Elon Musk

Private tech valuations

1. Fuck right off with that SpaceX BS. Ain’t no WAY

2. Stripe employees should mutiny for missing the greatest tech IPO window of all time pic.twitter.com/GvDiVQlr7l

— Bucco Capital (@buccocapital) December 30, 2022

or, another way to put it - if you're a rank and file employee in silicon valley, you only get to gamble on one company at a time (via working for them), so you better choose right.

if you are a VC, you get to gamble on a thousand companies, and your biggest problem is trying to get your fingers into as many pies as possible, because of the skewed upside/downside risk-reward profiles (being a series A investor in uber will pay many, many times over for being a series A investor in 1000 other failed start-ups that went bankrupt). because of this, the competition to get in the hottest start-ups will be intense, and it will be a race to the bottom and VCs will fall over themselves and throw caution to the wind, see all the stories about how the FTX investors did basically no diligence. because, while the music is playing, you have to dance!

jason calacanis is a grifter, but his book about angel investing was extremely interesting to me as someone who knows nothing about how early stage vc works. seems to be become the standard text for senior engineers who made fuck you money at uber or wherever and are so bored they're doing angel vc now.

that whole generation are a bunch of right place, right time guys, elon included.

Calacanis co-founded the blog network Weblogs, Inc.[3] with Brian Alvey on September 24, 2003, and the startup was supported by an angel investment from Mark Cuban.

i mean, lmao

there were a bunch of his blog peers (Anil Dash, several ex-Six Apart/blogger/flickr/etc) types dunking on Calacanis publicly on twitter late last year calling him an insufferable dweeb

you've got to be pretty terrible for people to pop up and do that

There are so many desperate, sweaty untalented dudes in nominal positions of power in tech. Though I will say, in 20+ years, Jason Calacanis stands out as amongst the top in terms of sheer embarrassing foolishness, even separate from his funding of white supremacist shitheels. https://t.co/mTHyEjJ97q

— anildash (@anildash) September 30, 2022

Ha! Exactly. I still recall when he couldn’t tell me apart from Mena bc you know, female blog company founders are confusing!

— Meg Hourihan (@megnut) September 30, 2022

all of the above is kind of funny because when you put it like that (generational wealth opportunities are only open to the rich who have disposable capital to invest, basically) you can see why crypto took off in such a big way. america, the country of temporarily embarrassed millionaires!

Not to mention the tax treatment on nearly all such investments will be long term capital gains and any losses will offset such gains the investors have elsewhere, while employees getting a W-2 alongside any such stock/interests/options get taxed at higher wage rates. Nice work if you can get it.

yeah i think the biggest elephant in the room is the way the us government has juiced the stock market, which is a public policy choice that has gone back literally centuries, the NYSE can trace its roots back to 1792. treatment of long term capital gains definitely a big one, makes no sense that one of the biggest opportunities for "wealth creation" is taxed the least.

another prominent in my mind are 401ks and how they've displaced relatively safer fixed-income pension funds, the government basically seeing all that money locked up in pension funds (which aren't as equity-weighted as 401k plans) and deciding it's better to allocate that to the stock market; now there's a permanent fixed bid on the S&P 500 to the tune of $20k a year multiplied by all W-2 employees in america, with an employer match to boot.

Lmao heading rapidly for $100, down almost 15% today

the guy who originally proposed the idea of a 401k based on a possibility given financially legislation is one of those dudes who goes around explaining why his idea was misused now

financially? financial

the government basically seeing all that money locked up in pension funds (which aren't as equity-weighted as 401k plans) and deciding it's better to allocate that to the stock market

should be pointed out that "the government" cited in that sentence consisted of members of Congress, who most definitely were having cash shoveled in their direction by businesses that would benefit from a move away from pensions and toward 401Ks.

OK, I'm going to get off of the Calacanis beat after this, but... jesus christ what a thin-skinned dork
https://himariapetrova.medium.com/why-does-jason-calacanis-hate-scott-galloway-3ada7784c9a3

xp dan to get back to the original point about valuing startups via extrapolating from privileged investments is just basically that the investors are getting better deal than say the employees, thats why they want it, how much more is it worth idk, but its not nothing

yeah I agree with that, at the end of the day it's the classic battle between Labor vs. Capital

musk of all people gets that. so much of his management style seems like class-based revenge rather than liberatian market-based capitalism tbh. which is why the lack of tech unions is so maddening.

i was too new to have any social capital to push for this myself, but the almost total lack of any serious conversation about unionization at twitter over the summer was baffling to me.

theres the classic dynamic where affluent or even merely middle class people identify with the ruling class, unions are for people who work in factories, its so wrong headed, feel like someone just needs to organize a campaign around getting privates offices (or i guess now home offices) instead of open floor plans and tech workers might start to see the benefit of collective action

i know it's a running joke but twitter really was the "wokest" set of employees i've ever worked with. if not there, it's difficult to see it happening anywhere in tech. the 90th-99th income percentile really don't get it.

yeah it would prob take a larger union wave to sweep them along, which could be happening tbf, but its got a ways to go

even at somewhere like twitter you've got a non-trivial number of libertarian, vocally anti-union cranks among non-management, which is surprisingly chilling for discussion, especially when it happens on slack rather than in break rooms.

just to threaten to tell the irs about their crypto dealings and theyll shut up

but in all seriousness if one really wanted to do it theyd prob need a plan that involves marginalizing those people, im sure someone will attempt to organize a tech company at some point, i know there was some agitation at google a while ago but they were going with the wobbly wildcat model thats about a chunk of workers taking ad hoc action rather than actually forming a union, which prob reflects the fact that the demand just wasnt there

iirc etsy may have done it?

oh its the sellers that are doing it thats interesting i hadnt heard about that https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/31/23330758/etsy-strike-boycott-indie-sellers-guild-union-fee-increase

i guess the other problem is that the social and professional boundary between management and ICs is especially porous in tech, which makes forming an org that excludes management trickier.

kickstarter is probably the most famous (and maybe first?) tech company to have a union

DM me to learn more

oh yeah i forgot about that thats cool salute to them

a little ironic because Kickstarter has said in the past that they intend to never go public, so the equity kind of exists in a limbo https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/17/kickstarter-paid-a-dividend-even-though-it-never-intends-to-go-public.html

ah yeah kickstarter was what i was thinking of, not etsy, i.e. the other brooklyn success

meanwhile the memestock elves on the trading floor after closing time:
https://i.imgur.com/UBlrQlm.png

160 what shenanigans is that

wtf

what the shit

Jordan Peterson has a "Twitter suit" with a tie featuring Elon Musk heads pic.twitter.com/U7TXC7m6aD

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) January 3, 2023

xp happens all the time A/H. volume is tiny. shows up particularly on google finance for some reason.

i know it often jumps around in a fairly meaningless way, the image is p funny though

There's a thread on Peterson with a surprise guest:

there's a very painful period when you see guys start to pay attention to clothes and they start to dress worse than they did before they started paying attention to clothes pic.twitter.com/RWNGjiv6SB

— derek guy (@dieworkwear) December 18, 2022

good thread

damn wow makes u think

pic.twitter.com/dJvUeO2P5t

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 3, 2023

Ah, the guy who has all our personal information and never reads probably thinks those books describe Utopia.

wow matt levine must be reading this thread, today's money stuff is all about the silliness of private company valuations and also some lol twitter tidbits https://archive.ph/5j4kj

hi matt

i didnt know there were preferences where you get back multiples of yr investment before anyone else gets anything, thats even worse! its much worse

https://enersection.io/twitter/

this is good because i forget that twitter had some cheap debt they issued pre-elon that is now very expensive debt lol

well yeah - the bad thing is that VC investors have a lot of leverage in these kinds of situations, private companies are nearly always on a runway to bankruptcy, so the choice can be take this cash that has a 2x/3x liquidation pref attached to it or go bankrupt xp

they should go bankrupt it would good since then there would be fewer apps

We’ve had enough of apps!

apps are out

Rare sympathy for landlords

The landlord said in the suit that it had informed Twitter in mid-December that the company would be in default on its rent if it failed to make payments for space on the building’s 30th floor within five business days.

Other parties, including a software provider and transportation company, have also sued Twitter in recent weeks to recoup overdue payments, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"I mean free speech let me tell you that if somebody's got to pay the servers okay so those features gotta cost at least eight dollars oh because otherwise how do we pay the freaking server bill um you know there's like a billion and a half ish you know of oil and server-related costs um and you know we're trying to get that lower but it's a lot it's like not trivial um and a minimum you know like there's like somebody's got to pay the bills"