alt Hacker NewsReid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'
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How is Reid Hoffman relevant?
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
This article encouraged me to look at the investor materials [0].
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.
Reid Hoffman hates Musk. Think what you will of Musk (we all have our opinions), but Hoffman criticizing one of Musks companies is the equivalent of Steve Jobs criticizing Windows. Its a personal quibble and therefore not really news worthy.
The key part - Reid being invested in both OpenAI and anthropic should have been higher up in the article. Pretty crucial context to him trash talking XAI.
Not that I disagree with his assessment…
The only objective information we really have is SpaceX's pre-IPO S-1 filing, which breaks down their revenue into Space, Communications and AI segments, with 2025 revenue for each given as.
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".
This shows how out of touch people like Reid Hoffman is.
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.
SpaceX renting out their compute to competitors is what crashes the "AI company" notion. They are either datacenter company or an AI company - but it cannot be both.
Compared to what? All the comments seem to agree, but I curious if people here have actually used Grok.
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?
> The asymmetry—Anthropic penalized while OpenAI was not—is what troubles him most
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.
Seems very relevant that SpaceX’s primary AI offerings are:
- Cursor - Lots of data centre capacity being rented to Anthropic and Google and others
That seems very much like being an AI company.
Sorry, that's a typo, it's not SpaceX, it's SPAC X - as in, Musk is using SpaceX as a SPAC to absorb other AI companies. Cursor is the first, but will certainly not be the last. So, if it's not an AI company yet, it will be soon. I mean, the humongous total addressable market from their IPO filing has to come from somewhere, and Grok will definitely not cut it...
Why is this news? Reid isn't relevant.
How many people use grok professionally? Compared to claude code/codex?
Guy who has enormous personal financial interest vested in xAI being a train wreck says xAI is a train wreck. Fascinating thought leadership.
I wake up every morning amazed that there were enough people foolish enough to buy a company with only $18B in revenue and no profit at basically at the valuation of Microsoft (a company with $300B in revenue and $100B in profit).
The "Tell Gen Z to stop booing AI" is crazy to me. Are we living on the same planet, every argument is dismissed even though it's backed with real data.
> The timing of Hoffman’s remarks is pointed. SpaceX went public on June 12th, with AI central to its IPO narrative. Within days, the company announced it was acquiring Cursor, the AI coding tool. Hoffman’s read: that’s not proof of AI capability, but evidence of its absence. “You could almost think of it as the IAC of AI,” he said, invoking the serial acquisitions roll-up strategy of Barry Diller’s internet-era conglomerate. “Use the market cap to buy AI companies and try to buy your way into relevance.”
Sounds like securities fraud to me.
xAI complete train wreck maybe, however their models are really great, in conversational Grok 4.3 is my favorite recently, followed by Opus 4.8. It's not that great for coding purposes tho.
OpenAI investor Reid Hoffman says competitor xAI is a "complete train wreck".
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.
"The pitch deck, he revealed, describes Manas as “an AI drug discovery factory for creating monopolies” legally permissible, he notes, because pharmaceutical IP functions as a sanctioned monopoly by design."
Fantastic insight! I take his opinion as having the most merit possible in this context. Why?
Because LinkedIn is also a train wreck and game recognizes game.
Whilst nobody can dispute the inordinate success Hoffman has had in building and scaling LinkedIn and his work on Greylock, his associations with the Epstein files, previous spats with Musk, and his warped political views makes me question anything he says.
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.
Last week Yann LeCun called xAI a "failure"
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/18/yann-lecun-elon-musk-xai-fai...
I wish there as chrome extension that surrounds pdf file names with something like the infamously misused (((...))).
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...
I've recently used grok build and grok is really competent at coding. Composer is slightly better IMO, but it's really close.
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.
What a terrible world to live in. Of course hes trying to convince Gen Z of the "opportunities" they have. Opportunities for him and his oligarch friends to make a load of $. Cant wait for this AI bubble to crash and dissolve a bunch of undeserved wealth.
I mean, I can see some issues with SpaceX valuation, but I find it really funny that we are now taking advice from the LinkedIn founder on HN.
Ideology is truly blinding.
Political and personal attack, no substance.
Reid is a mega-donor for the Dems, Elon for the Repubs.
Billionaires fighting, plebs on HN getting riled up.
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Oh shit, someone criticized something to do with the TechBroGod ...
Talk about shaking the tree for Musk's temporarily-impoverished billionaire dick-rider groupies, LOL
Elon Musk's companies launch rockets, build the most high-tech electric cars, host the world's most relevant social network, deploy high-speed internet to most of the world, build one of the world's leading LLMs, I could go on...
Reid Hoffman runs a social network for spam.
Okay, random dude says something -- everything completely behind paywall. Guess it wasn't important.
Not an AI company? You don’t have to keep selling me on SPCX, I’m a buyer now.
>> “I’ve been thinking about writing an essay on the kind of mistakes that are made by college graduates booing or otherwise dissing AI,” he said. As if speaking to all of Gen Z, he added: “You guys have the opportunity to be generation AI—where you come into the workforce saying, ‘I know this a lot better than all of you"
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.