, it would just be 0.14% of Musk’s $1.2 trillion net worth. Musk could give it without being asked, and the fact he hasn’t means he doesn’t like cop beaters any more than most of us.
https://x.com/CynicalPublius/status/2065590917726413268?s=20
@Left Bank. Typical leftie telling a capitalist what to do with his money.
I own a 2023 Tesla Model 3. One of the greatest inventions in human history. Full self driving. It is a marvel of precise and exhaustive engineering. This part doesn’t get much play. It’s a medical prosthetic for the elderly who are suffering from reduced vision and slower reflexes. The coming age of the Optimus robots will also be a boon for the elderly. One of Optimus’ most important uses will be to care for the aged in their homes and keep them out of institutions. I talk a lot to my Tesla. It responds to a wide variety of voice commands.
I ran some rough numbers this morning to put the current valuations into perspective.The Magnificent 7 companies currently have a combined market cap of about $23.6 trillion. Adding SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic brings the total to roughly $27 trillion for this basket of 10 companies.
If you were an investor buying the entire group and wanted just a 10% annual return, a very modest expectation given the risk these companies would need to generate $2.7 trillion in free cash flow every year. Assuming a generous 25% free cash flow margin (after all capital expenditures), that would require $10.8 trillion in annual revenue.That works out to about $1,300 per person per year across the world’s 8.3 billion people, growing with inflation. Most of humanity, however, earns far too little to support meaningful spending on these technologies.
Narrowing it to the developed world (~1.3 billion people) raises the figure to roughly $8,300 per person annually. Since about two-thirds of people don’t work, that equates to around $25,000 per worker. Using the U.S. as a proxy, this would mean the average worker would need to devote about one-third of their pretax income directly or indirectly to products and services from just these 10 companies.
Even if China and India continue growing, their wages remain a fraction of developed-world levels and can’t close the gap anytime soon. On top of that, widespread AI-driven job losses—something many AI proponents themselves predict—would remove income from a large portion of the population. Any profits gained from those layoffs would still need to come from the remaining workers and consumers.
You can tweak the assumptions up or down, but the core implication remains: current valuations assume these companies will effectively capture an ever-growing share of global discretionary spending and savings forever. That’s lunacy.
I’m not arguing that AI and these technologies have no value. They clearly do. But price is what you pay, and value is what you get. The economics simply don’t exist to support today’s prices without implausible levels of spending concentration or sustained high inflation. Either way, the fundamental value proposition doesn’t hold.
The Dems are a joyless, unimaginative lot that has led them to be the Party of Envy.
@Left Bank, why should Musk fund Democrat abuse of the DoJ? Do you still believe Tulsi Gabbard is a threat to air travelers? I suspect you do.
https://x.com/CynicalPublius/status/2065590917726413268?s=20
"We dont know if he doesnt owns a battle suit like tony stark (but he might)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=654p_58VZhc
Fast forward to 2:53
It's possible the value is puffed up but the history of these tech stocks is that they increase in value exponentially except for the ones that don't. Anyway, I'd rather let Musk fool around with a trillion dollars than Bernie Sanders........Musk will never be as rich as the OG Rockefeller. Tapeworm used to infect one in four people in the South. The Rockefeller fund eradicated it. Back when Carnegie was putting his millions to work building libraries, the US Government was investing heavily in battleships.......I have more trust in the judgement of billionaires than in the judgement of Congress. Well, not a lot of trust, but more trust than in ELizabeth Warren and such like people.
Remember when elon tried to pay the tsa workers
There is no math that makes the valuation work aside from the index shenanigans.
At a $1.8T valuation for a company with this much risk, you should be expecting a healthy return, despite the fact most investors today are pricing the Mag 7 equity below debt rates. I digress.
If you want a 15% return on your money at a $1.8T valuation, SpaceX needs to generate $270B per year of free cash flow and grow that at least along with inflation forever. Assuming a very generous 25% free cash flow margin, it needs to bring in $1.1T in revenue today, not in decades, and grow that at least along with inflation. 2025 total revenue was $19B. The business needs to grow by a factor of 58x to justify today's price.
If it's a rocket business, at say $30M revenue per launch it needs to do some 37,000 launches per year. 100 per day. The opening scene of Wall-E comes to mind.
Most of its current revenue comes from Starlink. Let's call it $2,000 per year per subscriber. So it needs 550M subscribers close to $200 per month for subpar service. If we get that down to competitive prices it needs over 1 billion subscribers. Roughly 12% of the world's population, most of which doesn't make $2,000 per year in income.
AI data centers, X, whatever other nonsense gets added will contribute as well. But those businesses will also need to generate huge numbers. Just as all of its AI competitors will. Every human on earth will need to be a paying customer.
No matter how you slice it there's no way SpaceX will ever grow into today's valuation. Launches can't possibly do it. AI can't. So Starlink is all there's left. And there isn't a large enough global population that makes enough money to pay Starlink to ever get to the revenue needed, particularly since competition is a thing. AI will become a commodity just as telecom is. Commodity companies don't make 25% free cash flow margins, so the revenue numbers need to be even larger and more impossible.
https://x.com/GadSaad/status/2065654510492508668
Guy that’s predicted 15 of the last 0 recessions has deep thoughts on stock valuations.
Left Bank should empty his bank account and pay for the medical care, food, and housing for the less fortunate among us. Pick several families as a start.
See how easy that is.
“AI data centers, X, whatever other nonsense gets added will contribute as well. But those businesses will also need to generate huge numbers. Just as all of its AI competitors will. Every human on earth will need to be a paying customer.”
I asked Grok: “What’s the monthly annual combined subscription income monthly/yearly of GPT and X/Grok?”
Grok’s answer: “ Combined GPT + X/Grok Subscription Income
• Annual: Roughly $21–26+ billion (dominated by OpenAI’s $20B+ run-rate + X/Grok’s ~$1B). This is a directional 2025–mid-2026 figure; actuals vary by exact period and scope (consumer subs vs. all recurring). getpanto.ai
• Monthly: Roughly $1.6–2.2+ billion recently.
I asked Grok: “What is OpenAI’s total income from corporate users:”
Grok: “Implied enterprise revenue run-rate: Roughly $10 billion+ annually.”
If ever you wanted a man to have a trillion dollars, it would be Musk or someone like him, to whom money means nothing beyond a way to do shit that nobody else has done. Whereas people like Kimmel, if put in that position would be insufferable, toxic human waste. Not that Kimmel is not already a pile of insufferable, toxic human waste. Call me old fashioned, but what Kimmel sorely needed when younger was a good beating. It might not do him any good at this point in his miserable existence, but I'd pay good money to watch it. Or administer it.
I suggest Musk buy Kimmel's network next.
"unfuckable"? How many children does he have?
It is a steal, just not in the way you think..
SpaceX is worth $63 according to Morningstar. But sure... $160.95 on Friday. Nailed it.
The pump is supposed to look good on day one. that's the whole point.
And just think. We have $2T + more this nonsense coming with OpenAI and anthropic. $4T for 3 companies that make no money.
Here’s a link to Morningstar's full note on SpaceX valuation:
https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/uploaded-files/OneSmallStepForSpaceX_060826-1ff7873c-8c12-4540-b45a-60f3a9051851.pdf
And here’s its note on Starlink market sizing:
https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/uploaded-files/Our_Realistic_Starlink_Market_Sizing-915d25bb-5968-4e1f-ae0b-ad5999a9aa87.pdf
The Drill SGT said...
Humperdink said...
Musk made several hundred of his loyal employees millionaires.
I think the count was more than 1000,
Over at Instapundit they say 4,400
Jeez. 40% of our index funds are already just a handful of AI companies. Now add Space X to the mix. Something like 50% of our investments make zero money.
Kimmel's monologue was the Alinsky equivalent of a bill of attainder.
“We have $2T + more this nonsense coming with OpenAI and anthropic. $4T for 3 companies that make no money.”
I just showed you that OpenAI is bringing in very substantial income. GPT is OpenAI. GPT is already producing $20B in annual subscription income, and many billions more for sales to its corporate enterprise users. None of the investors are expecting immediate full ROI on their investment in AI. They are staking out territory in a vastly remunerative future market.
Notice the mindset embedded in this statement.
Indefinitely Extended Excursion™️ said...
"Assuming a generous 25% free cash flow margin (after all capital expenditures), that would require $10.8 trillion in annual revenue."
As if CapX spending is a subtraction from value, and has absolutely nothing to do with the valuation of a company embarking on myriad new technologies.
The left doesn't understand economics or they wouldn't advocate the sort of policies they do. These are the sort of people whose investment advice is worth what you paid them for it.
"You're a part of something here, Bud. The money you make for people creates science and research jobs. Don't sell that out."
1. Elon Musk is objectively a world-class weirdo.
2. Saying that about a trillionaire is not punching down.
3. Jimmy Kimmel is deeply unfunny.
All of those things can be — and are — true at the same time.
Yesterday Musk had a decent day. He created 4 thousand millionaires just among his employees including the cooks and janitors. He did this by convincing millions of people to voluntarily give up their money to invest in his people.
Kimmel lost a bunch of money and read words off a teleprompter that his wife makes him read. The people watching him quickly fell asleep.
That's not just punching up. That's a mosquito trying to bite through Musk's shoe.
“ Expressing contempt for Musk because you see him as weird — and unfuckable — reads as a careless cruelty against people who are on the autism spectrum.”
“Musk came out very openly — 5 years ago — as a person with Asperger's syndrome:”
Yeah. Aspies often come across as a bit weird. When I first started hearing Musk talk, I was pretty sure that was his situation. And am happy to see that I was right. They often sound a bit disconnected from their brains. And that’s probably because their brains are running a lot faster than their speech. One of the reasons that female Aspies are harder to diagnose (beyond the much higher prevalence among males) is 5hat this is typically much less noticeable among them.
Dr (Sir) Simon Baron-Cohen has theorized that the issue is that with Aspies (and even more, Autistics), the speed governors on their brains is missing, or at least much less effective. There are downsides though - such as shutting down when overstimulated.
Silicon Valley had maybe the highest concentration of Aspies in the world. baron-Cohen theorized that it may be the high density of high math ability pairs mating. Assortative mating. And worried about my daughter in that regard - but she married a biology guy, and not someone in her PhD program. A bit of out-mating.
Whatever disability Musk has, I'll take it.
I have quirks
You are eccentric
Kimmel is weird.
https://notthebee.com/article/cnn-hosts-shocked-to-discover-that-world-cup-tourists-think-the-south-is-welcoming
Say what you will about Kimmel but he was s mart enough to realize he could make himself rich by serving the TDS market. It’s earned him much more than he could have ever made as a comic.
Yes, stock valuations are concentrated in a relative handful of companies. This happens from time to time. The 'value' of the non-growing stocks remains stagnant, but they will be around when routine generational tech volatility returns. Tech is fantastic if you ride a bubble up, but brutal if you catch a crash.
Non-Tech dividend stocks are the retail "bonds" of today. Genuine bonds often pay sub-inflation dividends and are used as a government money sponge. Ordinary people get tricked into holding bonds with de-facto negative returns and much higher risks than simple CDs/Money Market savings.
Yes, CapEx can fuel growth when executed well, but there's a strong case against treating it as automatic value creation, especially at today's AI spending levels.
Empirical studies show the "capex effect": companies ramping up heavy investment (or issuing equity to fund it) have historically underperformed. It's not just theory over-optimism, empire-building, and mean reversion bite hard.
Cash spent on CapEx isn't available for buybacks or dividends, and many investors prefer capital-light compounders with high incremental ROIC over asset-heavy buildouts that require endless maintenance.
In AI right now, the risk of overcapacity is real: hyperscalers racing to spend hundreds of billions (trillions projected) could lead to commoditization and write-downs, just like past infra bubbles (telecom, dot-com). Valuation models require extremely heroic assumptions on future cash flows to justify current prices, often more narrative than rigorous math.
Great companies can make it work. But assuming big CapEx = value creation is dangerous. History, incentives, and data suggest caution.
"It's a trillion dollars. It's hard for our brains to conceptualize that. I mean, we know trillion is a number, but it's so large... we can't fathom it."
Carl Sagan talked about this. The idea that people could not comprehend just how large a "trillion" is. That's why he said his trademark, "billions and billions" instead of the word, "trillions."
And speaking of things too large to understand: Musk cannot "blow up the moon." If every nuke on earth was shot at the moon, it wouldn't blow it up. The moon is just too damn big. The moon has a volume of about 3/4ths of a trillion cubic miles.
Did Musk’s hype suck the money out of a lot of suckers this week? Maybe. But I don’t think so. We are probably beyond the point where there is viable long term competition in certain areas. The race to space is effectively over. SpaceX has essentially destroyed the ability of anyone else to compete, except maybe the Chinese, through rapid prototyping and reusability. Reusability destroyed the market for anyone else to compete in the launch market. The cost to orbit is already down to 10% of what we were paying 10 years ago. And with his big rockets, rapidly approaching use, it will quickly be down to a couple of percent. That is massive.
That alone probably wouldn’t justify a $trillion$ IPO. But that lever age is what justifies it. The possibility of control over worldwide communications helps. Taking over the high speed Internet and cellular phone networks is very possible. Then there is the possibility to dominate the data center and related AI industries, from space. Yes, despite the protestations here to the contrary, cooling in space is well known technology. And you can build cleaner, more uniform, ICs in space. Why do you think that they are dumping hundreds of $billions$ into state of the art fabs in TX? The list goes on. And that is the point.
By nearly every important metric Kimmel is a Lilliputian. In contrast Musk is a giant who employs more than 150,000 people. Several thousand “working people” are millionaires because of this IPO.
Democrat reaction to greatness is bilious resentment. That’s why they elect garbage people. It’s why they hate Musk and Trump who are great men in very different ways.
Some 1920s mogul (Joe Kennedy?) said that when his cabdriver started talking about stock tips, he pulled out of the market. On that basis, I wonder if all the chatter about the SpaceX IPO is a bad sign.
Yes, insulting aspies is not good, but people are going to insult those they disagree with and want to vilify. Take out that and the p0rn out and a lot of the internet would be gone.
I work for a living, don't watch much, if any tv.
I thought Jimmy Kimmel was done?
It’s worth noting that the Biden administration allocated $42.45 billion for the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program, to bring broadband Internet connectivity to house lids thst had no access to Internet Service Providers. In fact no households were ever hooked up. Space-X could provide that access for a tiny fraction of the allocated dollars. I do not begrudge Musk a single dime.
@loudogblog Carl Sagan worked for the US military on an experiment that involved detonating a nuclear device on the moon. Apparently, cooler heads prevailed. He kept that (and physically assaulting his first wife) a secret for years. So if we want to talk about famous people who were willing to run the risk of blowing up the moon ... looking at you, Carl.
@Big Mike: to bring broadband Internet connectivity to house lids thst had no access to Internet Service Providers
The DEI efforts of that era were driven by pure imagination. There was deep concern about "marginalized" low-income remote workers without broadband...until people pointed out that it's entirely circular. To be eligible for remote work one had to be a computer-based worker (i.e., already educated and typically middle class). There was and is no need business for home broadband among people doing service, field, security, or delivery work.
As usual, and as expected, the trolls crawl out to slam Elon. They said the exact same things when he started Tesla, bought X, and started SpaceX.
The lack of ability, lack of imagination, and the raw power of their stupidity is absolutely stunning. Undeterred by reality, they simply keep going, unable to disobey their masters orders.
“Empirical studies show the "capex effect": companies ramping up heavy investment (or issuing equity to fund it) have historically underperformed.”
I had the unique and often hilarious experiencing of working for several start-ups during the 1990s dot-com era. VC investors threw hundreds of millions at start-ups that went bust and never brought a product to market. But a very few did succeed and their investment returned preposterous long term profits. I don’t know how to look at it, but Marc Andreessen says: “It’s the third owner of the motel who makes a profit.”
SpaceX was given special permission to be added to some index funds early.
Why? Because they can’t find early investors who believe in the valuations of this stock, so they want your passive retirement index funds to invest in it instead.
$20 billion of the raise is being used to pay back the banks who financed the Twitter purchase.of Twitter. xAI was also folded into the SpaceX IPO and as we know — xAI is a cash furnace.
I’m glad S&P held the line on Strategy and SpaceX. I can’t think of a higher impact on the public perception of their retirement IRA's and the casino aspect of markets if this were to be allowed.
Investors participating in the IPO will be financing execution that has not yet even started to happen, facilitating the lucrative exit of pre-IPO shareholders, ceding any meaningful levers of control, and enabling underwriting banks to de-risk the exposure they had taken on to secure the IPO mandate in the first place.
$1.75T. Lots of risk. Minimum 15% return expectation. More realistically you should be expecting something much greater. Needs to generate over $260B in free cash flow. That's 16x SpaceX 2025 revenue of $16B.
In no scenario can SpaceX ever support this level of valuation.
SpaceX IPO shows Musk’s genius is in myth-making. How exactly the company plans to support its massive valuation is not obvious.
Good luck.
I would genuinely appreciate analysis of funds for my RMD starts this year
There have been trillionaires before, if you account for inflation.
News flash to Rich: The market values growth more than current income. Amazon wasn't making any money back in the 90s but had a large valuation. Turns out it was undervalued.
Craig Mc said...
"unfuckable"? How many children does he have?
And all of the women are at least 7's.
Big Mike said...
The Drill SGT said...
Humperdink said...
Musk made several hundred of his loyal employees millionaires.
I think the count was more than 1000,
Over at Instapundit they say 4,400
This is why the United States is the greatest nation on earth.
The globalists control the rest of the planet and they make sure people like Musk are never allowed to create this kind of wealth for the little people.
Indefinitely Extended Excursion™️ said...
SpaceX was given special permission to be added to some index funds early.
Why? Because they can’t find early investors who believe in the valuations of this stock, so they want your passive retirement index funds to invest in it instead.
It wasn't special permission. This always happens.
As far as I can tell the culture of the left stops in high school cliquishness. It's below sophomoric.
Oh please. There's absolutely nothing wrong with making fun of Elon Musk because of his weirdness and strange looks and mannerisms. The real crime is Jimmy Kimmel wasn't funny. Imagine Tony Hinchcliffe hosting a roast of Elon Musk. They would go way way worse and everybody would be rolling in the aisles.
I had a lot of fun watching senator Fauxahontas lecturing us proles about how terrible it is that people are “hanging on by their fingernails” while Elon Musk is a trillionaire. Tell me, someone, why it is that so many lefty politicians, economists, university professors, and other such useless consumers of oxygen molecules think that an economy is a zero-sum game? Did not mathematician Steve Nash prove, mathematically, that it is not? The was an effing movie about him, was there not?
I also note that she is speaking from the back seat of a MFing limousine, for crap’s sake.
That’s a familiar alarm going off with multiple economists who’ve referred to it as a Ponzi scheme.
…I doubt the accuracy of this claim but if true those economists are Democrats and/or don’t know what a ponzi scheme is…
“Over at Instapundit they say 4,400 (of Musk employees became millionaires).”
Meanwhile, hero of the Commie left, the Oracle of Omaha pooh-pood Musk’s achievements. Warren Buffoon ensured his railroad petro-chemical tank cars were full by guaranteeing any trans-America pipelines were never built. The leftie playbook - eliminate competition (see: Wild Bill Gates)
"those economists are Democrats and/or don’t know what a ponzi scheme is…"
Yes, I'm sure they would not admit that Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme ever. It survives only because we are forced at gunpoint to stay in it to keep it going.
The only time Democrats worry about money is when they aren’t getting a cut.
Howard said...
Oh please. There's absolutely nothing wrong with making fun of Elon Musk because of his weirdness and strange looks and mannerisms. The real crime is Jimmy Kimmel wasn't funny. Imagine Tony Hinchcliffe hosting a roast of Elon Musk. They would go way way worse and everybody would be rolling in the aisles.
I would love that sort of thing.
The problem we really have with Jimmy Kimmel is he is an evil propagandist working for an evil democrat party who is trying to build support for a fascist government corporate regime.
Kimmel works for a Billionaire who wants the government to take Musk out for him and they are running the same tribal government protection scheme that every society in history has run with.
I am tired of the Pritzkers and Redstones and Johnsons and the old money running the same reductionist bullshit and Jimmy Kimmel is their catspaw.
I hate the stupid catspaws almost as much as the billionaires that fund them.
FedGov spent $7 trillion last year. Which must be even more unfathomable, right? Did we get equivalent value?
Some years ago (before SpaceX was such a big thing) I had interesting experiences doing diligence on a few startups here in Silicon Valley (where Tesla HQ was). I kept running into founders who had held senior positions under Musk, but had left. They all had two things in common: They said Musk was very difficult to work for (Steve Jobs got mentioned a few times), and they had nothing worse than that to say about Musk or his businesses.
Farther back, In The Beginning, there was Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC was a bit like that, or Apple. In fact, the Valley joke was that PARC wasn't so much a business, as a "conspiracy to form new companies".
Fred Drinkwater said...
FedGov spent $7 trillion last year. Which must be even more unfathomable, right? Did we get equivalent value?
We got learing centers and we close the female wage gap.
And massive inflation and degradation of the value of wages.
Were Trump to ask Musk for the $1.776 billion for his J6 fund, it would just be 0.14% of Musk’s $1.2 trillion net worth. Musk could give it without being asked, and the fact he hasn’t means he doesn’t like cop beaters any more than most of us.
I was waiting for the stupidest comment on this thread. Congratulations.
What percent of the people imprisoned for being in DC for that J6 event a while back were accused or convicted of physically assaulting police on that day?
I have not invested in SpaceX, and don't really plan to. It's not my kind of play. The valuation is pretty hard to get past, but the thing that really makes it attractive anyway is that IEE really hates it. That almost makes it a sure thing regardless of the numbers. I expect another name change is on the horizon.
I think it's important to understand what is driving the markets and all of this "investment". I've ranted about it quite a bit in these comments, but I'd like to add some further context for those interested.
What has happened over the last 26 years is purely driven by unprecedented stimulus to support the dotcom, housing, and Covid busts. Stimulus isn't itself bad, but the problem is that none of these stimulus packages have ever been allowed to unwind and they continue to compound on top of each other (we're still running multi-trillion dollar deficits) and most importantly the stimulus has been wildly excessive as the real economy has never been able to absorb it. This excess stimulus has been the primary driver of financial market gains and the "investment" talked about in this article. Let's look at some numbers.
To understand the impact of debt on stock market gains, we need look no further than total market cap, GDP, and debt growth.
From 2020 to 2026, total US market cap increased $58T. GDP + Federal debt increased a combined $55T. Perhaps that's coincidental you say. From 1974 to 2000, market cap was up $14T. GDP + Federal debt was up $14T. Two 26 year coincidences. From 2020 to 2026, market cap is up $31T. GDP + Federal debt is up $21T. Less of a 1:1 relationship shorter-term, but it evens out over the whole 2000 to 2026 period.
Debt is a stimulant. When the real economy can't absorb the extra cash flow, the outlet is the financial markets and the "investment" arena. And that is what we have seen over the last 26 years. See GDP per Capita / Debt per Capita and $ GDP Growth to $ Debt Growth below, which both show that ever growing debt has become increasingly ineffective to drive the real economy, so it gets redirected to and inflates the financial markets.
What does all this mean? It means that if people expect markets to continue as they have the last 26 years, and particularly the last 6 years (irrational exuberance is alive and well), the only way for this to happen is we need to continue to take on ever larger amounts of debt and as a growing percent of GDP. Stop debt growth and you stop market gains. Productivity (AI or otherwise) won't get us there.
Thanks for reading.
Total US Market Cap
1974 = $0.7T
2000 = $15.1T (12.5% CAGR)
2020 = $41.6T (5.2% CAGR)
2026 = $73T (9.8% CAGR)
54% of total market growth over the last 26 years has come since 2020.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/CM.MKT.LCAP.CD?locations=US
https://www.longtermtrends.com/market-cap-to-gdp-the-buffett-indicator/
Market Cap to GDP
1974 = 37%
2000 = 138% (peaked in March)
2020 = 149% (Dec 2019 before Covid hit)
2026 = 228%
https://www.longtermtrends.com/market-cap-to-gdp-the-buffett-indicator/
US GDP
1974 = $1.6T
2000 = $10.4T
2020 = $21.9T (end of 2019 before Covid)
2026 = $31.8T
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN
GDP per Capita
1974 = $7.5k
2000 = $36.8k
2020 = $66.6k (Q4 2019 before Covid)
2026 = $92.9k
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1WRVs
US Federal Debt
1974 = $0.5T
2000 =$5.7T
2020 = $23.2T (Q1 2020 before Covid stimulus)
2026 = $39.2T
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/debt-to-the-penny
Federal Debt to GDP
1974 = 31%
2000 = 54%
2020 = 106% (end of 2019 before Covid)
2026 = 123%
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
Federal Debt per Capita
1974 = $2.3k
2000 = $20k
2020 = $70.5k (Q1 before Covid)
2026 = $112.5k
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1WRVp
GDP per Capita / Debt per Capita
1974 = 3.3x
2000 = 1.8x
2020 = 0.9x
2026 = 0.8x
$ GDP Growth to $ Debt Growth
1974-2000 = $1.69
2000-2020 = $0.66
2020-2026 = $0.62
Ever growing stimulus measures have become increasingly ineffective.
M2
1974 = $0.9T
2000 = $4.9T
2020 = $15.4T (end 2019 / early 2020 before Covid)
2026 = $22.8T
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
M2 to GDP
1974 = 56%
2000 = 47%
2020 = 70% (peaked at 89% in Q2)
2026 = 71%
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1WRVw
I won't be alive when it gets written off, so print until the printers run out of ink. But don't let them run out of ink please.
"I think it's important to understand what is driving the markets and all of this "investment"."
"Understand"? So you're out. Got it.
This Indefinitely guy is the king of tl:dr
Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta.These three have printed money: in 2024, together they generated free cash flow (cash profits after investment spending) of over $200bn, four times the level of a decade before.
If you wanted a 10% return on your money, which is quite low considering the risk, you'd be willing to pay no more than $2T for this cash flow and you'd expect it to grow at least with inflation.
The current market cap of these three is $8.71T. That means with a $200B free cash flow you're getting a 2.3% return on your money. You can get 3.9% in a money market.
What are the chances that the first trillionaire would be normal. Also, Jimmy Kimmel has no basis for calling other people weird.
Indefinitely Extended Excursion™️ said...
I think it's important to understand what is driving the markets and all of this "investment". I've ranted about it quite a bit in these comments, but I'd like to add some further context for those interested.
LOL!
Keep hope alive retard.
Jimmy Kimmel is neither funny nor entertaining. What is his major malfunction? Elon Musk is productive. He makes humanity better. Kimmel is parasitic.
Jimmy Kimmel is neither funny nor entertaining. What is his major malfunction? Elon Musk is productive. He makes humanity better. Kimmel is parasitic.
Regarding massive government debt (worldwide): Stay out of bonds. "Safe" bonds are the way that the government strategically underpays interest to adjust for free-money entitlement overspending. Inflation is required to cover its promises and fund fantasy programs, and to mitigate the risk of a market crash. Bidenflation of 2022-2023 proved the bond scam. See Japan's Nikkei crash and decades of stagnation too.
To survive one must latch on to the momentum plays wherever they are (or just Bogle the entire market). You are NOT getting rich in a high spending inflationary environment, but your investing dollar numbers will go up and you won't fall behind.
I'm not saying gold is an answer here, for China, India, and Costco moved gold from the commodity market to the luxury, novelty, and consumption markets. Consider China's red/gold decorations and India's bright and flashy art. The US gold tax laws erode its potential return too.
Left Bank: I've watched your ilk beat cops, first responders, and bystanders merilessly and with intent and planning for decades,. Just stop lying, you piece of antisocial garbage.
Enigma: where do you live, Brooklyn Heights?
In rural America, many people who previously had poor or no internet access now have it provided through their employers with starlink so they can do customer service from home while raising children.
You're utterly ignorant of the working-class workforce. Trust fund baby? Come on, give us your real name if you're a real man.
@Tina Trent --
Fail. You are projecting your fantasies with massive clarity.
I grew up in a tiny small town that was 20 miles from a larger town and 50 miles from the nearest city. My mother had a trashy local ISP with modem-like speeds long after broadband arrived. I maintained her setup every time I visited.
I also completed a literal research project on rural broadband in the COVID era. The remote work market was circular and workers had to live where the broadband was. As such, they started 2020 with good infrastructure and couldn't move off grid if they wanted. Conversely, those without broadband needs in 2020 worked in industries without broadband requirements. The vast majority who need it today still live in places with hardwired broadband. They've got houses, and many were called back to the office.
In simple terms, access to cable TV means access to broadband. The correlation is high and the ROI on expansion (beyond Starlink) is poor. Starlink is making more places viable for broadband employees. Yes.
I'm not a real man. I'm just an enigma. Perhaps AI.
Did he really expect a person with so many accomplishments to be "normal" which is just a synonym for average?
Although I don't own stock in Spacex (that I know of), own a Tesla, or subscribe to StarLink (although I'm considering the later, Comcast sucks), I, for one, have not noticed my life has diminished in any way by Elon becoming a trillionaire.
Rich man calls richer man 'bad'.... what a hypocrite.
“A weird man is a weird man
A rich weird man is a rich man”
A weird poor man is creepy. A weird rich man is eccentric.
And if Musk had rah-rah'd Harris in the last election Kimmel would be singing his praises. Keep giving half the country a reason to never watch your show, Mr. Kimmel.
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