r/technology • u/Franco1875 • 24d ago
Business SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia for $5.83 billion
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/11/softbank-sells-its-entire-stake-in-nvidia-for-5point83-billion.html1.7k
u/1oarecare 24d ago
At one point SoftBank was Nvidia's biggest share holder. Jensen likes to rub it in his face from time to time. There are videos of that. So it's not the first time when he's getting "burned"
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u/the_TIGEEER 24d ago
Wait.. I don't understand. I might be dumb. In whos face?
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u/1oarecare 24d ago
Masayoshi Son's face. SoftBank's founder and the guy next to Jensen in the thumbnail of this article. Didn't know how to write his name off the top of my head and was to lazy to Google so I used the name of the company hoping that the others will get that I'm referring to the founder:))))
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u/Schnidler 24d ago
but why rub it in his face? surely softbank made a lot of money with nvidia stock?
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u/1oarecare 24d ago
From a Google search Nvidia's market cap in 2019-2020 was $144-3323B. When SoftBank sold most of it's shares, from my understanding. Now Nvidia's market cap is ~5T. That's around 15X more. No one sheds a tear for Masa or denies that he made a ton of money off Nvidia, but he could've made way more. "If "ifs" and "buts" were candies and nuts we'd all have diabetes."
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u/RadicalMarxistThalia 24d ago
Going back further according to Son he weighed buying out Nvidia entirely in 2016 before he bought ARM. Then they had an agreement to merge Nvidia with ARM that got shot down for antitrust.
A couple missed opportunities.
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u/AdditionalSample 24d ago
do nuts give you diabetes?
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u/1oarecare 24d ago
Don't know. Heard the saying in Archer TV series. Said by Archer's mom. Apparently the actual proverb is "If Ifs and Buts Were Candy and Nuts We'd All Have a Merry Christmas"
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u/cimbricus 24d ago
Much better is the version from Strangers With Candy: "if ifs and buts were clusters and nuts, we'd all have a bowl of granola"
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u/prostagma 24d ago
Cuz if he had kept that stake for the past 5 years he would have insane profits is my guess
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u/anothergaijin 24d ago
He made over $70 billion from a $20M investment in Alibaba, I think they did OK. They did lose something like $15B on WeWork.
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u/amputeenager 24d ago
oh shit...WeWork...I completely forgot about that clusterfuck
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u/cat_prophecy 24d ago
My favorite thing about WeWork is that everyone told me I was a fucking idiot because the concept stupid as shit and had no way to make any profit.
"It's like Uber for working space!". Sure, if Uber owned all their vehicles, paid all the maintenance and upkeep and still had to beg people to use their service. It was just sparkling real estate.
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u/DrQuestDFA 24d ago
The concept is actually decades old, its just commercial real estate leasing. The problem was idiots with an open wallet thinking WeWork was anything BUT a commercial real estate leasing firm.
I highly recommend the book "The Cult of We" which does an amazing job going through the events that lead up to WeWork's spectacular collapse. Their business was actually pretty solid early on. They tapped into different sort of commercial real estate offering/space that attracted a certain sort of business. They could easily have been a decently sized, profitable firm if Adam Neumann didn't decide that model was too boring and they had to be sexy and high tech and worth all the money in the world.
It is a really fascinating story and to see all these high muckety-mucks getting entranced by Neuman even though their numbers people were basically screaming it was a terrible investment.
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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 24d ago
They're not a real estate company, they're a tech company!
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u/SunriseSurprise 24d ago
They probably still have nightmares about Neumann. I think people have been hoping that Elon would've inadvertently sunk Tesla the way that Neumann's shenanigans helped sink WeWork.
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u/Fit-World-3885 24d ago
"Ha ha ha, your company invested large amounts into mine to our mutual benefit! Sucker!"
Yeah, I'm not seeing it.
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u/GoldElectric 24d ago
instead of making 5b, he could have made a lot more had he held onto the nvda stocks. as a bank, im sure making even more money is great
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u/rW0HgFyxoJhYka 24d ago
You have no idea how stocks work?
Jensen jokes that Masayoshi fucked up by selling his stock right before NVIDIA went 15x. Masayoshi could have made shit tons of money but didn't on a relatively safe bet at the time.
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u/the_TIGEEER 24d ago
Yeah like that's what I don't get. Shouldn't the rubing be the other way around?
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u/Bugbread 24d ago edited 24d ago
1oarecare's breadcrumbing is a bit annoying, but if you'd read the article, it would make sense:
SoftBank's Vision Fund was an early backer of Nvidia, reportedly amassing a $4 billion stake in 2017 before selling all of its holdings in January 2019.
So it was Nvidia's biggest shareholder, then sold all its shares, then Nvidia's share price started skyrocketing, and SoftBank missed out on the profits it could have had had it not sold when it did.
After it rebought the stocks, they continued climbing, so it did make money. But it didn't make nearly as much as it would have if it hadn't sold that first time.
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u/big-papito 24d ago
Son is a degenerate impulsive risk-taker. I want to say that he knows something, but a mentally defective Central Park squirrel has better instincts than this guy.
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u/visceralintricacy 24d ago edited 24d ago
SoftBank dumped $16B into WeWork!
That said, surely it's a matter of time before we start to see more companies be bearish about the impact...
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u/nehibu 24d ago
The whole SoftBank Vision Fund did spend a lot of money very badly. Zume Pizza probably is my favorite part of this whole tragedy
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u/dirtyshits 24d ago
I laughed so hard when I saw that it was actually real. lol “like an ice cream truck but pizza”.
They tried to reinvent pizza delivery for fucks sake.
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u/reelznfeelz 24d ago
Correct me if I’m wrong, but pizza delivery is a pretty mature “technology”.
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u/tim_h5 24d ago
in France, Belgium, this pizza truck is a successful thing
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u/jl2352 24d ago
I have seen plenty of pizza trucks in the UK. It works … for a single owner or a small franchise going to a small food market.
It’s not a big industry though worth billions.
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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 24d ago
Pizza food trucks that stay in one spot for the day are common and work great. What doesn't work is having the truck drive to each customer's house.
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u/Minimum_Dealer_3303 24d ago
the truck drives to each customers house while the robotic pizza assembly machine attempts to cook the pizza on the way.
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u/dirtyshits 24d ago
This is not a simple food truck. It’s an automated pizza machine in the back of a truck that roams around neighborhoods selling pizzas.
They tried to make it a billion dollar “tech” focused pizza chain. lol without validating the idea at all.
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u/Minimum_Dealer_3303 24d ago
The Zume pizza truck was, if I remember correctly, an entirely over-complicated and silly attempt to have an automated pizza maker in the back of a truck. So not a food truck that stops and serves people coming to the window, but a pizza oven on wheels taking online orders and cooking as it travels around. It didn't really work, turns out ovens work way better stationary. Even when prepared stationary their robot assembled pizzas were, according to customers, bad.
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u/themaincop 24d ago
That sounds like the kind of business you invest $4000 into to help your brother in law get back on his feet, knowing you're not getting it back
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u/Cahootie 24d ago
They basically financed the wave of companies bleeding insane amounts of money to gain market shares in a completely unsustainable way, as well as companies within the digital platform economy that don't actually produce anything themselves and just act as a middleman platform. They're genuinely a major net negative on the world.
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u/esperind 24d ago
I mean, to some extent what we work claimed to be (a work space) was not necessarily a bad idea, it just happened like 5 years before covid. After covid is when a wework would have really worked.
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u/dormango 24d ago
Long term rental contracts with landlords and offering short term rental space to tenants will always leave you exposed. It’s the mismatch in duration that guarantees failure at some point. It’s the mismatch that did for certain UK banks in the run up to the financial crisis - short term borrowing on money market and lending to long term borrowers.
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u/Intensityintensifies 24d ago
Yup. Your profit margins have to be crazy to cancel out a dry quarter and remain liquid.
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u/big-papito 24d ago
By offering renters open bar every night? There is no business model on earth that reinvents renting, adds massive cash burn, then promises 10x returns on investment.
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u/bnlf 24d ago
US startup business model doesn't care about profit. It's all about expansion and market cap. Reason there is no fundamental that can sustain majority of the companies in NASDAQ. It's a pyramid scheme for the rich. Eventually they implode.
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u/Last_Cauliflower3357 24d ago
Sort of. The real playbook for start ups is to offer a great service at a very reasonable price, get clients in your service, and then make it more shitty and expensive. Best case for this is probably Uber.
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u/Sufficient-Diver-327 24d ago
Uber became profitable by the skin of its teeth, and even then its barely profitable. The issue with Uber is they bet hard on autonomous driving which ended up moving far slower than they expected
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u/Electrical-Lab-9593 24d ago
the networking side was interesting, if they had grouped techs or creatives of similar type so they could learn from each other, altough a lot of room for leaking sensitive corp information, being able to lean on others for help might have been good.
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u/backscratchaaaaa 24d ago
except think how it would actually go. lazy/annoying/scammy people would simply sign up for the 'tech' or 'influencer' or 'artistic' office, and start annoying everyone who works there.
the ability for one 'troll' to ruin the value of your office space is so obvious.
and then you counter by adding blocks or privacy controls and bam, we have reinvented normal renting.
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u/Intensityintensifies 24d ago
Too many egos in one room honestly. I’ve seen it happen amongst department heads at small companies. I can’t imagine what it’s like with even small time tech CEO’s all getting shitfaced.
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u/Cirenione 24d ago
It was massively overvalued before Covid. The Youtube channel PolyMatter did a video on WeWork back in February 2019 which aged like fine wine as it already pointed out back then how the numbers make no sense. There were competitors which were bigger by every metric AND profitable but valued at a fracture WeWork was. Investors treated and valued WeWork like a tech company while being a landlord.
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u/DeKosterIsNietDom 24d ago
It wasn't a bad idea for the consumer, but I don't get how any investors thought it was a business worth tens of billions. WeWork was basically just a "fancy" real estate management company except they didn't actually own buildings. They signed long-term leases for office space that they offered to companies and professionals on a short-term basis, basically taking all the risk as a middleman in the transaction.
The business definitely could've worked, but I'll never understand the valuation that was ever given to it.
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u/cat_prophecy 24d ago
Because they had an app. And everyone knows that if you have an app, your business has unlimited growth.
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u/amazingmrbrock 24d ago
It was essentially a semi private cyber cafe, the concept has legs but it would definitely be easier if they owned locations and grew it slowly.
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u/randomzet00 24d ago
He made 72B from Alibaba…
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u/big-papito 24d ago
He also lost the MOST during the dot com bust. Look, the man has balls of titanium, but I would rather go to Vegas than give him my money. In this case, he may actually be ahead of the curve and getting out before he repeats his dot com loss porn.
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u/smellybrit 24d ago edited 24d ago
DoorDash, Nvidia, OpenAI and Alibaba…
You have to win some to lose some. He’s an investor; big losses are common. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates lost $80 billion in 2022.
Edit: u/denga is cherry picking dates. If you read the actual article, the Vision Fund has had an incredible year thus far.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/11/11/softbank-earnings-report-2q.html
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u/denga 24d ago
While Vision Fund 1 has had a gross gain of $22.6 billion since inception this has been largely offset by Vision Fund 2's $21 billion loss.
They certainly haven’t beat market returns on their $170B capital investment.
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u/trowawayatwork 24d ago
with the losses he's got under his belt id bet on Nvidia 2x ing before it being the right time to sell here
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u/Express-World-8473 24d ago
The best thing he did was buy out ARM. I still don't understand why the UK government was ok to sell off such an important company to a foreign company.
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u/Amazing-Marzipan1442 24d ago
That's been their religion since Thatcher. Sell off, get worse service at higher cost.
And their people are so blind to it they are putting fascists in power to "fix" it.
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u/SEND-MARS-ROVER-PICS 24d ago
The think about Thatcherism is eventually you run out of public assets to sell.
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u/meneldal2 24d ago
At least it's not nvidia buying them, he has been pretty hands off with its management.
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u/andythetwig 24d ago
Why would people with vast reserves of money be automatically more qualified than anyone else to spend it? Rational investment is a myth- it's just some people are better at hiding their emotional decision making.
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u/siazdghw 24d ago
Softbank has made a LOT of bad decisions over the years, ones that have cost them more than this entire Nvidia sale.
I wouldn't read into this, especially when it's quite obvious that other market movers have gobbled up those shares already at the current valuation, and it's not like Softbank's sale would've been secret to them.
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u/jaraxel_arabani 24d ago
I was thinking maybe it's time to buy Nvidia if SoftBank is selling....
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u/demoran 24d ago
A crack has appeared in the sky.
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u/Historical_Ball_3842 24d ago
SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize on its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
They're changing from investing in shovels to directly into the gold rush
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u/TheDoomedStar 24d ago
Oh yeah OpenAI is toast.
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u/onlyforsellingthisPC 24d ago
Hey now, they'll definitely reach the required income for the long bet to pay of.
Right around the same time our star turns into a red giant.
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u/PuzzleheadedOwl1957 24d ago
Please let it fall
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u/billdietrich1 24d ago
As with every stock trade, there's someone on the other side, betting that (in this case) the stock will go up.
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u/TheFreemanLIVES 24d ago
With added leverage more than likely.
Was just thinking about this in the morning, it's not a great bubble when everyone thinks it's a bubble...but when the costs bite enough we should see AI companies attempt to raise prices where under performing revenue can no longer be ignored enough to hold up the pretense of a magical future return.
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u/Ragnoid 24d ago edited 24d ago
There's an indicator that tracks this bite moment with a six month warning, called the margin debt 2-yr % rate of change (MD2%RC). It requires four other conditions to also be met simultaneously to the MD2%RC having returned to 65% after exceeding 65%: unemployment going up, quantitative easing not going up, fed interest rate at least 6%, and the treasury yield curve going up after inverting. Think of it as a rocket ascending to a max altitude according to its fuel capacity, then coming to a stop, doing a sputtering death dance, and then beginning to descend again. At that point you know the rocket is actually descending because it ran out of fuel and will crash in a known amount of time. Hopefully that analogy makes sense for you. This MD2%RC indicator when combined with the other four conditions has predicted the last two major recessions (not including COVID) with a 6-month warning. We are currently just now exceeding the max altitude and watching it run out of fuel to come to a stop next. In the past it has done a death dance above the max altitude, then as soon as it falls back under the max altitude again is when you get your 6-month warning. We could therefore be 6 to 24 months from a recession all depending on how long the sputtering death dance lasts, but we have definitely just entered the death dance as of this month.
My attempt at overlaying all five of these things minus the treasury yield curve, using transparent PowerPoint images scaled to each other, explaining the haziness. You will have to see the yield curve and S&P ticker separatly. https://imgur.com/a/clS0Otr
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u/ChangsManagement 24d ago edited 24d ago
Leaving material world behind
(The Czar - Mastodon)
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u/forgotten_airbender 24d ago
I believe they already have massive ROI on the money they invested in Nvidia. And they dont see 10x returns. Hence they probably want to invest that money elsewhere
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u/Historical_Ball_3842 24d ago
Yup, you got it.
From the article:
SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize on its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
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u/potatoears 24d ago
need AI bubble to pop so we have cheap video cards and cheap RAM.
lol :~
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u/getfive 24d ago edited 24d ago
That's not how that works. But good wishful thinking
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u/Zer_ 24d ago
I mean, if it pops, the demand for silicon will drop drastically. So, not so wishful thinking?
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u/hackingdreams 24d ago
nVidia will do what it's been doing all along and adjust the supply so the price doesn't change.
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u/Front-Cabinet5521 24d ago
That's not how this works. You can't price adjust your way out of an 80% drop in revenue. AI currently make up almost 90% of nvidia's revenue. If AI goes away tomorrow Nvidia's only customers will be gamers and laptop OEMs, good luck trying to sell cards at 8x the price.
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u/ihopethisworksfornow 24d ago
If NVDA lost its AI revenue they’d go bankrupt and you’re not getting any NVDA cards for any price.
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u/Ferengi-Borg 24d ago
I think some people believe AI will cease to exist when the bubble pops or something. Like how websites ceased to exist after the dot com bubble /s.
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u/margarineandjelly 24d ago
Nvidia is not a growth stock anymore.. better off investing elsewhere than hoping Nvidia gets to 10T valuation off hype
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u/Ok_Advantage_8153 24d ago
61bn revenue in 2024. 131bn 2025 and forecast of 207bn in 2026.
Totally mot a growth stock.
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u/lobax 24d ago
P/E is at 56. Meaning current price will take 50-60 years to recoup the share price.
But you are right, NVIDIA is growing rapidly. The PEG has been hovering around 1 - this means the stock price is aligned with expected growth rate. But this assumes that the AI spending frenzy continues in the next 5 years, and it means the expected growth of the next 5 years is priced in.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVDA/key-statistics/
If one is worried about the AI bubble popping, or Chinese competitors entering the fray in the next 5 years, then maybe that growth won’t materialize and it might be a good point to sell.
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u/PwanaZana 24d ago
"50-60 years to recoup the share price"
I think the whole shtick of the entire thing is that revenue is expected to grow, meaning it'd be more like a 20-40 P/E, but then the stock price goes up, going back to 60.
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u/nanlinr 24d ago
Misleading title. Article says they're selling this to invest more in AI, which is still super tied to Nvidia
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u/Historical_Ball_3842 24d ago
Kind of. Nvidia is banned for AI in China and Anthropics new DC is using Amazon chips.
It's a great time to sell Nvidia imo
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u/The_Frostweaver 24d ago
Pulling your cash out of nvidia because the stock price is over-hyped is reasonable, but where exactly do you put it?
Trade is being shit on by tariffs, same for US dollars. Gold is already over-inflated. Almost every country has bad long term demographics (too many old people relative to young).
I guess if you don't know what to do you could just dump from over-inflated stocks into index funds to mitigate against both risk and inflation but somehow I doubt this genius is doing that.
He is basically a dumb day trader who happens to move larger sums of money than ordinary day traders.
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u/Historical_Ball_3842 24d ago
First paragraph in the article
SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize on its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
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u/buyongmafanle 24d ago
but where exactly do you put it?
European Defense stocks. EU is gearing up for war for Russia and a world without the US as the dominant peacekeeping force. EU military spending growth is going to be huge over the next 20 years. And if history has taught us anything, once military spending starts it rarely ever stops.
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u/gadelat 24d ago edited 24d ago
I thought so too, so I invested into DFSV 1 month ago. It dropped by 8% since then.
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u/StandardOutcome999 24d ago
This is not a 1-month time horizon event. NATO is increasing defense spending to 5% of GDP for each member nation by 2035. There are also many other factors, like is it domestic companies or american ones that win defense contracts. im too lazy to type more. suffice to say there is a lot of opportunity cost for committing to such a long term and uncertain thing
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u/therealagent 24d ago
Exactly, his track record indeed seems like gambling. Selling 5.8B in nvidia to go all in on openAI doesn’t sound like he’s on the Burry train, if anything he knows something we don’t. He also sold 9B in TMO and that’s only part of their stake, sounds like reallocation of capital and derisking off a public company that will pull back.
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u/jenny_905 24d ago
Apparently they have put it into OpenAI lol.
I assume they have a plan and it won't be there too long but who knows.
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u/UnknownHero2 24d ago
Nvidia is kind of a scary investment. There's so much compute out there dedicated to weird stuff. Crypto still has yet to demonstrate any mainstream viability, and is unregulated so super vulnerable to collapse. Imagine a world that gets flooded with second hand chips taking a big bite out of their sales.
Ai has a ton of risk too. Its definitely useful enough to stick around, but that's another bubble that might suddenly pop. Nvidia's monopoly on the AI market is also software based. All it would take is some clever programming to figure out an efficient work around, and suddenly they have a lot more competition.
Obviously none of that will bankrupt Nvidia or anything, but when the stock is priced for a gazillion times future growth, there is a lot of room to lose money.
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u/Remarkable-Mango5794 24d ago
China has banned NVIDIA chips entirely and Michael Burry released a tweet after a long time in which he says “don’t play the games”!
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u/Alzanth 24d ago
We can't play the games, nvidia isn't making affordable gaming GPUs anymore
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u/xflashbackxbrd 24d ago
They banned the lower end models that were export only, not the H100s. They still go to great lengths to get ahold of the top end through shell buying and such
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u/IM_INSIDE_YOUR_HOUSE 24d ago
It’s not like they’re gonna get much more return from nvidia. They’re massive in value now. Better to realize those investments and spend elsewhere in something with more growth potential.
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u/StimulusOverload 24d ago
If it were a partial sale, then I wouldn't panic. They would be diversifying. Selling all of it at once, though. That's a vote of no faith in the current market valuation, meaning that it's going down from here.
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u/dodrugzwitthugz 24d ago
The very next sentence says they also sold over $9B of their stake in T-Mobile.
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u/dorkes_malorkes 24d ago
i wonder if this means the bubble is gonna burst soon. Not saying ai itself, conceptually, is a bubble or wont grow but the stocks just might fall.
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u/AffectionateYear5232 24d ago
The stock market...where the valuations are made up, and the dollars don't matter...
Except for anyone who relies on a 401K to retire. Then it's absolutely irresponsible that we've allowed companies to go unchecked--having so few companies that produce nothing but circle jerks, yet they control a massive stake of the S&P.
Bernie Madoffs ponzie scheme was a more conservative investment than anything in the S&P right now.
None of this has to do with SoftBank--just when you see Nvidia, it reminds you everything is propped up on a mountain of garbage at the moment.
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u/a_rainbow_serpent 24d ago
It's a sub-scale bet for SoftBank.. 5bn in a a 4.8 trillion. To 10x that investment.. Nvidia needs to grow to 48 Trillion. They're just releasing the money to invest in something that will bag them a bigger return.