cyphertruck (u/cyphertruck)

cyphertruck commented on US reportedly forcing TSMC to buy 49% stake in Intel to secure tariff relief notebookcheck.net/Despera... · Posted by u/voxadam

araes · 20 days ago

The article pretty much says it right in the opening section

> investing a further $400 billion in the US alongside buying a stake in Intel seems improbable from a purely financial standpoint

TSMC's entire assets are ~$200,000,000,000 [1] (cash, inventory, accounts receivable, land, buildings and equipment.)

Buying 49% of Intel ... maybe. Intel's outstanding Market Cap is current ~$88,600,000,000. (4,377,000,000 outstanding shares [2] @ 20.26 8/5/25 midday price [3]). Double TSMC's entire assets is a bit extreme.

Notably, Intel's valuation also seems kind of nonsense. They made $13B in revenue last quarter. 2024 yearly was $53B ... on a market cap of $88B? Intel's been a mess lately, yet their valuation's also kind of a mess. If they ever stop bleeding money on operating profit and net income they won't look that bad.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC

[2] https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/intc/instituti...

[3] https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/intc

cyphertruck · 20 days ago

That money will be provided via a loan, from the US Government, at a reasonable interest rate. USG doesn't lose money, TSMC gets to expand into all of Intels fabs (when they raise the money to buy a controlling interest in INTC down the line.)

Or the entire thing can be done by a stock swap, with whoever diluting themselves however amount is necessary, etc.

cyphertruck commented on US reportedly forcing TSMC to buy 49% stake in Intel to secure tariff relief notebookcheck.net/Despera... · Posted by u/voxadam

duxup · 20 days ago

This whole economy by corruption and coercion is not going to work out.

cyphertruck · 20 days ago

This isn't corruption or coercion. This is a deal. These are terms being offered. They can say no, or counter. But these terms benefit all parties-- TSMC can eventually buy out intel, get lots of top end fabs, bring their superior processes to those fabs and meet the huge demand in AI chips-- that they currently can't grow fast enough to cover. ASML machines take years to build... a better TSMC process on existing ASML machines in Intel fabs is an easy %30 win for the entire world.

Plus, china kept at bay, peace increased, intel's bad management gets to bail out saving face, TSMC gets rewarded for their hard work, Trump gets a win, Intel's employees get better management, and get rich from their stock options winning hugely....

Capitalism is where everyone wins like this.

Even china, because china loses if it goes to war, but china feels it has to go to war.

cyphertruck commented on US reportedly forcing TSMC to buy 49% stake in Intel to secure tariff relief notebookcheck.net/Despera... · Posted by u/voxadam

phkahler · 20 days ago

On the surface, buying 49 percent of Intel wouldn't infuse the company with any capital. It would just bail out investors.

cyphertruck · 20 days ago

It actually wouldn't. The sale price will be pretty close to the current market price, maybe %10 more. If the Government kicks in funds to underwrite the deal (say a loan to TSMC) then the deal would likely happen exactly at market price.

That means investors who sell are getting the current low market price or a little bit higher--- they will still be down the massive amount.

This is really bailing out current management-- letting them be replaced by the more capable TSMC people and getting an attaboy for helping the US government strengthen the alliance with Taiwan, keeping peace in the region.

cyphertruck commented on US reportedly forcing TSMC to buy 49% stake in Intel to secure tariff relief notebookcheck.net/Despera... · Posted by u/voxadam

cyphertruck · 20 days ago

This is like an old fashioned Civilization game trade. Taiwan gets a significant ownership in a blue chip US company, TSMC should then take %51 control over intel, and turn it around. The US gets a stronger position with China such that china attacking Taiwan would be like bombing Apple or Google. The USA will go to war over that.

Only the willingness to go to war, stops aggressors. War is terrible and economic competition is the path to peace, but if you can't defend yourself you will get destroyed.

cyphertruck commented on 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program kcrw.com/news/shows/npr/n... · Posted by u/ProAm

gammarator · a month ago

Comments about SLS miss what’s happening. SLS is inefficient and wasteful, but human spaceflight is not what’s getting cut at NASA. Instead, very productive current and future science missions are getting killed, in defiance of Congress [1].

Until this year, NASA was the world leader in space science. We’re pushing out the experts who build and operate astrophysics missions like Hubble, Chandra, JWST, Kepler, TESS, Swift, and many more in planetary and heliophysics. This is a loss of capacity that will set the US back a generation.

The private sector is irrelevant here: SpaceX and friends don’t do scientific research.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/07/trump-administration-m...

cyphertruck · a month ago

These cuts are absolutely not the ones I would make, but the reality is not as it is being portrayed.

The claim that SpaceX does not do science is false. Not only do they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts, they also do independent science, including the Polaris Dawn and FRAM 2. Along with Axiom, they put science missions on the ISS, and all the NASA science done on ISS is facilitated by SpaceX putting humans there. Finally, literally everything that SpaceX has done or built is a result of science that SpaceX has had to do, including colder than ever propellants, and life support systems, etc. The Polaris Dawn spacewalk was not a replication of the 1960s spacewalks, as it was based on new suit science, etc.

Somehow, people like to pretend that probes landing on other planets is the only form of science that is done.

And the reality is that new entrants from RKLB, SpaceX, Firefly, and a lot of smaller companies are doing exactly this kind of science as well--- but at vastly lower cost.

The inescapable reality-- and this will always be the case with political organizations like NASA-- is no matter how well meaning they cannot do science as effectively as private organizations. NASA slows science down in large part because they are hamstrung by congress.

Yes, it looks like some way too expensive projects are getting cancelled and that means some waste of money. It's not the choice I would make.

But in the next 10 years, nearly %100 of all science will be done outside of NASA.... because the NASA overhead is too much, makes things too expensive, and less reliable.

For example, it's better to blow up 1 falcon one, and 2 falcon 9s, to get 500 successful falcon 9 launches at 1/100th the cost per kilogram of mass to orbit than to have a completely successful SLS system that launches only 2-3 times a decade.

The former accelerates science, lowers the cost of all science and more science gets done per dollar than the latter.

That transition is happening whether government, the senate and congress is aboard.... or not.

cyphertruck commented on Sleeping beauty Bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2B marketwatch.com/story/sle... · Posted by u/aorloff

raggles · 2 months ago

I don't really follow bitcoin, but last I checked over 75% of block confirmations came from the top 3-5 mining pools. That seems a hell of a lot more centralized than the traditional finance system.

cyphertruck · 2 months ago

The traditional finance system is that a single central bank, owned by a cartel of rich banks- chase, jpm, etc-- issue the currency, charge us to use it and get first dibs on the benefits of monetary inflation -- google "cantillon effect".

The now much more diverse mining space is much better than completely centralized in one entity current system.

And bitcoin community has a way of working to fix weaknesses wherever they find it... there is active campaigns to diversify mining, as you pointed out those are pools-- and pools are being made obsolete. behind those pools are thousands or tens of thousands of mining operators, of all sizes, as it's viable at industrial as well as individual scale-- many use it to heat their house for less than the alternative, the earnings don't have to cover the full cost to be beneficial to people.

cyphertruck commented on Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/pseudolus

carabiner · 6 months ago

Jesus. It really is that hard. With all the bajillion in extra compute and simulation time from Apollo era, we can't do hard things anymore. We don't know how.

cyphertruck · 6 months ago

Apollo took up an appreciable percentage of the GDP… this is a small startup with a fraction of the funding. Firefly landed successfully, but they are bigger.

This is a hardware rich, inexpensive program, and they could fly probably 100 missions for the cost of one NASA old style mission.

cyphertruck commented on SpaceX Super Heavy splashes down in the gulf, canceling chopsticks landing twitter.com/spacex/status... · Posted by u/alach11

fastball · 9 months ago

They also apparently already have a V3 in the works.

cyphertruck · 9 months ago

It's been announced, and is surely being designed, but they are only building hardware for V2 right now. Most likely V2 will continue as long as they need to get dialed in what they want V3 to be, then they will switch. V2 seems to be based on the learnings from V1, and I think V3 is the real design they want to fly-- but V3 depends on Raptor 3 and probably other advancements, and Raptor 3 is still at the testing stage in MacGregor.

For instance the V2 design seems to use Raptor 2.5 which is a Raptor 2 variant with Raptor 3 style interface with the ship. So they are testing the ship design to support Raptor 3 before they have Raptor 3.

The engines are really heart of these things and drive the development cadence.

cyphertruck commented on · Posted by u/Tomte

cyphertruck · 10 months ago

Going somewhere and paying for things to boost the local economy is not "exploitation". This is just agitprop.

cyphertruck commented on Mass Market DVDs Are Dead: Long Live Heritage Physical Media variety.com/2024/film/glo... · Posted by u/throw0101d

mastazi · a year ago

I remember in the 90's the promise of the Internet was that it would be a resilient repository of all human knowledge and cultural artifacts. I remember people pointing out that the Internet was designed to survive even a nuclear war, so tragedies like the loss of the Library of Alexandria would never happen again.

Instead, we got link rot, abandonware IP, and lots of memes.

cyphertruck · a year ago

The internet was originally designed to be robust in the face of nuclear war, but that meant packets could be routed over the network even when individual point to point connections were lost.

I remember seeing an ad for whose premise was a cheap hotel where "we have every movie ever made on our TVs".

That was one promise of the streaming future... but there was never an understanding that the internet was permanent.

Even during the initial fad of "everyone needs their own homepage" before geocities, most pages were dead or broken or obsolete in a few months.

A large distributed redundant archive of data would be useful... probably with some mechanism where you can donate resources to preserve the data you like without having to support the stuff you don't care about (because resources are finite.)