Quite patronising. Maybe they really do know it a lot better than you, Reid, but not in the way you think. Maybe they see through the hype and hustle culture and are more interested in working towards fulfilling lives and jobs.
I run into them because of their attempts to improve the community. And there are those who do it super quietly, give big, and do everything they can to avoid getting credit for it; there's another Silicon Valley Reed that does this in my community. Steve Jobs apparently did this too, big donations but anonymously.
Do not take the blabbering idiots on the All-In podcast as representative of all of Silicon Valley, the old Valley was far different than those people and there are still plenty of people that pursue wealth not for the purposes of their own self-aggrandizement and power.
I don't think theyre special. Years of being surrounded by yes men and sycophants will probably do that to most people.
One of them in particular was much less toxic and relatable pre-billions.
Where did you get that from the comment you replied to? They merely pointed out you couldn't paint everyone with the same brush, which is pretty much the definition of 'not special'.
Many of them donate money but it doesnt make them any less of an asshole.
I certainly didn't put forward an idea that having money makes people less of an asshole. Somebody who gives it away in a non-assholish way certainly makes them less of an asshole.
Or is your contention that anybody with money is an asshole, without exception?
> most people into assholes
might just be a you problem. Get out and meet more people, and if you're still surrounded by assholes, then the real asshole is probably you.
People are people everywhere. Money really doesn't change that as much as you're implying.
most people probably do have the capacity to be raging assholes but society doesn't indulge their every whim and prejudice or stroke their ego constantly. so they aren't.
People have very good, very legitimate reasons for "booing" GenAI.
Most human interactions with GenAI are either with corpo sludge or overly cheerful, dangerously useless text generators.
The technology is steadily eroding businesses from the inside out in the same way offshoring did in the 90s.
There's a massive crash looming that is going to crater the economy for years... caused by criminally irresponsible circular investment and silicon valley grift.
Not really what I'd want to tether my identity to.
Reid Hoffman is not a boomer. He was born in 1967. Also: ageism isn't sexy.
Also, Hoffman very intentionally opened the door to talking about generational differences, this kind of feels like the commenter may have touched a nerve
Is that really an evolution? "Millennial" was coined to refer to the cohort that gradated from high school in the year 2000. Not all high school graduates become college students, of course, but if we are generalizing it isn't unreasonable to think of recent high school graduates as college students.
Now, there was nothing in the definition to declare if you must continue to recognize them for who they are going forward (i.e. 40-somethings now), or if you are to remember them in that moment as high school graduates, many of whom were college bound. So still thinking of "millennials" as being college students is a fair interpretation before evolution.
I don't know that what Reid is expressing is an outdated perspective, but that's of course subjective.
Yeah, it was expressly my intent to shut this kind of nonsense down. This is just a different version of "get on board right now or you'll all be left behind". Enough with the lying.
This is actually false. There are plenty of 80+ year olds in care facilities and living alone that are disadvantaged by the implicit assumption that everyone has a smartphone or an email address. Unable to communicate with their bank, insurance company, care providers, etc. All down to your "inclusive progress".
Call it what it is: an extractive, inhumane power grab meant to monopolize everyone's attention.
And that was tech's Big Success Story. Everything since has been trying to re-live those glory days.
Biology is ageist. The youngest baby boomers are still in their early 60s, and not yet subject to a precipitous-decline cut-off, but the median Boomer is about 71 and probably past it [1].
Given every President since 1993—with the exception of Obama—was born in 1942 or 1946 [2], I think it’s fair to admit this whole an-eighty-year-old-is-the-same-as-a-thirty-year-old tripe has swung to an untenable extreme.
Race is a social construct. Age is not. Mixing them up is fundamentally wrong and, I’d argue, dangerous.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4906299/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...
Even worse. Our entire society, hell our biology is based on old people retiring to leave space for the young to develop themselves. When you got gerontocrats in power for too long and after them boomers, all you'll end with in 20 years is a bunch of dead boomers and gen silent, and a bunch of gen y/z that never had the opportunity to actually learn leadership skills and failing spectacularly as a result.
This strikes me as a spin on the lump-of-labor fallacy.
The problem with a gerontocracy is you have masses in cognitive and physical decline at the peaks of power. Absent that condition, the model isn’t fundamentally broken. (You would probably see more patricide in hereditary lines…) Old people aren’t a problem, aged people in command are.
That’s what makes the comparison to race interesting—a society that brain drains gets wealthier for everyone. If we made our immigration 65+ only, on the other hand, it would be an almost-immediate disaster.
No it is not. People retire, because they dont have strength to work anymore. They have no duty to give up their lives just because you want to take it from them.
That's part of the problem, we shifted from an agrarian to industrial and now service economy. Unlike the first two, in a service economy you can work until old age finally takes you.
The gerontocrats running the US government are a complete disaster and need to be replaced as rapidly as possible.
The entire point is to reduce the value of a person’s opinion to only their age.
Typical boomer needing things to be based on sex all the time.
By living like recluses, doom scrolling Tiktok and gambling on Kalshi all day? Lol. They're hardly saints.
There is zero evidence for this time being different. Instead, there is evidence of zombie leverage and corruption coming home to roost while the global growth engine shifts towards China.
How are you defining “all of the energy on the planet”? By conventional definitions, no, we harness a tiny fraction of even just insolation.
Ongoing servicing of that metabolic need requires continuous access to the same or greater amount of energy year after year. The world burns through its annual resource budget in July this year.
As we continue to extract more and more, the energy return on energy invested goes down, so net energy availability drops, making it harder and more expensive to continue the current basal metabolic rate, let alone fueling continuous growth. Because so much is built atop the energy mechanism, instability happens when it's threatened or changed.x
So maybe a better turn of phrase would have been that it's the first time we've harnessed so much energy at once and effectively put a lot of energy slaves to use per each person. Like starting to use fossil fuel to create fertilizer that enables more people to survive famines, you create a scenario where you need ongoing access to the same or greater amount of energy just to keep up. Not saying it was the wrong choice, just that we tend to fix issues by making more complex solutions that introduce future resource need.
No? EROI going down is like margins going down. That doesn't mean profits stops growing, it just grows more slowly per unit of input.
Lower EROI on a much-larger energy base means we're producing more net new energy today than at any time in history. That would be expected to continue all the way to EROI being close to zero. Until EROI is negative, you wouldn't expect to see net energy availability drop. But we have no foreseeable place where that's the case given solar panels exist.
Sounds like a sad way to live.
Will they? Generally, yes. Work, kids, partners, home maintenance, etc. tend to take priority once one becomes an "adult". There is only so much time in the day. That is, after all, why one seeks to front load their remaining life's idea exploration by going to college. Those who plan to explore ideas for the rest of their life simply do so. They don't need "hallowed halls".
Someone like Elon being asked for their opinion on tech - I kind of understand - was at least at the coal face of SpaceX and Tesla for a time, seemed to understand the tech and was not terrible when it came to direction.
Zuck I'd get, Bezos, Dario, Sam - but I don't actually get why Reid is always in the conversation - he's never been in front of anything
To be fair, this isn’t obvious from the top comment. Another comment literally argues for shutting them out [1].
One is normative: listen to tech CEO's if you want to predict what will happen.
Another is positive: let CEO's tell you what ought to happen.
What happened here was the original commenter talked about listening to Reid for normative reason but the conversation got derailed into ignoring CEO's for positive statements.
This is something I see often where one talks about what would happen but people barge in to signal their ethics and morals instead.
If you ask an AWS consultant what the best solution for your problem is, don't be surprised if the answer is AWS.
Not every human on social media or talking to the press is trying to influence others in a survival situation. Go touch grass.
Yes to make money so they can provide a roof and food for their families.
But also other goals. To invent. To create. To provide goods and services.
People lie.
The information content of this is rather minimal. Even if everything he says is literally true it's hard to tell through the massive, massive vested interest he has.
And it doesn't help that...
'Hoffman, who is an investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI, pushed back firmly on the narrative that the two companies are in a zero-sum race. “We tend to want to tell these stories as cage matches,” he said, as in two companies enter and only one leaves, but “in fact,” he claimed, “there’s a lot of room for both of them to win incredibly.'
that's clearly a very self-interested gloss on the flip side of the situation. Yes, that's in the possibility space. No, I would not consider "both companies do fantastically for many many years" as a terribly large part of the possibility space. Look to all of the many past instances of industries starting up. It is a very common case that if you take the two early leaders you aren't looking at who is going to be the two biggest companies in 10 or 20 years. It is in fact a common case that neither of those companies are the leaders in 10 or 20 years. The sheer staggering size of the AI training moat at the current time may lock in the possibility that no other business could possibly overtake them... but what if somebody solves that massive training gap? It probably isn't mathematically fundamental; I can't help but observe that humans do not get to their level of capability by pouring the entire Internet through their head several times.
He probably does know a lot of things most of us don't know, but I doubt he's sharing very many of them in this article. This is just trash talk.
But then I'd say I don't understand the valuations of a lot of companies right now. It seems to me the stock market has written into its structure the idea that United States companies will be claiming something like 500-1000% of all TAMs in the entire world in the next 10-20 years, which seems unlikely to be the case. SpaceX's claimed TAM of "pretty much the entire United States GDP, you know, why not" is merely the most blatant instance of this.
I'm not defending SpaceX or xAI. Billionaires don't need my help. But this article is still pretty pointless. Hoffman isn't a dispassionate observer, he's one of the players. Of course he's telling everyone he's going to win and the other guy is going to lose. Even when a coach is completely objectively correct when he says in his pre-game press conference that he has every confidence that his team will win in the end, it's still an information-free statement.
Why not? The guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to NOT trash xAI was trashing xAI.
Which is ironic, because Reid was a friend of Epstein and visited his island.
He's just stating the obvious, so I really don't see this as contentious.
xAI is irrelevant. It's so irrelevant that after being relegated hardware from Tesla, then pushed into Twitter to try to make that have value, then pushed into SpaceX because Elon Musk somehow gets away with hilarious levels of securities fraud, now it's basically reduced to renting out hardware.
Yes, xAI is irrelevant, and Hoffman is just pointing out the blatantly obvious. Its only value is in renting out hardware that can be better used by more capable orgs. It is basically a scalper that happened to get loads of nvidia hardware pre-orders in just before the AI run-up, and the entire SPCX scam relies upon everyone trying to buy usage of it.
Saying they aren’t relevant is comical
In porn and deepfakes. Yeah, they should be regulated to obliteration.
>they own cursor which has a good percent of the coding market
They don't own cursor. They announced an acquisition immediately after the insane SPCX valuation to desperately scrabble to lock in some of that laughably nonsensical hype valuation (as the entire US equities market has become firmly detached from reality, and at some point is going to catastrophically crash to reality). It doesn't close for months. And FWIW Cursor is rapidly declining, and anyone still foolishly on it should probably find an offramp now. Before Elon Musk starts fiddling with it and you find your code focused on the genocides of whites in South Africa or something.
I mean, the fact that you had to cite that as their credibility fully demonstrates how completely worthless it is. GPUs that were originally Tesla's (before the whole robo-taxi scam fell apart), then shuffled to Twitter, then to SPCX.
>Anthropic runs thier ai on xai’s data centers
That was literally the foundation of my comment. xAI is so worthless that they get better value become another vanilla rent-a-GPU operation.
xAI is a joke. Somehow Elon's pathetic Matryoshka doll routine keeps suckering fools.
Yep. I switched to Zed over the weekend and I’m very happy so far. It’s snappy.
Trash talk is Musk's entire M.O., so that seems like a good way to proceed in 2026.
He is connected and gives money to people - why should that mean anyone should listen to him about any of this. He's not actually a do-er is he?
Is there something I am missing? The amount of coverage he gets seems massively disproportionate to his skill, talent and insight.
Thats why. Not that we should listen to him (no clue who exactly he is) but thats why he gets attention.
This comment thread is bonkers. I've never seen stuff like this on HN before!
What does this actually mean? I’ve always taken this use of relevance as an influencer metric.
The answer seems to be "we don't, he's on the board of a competiting AI company"
That seems like a good reason to listen to him? He is prominently placed in the field. Has a lot to lose by knowingly making false statements in public about a competitor. And has an incentive (and the resources with which) to dig deeply into them in a way e.g. a trash-talking YouTuber does not.
He has his set of biases. But Board member at a multi-trillion dollar established software and AI kingmaker seems like a weird way to dismiss an opinion.
Remember prepared statements can be written by smarter people. Ask him to speak extemporaneously and find out how stupid he really is.
There's legions of Republican maga affiliated red red red ultra-wealthy tech people, so having some exception on the other side to point to gives everyone a "both sides" way to take presumed affront.
He's in the Epstein files as an island visitor?
He's a sleazy guy. From Wikipedia (which leans left):
> He funded a group involved in Project Birmingham (a 2017 Alabama Senate race disinformation effort using fake Facebook pages and tactics mimicking Russian interference to hurt Roy Moore). He later apologized, saying he wasn't aware of the specific methods.
He co-founded linkedin a platform every one knows.
Elon Musk invented the Cybertruck and has a weird cult following through Tesla.
i mean Elon Musk called some of his kids this:
X Æ A-Xii Musk, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk and Techno Mechanicus Musk
What opinion should i give more value?
When I was a child my brother taught me to always consider the incentives, especially the monetary ones, of a speaker. 'Follow the money'. So, in this case neither Musk nor Hoffman would get much traction with me as both of them are incentivized to form a pro or con opinion of xAI.
That alone should be justifiable cause for exile from society.
The valuation of SpaceX is due to AI, namely the revenue they get for renting out their GPUs to companies that actually have AI customers, as their own AI tech has not panned out.
For the large number of companies rolled into SpaceX, they are all failed attempts to grow large enough to justify their valuations, and when a company fails to do that it just gets rolled into the conglomerate as a way of hiding the failure.
Tesla's valuation contrasted with its performance means that Tesla will likely be rolled into whatever latest vehicle of Musk's has the most attention, hiding the failure of Tesla to come anywhere near to its promises.
Renting them out for 90 days!
It's never going to be cost effective to send anything back down the gravity well, which means that the only way Musk's plan leads anywhere is if he's able to bootstrap an entirely self contained, self perpetrating economy in space. That's not happening in five years.
Edit: and no, data centres in space are not the answer.
Star Link is the main thing which increased the payload to space significantly.
Star Link only has 10 million customers and every few minutes a satellite handover is happening which makes it hard to use for video call (was my experience at a friend's house)
While this business is paying of right now others will get into it too and destroying SpaceX margin (china etc)
Now what else on payload is there? Ah yes Datacenter.
It would take 300-400 Sparship launches alone to get a current 200-300Mwh DC into space alone.
Starship doesn't deliver yet what it needs to be able to do. Neither on payload side nor on cost reduction due to reuse.
A DC will be cheaper on earth for a long time as long as earth is as empty as it is especially for areas which are just dessert.
It would be a lot better long term investment to just build its own Datacenter city in the dessert as ai doesn't need that low of latency and use everything realtime in the other Datacenter we already have.
SpaceX Elon musk fantasy is 50-100 years to early.
You gonna wait so long?
The 55th slide "key metrics" wording stood out to me:
> AI: "Nameplate Compute Draw" Total number of GPUs installed in the data centers at the end of a period multiplied by the respective all-in power draw, reflecting installed capacity and not actual power consumption or utilization
Close to $15 billion in losses since 2023 and not much clarity on actual usage or impact. TIL the plan of record is AI satellites assembled on the moon.
Any other person selling an alternative… might just be BS.
Hoffmans critique about which businesses have good promise should be taken seriously, if with a grain of salt.
But yeah its clear that xAI is a trainwreck and Space-X is weird cult hype.
Less faux than a bit silly. Their outrage isn’t fake. It’s just misplaced.
The comparison doesn’t work because the KKK’s violent racism isn’t comparable to commercial competition and the relatively-polite quibbles of two San Francisco billionaires. That’s less insulting than just wrong.
Not that I disagree with his assessment…
Communications (i.e. Starlink) 11.3B
Space (i.e. launch services) 4.0B
AI (i.e. Twitter, Grok) 3.2B
According to Google's AI summary, Twitter 2025 revenue was 2.9B, and Grok was 0.5B, so the 2025 "AI" revenue is basically all Twitter, although at least temporarily going forward there will also be significant datacenter/GPU rental income from Anthropic and Google, and now we also have Cursor with an ARR of 4B.
The only significant "AI" revenue here is from Cursor. Datacenter rental seems like it will bring in a lot of money in 2026, but that's hardly "AI".
I rotate between major models frequently. Grok has been up there in accuracy and research for some time, trading places with Gemini IMO. Latest 4.3 release has been solid.
Composer is pretty good and now they own Cursor. Don’t count them out yet.
So.. it’s bad, compared to what? Claude from 2 months ago?
composer 2.5 is actually very good and use it for a good chunk of tasks.
you got your answer already. Nobody actually uses Grok.
He thinks it's a daming accusation that SpaceX is "not AI" but in reality "not AI" means rockets and satellite internet.
The parts of the business his class cares about is the garbage, not the substance
Agree that X.ai is a tire fire.
Well, no.
SpaceX it is the 50th or so rocket company. The previous ones did not fail because they couldn't get rockets working or couldn't improve on the state of the art in rocketry. The ones not supported by nation-states failed because they couldn't get the financials working. To be fair some of them failed because they couldn't get to earth orbit. But that's not the common case. More common: "New rocket type works! We demonstrated it succesfully! No launches ... so no money. We're publishing our work and shutting down. Bye". Irritatingly quite a few of these new rocket companies are theoretically more efficient than SpaceX will ever be. Also irritatingly most of these companies, through financial necessity, demonstrated a working rocket in one try, in contrast to SpaceX.
(my favorite? Aerospike nozzles. Aside from their great "Wiley E. Coyote" potential should launch fail they look absolutely incredible)
Did Space part of SpaceX get the financials working? No. Not even with Starlink (their debt repayments still drag it into the negative). What is their fix for too small a market? Make Spaceship, an even bigger rocket ... for a market that sees no use for the existing Falcon 9 launch capacity ...
Starlink: same. It's not even the 10th satellite internet company. The previous ones all failed, because the market was too small, and had to be bailed out by nation states, famously Iridium. Did Starlink solve the financials? No.
The most irritating bit of this is of course Elon Musk himself. Why did he succeed? Well he keeps mentioning himself and "starting from first principles". As illustrated above: he started from first principles, he failed (private, ie. profitable access to earth orbit? SpaceX doesn't do that), then he got incredible amounts of money somewhere to pour down a black hole (using artificial demand like Starlink) and so everything is still moving. Obviously Elon Musk's achievement is 100% finding this money and 0% practicing science from first principles".
That's also Elon Musk's great redeeming quality. What's his achievement? Convincing, first himself, then humanity, or at least enough humans to get ~300 billion in cash, that Space exploration is worth doing despite the fact that it's unprofitable. The actual technical Space exploration side he ... frankly didn't do particularly well, though well enough that it (eventually) worked. But the result is still fantastic: we're in space far more than before!
Its Falcon 9 has flown 667 times to orbit with a 99.55% success rate. SpaceX isn't like the other rocket companies and it's pretty obvious to anyone who looks at the metrics objectively. Not in technology or in finances.
>"minus $5B/year but AI/Space makes it +$200B”
$18.7B revenue in 2025. Starlink alone was $11.4B
The comparison to Iridium isn't even worth refuting because it's like comparing the Wright Flyer to the 747.
It's a shame that otherwise intelligent people have such difficulty objectively assessing anything Elon Musk; I assume it's mostly idealogical reasons. Do I think $135 is a bit high for the SpaceX IPO? probably. Do I agree with everything Elon Musk says? nah. Is Elon Musk the most capable entrepreneur and innovator to ever live? It's definitely possible.
It’s designed to go to Mars. It boggles the mind that anyone would invest in a company and just ignore and/or disbelieve the reason the company was created. Either they’re just gambling or they’re delusional when they discuss so called fundamentals.
So, you don’t invest in it. And then you don’t need to bother discussing the financial viability of Starlink or anything else.
It’s like there’s a planet sized elephant in the room that everyone is avoiding looking at.
In a sane market neither will generative AI, but that’s what’s propping up this valuation at present.
So you appear to agree with him that the valuation is nonsensical.
Patrick Boyle said it best. Roughly 1 billion people on the planet make more than $12k annually (folks with "discretionary" income). Divide that TAM of $28.5T by 1B and the every single person needs to give SpaceX ~$28.5K every year forever in order for that figure to make sense. It's more than 3x what the planet spends on food currently.
It also seems impossible. What are people seeing that I don’t?
This will continue to work until they run out of morons willing to buy a stock with a PE of 300 at which point it will contract spectacularly.
Either or both of those being true is almost as mind-boggling to me. How is one supposed to navigate that world?
Mass delusion seems like the most likely answer to me. I can point to instances of that at similar scales outside of tech/investing.
why not?
This isn’t the asymmetry that worries me. Anthropic was penalized, which makes OpenAI (and xAI and every other American company) theoretically subject to the same class of penalties.
DeepSeek is not.
- Cursor - Lots of data centre capacity being rented to Anthropic and Google and others
That seems very much like being an AI company.
Cursor is obviously an AI company and the main problem Cursor faced was not really having their own model and being forced to buy expensive inference from other providers.
Cursor + their own data centres + the ability to train their own models is pretty big. Definitely an AI company.
Would your requirements also make Atlassian an Ai company? They have data centers and have trained their own model and have Rovo. I certainly do not because it's not their main line of business and their "ai" sucks hard. SpaceX seems to be closer to this category than Anthropic/OpenAI
To help you understand my mindset here: Picture a simple game or bet. RNG/dice etc. 55% chance for a $10 payout; 45% chance to lose $10. You would keep on rolling that die, right? I believe this is is close enough of a comparison.
Stated another way: Someone else who has no confident predictions about the market and is in index funds or similar, would love to be able to make confident statements about a stock (SPCX or w/e), because it would be an effective edge. They wouldn't just post about it on the internet; they would take appropriate positions.
The answer is that it depends? If I have $1B then yeah I would roll the dice and keep rolling as long as they let me. If I have $100? Maybe not because you can go very easily go broke even if each bet is positive EV.
Sounds like securities fraud to me.
Why listen to these people when they have a clear vested interest in talking nonsense about their competitors?
These comments from investors are predictable and it is obvious why they keep doing this.
I commented 51 mins ago when there were around two comments here that were not talking about Reid's bias against xAI.
5 more comments appeared afterwards in roughly the same timeframe when I posted my reply and that was the first mention of Reid being an OpenAI investor which is enough to explain his obvious bias here.
Because LinkedIn is also a train wreck and game recognizes game.
I found it to be otherwise, but it was not a complete hands off experience. Which is ideal for me, I like to be specific and grok 4.3 and composer are great code monkeys.
Opus and GPT are the models you want right now, for "I have no idea how to build this, so figure it out".
In this instance, I see it as nothing more than a self-serving and politically motivated diss against Musk, even if the substance of what he says is true.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/18/yann-lecun-elon-musk-xai-fai...
So that you are reminded, as you read about them, that they were one of Epstein "associates". Nothing wrong with that, of course, I'm sure it was only business deals, etc...
It's not Opus or GPT 5, but that's fine, I don't need the AI to vibecode, I need it to follow my instructions and avoid producing slop.
I think the next models will change everyone's pessimistic minds.
Ideology is truly blinding.
Reid is a mega-donor for the Dems, Elon for the Repubs.
Billionaires fighting, plebs on HN getting riled up.
Talk about shaking the tree for Musk's temporarily-impoverished billionaire dick-rider groupies, LOL
Reid Hoffman runs a social network for spam.
Teslas aren't the most high-tech these days. They have fallen behind on the hardware side, particularly in charging and batteries. Here's a charging speed comparison:
Tesla: "Not a tech company, but priced like one"