All caveats apply. 20≠100, employees might include staff and grad students, etc.
Still, I would never advise anyone to donate to any institution like this.
If you ran MIT, what do you think a good endowment amount per faculty member would be?
I’m not sure $20m is far off from optimal.
I might go down to $15m, with an annual draw down $750k so (5%) per year to cover burdened labor rate of average professor and certain percentage (half?) to go to “support” (i.e., everything else, including libraries, staff, maintenance, maybe grad student funding, etc.). Even that seems sort of on the tight side.
Being answerable to funding sources, tuition, etc. is a good thing. Having money to soon off from is not.
How can you write "employees might include staff" and keep a straight face? Yes, they do, how is this even in question? MIT has 1089 faculty members but 17,180 employees total. That's a 15x difference.
It's almost all bloat and overhead made possible by being over capitalized.
TSMC are the best in town, but they're also not the only game in town. Pretty sure Intel and Samsung are constantly tempting Nvidia with good offers, which Nvidia can use as leverage in negotiations to keep TSMC prices in check.
If TSMC doubled or 10x what they charge Nvidia on Monday, Nvidia can’t switch suppliers overnight, and it would crash Nvidia’s valuation, leaving TSMC to say “ok we have the capacity for anyone who wants to take on Nvidia”.
Another side of that, while the whole “China invading Taiwan thing” isn’t exactly on the cards, there’s now $1+Trillion at stake shorting Nvidia stock alone if China felt like putting a few boots on the ground for a week.
Thanks!
Theres a very recent comment from the CEO stating something similar... But historically it's seemed they've allowed their customers to take most of the margin.
They should have a lot of leverage being on the most advanced node, but doesn't seem they use it.
Likely a cultural thing, but if somebody has more insight would be curious
I'm not claiming that applies to Nvidia either way specifically, but it's a good sign in the generic:
1. They're efficient.
2. They've avoided the curse of overhiring (hi, Google!)
3. They can stay afloat even if business drops a lot.
Check this https://airleasecorp.com/press/air-lease-corporation-announc... they made 753.6M in 2023 with 163 employees or 4.6M per employee. No one comes even close. No one.
I believe Fannie Mae is the second who made 17400 with 8100 people or 2.17M per employee.
To compare, nVidia made 4368 with 29600.
Remember the point of "AI" is getting human-like productivity out of machines.
So should it be surprising that the company at the forefront of this is has a low human-to-everything ratio?
