churchill
Even if you give SpaceX the benefit of the doubt and assume they'll eventually settle at the profit rates Apple, Google, etc. have (~25%, check it), it'll be $4b in annual profits holding up $1.8t in market cap or roughly 450 PE ratio.
And that's if we give them the same great odds for profitability as America's most successful and profitable firms.
In summary, in the short-term the stock might very likely shoot up to $3t, but in the long-term, it doesn't look very healthy.
Fresh off WW2, with a titanic arsenal and industrial base, America and all of its allies couldn't end the war on their terms after China intervened.
That's why the US only did search-and-destroy missions, targeting Vietcong cells in the south and bombing supply lines in Laos. Which didn't matter much.
Once the Americans left, the North marched down a proper army and wrapped it up.
Maybe just pull a Bending Spoons after the acquisition, layoff most of the staff, and bring a lot of ops in-house and they'll be in profit ASAP.
Or, like Mao said, "the Army is the chief component of state power and whoever seeks to acquire and retain state power must have a strong army."
Now, you may point to other "popular revolutions" throughout modern history, but that only proves my point. After Khomeini went into exile in France, tens of thousands of his loyalists continued building their networks in Iran's universities, bazaars, mosques, offices, government agencies, etc. The revolution of 1979 was simply that underground network rising to topple the modernist Persian state once they'd reached critical mass.
Even during the Arab Spring, nothing really changed. For instance, in Egypt, the Army ousted Mubarak to simply install their own man who commanded a real army with guns (Sisi). When the protesters didn't get the memo, they were fired upon and thousands killed.
Across the Artesh (Army), IRGC, Basij militias, and other Shia paramilitary groups, Khamenei has over a million armed, trained young men who believe his words are God's words, and whose fortunes are tied to the regime's survival. No amount of airstrikes can meaningfully degrade those numbers to the point where Reza Pahlavi can be allowed to touch solid ground and be installed as king.
Reza Pahlavi has millions of bots on Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc. who astroturf him as a contender for state power.
It's not even a contest.
What exactly will you do? Tell ADL to sue and shut down hacker news because we refuse to love and adore your genocidal terrorist state?
Even if you want to give OpenAI the benefit of the doubt by comparing it to other software primos, they're doing terribly. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc. were profitable almost immediately after their founding. In the cases where they accumulated losses it was a deliberate effort to capture as much of the market as possible. They could simple hit the brakes and become profitable at will.
In OpenAI's case, every week yet another little-known lab in China releases a 99% competitive LLM at a fraction of their costs.
It's not looking good at all now or in the long-term.
Sodomizes prisoners so much that their rectums are punctured, and when the culprits are to be held responsible, the entire society, lawmakers, everyday citizens, activists, etc. protest and break them out of prison where they were kept for anally raping Palestinians.
Insider leaks video of the attacks and instead of having a moment of humility, the gov. declares a manhunt and accuses her of a blood libel.
Terrible, abominable society. A completely diseased culture.
That campaign helped Hemedti build up his profile, eventually become one of Sudan's power brokers (kinda like Prigozhin to Putin), amass eye-watering amounts of money (from gold mines yielding bullion that's laundered in Dubai), which in the latter case has been used to arm a substantial personal army.
The RSF were joined at the hip with the Sudanese Army until 2023 when they tried toppling the military to seize power and make Hemedti the national leader.
Whenever any country falls into instability, people try to get away as far as possible. A huge chunk of the European populations of North & South America, Australia, etc. were fleeing persecution, war, and just general disorder.
Their only advantage was that these didn't have states organized enough to stop European settlers. Right or wrong, if you don't use state resources to stop refugees, you don't get to complain.
Growth has slowed to a crawl (just over 1%), trade friction has choked countless small exporters, and the “take back control” slogan now sounds hollow when irregular immigration is still higher than ever, while industries that relied on EU labor, say, healthcare or agriculture, are struggling.
Even though public opinion has shifted toward rejoining the EU, it could take a decade or more to rebuild the political will — and any return deal would likely come with less favorable terms.
You're strenuously refuting a point I didn't make. So, I decided anything else you wrote would be quite inappropriate and not worth my time.
How they choose to organize their society is none of your business. Whenever any Arab society becomes democratic, it's almost guaranteed they'll vote in Muslim Brotherhood types that'll be joined at the hip with Islamist movements. So, you don't want rapidly liberalizing benevolent monarchies, but rather democratic Islamists? Wasn't it the Americans who nudged the Egyptian military to topple Morsi after the Arab Spring brough an Islamist to power? Democracy until whoever we dislike is elected by the people.
It was the Western powers messing around with Mossadegh's democratically-elected regime in Iran that led to its fall and later down the line, the rise of the Shia-extremist Iran.
You westerners are so full of hubris. You don't know how to leave well-enough alone.
>Solar energy is cheaper and it doesn't need to be trucked around on ships, threatening insanely expensive disasters.
That's none of your business either. No western country is accelerating the renewable transition. Stay out of the way of those doing it, and don't pontificate to those providing energy for civilization now.
>... and instead funding them in Western countries, yeah. Saudi funded madrasa schools or imams funded by oilsheik countries are a massive problem, although I admit a part of that is our fault as well for not running theology studies in our universities for Islam (unlike for Christian denominations).
That's a YOU problem! Western governments hold a monopoly of violence within their own borders. You can simply shut down Islamist mosques. If you refuse, you implicitly permit their activities. There's a reason why extreme preachers are imprisoned/executed in the Arab Gulf, but they find an audience in the West. You allowed it; it's a you problem.
>Well, Hamas is strongly supported by Qatar and Iran.
And Israel too, right? Are we going to gloss over that? That these fighters are mostly orphans, whose parents and grandparents where marched out of their homes at gunpoint and had their homes stolen?
>Well, Hamas is strongly supported by Qatar and Iran.
You're still making these mistakes now, like the ongoing genocide in Gaza. You don't get to pontificate or preach. You don't have the moral capital. No one takes the West's moral posturing serious. The only people who do are developing countries paying lip service so they can get aid handouts. No one cares. Pack it up.
What does anyone care about the people who attacked Israel? The Arab Gulf has rivers of oil required for driving human economic progress forward. they have been consistent about suppressing Islamists within their borders. The Saudi security infrastructure had voided Bin Laden's citizenship since the 1990s and notified the US & their Western partners.
Pinning Hamas on the Arab Gulf might advance your narrative, but it's provably false for anyone willing to actually probe that claim.
>we got to get rid of fossil fuels because with the exception of Norway and the US, almost all major relevant suppliers of them are religious autocracies and/or kleptocracies.
LMAO. Imagine a (likely) Western European preaching about morals after ethnically cleansing three entire continents? If morals ever mattered to anyone, we'd have known before now.
Likewise, if you legally purchase double-digit percentages of Indian, Chinese, Brit, Australian land, it doesn't give you the moral or legal precedent to expel the natives from the rest of their land and declare it your state.
So, being attacked and nearly killed by other white boys does not validate his opinions on apartheid.
All the third-world countries that have had their debts to China blow out of control have been able to renegotiate.
>Countries near China's borders have turned strongly against their neighbor. The US has built a widespread network of alliances around that.
I'm not upholding China as a moral actor. They're as utilitarian as anyone else, but they're honest about it, that's all.
Western countries preach about morals, human rights, rules-based order, and all kinds of bullshit but always seem to violate their acclaimed principles every Wednesday.
China sells weapons to everyone who has money, works with all kinds of regimes, and generally have a non-interventionist policy. That's why smaller countries tend to prefer partnering with them. They're not your fairy godmother, but at least they're honest about what they want.
This is just a rogue state going mask-off.
Imagine if China or Russia even suggested the same willingness during a press conversation, let alone making a law to that effect.
I actually don't mind tyranny on some level if I can't do anything against them. it just feels good having the mask of righteousness & honor fall off so that the world can see the ugly, unvarnished, hypocritical beast under the makeup.
In other words, Churchill might have hated the Nazis (because they threatened his beloved England), but he believed in the state of exception they promoted. He believed he wasn't obligated to obey basic decency when dealing with non-European natives because, like Schmitt would say, "sovereign is he who determines the exception."
America's elected leaders also have power to punish & bring oligarchs to book legally, but they mostly interact symbiotically, exchanging campaign contributions and board seats for preferential treatment, favorable policy, etc.
Putin can order any out-of-line oligarch to be disposed of, but the economic & coercive arms of the Russian State still see themselves as two sides of the same coin.
So, yes: coercive power can still make billionaires face the wall (Russian revolution, etc.) but they mostly prefer to work together. Money and power are a continuum like spacetime.
If any of your acquaintances are ever in doubt of anything ever happening, this will be a handy guide for them to consult.