Wework was a valid long bet that office properties would re-appreciate once the pandemic stopped — but now that AI is pulverizing the job market, any hope of that long bet paying off will require one of three things: a free-market boom in workers that require commercial property for success (e.g. physical invention companies like e.g. Saildrone due to not being able to homelab resins for safety reasons), and/or a market-wide rehiring event due to AI’s failure to deliver, and/or regulatory shifts in profit taxation and new business investment that trigger the above-described boom.

I know some commercial property owners in my hometown let their lowest-desirability storefronts sit vacant for twenty or thirty years (!) in order to prevent commercial property rent from falling across their entire portfolio. Turns out you can pay a lot of property taxes with not much revenue, and there hasn’t historically been regulatory pressure to pay an escalating “empty tax” to compel landlord pricing to behave according to supply and demand pricing models. Wework is still a terrible investment for an investor, but if you’re looking to bet long with no call and have the patient of decades, it’s not the worst plan. (There are certainly worse ways to gamble your money on the commercial property market!)

No land value tax == wasteful speculation. It’s been known for 120 years but obviously rich people have done a good job suppressing that understanding

> any hope of that long bet paying off will require one of three things: a free-market boom in workers that require commercial property for success (e.g. physical invention companies like e.g. Saildrone due to not being able to homelab resins for safety reasons)

That doesn't make sense for WeWork, though. Aren't they a rent-a-generic desk company? If you have any kind of specialist requirements (e.g. "processing resins") they'd seem like a bad fit.

Depends on how tall and ventilated your first floor is, I suppose!

SpaceX valuation is also going to be interesting. Talking about CapEx, SpaceX has deorbiting assets on top of depreciating ones. And without Starlink the space launch market size is pretty small.

> SpaceX has deorbiting assets on top of depreciating ones

The deorbiting part is redundant. Their satellite are just that, a depreciating asset. Their lifetime seem to be 5 to 7 years. The important claim is if the total cost, including the launch, can be recuperate over that lifetime or not.

Sure, but Tesla is doing a surprisingly poor job of capturing the EV market lately.

Is it? It’s less than obvious that the orbital datacenter boom will happen. Space mining could be a big deal but that’s not a foregone conclusion. Maybe someone will want to build a huge radio array on the far side of the moon, but I don’t expect hundreds of billions to be spent launching it — who would pay? Mars is less fashionable than it was a few years ago. Starlink is pretty impressive, but so is boring singlemode fiber, and the latter is increasingly being deployed everywhere.

(Obviously it will “skyrocket” unless someone comes up with a commercially viable launch system that doesn’t involve rocketing into the sky…)

There is Starlink and Amazon’s version, which both need many thousands of launches each (ignoring data centres)

There’s US military stuff like the starsheild, and it seems extremely likely china will follow suit.

Sat internet is changing the world rapidly where fibre can not be run. I saw it first hand in remote Australia, Yukon, Alaska and Africa. Not to mention ships and planes.

These projects are aggressively driving down launch costs, which increases demand for launches, which drives down launch costs which drives up demand.

Just as we had the other day: Competition is not market validation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961726

There is no doubt it is worth a lot in very remote destinations. But by definition there aren't many people there. Thus limited market size.

Launches for US military hardware is a market, yes.

Other countries are going to want to use/build up their own capabilities, so SpaceX won't have market access. Especially China.

The launch market is already booming. Denying that is denying reality.

> WeWork.. hard to take anyone seriously that ever invested in this bad boy.

Masayoshi Son may not be providing returns for its investors but he is providing entertainment for the rest of the world.

Yep, SpaceX actually has a track record as an actual leader and innovator in it's niche (that's very CapEx intensive to enter), it's not really a moat but it's a lead that no other entity seems to be closing in on (on the contrary many would-be competitors seems to have almost given up).

As for OpenAI, I'm not sure if Altman is an idiot or fraudster, claims about reaching AGI/ASI with scaling and investing in that fashion was always delusional at best or fraudulent at worst, maybe he just hoped to divert enough money to engineers to make actual breakthroughs or that the hardware would become a moat but competitors have kept pace, and I fully agree that they are mostly now only hanging on with an insanely bad cost structure now.

> on the contrary many would-be competitors seems to have almost given up

maybe the smaller ones; Blue Origin succeeded, and French and Chinese nu-space companies will continue to get funding for decades - national governments are capable of footing the bill of large CapEx projects. SpaceX competition is irreversibly tied to US foreign policy, and only scientific amd commercial launches are price-sensitive

> xAi isn't even a point of discussion

The reason GP said SpaceX/xAI is that these are now a single company.

xAI is ahead of OpenAI on the LLM Arena 'Arena Overview' for what it's worth. Not bad given they've only really been going for a couple of years.