At this point NVIDIA seems to be motivated by shareholders value, and nothing else.
They shifted part of their production capacity to release dedicated cards for mining that have way shorter life-cycle, because they can't be used by anyone else.
They found a way to sell more cards with a higher price tag.
It's mostly short-sighted shareholders looking at quarterly results. I'm not sure long-term shareholders like the games NVIDIA is playing with the companies.
They lost Tesla for self driving, Waymo didn't even consider them, even though they had early advantage in AI. Comma.ai started with NVIDIA chip as well. I think Jen Huang is brilliant, but he's listening to the wrong people.
What’s wrong with that? Being an NVDA shareholder isn’t some select privilege for an elite few. Just buy the stock. I’m currently holding an NVDA position worth over $300k off a modest investment I made 5 years ago. To attack companies for delivering value to shareholders is just jealousy, and speaks ignorance of the market.
The median US net worth is about $121k [0]. When you're talking about having $300k available to put into stocks, and saying "Just buy the stock.", that is something entirely out of reach for the majority of people.
The OP said they opened their position 5 years ago, when the price of NVDA was 20 times less. So they probably only invested about $15K out of that median $120K net worth.
The median net worth represents assets you own, not cash on hand. When someone has a median net worth of 120k that is likely the value of their house minus the outstanding debt their car and their pension fund, and unless you're willing to take a loan out on your house to gamble on the stock market, the median American does not have 15k to buy stock. In fact the median American can barely cover 400$ in emergency bills.
xwdv started his post by saying that having significant stock was not something restricted to an elite few, and then followed up by giving examples that directly contradict that point. My goal wasn't to comment on the graphics cards themselves, but rather to add support against the pervasive and self-destructive idea that maximizing the value of the shareholders is the sole duty of a corporation.
You live in a reality that is much different than most Americans, Europeans or Asians. Reasonably, the average person can maybe get a single share, and being willing or able to blow $500 on a single share is rare. Get back down to earth, you're part of an extremely privileged group of people that fully benefits from your shares, while actual customers do not get to see returns.
Putting money in a company is not work. You are not owed anything.
Regarding your last sentence... That is opinion not fact, there are a lot of laws protecting shareholders.
But I generally agree with the rest of your comment, an investment of approximately $20000 in a single stock 5 years ago is not a modest investment for the average individual.
I'm just trying to understand your point. Are you implying that a majority of Nvidia's customers can't afford to invest $500 in something with inherent risk? Or are you using the term "customers" to mean average people in general? The former doesn't really make much sense to me, considering the majority of Nvidia customers are presumably spending hundreds of dollars on luxury goods.
He is owed whatever the price someone is willing to pay for his shares which for now seems to be around $300k. He is not owed anything else though.
> Putting money in a company is not work.
He did work for that money, and he did take a risk investing it in these shares, a risk many were not willing to take. This is what he is being rewarded for now. Doesn't make him a hero or whatever of course.
How do you know that? People who have lots of money often did not work for it, it's inherited.
> he did take a risk investing it in these shares
People often talk about investment risk like it's a real thing, but it's not. You can either afford it or you can't.
If you can afford the loss its not risky, it's just gambling.
"I'm taking all the risk, I deserve most of the benefit" is just bullshit rich people talk to avoid the fact that the people who actually do all of the work deserve more of the upside.
Most people in the highest net worth lists are self made. Inheritance doesn't help you that much if you are retarded. Mostly it's gone in one or two generations.
A risk many _cannot_ take. For a company as large as NVidia, the risk of it collapsing is basically nil. The risk of itsInvesting at random in the stock market gives you a pretty much guaranteed growth on average.
However, many of us cannot blow 20k. We can't blow 10k. We can barely blow 1k. Once again, OP ought to have a little bit of humility and recognize his incredibly privileged position.
I have a 300k position as a result of a modest investment of about $20k I made 5 years ago. Christ, I never said $300k was the modest investment and on a forum filled with software developers making 6 figures I’m sure more than a handful can invest $20k toward their future retirement.
Of course now I’ve been pelted with downvotes and no one will remember what I actually said.
I suspect that there's a relatively large body of folk that read your comment and understood your intended meaning without offence, either agreed or disagreed with it, and adjusted their personal opinion on the subject appropriately without feeling the need to argue with you about it.
Good on you for investing smartly and/or getting lucky. Hopefully you use your good fortune to somehow make the world a better place, and find
personal happiness in the process.
It's seemingly a non-sequitur, but I just remembered reading a short story in primary school English class years ago. It was about a distopian society where attractive, athletic folk had to wear ugly masks and weights to encumber them. Did anyone else read that?
What are you doing on a software board then? California houses cost at least 2-3 mil. What's the home ownership rate? Are you implying that all Californian home owners are part of some elite?
My income is in the "2%". I also entirely understand that that makes me in "the elite few".
> California houses cost at least 2-3 mil.
You mean "houses in a few select neighborhoods and locations", such as SF, more prestigious areas in LA. Also, they don't. Median SF house price: $1.4M. Sunnyvale, $1.6M.
Not "at least 2-3M". And certainly not in conjunction with this:
> implying that all Californian home owners are part of some elite
The median Californian home price is $700K. So no. But since you seem to imply that California is somehow defined as "places where homes cost $2-3M" then yes, absolutely. If you own a home worth $2M+ you are unequivocally "one of the elite". You may not be buying a new private jet every five years, but you are also entirely capable of a lifestyle that the VERY VAST majority of Americans have no chance of attaining.
For reference, a $3M mortgage with a substantial downpayment results in a mortgage payment of nearly $14,000/month, which with Jumbo loans requires an annual income in the region of $800K/year.
Please don't try to continue an argument that says that someone making just shy of a million dollars a year is somehow neither privileged nor elite.
I am stunned that people don't know that Americans are far and away outliers on the programming pay scale. Please tell me you're aware that not all programmers are in America making those crazy amounts.
Implying this is some frivolous expense akin to gambling your savings away at a casino or buying an expensive car is the wrong mindset. This is not entertainment; saving for your future and retirement is a life impacting matter that people need to take seriously. Yes I can't afford to and won't blow $3k on a fancy new TV. But I can afford to set aside $100 a month to put into a stock account even if I skip eating out or having a fancy phone plan.
The restrictions were never going to work against industrial miners. What they actually do is make it harder for gamers to mine in their spare time, making it harder to offset the card cost and meaning big miners have more profit and can bid up prices even more.
Because they screwed up the earlier launches unrelated to mining, because they practice annoying market segmentation anyways, because it's seen as a cash grab, because it isn't helping one bit despite the hassle, because stopping mining also degrades the value of the card for resale even if the original buyer is a gamer, and because restricted drivers are DRM and people hate that.
They just have no credibility now so nobody believes it was to help anyone but themselves.
They shifted part of their production capacity to release dedicated cards for mining that have way shorter life-cycle, because they can't be used by anyone else.
They found a way to sell more cards with a higher price tag.