Pretty sure the tradwife folks are targeting something more like the 1950's than the 19th century, but it could be funny -- though not at funny as, say, sending the housewives of Orange County or the Kardashians back to a pioneer home.

But I have a MUCH better idea.  Let's take Democratic Socialist influencers and politicians and send THEM to actually live the life they are promoting, say in 1930's Ukraine or 1960's China.

• Countries don't surrender under the onslaught of air power alone.  Ever.  If anything relentless bombing tends to heal fractures in the population as people band together against the common threat.  As I wrote here

All this of course is to reiterate my skepticism that bombing the sh*t out of Iran is going to lead to any sort of surrender or favorable regime change. I see of late that Trump supporters have adopted the defense that their purpose in Iran is to degrade Iran's military ability and ability to support terrorism and conflicts in the region. But that sure as hell was not the Administration's public line at the beginning of the war. My recollection was that Trump's reasoning was we were going to decapitate the leadership and the people would rise up in revolution

• The US has a terrible record of regime change through leadership decapitation and we almost always end up with something worse, at least without the application of a lot of ground troops.  Iraq is perhaps better off post-Hussein and Panama is almost certainly better off post-Noriega, but those changes involved a lot of boots on the ground.  Venezuela may turn out to be an exception as well but way too early to tell.

Certainly Iran's military has been degraded (though so has ours) but I wonder if the loss of $100 million fighter planes isn't the equivalent of losing the  battleships at Pearl Harbor, ie the loss of a very-soon-to-be obsolete military equipment.  In the world of drones on what increasingly looks like the nature of the modern battlefield, the loss of the old stuff may just accelerate their switch to the new war technologies (a switch I am not at all sure our military in the US is on top of).

Seeing little hope of victory, I have been hoping that Trump would declare victory and Iran and go home, which he has sort of done.  Kudos at least for this, if only the US had done the same in Vietnam in 1965.  However, the peace agreement (MOU?  Docusign?) appears incredibly cynical.  As I understand it, there is an armistice of sorts that lasts until 2 days after the US elections in November.  It is clear that whatever JD Vance is spinning, the US got about zero (and maybe less than zero) from this agreement EXCEPT for the Administration's ability to maybe get the war and gas prices out of the paper until after the election.

Let's say mom and dad have a business that they are going to be able to sell for $100 million.  They have three classic failure to launch kids with expensive degrees in things like art history and anthropology that are not very marketable.  All three from time to time have been employed in various roles (some real, some made up) in the family business.  Over the years mom and dad have created a non-profit and donated half the equity of the family business.  Once the business sells there is now a non-profit they control with $50 million in cash.

OK, so they rename the non-profit the "Smith Family Foundation for Art and Architecture Preservation".  That sounds laudable, right?  They get a lot of prestige from friends and the press for donating $50 million to "charity."

Making some perhaps over-optimistic assumptions about investment returns, let's assume that this new Foundation invests its $50 million (which they now call their endowment) and gets $4 million a year in income.  Here is how this money might get spent:

• We need managers of the Foundation -- hey, let's hire the kids.  We will pay them each an executive salary of $750,000 a year
• We probably need someone who can do actual work, so we will hire an office manager for $60,000 a year
• We need an office, something whose prestige matches that of our new Foundation. We rent 5,000 square feet at $30 per square foot for $150,000 a year.
• We will need supplies, utilities, etc.  Throw in $50,000 a year
• We need at least two board meeting a year with mom and dad and the executive team.  No reason that this can't be at a nice resort with a spa.  Call it $150,000 a year.
• The executives need to visit sites with art or architecture preservation needs.  Where is that?  It could be anywhere, from Florence to Siam Reap.  Eight trips per year at perhaps $50,000 each is $400,000 a year.
• We will need a PR agency to make sure the world knows the good works we are doing, call it $100,000 a year
• We will need to do various tax and legal filings, perhaps $40,000

That leaves $800,000 we can actually donate to other agencies or projects that support our mission.  Good for us!  Make sure the PR agent gets all the details, because after all this is a charity.

I will assure you that, though the IRS scrutinizes some of this stuff more, this is an entirely representative example.  I went to school with kids who have exactly these sort of lives as executives of the family foundation.

Since its origin, this model was expanded and the primary seed of these new non-profits is not generational wealth but money from the government.   When I worked more closely with the government running recreation areas, I was frequently frustrated that government employees almost fetishized non-profits, preferring if possible to allocate all outside contracts and partnerships to them if it was at all possible.  I am not an expert on the history of this mythology, but I can assure you it exists -- whether Federal, state or local, government agencies almost always believe that non-profits are the best partners as they are safe from the taint of profit motive and thus pure in their intentions.

Sometimes that was true.  I remember the government awarding a few campground management contracts to non-profits staffed with volunteers.  The problem was -- and I think anyone who has been part of a non-profit can attest to this -- that as the initial passion fades, it is really hard for such volunteer organizations to provide services 24-7-365.  Most all of these failed.

But then a more clever actor entered the picture in my little business niche.  These were folks who wanted an edge winning contracts, so they built what would in every other respect just have been a business like mine but organized it as a non-profit.  They then won contracts from agencies that were far more comfortable working with a "non-profit" than with a for-profit like my company.  I remember objecting to the agency and saying that the president of that non-profit paid himself more than I made a year in profit, but I got nowhere.  The perceived superiority of non-profits was an idee fixe in the government's mind that I could not overcome.

All of this came back to me as the DOGE effort dug out questionable non-profits on the government take and even more so as frauds in many states like MN and CA have demonstrated that the halo effect around non-profits still exists in government, and can be powerful enough to hide fraud and political money laundering.

Note:  I am still  much weaker than I expected following a post-operative infection, subsequent surgery to clean it out, and weeks of having my body host microbiological warfare on a grand scale.  So I am trying to catch up on a few easy subjects I have intended to write about for a while.

Anyone who has been following Tesla for years has to know what is coming at SpaceX.  In the movie Gettysburg, the great Sam Elliot speaks these lines as General Buford, the union Cavalry commander who was able to slow the southerners just enough on day 1 to let the Union grab the high ground.  But ahead of this success, he fears that he and the union will fail and the South would slaughter Union troops trying to take the hills too late, as at Fredericksburg (and as happened to Pickett a couple days later).

Devin, I've led a soldier's life, and I've never seen anything as brutally clear as this. It's as if I can actually see the blue troops in one long, bloody moment, goin' up the long slope to the stony top. As if it were already done... already a memory. An odd... set... stony quality to it. As if tomorrow has already happened and there's nothin' you can do about it. The way you sometimes feel before an ill-considered attack, knowin' it'll fail, but you cannot stop it. You must even take part, and help it fail.

Having been a (peripheral) part of the online community skeptical of Tesla stock valuation,  I feel I can see the future of SpaceX stock over time as if it has already happened.

There are at least two distinct patterns one sees over time in the stock of Musk-led Tesla that I fully expect to see duplicated at SpaceX.  So it is worth reviewing those.

1. Absurd Valuation Based on Musk Shouting "Squirrel"

Tesla has a Trailing 12 Month PE ratio of 387(!) and a forward PE of 216.  These ratios are almost unprecedented for a company not in the middle of a restructuring, and indicate simply enormous growth expectations.  This is not some weird temporary data spike... Tesla has maintained a PE over 150 for years and years.  Just to give it context, let's compare it to Nvidia which is perhaps the world's most famous growth company right now.  Nvidia's revenues have really gone vertical over the last quarters:

For that it has been rewarded with a PE of 34 / 25 (Trailing / Forward).  So Tesla must REALLY be growing to justify a PE of nearly 400, right?  Well, not really.  In fact, Tesla's revenue has been essentially flat for 14 quarters:

So how does Tesla maintain such a crazy-high valuation?  Honestly, I don't know.  But from watching it and Musk for years I would argue that the most important factor has been Musk's ability to keep shifting the endgame.  The response to valuation concerns is always "yeah, but you are only looking at the current business, [fill in the blank] which is coming soon[-ish] will be worth a trillion dollars."  The fill-in-the-blank over the years has included solar roofs, full self-driving, semi-trailers, battery swap, robo-taxis, neural implants, humanoid robots, and AI.

Tesla Translated to SpaceX:  The proposed SpaceX valuation of $1.75 trillion is, if anything, even crazier than Tesla's.  It is impossible to apply a PE, since SpaceX loses money and can be expected to do so for years, even decades.  But with about $18.7 billion in revenue last year, the SpaceX valuation is nearly 100x revenue (Tesla trades at a lofty 15x revenue).  Nobody, ever, has made money investing in a 20-year-old company with low margins at 100x revenue (barring the occasional sucker who will later pay 120x).

The tell for me is the emphasis and investment in AI at SpaceX.  Strategically, this is a terrible idea as their core business is already very capital intensive and they really don't need a diversion into something else.  They are competing in AI with a number of companies that are far ahead of them and I don't see an obvious way to catch up (very similar to Tesla and self-driving).  Musk says they are ahead but Musk said Tesla was ahead on self-driving and robotaxis until it has become obvious that they are not even close.   There is a potential AI-related launch and hardware opportunity, maybe, someday, to put AI processing in space, but there is no reason that should be dependent on SpaceX's independent investments in AI.  The one thing AI gives SpaceX, of course, is a squirrel to help fill in the value hole between "losing money on $18 billion of revenue" and $1.75 trillion.  Investors in SpaceX can expect a constant stream of squirrels over the coming years.

2. Propping Up Older Musk Investments with Newer Ones

Over the years of following Musk, the one action of his that aggravated me more than anything else was the transparent bailout of his friends' and family's investment in SolarCity using Tesla stock.  Like most other rooftop solar businesses, in 2016 SolarCity was close to bankruptcy.  Rather than allowing that to happen, losing money and prestige for Musk, Musk used his extraordinary control of the Tesla board to have Tesla buy out SolarCity for far more than any sensible market value.  In doing so, Musk trumpeted another classic Tesla squirrel, presenting the Solar Roof, basically modular rooftop solar tiles that looked like wood or slate that would snap together into an attractive rooftop installation.  It was later found that most of the early demo was likely fake, as the tiles were not even close to release-ready and while Musk was predicting 12,000 installations per year and growing, perhaps only 3000 in total were ever completed over 10 years.  The Solar City results continued to fall at Tesla and were rapidly buried in the energy sector, making it almost impossible to figure out how much value Tesla got from SolarCity, given that the vast majority of energy sector revenues are unrelated to rooftop solar and are instead large battery storage projects.

Since that time Musk has used his AI lab xAI to buy Twitter/X.  And then just this year had SpaceX buy xAI for $250 billion.  Does it make sense that an orbital launch company own a social media platform?  Absolutely not, but it bailed Musk out of an investment in X that was going to be very hard to ever recover any other way.

Tesla Translated to SpaceX: 

Last year Tesla booked $890 million in revenue from SpaceX  (cars, battery storage, some AI).  This is less than 1% of Tesla's revenues though I expect it to be, since it was not arms length, more profitable than average.  But the real threat to SpaceX will be, as Tesla's stock valuation eventually starts to return to Earth, that Musk will use his unique control of both companies to have SpaceX buy Tesla.  People are already discussing it. These are two companies that absolutely have no reason to be under one roof EXCEPT that it would help maintain Musk's net worth.  Yes, I am sure he will generate a logic that the Musk fan-boys will love -- AI consolidation or some such.  And I guess it would be accretive, in an ugly way, with a 100x revenue company buying out a 15x.  Just remember that these two companies, which if the IPO price holds for SpaceX, have a combined market cap of $3 trillion and a combined 2025 net income of -$1 billion.  Even if your excel spreadsheet has enough columns to add years marching towards the heat death of the universe, I am not sure that investment ever pays off.

Parting Thoughts

None of this necessarily means that the SpaceX IPO will fail or that SpaceX stock won't rise post-IPO.  I spent too many years getting burned off and on shorting Tesla to ignore the fact that any Musk enterprise commands a premium among a subset of investors -- he is like Warren Buffet in that his name association with a deal has overwhelming value (the only difference from Buffet being that Buffet's investments actually produce profits).  Be aware if you invest that you are likely soon to own Tesla as well, because I do not think Musk can resist the temptation to use high-multiple SpaceX stock as wampum to buy out his other investments.

There is a sort of clock in Musk investments, going back to SolarCity.  There is a lot of arm-waving and squirrels to maintain a valuation, but as business performance inevitably does not live up to the valuation hype, its time to have the next investment that is at the peak of its hype with a huge multiple buy out the old one.  I really thought Tesla might finally hit that point when the valuation collapses to that of a low-growth car company once the robotaxi initiative proved a loser, but here comes SpaceX just in time.

I do not give out investment advice but if I were short Tesla right now I would run for my life.  The SpaceX IPO will essentially be a big Tesla bailout.

All this of course is to reiterate my skepticism that bombing the sh*t out of Iran is going to lead to any sort of surrender or favorable regime change.  I see of late that Trump supporters have adopted the defense that their purpose in Iran is to degrade Iran's military ability and ability to support terrorism and conflicts in the region.  But that sure as hell was not the Administration's public line at the beginning of the war.  My recollection was that Trump's reasoning was we were going to decapitate the leadership and the people would rise up in revolution, an outcome I found unlikely from the first day.

Postscript:  I would have thought it a perfectly defensible position in a war like this to argue against the efficacy of our attacks while still believing the target regime is awful.  Apparently that seems to be a bridge too far for most war opponents, as I increasingly see those on the anti-war side attempting to portray the Iranian government as morally superior to the US.  For all our flaws and our failure to live up to our own standards, that is frankly absurd.  But I still see it every day, women in the US running around protesting conditions for women in the US wearing Handmaid's Tale outfits while simultaneously defending the ethics of the Iranian (or Gaza) governments.

So I will add my usual postscript:  I put all of the above in the "I wish I were wrong" category.  Opponents of wars frequently fall into the trap of supporting the other side.  The Iranian government is one of the worst in the world, both in how it treats its people (or at least the half without a Y chromosome) and its proclivity for inciting violence and mayhem in other countries.  It is a totalitarian regime responsible for much of the current instability in the Middle East and I would love to wave my magic wand and see it gone.

The only vague hope I might have harbored was that the CIA had some secret plan in place with the opposition organized by agents on the ground.  Really, this was an absurd hope, but I grew up in the 60's and the 70's when the CIA had a certain aura of competent deviousness.  Intellectually, I disabused myself of this mythology years ago, but its remnants must have still been lurking around my brain.

For others who might be harboring such vague hopes of secret master spy plans, there is this:

Even a massive military assault on Iran is unlikely to topple the Islamic Republic of Iran and its state system, according to a classified assessment produced by the US intelligence community shortly before the US and Israel launched their current 'shock and awe-style' military campaign on Tehran. The Washington Post first reported it, perhaps based on some kind of leak or briefing by an anonymous intelligence official, and calls it—

a sobering assessment as the Trump administration raises the specter of an extended military campaign that officials sayhas "only just begun."

The report, compiled by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) roughly a week before the war began, concluded that Iran's political system is structured to survive even major leadership losses, The Washington Post reports. However, this should really come as no surprise to anyone awake and observant throughout the past two plus decades of America's 'nation building' efforts in the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya. ...

The intelligence report also poured cold water on the idea that Iran's opposition could quickly fill any power vacuum. US intelligence analysts assessed that the country's fragmented opposition movements remain too divided to seize control, regardless of whether Washington pursued limited strikes against leadership targets or a broader assault on state institutions.

Equally unlikely, according to current and former US officials familiar with the analysis, is the prospect of a spontaneous nationwide uprising. We could speculate that this possibility may have had a chance of some degree of success within the opening one or two days of the mass US-Israel bombing campaign, but it clearly didn't materialize.

I will observe that no such promised revolution has occurred so far after the Maduro snatch.  You can almost visualize the Administration look of confusion when the revolutions they were convinced would magically appear did not occur.  Sort of like the look on the coyote's face when some trap he has created fails to work.

Postscript:  I put all of the above in the "I wish I were wrong" category.  Opponents of wars frequently fall into the trap of supporting the other side.  The Iranian government is one of the worst in the world, both in how it treats its people (or at least the half without a Y chromosome) and its proclivity for inciting violence and mayhem in other countries.  It is a totalitarian regime responsible for much of the current instability in the Middle East and I would love to wave my magic wand and see it gone.

The US is really good at getting rid of leaders like this, and if anything is getting better.  I won't go further back than my lifetime, but the Diem coup (and execution) in South Vietnam, the lukewarm (at best) support for the Shah of Iran that contributed to his ouster, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Afghanistan invasion, Gaddafi in Libya, Maduro in Venezuela, Noriega in Panama -- the list goes on.  But in many or most of these cases, what followed the US-led decapitation was as bad or worse than what came before.  Vietnam - equally bad or worse.  Iran - worse.  Iraq - better but took a really long commitment.  Afghanistan - at least as bad or worse.  Venezuela - unknown but no immediate revolution as hoped.  Libya - much worse.  Panama - probably better.

We have no historically successful roadmap to go by, and in a sense this may be a situation like Hayek's critique of government planning -- that a perfect roadmap cannot exist because we don't understand the mass of individuals we are "liberating", or even how they define "liberated', or even if they really want to be "liberated."  As all of us humans do, we project our own preferences and outlooks and assumptions on people where they may well not fit at all.

Even beyond the job of seeing Iran no longer acting as a leading agent of chaos, I would greatly love to see their people liberated.  Women in Iran who were just emerging into the 20th Century under the Shah's leadership have a chance to emerge from gender apartheid again, and I am 100% hoping to see this.  (I wrote a while back about the utter lunacy of US women on the Left consistently siding with hardcore Islam and ignoring the plight of women in these countries).

Unfortunately for my optimism, I said the exact same thing, almost word for word, when we invaded Iraq.  Iraq has since struggled to fulfill this promise, though to be fair a lot of the blame for that rests not on US failures or the Iraqis but on the ongoing efforts by Iran to subvert the country and keep it roiled in chaos.  But getting there took a HUGE US commitment of money and lives, way more than a pushbutton decapitation of the leadership.

A parting thought -- there is clearly an Iranian opposition.  We have seen them bravely marching in the streets (far braver than our anti-fascists here as they faced actual imprisonment and death for such protests against real fascists).  This is an honest question -- around whom does the Iranian opposition rally and organize?  As in many such authoritarian societies, only the authorities have organization.  So even decapitated, the military and former government theoretically have a huge head start in pulling things together under their control in the aftermath than an unorganized populace.  This is the same problem faced by many post-colonial governments.  It's not that their populace wanted a military dictatorship when the colonizer left or was thrown out, but in many cases the only organized and educated group in the country was the military which stepped into the vacuum.  I am not an expert on this but I have always assumed India escaped this fate because it had a relatively large, educated group of indigenous people trained in government and not in the military.

Postscript:  I continue to find it sort of hilarious that media that go out of their way not to deadname a transexual teen insist on describing Iran as part of the Arab world and their citizens as Arabs.  I can tell you with great confidence and many experiences that there is no way to piss off an Iranian faster than to call them an Arab.

First, a digression.  Anyone who is more than a casual user of Microsoft Word understands that there are fundamental bugs in the core of the program that have existed since almost the very first version and have never been fixed in almost 30 years.  Two that come immediately to mind are the difficulty in getting images to stay where you put them and the absolutely terrible structured outlining (eg section II-B-iv-2-a).  The former is so bad you can find a zillion memes on it.  The latter is so bad that Word Perfect still survives focused on lawyers who write a lot of documents with hierarchical bulleting.

Everyone knows these problems exist.  Presumably they are fixable with some amount of effort.  But they are not fixed.  Instead, release after new release in Word trumpets new niche functionality without ever focusing on the core functionality. I can't remember ever using a feature of Word that was added since 2005, and maybe earlier, but yet adding those new features is what consumes all the development time.

My fear is that AI companies are doing the same thing.  New features and capabilities of the major AI models are impressive.  But at their core, at least for researching and writing, they still have the critical, fatal flaw of hallucinations.  Almost every day we can watch some law firm get reprimanded by a judge for submitting briefs that include fake, made-up, hallucinated cases.

I don't care how capable and human sounding these ai models are, if they are inserting reputation-destroying hallucinations in a firm's output, or writing in an identifiable AI style, they are worse than useless.  And companies that say "Oh, we don't use AI" are fooling themselves because even the best and brightest kids that they are hiring have become habituated to using AI to finish research and writing assignments.  A young woman I know who manages case teams for one of the big strategic consultants (I won't give the name but think McKinsey, BCG, Baine, etc) says that a huge part of her job as engagement manager is to stop AI-generated slop with obvious errors and recognizable AI writing style from getting to the client.  Her case team keeps handing her things that at best are obviously AI prose and at worst contain errors.  Interestingly, she checks all this stuff not because she was assigned to do it, but because she grew up on the AI/non-AI temporal border and sees the risks.  I have a bet online where I believe one of these firms is going to be caught up in a public scandal and lawsuit in 2026 for turning in ai-generated client presentations while billing that client 7 figures a month (imagine the explosion when a CEO finds out they were paying $1 million a month for the output of a few ChatGPT prompts).

The problem is actually bad enough that I briefly considered starting a new firm whose sole job was to independently review, fact-check, and edit all of a firm's output to help them identify hallucinations and AI tells.  You could probably go hire 100 of the older generation of Washington Post layoffs right now who have actual reporting, editing, and fact checking experience (avoid the younger ones who grew up in the journalism as advocacy era).  Go out and sell your services to law firms and consultants and such.  Gotta be a business there.  Right now I am too newly retired to pursue it but I will leave the idea to you guys.  You're welcome.

Obviously, nothing about what I describe above sounds like the employment apocalypse everyone is expecting.  You are simply not going to see the promised productivity gains until AI cleans up its house and in my mind that would include transparency about hallucinations -- what are the rates, what have they done to fix them in this version, are the rates going down, etc.

The incident that set me to thinking started at a gorgeous winery called Bond, part of the Harlan family series of vineyards.  I had never heard of Bond or Harlan, which generated approximately the same reaction from wine-lovers as, say, telling my daughter I can't name any Taylor Swift songs.  Anyway, we had a tasting there, which I understand was something of a coup in in itself.  At the tasting we tried 5 different cabernets from 5 different parts of the valley.  It was actually cool, they had a jar of the soil each wine's grape was grown in next to the bottles and there were very dramatic differences.  I found this infinitely more enlightening than being told the word "terroir" over and over.

They did a couple of things that I have come to learn make for the best high-end vineyard tasting experience.  First, the whole thing was quiet and private for just our group.  And secondly, in addition to opening up all their current vintage wines (all cabernet sauvignon) for tasting, they pulled a few 2013 versions of the same wine from the library -- "library" being wine-speak for inventory of older stuff.  2013 was apparently a very good year for them and this was by far the oldest stuff we had been offered anywhere.

I had always been told that you can't drink cabs right away.  They have to age in the bottle for 10 or 15 or more years to really be their best.  I had never experienced that for myself but drinking the 2013 version next to the 2023 version was eye-opening to me.  TL;DR it makes a big difference that even I could readily taste.

By the way, if you have any scientific bent, good luck asking any of these tasting room types what -- chemically -- happens in the aging process once in the bottle.  I am more used to bourbons that really do not continue to age once they are out of the barrel and into glass bottles (aging for bourbons requires molecular exchange with the wood in addition to evaporation from porous barrels and even changes to the weather).  So I was curious how wines age in the bottle.  But I asked wine folks about what happens in the bottle -- do long chain molecules break down, do molecules combine, do some chemicals vaporize and leave solution -- and all I could ever get was new-agey stuff about ... something or other.  Something happens to the tannins -- I could probably look it up.

But this is where I hit my conceptual wall I am still struggling with.  To understand this you need to know that the current vintage bottles of cab at this winery go for $800 a bottle -- that is for the 2023 version.  The problem is that I don't really buy $800 bottles of wine.  I don't actually buy $800 bottles of bourbon (see footnote below).  But I knew that people fight to get even a few bottles on allocation from this winery at this price.  So I thought about buying something because a) it was really a lovely tasting and buying a bottle or two seemed good manners and b) it might be fun to have a special bottle tucked away for a special occasion, maybe for the birth of our first grandchild or the night before I get put up against the wall come the revolution.

Outside the tasting, though, I searched on my phone for the 2013 Bond Pluribus we had tried.  I learned that this was considered a very good wine and scored a 100 from wine critic Robert Parker, which is apparently a good thing.  This very highly regarded and more fully aged 2013 vintage was going for $600 in several places. $600 aged 10 years vs $800 new -- I was confused.

My wine friends did not even blink when I said this.  Their reaction was "well, that wine was probably originally sold for $200 and $600 is a pretty big markup."  But that makes zero sense to me -- the original sales price should be irrelevant.  The 2013 is known to be one of their very best years and likely a better year than 2023.  But more importantly it had already been aged for 10 years in the bottle.  By any possible wine drinker metric, the 2013 had way more value than the 2023.  We all agreed the 2013 tasted way better, at least today, than the 2023.  But it was $200 cheaper.  Another way to think about that is that if I have to store the 2023 for at least 10 years for it to really be drinkable, that means the future value at 8% discount rate of my $800 I pay today is $1,727 in 10 years.  Why buy a young bottle today if I can buy an aged bottle from a really good vintage for cheaper?

I had a professor at HBS who taught investing -- I am sorry, I have forgotten his name but he was quasi-famous.  He would put crazy arbitrage opportunities on the board, and we would all argue about why they existed and how money could be made from them.  He would end all such discussions with the same phrase, "either this is a real opportunity or there is something you don't understand."  I am willing to believe there is something I don't understand and am open to commenters educating me.  I can think of a few possible explanations:

1. The online offer is counterfeit, like a fake Hermes bag  (I don't think so, I ended up ordering a bottle from a very reputable store and it appears quite real).
2. People don't trust the provenance of wine sold by third parties -- what if it has not been stored well?  Maybe they left it in a hot car trunk for a month?
3. People are buying lottery tickets -- just as a Pokémon card collector might buy a huge box of unopened card packs hoping to score a super-rare card, perhaps people are willing to pay more for wines at great vineyards in hopes that one will be that wine or vintage people talk about for decades.
4. With bourbon, people pay a premium to put together collections of all the different runs of a particular brand.  Do people do this in wine, try to collect all the years of a certain label?
5. Perhaps wine people are the ultimate marshmallow test kings, actually expressing a preference for 10-years deferred gratification.
6. Maybe it gives wine people an excuse to keep buying wine because none of what they already own is ready to drink yet

Footnote on Bourbon:

I have various types of bourbon tucked away all around my house, but I don't think I have ever paid $800 for anything.  And it is certainly possible to do so.  The most famous, the 23-year Pappy Van Winkle usually goes for $4000-$5000 a bottle on the secondary market. I saw a special bottle of Eagle Rare going for $10,000 a 2-ounce pour in a Nashville bar.  Woof.

I have been lucky enough to try Pappy and other very rare bourbons on someone else's dime.  And my general conclusion is that they are not worth it.  My wife and I did a very special trip to Buffalo Trace several years ago and somehow scored a tour and tasting from the CEO of Sazerac.  So even my wife, who hates bourbon, knows that Pappy and Weller start out in the same barrel.   I signed a Pappy/Weller barrel that my wife hammered the cork into -- it should be available for my funeral.  Anyway, the main difference is Pappy stays in the barrel longer -- which is NOT always a good thing in bourbon IMO -- and it has a higher proof, about 20 points higher on ABV proof (10 points higher on ABV),

So my wife ran a blind test last weekend with a friend and I between Weller 12 and Pappy (18?)  Anyway, my friend could not tell the difference and I could tell only because I knew Pappy had a higher ABV and I could taste the burn from the greater alcohol content.  Had we diluted the Pappy down to Weller level, not sure I could tell the difference.

I find almost any bourbon quite drinkable.  If you like your Angel's Envy or Woodford or Knob Creek or Makers Mark -- great, and I am more than happy to share them with you.  If you want a recommendation, however, here are my go-to's:

• Everyday bourbon, $55 at Total Wine -- Colonel EH Taylor Small Batch.  Seriously if you told me that this was the only one I could drink the rest of my life, I would be fine
• Pricier bourbon, $150-ish on secondary market -- Weller 12.  Probably my favorite of all bourbons and much more affordable recently (several years ago it was going for $400)

Special variations of these, like the EH Taylor Single Barrel and the Weller CYPB are great and fun to compare to the base models.  If you like these, you will probably like the other Buffalo Trace offerings like Eagle Rare and Blanton's as well.  Blanton's definitely has the best bottle, looks great on the shelf, and everyone loves the little horse.  If you are in a bar and see a nearly empty bottle of Blanton's, finishing it off in any good bar should score you the horse.

From these selections you can guess I hang out a lot in the upper left right of this map but I still enjoy things all over the spectrum.

Note:  Watch for a podcast coming out soon.  I am working on an outline I have tentatively called "the birth and death of a small business" covering issues across the range of small business life.