Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

1vuio0pswjnm7

"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."

6stringmerc

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.

jordanb

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.

rob74

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...

deadbabe

Not an AI company? You don’t have to keep selling me on SPCX, I’m a buyer now.

mbmbn

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.

ryno364

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.

AJRF

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

randusername

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. [0]: https://ir.spacex.com/investors/default.aspx

rvz

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.

Havoc

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…

outside1234

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).

globalnode

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.

Fricken

Last week Yann LeCun called xAI a "failure" https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/18/yann-lecun-elon-musk-xai-fai...

trollbridge

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.

nevf1

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.

BluSyn

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?

uyzstvqs

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.

excalibur

> 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.

kklisura

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.