Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: finance

Analyzing Bill Ackman’s SpaceX IPO Offer w/ Tesla Larry

🔹 Q: What specific cost advantages does SPARC offer beyond eliminating underwriting fees? A: SPARC reduces friction, cost, and time by bypassing the traditional investment banking process entirely, eliminating promotional fees and creating a cleaner, more transparent process than traditional SPACs.

🔹 Q: How would Tesla shareholders get early access to SpaceX shares through SPARC? A: Tesla shareholders would receive special rights to acquire SpaceX shares at the IPO price before the public, potentially through warrants at a discounted price, allowing them to benefit from SpaceX’s future growth.

🔹 Q: What advantage does SPARC provide Tesla investors over traditional IPO allocation? A: SPARC enables more equitable allocation of SpaceX shares to Tesla investors, avoiding the traditional gated process that benefits Wall Street bankers’ friends and their preferred clients.

🔹 Q: How could SpaceX share access impact Tesla’s stock price? A: The SPARC structure allowing Tesla shareholders to receive warrants for SpaceX shares at discounted prices could potentially boost Tesla’s stock price by providing unique value to existing shareholders.

Pricing Control.

🔹 Q: Who controls pricing in SPARC versus traditional IPO? A: SPARC allows the public to set the price rather than banker control, giving SpaceX more control over pricing decisions compared to traditional IPO where investment banks determine valuation.

Continue reading “Analyzing Bill Ackman’s SpaceX IPO Offer w/ Tesla Larry” | >

Helping AI agents search to get the best results out of large language models

Whether you’re a scientist brainstorming research ideas or a CEO hoping to automate a task in human resources or finance, you’ll find that artificial intelligence (AI) tools are becoming the assistants you didn’t know you needed. In particular, many professionals are tapping into the talents of semi-autonomous software systems called AI agents, which can call on AI at specific points to solve problems and complete tasks.

AI agents are particularly effective when they use large language models (LLMs) because those systems are powerful, efficient, and adaptable. One way to program such technology is by describing in code what you want your system to do (the “workflow”), including when it should use an LLM. If you were a software company trying to revamp your old codebase to use a more modern programming language for better optimizations and safety, you might build a system that uses an LLM to translate the codebase one file at a time, testing each file as you go.

But what happens when LLMs make mistakes? You’ll want the agent to backtrack to make another attempt, incorporating lessons it learned from previous mistakes.

Interpol-led action decrypts 6 ransomware strains, arrests hundreds

An Interpol-coordinated initiative called Operation Sentinel led to the arrest of 574 individuals and the recovery of $3 million linked to business email compromise, extortion, and ransomware incidents.

Between October 27 and November 27, the investigation, which involved law enforcement in 19 countries, took down more than 6,000 malicious links and decrypted six distinct ransomware variants.

Interpol says that the cybercrime cases investigated are connected to more than $21 million in financial losses.

Inside SpaceX’s Pre-IPO Share Buyback and Who Gets Access

SpaceX is preparing for a potential IPO by buying back shares from institutional holders and allowing existing shareholders to sell shares, while its affiliate company Tesla is making progress in autonomous driving technology with plans to launch robo-taxis in multiple cities ## Questions to inspire discussion.

SpaceX Investment Access.

🔐 Q: How can individual investors access SpaceX shares before the IPO?

A: Investors must be accredited with liquid net worth over $1M (excluding home) and can access shares through special purpose vehicles (SPVs) that charge upfront fees and 10% carry on returns.

💰 Q: What is the minimum investment required to buy SpaceX shares directly?

A: Direct SpaceX share purchases require $50M-$1B investments due to SEC’s 2,000 shareholder cap for private companies, making SPVs the only option for smaller investors.

Continue reading “Inside SpaceX’s Pre-IPO Share Buyback and Who Gets Access” | >

How to build an A.I. brain that can surpass human intelligence | Ben Goertzel

How to build an A.I. brain that can surpass human intelligence.

Watch the newest video from Big Think: https://bigth.ink/NewVideo.
Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos: https://bigth.ink/Edge.

Artificial intelligence has the capability to far surpass our intelligence in a relatively short period of time. But AI expert Ben Goertzel knows that the foundation has to be strong for that artificial brain power to grow exponentially. It’s all good to be super-intelligent, he argues, but if you don’t have rationality and empathy to match it the results will be wasted and we could just end up with an incredible number-cruncher. In this illuminating chat, he makes the case for thinking bigger. Ben Goertzel’s most recent book is AGI Revolution: An Inside View of the Rise of Artificial General Intelligence.

BEN GOERTZEL:

Ben Goertzel is CEO and chief scientist at SingularityNET, a project dedicated to creating benevolent decentralized artificial general intelligence. He is also chief scientist of financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings and robotics firm Hanson Robotics; Chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC; Chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation. His latest book is AGI Revolution: An Inside View of the Rise of Artificial General Intelligence.

TRANSCRIPT:

Continue reading “How to build an A.I. brain that can surpass human intelligence | Ben Goertzel” | >

The Governance Case for Tesla Taking a Pre-IPO Stake in SpaceX

Elon Musk is considering Tesla taking a pre-IPO stake in SpaceX to integrate their businesses, accelerate ambitious projects, and increase the value of both companies ## ## Questions to inspire discussion.

Strategic Governance Alignment.

🔄 Q: Why should Tesla acquire a pre-IPO stake in SpaceX rather than waiting until after the IPO? A: A pre-IPO stake resolves governance and conflict risks before SpaceX’s planned $30B IPO in mid-2026, ensuring all transactions are recorded as part of the IPO and avoiding complications that could impact IPO pricing or create persistent post-IPO conflicts between the two companies.

🎯 Q: What is the core governance problem Tesla shareholders currently face with SpaceX? A: Tesla shareholders are exposed to SpaceX outcomes through dependencies on Starlink connectivity, orbital compute, and launch cadence without any ownership rights, governance rights, or downside protection as the companies converge operationally but not financially.

⚖️ Q: How would a pre-IPO stake transaction affect Tesla’s ownership structure and Musk’s control? A: The transaction would dilute Tesla by 20% but could raise market cap to $1.62-2T, increasing Musk’s stake to 22.1–24% and his net worth approaching $1T, enabling him to achieve 25% control significantly earlier than under the compensation plan.

Capital Requirements and Infrastructure.

Continue reading “The Governance Case for Tesla Taking a Pre-IPO Stake in SpaceX” | >

A universal law could explain how large trades change stock prices

Financial markets are often seen as chaotic and unpredictable. Every day, traders around the world buy shares and sell assets in a whirlwind of activity. It looks like a system of total randomness—but is it really?

Scientists have long suspected that there is a hidden order under this noise, but it has been difficult to prove. Now, Yuki Sato and Kiyoshi Kanazawa of Kyoto University have provided some of the strongest evidence yet. By studying eight years of data from the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), they have confirmed a long-standing hypothesis known as the square-root law (SRL) of price impact.

The Universal Law Behind Market Price Swings

Analysis of a large dataset from the Tokyo Stock Exchange validates a universal power law relating the price of a traded stock to the traded volume.

One often hears that economics is fundamentally different from physics because human behavior is unpredictable and the economic world is constantly changing, making genuine “laws” impossible to establish. In this view, markets are never in a stable state where immutable laws could take hold. I beg to differ. The motion of particles is also unpredictable, and many physical systems operate far from equilibrium. Yet, as Phil Anderson argued in a seminal paper [1], universal laws can still emerge at the macroscale from the aggregation of widely diverse microscopic behaviors. Examples include not only crowds in stadiums or cars on highways but also economic agents in markets.

Now Yuki Sato and Kiyoshi Kanazawa of Kyoto University in Japan have provided compelling evidence that one such universal law governs financial markets. Using an unprecedentedly detailed dataset from the Tokyo Stock Exchange, they found that a single mathematical law describes how the price of every traded stock responds to trading volume [2] (Fig. 1). The result is a striking validation of physics-inspired approaches to social sciences, and it might have far-reaching implications for how we understand market dynamics.

/* */