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geremiiahtoday at 1:14 PM30 repliesview on HN

Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?

Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit, but I'm not convincing myself. These speculative assets are only attractive as long as the price keeps inflating. But that can only happen if there is more and more demand. So it's basically a bet that there is an average amount of retail investors (I assume it's mostly retail investors but I could be wrong) that consistently put a percentage of their income into these speculative assets. Can this be maintained forever?


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drakythetoday at 1:46 PM

The saying "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" exists for a reason.

In short, the answer to your literal question is "no" because nothing remains forever in this world. The practical answer is "yes" because the TSLA stock has been irrational for years already and it shows no sign of stopping.

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mixduptoday at 1:55 PM

The thing is fundamentals really don't matter. TSLA and SPCX aren't paying dividends so there's no real performance they have to hit, no one is going to miss a dividend payment and dump the stock. The Elong vibes can carry it as long as people keep smoking what he's selling

The real question is, when does that run out of steam? When do we wake up to the charade that has built up around us? That's a much bigger thing than just Elon and his businesses. Like someone else said, when the next crisis/downturn/depression hits the house of cards will fall. Unfortunately it will hit all of us not just people in the meme stocks

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petilontoday at 1:41 PM

Michael Burry, a hedge fund investor featured in the book “The Big Short” for his predictions on the 2008 financial crisis, said in a Substack discussion last month that any increase in SpaceX’s stock after its I.P.O. would “be on hype and technicals.”

Here, “technicals” means technical analysis signals rather than the company’s business fundamentals. In other words, Burry is saying the stock could rise because of chart-based trading, momentum, and market behavior—not because investors think SpaceX is truly worth that much based on revenue, profits, or other fundamentals.

How long can the hype be maintained? TSLA is still maintaining its hype, judging by its P/E ratio.

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pjc50today at 2:24 PM

Notably, it looks like the meme power is gradually being redirected from BTC and cryptocurrency in general towards AI and SpaceX in general. Now that people have found a means of consuming vast amounts of computing power that occasionally emits useful output, rather than just a hash and a colossal waste.

jldtoday at 1:31 PM

While gold has industrial uses, isn't most of its value based on the fact that people like it and believe that it has value?

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throw0101ctoday at 2:55 PM

> Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?

The "value" of something can be a bit of a meta-game:

> A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

Plenty of folks may think these companies are garbage but are 'playing along' because it's not necessarily what they themselves think that is important, but what others think.

This idea was put forward by Keynes in his General Thoery publish in 1936, so human nature has hardly changed since then.

instalabsaitoday at 2:20 PM

This is why I think Elon buying Twitter was one of the most strategic decisions he ever made: he quite literally bought the meme machine that upholds the valuations of his companies.

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otterleytoday at 2:48 PM

On what grounds do you believe the value of BTC is meme-driven? Another (and arguably more plausible) explanation is that the price reflects the vast amount of criminally-obtained wealth stored in it. It’s a far better store than burying cash in mountain caches.

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yousif_123123today at 2:19 PM

At least as long as Musk is the CEO, perhaps. I don't think it's easy to find another charismatic figure to keep it going.

It's a different kind of hype than Nvidia has, which is showing very high and fast growing revenues (which may not continue, but they're real now). Jensen I think is not as critical to the AI hype as Elon is to his companies.

All these major tech companies eventually get leadership changes. Apple, Google, Amazon, have all done well because they're real companies and go beyond their original leadership. Tesla and SpaceX I think would surely go down the moment Musk is no longer in leadership.

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rapindtoday at 1:29 PM

> Can this be maintained forever?

Obviously not. It’s all about timing your bail so you don’t get left holding the bag.

ozgrakkurttoday at 1:32 PM

> BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes

This is not true.

BTC is way more sane than SpaceX as can be seen by it's history so far.

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stetraintoday at 1:31 PM

The current market cap of SPCX and TSLA combined (~$3.8T) is about 3 times the total value of all BTC (~$1.3T).

jayd16today at 4:51 PM

Pump and dump only has to meme hard enough for the pump part.

teekerttoday at 2:53 PM

Someone invents something that is digital, but can't be copied. Quite brilliant as it is the first digital asset that can store value without centralization and trust, based on market demand.

Someone on HN: "BTC is valueable solely through the power of memes".

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jtbaylytoday at 1:30 PM

I saw that one wealthy individual had purchased $1 billion of SpaceX at the IPO. Does that count as a retail investor?

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grey-areatoday at 3:01 PM

It seems like that during a bubble (things can never go down!) but the market eventually does correct, even if it can take years or even decades to do so, and usually overcorrects when it does.

tim333today at 2:24 PM

It's down to the balance between buyers and sellers. If you've got more selling than buying it'll go down but Musk has been remarkably good at keeping the buyers there.

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bilsbietoday at 2:42 PM

Everything is ultimately valued by memes.

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jesse_dot_idtoday at 1:50 PM

If there is ever another depression, which seems highly probable at this point, the meme stocks will be the first ones down the toilet.

alpinemantoday at 2:28 PM

Sure until retail are forced to sell in an correction. Wealth destruction can happen very fast

Grombobuloustoday at 2:22 PM

Bitcoin isn’t valuable solely through memes, it’s also deflationary by design.

throw310822today at 1:37 PM

As long as there is someone around who is very good at keeping the price inflated (and that in turn also because he did actually deliver extraordinary things, it's not just smoke and mirrors).

On the other hand, the fact that BTC has absolutely no intrinsic value can be an advantage over a real company, as it makes it more insulated from reality. Supply chain shock? No problem. Competition? Same. New technologies, political change? Neither.

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_DeadFred_today at 3:39 PM

SPCX only floated a small amount of shares, and made the stock exchanges compete so that it would get to rig the system in a way. If funds have to buy SPCX + small share amount, it's going up. This is the reason stock buyback used to be illegal. It's purely market manipulation of share count, not market based on actual value.

throwaway894345today at 2:58 PM

At least some of TSLA and SPCX value is derived from Musk's ability to purchase politicians to ensure the tax dollars keep flowing to them. Essentially, these ticker symbols are backed by the US government's ability to force us to give Musk's companies our money.

somenameformetoday at 2:01 PM

The overwhelming majority of SpaceX holders are institutional. They had planned to allocate 30% to retail, but it ended up in the 20% range as a result of institutional demand. [1] No clue what's going on right now as their stock is going to the Moon. But in any case, I think the people that don't understand why it's doing well are mostly those who are unfamiliar with the space industry. SpaceX has already revolutionized space by dropping the cost to orbit by multiple orders of magnitude relative to the Space Shuttle, which it replaced. And it looks set to do that again with the Starship.

The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space. SpaceX brought that down to about $5000, and then further down to near $1400. That's a massive reduction in price, but you're still left with the problem that it costs $1400 to get a liter of water to space, which is why we still can't have nice things, yet.

Starship has the promise of bringing that down a couple of more orders of magnitude where the goal is to get it within the $10-$20 range. If they succeed, then you've just opened the doors to an entire new frontier of expansion and growth for humanity which is practically infinite. And right now there's no real reason to think that they won't succeed. And more importantly than this is that nobody seems to be able to compete on their level, or even remotely close. Their closest competitor is probably China who remains technologically well behind. And so SpaceX today is akin to being able to get a piece of some sort of super-ship making monopoly, just prior to the Age of Sail. The downside risk is basically zero since they're still making rapid progress - the only question is how rapid. And upside potential is basically infinite.

[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/11/spacex-cuts-retail-ipo-alloc...

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brachkowtoday at 2:52 PM

> BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes

Like everything else in finance...

Saying this is not to defend all sorts of crypto-bros. The economy, especially one overly focused on publicly traded companies like the Western, and especially the US economy, is a meme economy.

Coffee, flats, healthcare, military spending, etc., of comparable quality in the abstract East, cost multiples less than in the EU/USA because they and their currencies are weak on memes.

DanielHBtoday at 1:39 PM

The limits are when companies and institutions start to default on their loans. Or, in the case of governments, trigger hyperinflation by printing money to pay off the debt.

Of course it can collapse before that, but if it gets to that point it is guaranteed to collapse.

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kamaaltoday at 2:19 PM

>>Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit

I mentioned this in other thread(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514481), we are at runaway intelligence already.

Mostly because we are looping AI to fix problems, and then the same data is used to improve AI. There is no upper limit to this.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this process needs a hardware scale that might even look laughably huge at this point. Its fairly obvious space is going to play a big role in the coming times.

I could be wrong, and I humbly accept it when Im proven wrong. But it does feel like a lot of people in top places know we are going to need all the energy and resources space has to offer to run this runaway intelligence.

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dist-epochtoday at 1:29 PM

When you invest in TSLA and SPCX, you don't invest in a car and a rocket company, you invest in Elon Musk. So revenue, assets, are irrelevant.

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