That Which Belongs To Caesar

Come on now, don't you trust me?
(Sources: GPT Image 2, aninews.in, Google Books Ngram Viewer)

The past few days has seen much commentary on America's latest Iran deal and geopolitics in general, including a pair of well-written commentaries in the national broadsheet, one of which introduced the Sanskrit Arthashastra as a contemporary treatise to Sun Tzu's probably more-famous The Art of War (as discussed last June). The analyses are well-considered, and I would beg to differ on only one point, specifically the assertion that "what Trump had embarked on was not strategy but recklessness" - which I believe should be revealed to be not entirely accurate quite soon. Case in point, the statement was predicated on Iran being "poised to extract sanctions relief and the unfreezing of its dollar assets", but as explained here some weeks back, the purported US$300 billion reconstruction fund (and related concessions) was an obvious troll from the start.

Even disregarding that the "deal" was an entirely non-binding memorandum of (mis)understanding towards kicking the football-shaped can sixty days down the road, the GOD-EMPEROR TRUMP (with some help from Israel and Hezbollah) has already pulled the football away with a public declaration that Iran would "not (get) ten cents" - but really, if Charlie Brown the mainstream media hasn't learnt their lesson after the thirty-ninth time, maybe the problem lies with them.

The specific phrasing by GEOTUS may be notable for its apparent uniqueness, with the expression more commonly heard as "not a penny/dime". This intuition is supported by an n-gram search, with the "penny" version remaining the most popular despite TRUMP discontinuing production (possibly to help drop the penny for his unenlightened detractors), followed by the resurgent dime, and then the dollar. "Not ten cents" was not found in the corpus - and thus might be accounted another TRUMP original coinage - and likewise for "not a nickel" and "not a quarter", despite their quantity in circulation being comparable to that of dimes at least. Well, as explained last month: if TRUMP took/gave the ten cents, the (Iran) game would be over!


It was inevitable, once one understands how The Game is played - Singapore does have one of the highest average I.Q.s in the world
(Source: r/singapore)


More Coinages Revisited

And to follow up on recent posts, it had been questioned as to why the section on Musk's fortune had began with "Unto Elon AI" when SpaceX is a rocket and space exploration company (i.e. it's rocket science!), surely? Upon double-checking, the SpaceX S-1 filing for its IPO clearly states that the space-related portion of its business, including Starlink, is responsible for less than 7% of its value (some US$2.43 trillion, as of today). Instead, the majority of its worth is projected to come from "providing AI services in space", apparently by sending cloud servers into orbit, making Musk's conversion of his Tesla Roadster into a satellite circa 2018 something of a test drive.

So yes, "Unto Elon AI" is accurate.

This does raise the natural question as to why AI SERVERS IN SPACE is necessarily so much more valuable then simply planting them on terra firma (and just transmitting the signals to space). In particular, Amazon's AWS is the largest cloud provider on Earth with a revenue of about US$120 billion last year, but SpaceX has already overtaken them in market value despite a storage capacity of approximately zero, with a price-to-earnings ratio of -61, and a price-to-sales ratio of about 138, on a revenue of US$18.7 billion and a net loss of US$4.9 billion.

This compares extremely unfavourably to its peers (the likes of NVIDIA, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon), all of whom are turning annual net profits from about US$77 to 132 billion, which has had pundits such as Michael Burry and Aswath Damodaran having qualms about SpaceX's valuation. It is not known as to what Warren Buffett (who was the world's richest as recently as 2008) thinks of it, but as Burry points out, SpaceX has just eclipsed Berkshire Hathaway more than twice over in just three days, with Elon Musk making more than Buffett's entire lifetime net worth in a single day.

The acquisition of AI startup Cursor for US$60 billion (of stock) by SpaceX has done little to quell concerns thus far, with commentators realising that if SpaceX's current market cap of about US$2.43 trillion is entirely unjustified by conventional metrics... what is to prevent its market cap from ballooning to, say, US$10 trillion (or roughly a third of the U.S. GDP), given that the degree of absurdity would remain largely unchanged? As Elizabeth Warren and others have also noted, fast-tracking SpaceX onto the Nasdaq-100 index would further force buying by index investors such as hedge and pension funds, whatever the fund operators themselves think of SpaceX itself.

Given this, we can only return to the explanation from last week, and revisit the original question of what SpaceX is: is it a rocket, social media or AI company? To this, the deeper answer would be none of the above; SpaceX is an Elon Musk company, with its main product being Elon Musk. Here, let us briefly reflect on the life and times of that remarkable African-American man, scion of an emerald mine owner, UPenn physics and economics alumni, PayPal CEO, Mars terraforming evangelist, electric vehicle visionary, and father of around fourteen. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that such a man would wind up as the funding mechanism for the United States of America, as an all-singing, all-dancing, living and breathing trillion-dollar coin...



Do you understand how much trouble we had to go through to pull this cash infusion off, without (most of) the market realising?
[N.B. Musk *is*, indeed, essential to reducing federal expenses!]
[N.N.B. Looks smaller-scale than expected though.]
(Source: youtube.com, again; and GPT Image 2)

[To be continued...]