You forgot third: He delivers results often enough to keep the believers believing. Tesla really is an electric car company that builds actual cars. SpaceX is actually flying rockets, and has achieved reusability, opening the door for dramatically cheaper space access.

Little of that is his own genius, but he does seem to have a knack for getting actually smart people working on visionary stuff.

Rich people don't liquidate assets when they want to buy something.

They get a loan against their assets. At extremely good rates. And no, they never pay them back. The strategy is called "buy, borrow, die".

First, you need to understand that if the stock price goes up more than their (low) interest rate, they're still making money.

Second, the whole thing is rolled up only when the ultra-rich person dies. The assets are revalued to their current market price at the time of death, wiping out decades of built-in capital gains tax liability. The estate can then sell a portion of the tax-free assets to pay off the outstanding loans.

tl;dr: They don't liquidate assets, if they did they'd have to pay taxes.

The reason for that isn't socialism, though. It's incompetence and corruption. Politics attracts the most incompetent and the most corrupt of people, always has and always will. Basically: If you're shit at everything else, you can always try making a career of telling other people what to do.

In theory. In reality, that has always been bullshit. The various bubbles, crashes and other events prove that. Valuations on the stock market are based on expectations, and expectations always include an element that is not rational.

True, though both of these companies do have an actual business and actual assets. There's plenty of companies on the stock market whose entire business can just pack up and leave tomorrow. Many of those are extremely highly valued. All the middle-men companies (ride sharing, food delivery, etc.) all work on the principle of outsourcing EVERYTHING. They hold no actual assets and their entire business model can be copied in a lazy weekend. Each and every one of them survives due to brand recognition, habit and by being just a little bit better in some way than alternatives. All of which can disappear in a week.

Tesla and SpaceX are overvalued. But they have factories and a workforce and produce things.Their value is not entirely made up.

I can read. Of course expected, that's implicit in "future" unless someone discovered clairvoyance.

So again, in other words: What do people base those expectations on when so far the company hasn't made any profit at all? In a profitable company, I can extrapolate. I can assume "with X additional cash raised, they can build Y more factories, selling Z more goods." - but for a company that is negative and is making a LOSS on every customer at the moment, growth does not equal profit, it equals more loss.

Yeah, but it's going to be quite a hunt to find an ETF that does NOT include any of the current obvious-cash-out IPOs.

But that's kinda the point. What future earnings, given that so far they have none? To make a profit, they would have to dramatically change their fees. As in: Quadruple at least. That's going to destroy the user base really quickly. And as Altavista found out: Once you are no longer synonymous with a service, you are easily replaced.

That seems to be the goal of all these massive IPOs recently. For early investors to cash out before the bubble bursts.

More importantly: Capitalism is an ECONOMY and market system. It is NOT a blueprint for a society. You can run your commerce and trade as capitalism, when you run your SOCIETY along capitalism principles you end up... essentially with the USA.

This is the part that is constantly forgotten. As a society, we have values that are not represented well within capitalism. But for some reason, we dumb shits think that we can treat everything as a market and apply capitalism to it and that will magically solve problems. But in education, just as one random example, the goal of it all is educated adults as output. It is not maximizing profit. Same for the prison system, the healthcare system and two dozen others.

It's greed, pure and simple.

Making a good product is possible. KEEPING making good products for decades is hard. Even more importantly: You will have hits and misses. Which, for a quarterly-result-bonus oriented manager is a no-no. Subscription models mean plannable revenue streams. Then all you need to do is negotiate your bonus package so that the already existing subscriptions will provide and you're home free and can already order your 2nd yacht.

Which is, of course, nonsense. Nothing stops you from making a copy of encrypted data. What sucks is that for a backup, you likely can't do incremental.

In your case it might simply be that there was not enough of this kind of tasks in the training data.

I agree in general, but not with this strong phrasing. I've let AI build a good amount of non-trivial code. But my consistent experience is that it works best when guided by an experienced coder who can correct it, and when implementing well-known algorithms rather than coming up with novel solutions.

Example: I let it write up a quadtree implementation in a language for which there was no ready solution online. It took 2-3 correcting prompts to get a good result. I could've done it myself but it would've likely taken a few hours to get it all right instead of the half or so hour it took with AI. The important part for me was that there's nothing unknown in how to implement a quadtree. All the AI needs to do is take the 100s of existing implementations and translate them into a different language.

True but too simplified. The Luddites had an entirely different motivation: The fact that factories now employed women and children at very low rates meant that the men lost their status in the family as bread winners and head of household. That was a major social disruption, which we don't have with AI.

I'd compare it more to teamsters or wagoners when cars became common. Your job is threatened by a different way of doing the same thing, a way to which your skills don't cleanly transition. Some choose to pick up the new tech, some want the old ways to persist.

In the end, coachmen became chauffeurs, because rich people prefer to be driven around oder driving themselves, no matter if it's a horse or an engine doing the pulling. But much fewer teamsters and wagoners became truck drivers.

BOTH of them? :-)