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kphorn • today at 2:21 PM • 10 replies • view on HN

Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth. Significantly more than Elon, with the key distinction that Jensen has distributed much more of that shareholder value than Elon has through stock options to employees and appreciation of public stock (it’s one of the reasons he’s worth 150Bn vs 1Tn).

I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. Nvidia losing 50% of its value from its peak means it’s still a $3 trillion company. What if it loses 90%? Then it’s the size of Intel which we generally agree is an important part of the industry.

Nvidia can afford to invest in companies because the stock is so high and capital is incredibly abundant. Those companies buy Nvidia products at the 50% NET margins. Nvidia gets a ton of cash. Earnings are crazy. But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were which was a Tier-1/2 supplier battling for margin and market share. That is not a $6T company.


Replies

nemomarx • today at 2:25 PM

What's the downside of that for the economy? It seems like it would be the market becoming more efficient, cutting down on margins and so on. Bringing Nvidia back to earth might open up cheaper hardware for other companies to work with and accelerate AI anyway.

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qsymmachus • today at 2:28 PM

Doesn't this situation demonstrate how bonkers it is to pin the fortunes of the stock market and potentially the entire economy on the behavior of one person?

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doublepg23 • today at 2:46 PM

surely the telegraph was the biggest value creator ever?

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letsgofrets • today at 2:28 PM

What on earth are you talking about. The exponential growth in the 1990s, percentage wise, far outpaced the AI bubble. Go look at Intel, Microsoft, lucid, etc from the dot com boom. This is the problem with 20-somethings’ hot takes on the market: no history.

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boringg • today at 3:18 PM

And poof just like that the myth of the founder led company being untouchable has imploded. All other founder led CEOs will be watching this closely.

Alternatively if the company tanks the board will have a reckoning similar to the OpenAI debacle.

0xbadcafebee • today at 3:19 PM

Nvidia stock price is now lower than it was a year ago. Has been declining for about 6 months, highly volatile, with a step sell off starting a month ago.

Cisco's stock price was similarly very high during the dotcom boom, but then collapsed, and took 17 years to build back up.

The thing people keep forgetting is nvidia makes graphics cards. Not CPUs, not a range of different products. Graphics cards. With a software moat. Their only business advantage is that people currently want a lot of their graphics cards and are currently dependent on their software. All that can be competed against. China is already putting out their own cards. Google has TPUs. AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs. The memory prices will soon fall as more capacity comes online.

It's practically a certainty that this stock price will keep falling. They're valuable, but in a competitive market, likely not 10x more valuable than their $17 stock price in 2022. When they fall harder so will the AI economy.

elorant • today at 2:51 PM

And we get to buy GPUs again in normalized prices. How's that bad for the economy exactly?

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bbor • today at 2:30 PM

  Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth.
A) He never made a single product himself, and B) surely we can see in hindsight that this is a pretty goofy metric for success...? Like, "shareholder value" isn't exactly what we need at this pivotal moment in the terran story.

  I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. 
  ...
  But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were
Even if we accept capital as the most important thing, this seems pretty openly counterintuitive. You're lamenting the spectre of efficiency.
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joshstrange • today at 2:41 PM

This slavish devotion to shareholder value above all else is pretty gross.

He cheated, multiple times, he is scum for that.

He seems to have consorted with a spy and evaded export bans. He is a criminal for that.

Oh, but he made people a lot of money? All good! /s

Throwing all morals and ethics out the window because of the eCoNoMy is insane.

The cult of personality around CEOs is unhealthy.

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