> Under the terms of the deal, Google will pay SpaceX $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029 for access to “approximately 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, memory, and other related components.”
That part is not equity - that's revenue for services rendered. But a commitment for nearly $1B/mo in revenue will likely increase SpaceX's share price, and Google owns some of those shares, so their holdings will increase in value.
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Yes, the appreciation will accrue to the investor, in this case, Google (and every other shareholder). But it is not revenue for SpaceX, which is the error OP made.
I’m aware of the guidelines. Another guideline should be “check yourself for accuracy before you reach for the keyboard”—especially since it’s easier than ever. Giving false information that, if practiced and not disclaimed, could land someone in jail is irresponsible.
But the OP very clearly did not write anything of that sort. Their claim was:
> This deal increases SpaceX's revenue by $11 billion per year.
And that is pretty obviously correct. This deal is Google is buying a service from SpaceX for $920M/month, not investing in SpaceX. And that is revenue for SpaceX. I don't know why you're so insistent it isn't.
The false—or at least highly questionable and unsubstantiated—claim is “Now with this incredible deal, SpaceX is now GAAP profitable under the existing rules” simply because Google bought $11B of compute from SpaceX. It depends on how much it costs SpaceX to provision and operate the compute, and it depends on what other expenses and revenues they have.
A quick peek at their S-1 filing shows a $5B annual loss last year. Unless SpaceX is selling compute to Google at a 50% margin (unlikely but possible), they’re not going to turn a profit because of this deal. Any profit that does result will be small.
Google’s equity investment and P/E multipliers are irrelevant and have no bearing on SpaceX’s profitability. It should also be noted that when there are no earnings (i.e. net profit), the P/E ratio is NaN. There are no “securitized profits” when there are no profits.
And I have no idea why the OP responded to my response about the math not making sense the way they did. I said “equity investments aren’t revenue”. The response strongly implied that they believed equity investments in a company are revenue. Perhaps I read that wrong, and if so, I owe OP an apology.
If there’s financial engineering going on with SpaceX, it’s not merely because they have customers who are also equity stakeholders in a company. This is as common as the day is long. The top level comment is just a red herring.
Oh, if that was your objection, why did you identify the issue as "But it is not revenue for SpaceX, which is the error OP made"?
> A quick peek at their S-1 filing shows a $5B annual loss last year. Unless SpaceX is selling compute to Google at a 50% margin (unlikely but possible), they’re not going to turn a profit because of this deal. Any profit that does result will be small.
The cost of AI data centers is almost entirely the capex (10% opex, 90% depreciation), so the costs aren't meaningfully affected by whether the DC is idle or operating at full load. They're renting their DCs to Anthropic and Google for a combined $25B/year. The loss of the AI division is about $2.5B/quarter. The math is pretty obvious.
> Google’s equity investment and P/E multipliers are irrelevant and have no bearing on SpaceX’s profitability.
> why did you identify the issue as "But it is not revenue for SpaceX, which is the error OP made"?
It was an error by implication. They responded with something that appeared to disagree when I responded that any profit SpaceX earns under GAAP solely depends on the revenues and expenses, and is not dependent on Google’s investment.
> The cost of AI data centers is almost entirely the capex (10% opex, 90% depreciation)
The operating costs might not vary much, but these boxes are not cheap to power, house, and cool. Not sure about the 10% opex claim, but am happy to see real world numbers.
This is not just free speech, it's commerce, and the government has the ability to regulate commerce. Warranties and lemon laws are not regulating speech - they're regulating sales and the legal requirements for those sales. Providing a method for playing a game a customer purchased after the company decides to abandon it is putting a legal requirement on the sale of goods.
I would guess that the big reason is Microsoft is the owner of Typescript. Apple, Google, and Mozilla probably don't want to be tied to the whims of someone else's language specification. It's the same reason Dart isn't a browser language, NaCl doesn't exist anymore, ASM.js development wasn't widely adopted but sowed the seeds for WASM.
Web standards get worked on by committee where those four companies each have some pull, and standards are voted on.
Node's typescript support is by default just stripping all of the type information out of the source text. There is experimental support for some transformations behind a flag.
She had serious debilitating medical issues from pregnancy where she lost a ton of blood and was in a coma for several days and nearly died. Of course she's going to take her severance to help care for her family given the atrocious state of our healthcare system.
The argument Socrates is making is specifically that writing isn't a substitute for thinking, but it will be used as such. People will read things "without instruction" and claim to understand those things, even if they do not. This is a trade-off of writing. And the same thing is happening with LLMs in a widespread manner throughout society: people are having ChatGPT generate essays, exams, legal briefs and filings, analyses, etc., and submitting them as their own work. And many of these people don't understand what they have generated.
Writing's invention is presented as an "elixir of memory", but it doesn't transfer memory and understanding directly - the reader must still think to understand and internalize information. Socrates renames it an "elixir of reminding", that writing only tells readers what other people have thought or said. It can facilitate understanding, but it can also enable people to take shortcuts around thinking.
I feel that this is an apt comparison, for example, for someone who has only ever vibe-coded to an experienced software engineer. The skill of reading (in Socrates's argument) is not equivalent to the skill of understanding what is read. Which is why, I presume, the GP posted it in response to a comment regarding fear of skill atrophy - they are practicing code generation but are spending less time thinking about what all of the produced code is doing.
I don't think it was explicitly to compete with Microsoft. Gabe explicitly said when the Windows 8 App Store was announced that Valve was going to ensure Microsoft couldn't lock them out of the desktop market. He said Valve benefitted for PC's openness (up until it was threatened).
Microsoft also had Games for Windows Live at the time, which provided similar functionality to parts of Steam (friends, multiplayer, voice chat, achievements), so with that plus the App Store, one could easily see it as Microsoft coming for their market.
> Mr Newell, who worked for Microsoft for 13 years on Windows, said his company had embraced the open-source software Linux as a "hedging strategy" designed to offset some of the damage Windows 8 was likely to do.
> He said the success of Valve, known for its Half Life, Left4Dead and Portal titles, had been down to the open nature of the PC.
> "We've been a free rider, and we've been able to benefit from everything that went into PCs and the internet," he told the conference. "And we have to continue to figure out how there will be open platforms."
> "There's a strong temptation to close the platform," he said, "because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors' access to the platform, and they say, 'That's really exciting.'"
If I was going to take on Microsoft I would say a lot of things that were not “I’m going to take on Microsoft,” best not to wake the sleeping giant. You can fix a lot of orgs by attacking them. Also I think Valve is set up as a bit of an anti-Microsoft, a flat(ish?) org structure as opposed to the matrix org structure. Having worked at MSFT I was definitely thinking that these people are going to fumble and a getting into position ready to pick up the ball when that happens might be a good strategy - though clearly a long term one.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the story in so many of Valve’s early games—Half-Life 1, Portal, Team Fortress 2—is about how corporate work environments are amusingly terrible.
Indeed Chrome included many relatively small acquisitions to be built. For example, GreenBorder for sandboxing and Skia for the 2D graphics engine. At that time sandboxing was novel for a browser.
Which SoC should they switch to? Google's Pixel phones for Android 16's release just updated[0] their kernels to 6.1, which means the bleeding edge kernel version for Android phones is a release from December 2022. What Qualcomm SoCs are supported by this kernel, and how fast are they?
If the drivers were upstreamed it would be supported by the latest kernel.org kernel even before release.
AFAIK outside the Pinephone and Liberem 5 no hardware manufacturers explicitly target this and only 10 year+ old Qualcomm (other vendors such as Freescale tend to behave much better) SOCs have open source graphics drivers because the SOC vendors themselves often refuse to support their own hardware.
Google is able to do this because they build their own SOCs (probably because they got tired of being jerked around by Qualcomm) but still don't merge their stuff upstream (or at least they don't last I checked.)
That part is not equity - that's revenue for services rendered. But a commitment for nearly $1B/mo in revenue will likely increase SpaceX's share price, and Google owns some of those shares, so their holdings will increase in value.
Additionally:
> In Comments
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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