SpaceX files to go public
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Starlink Mobile supplements this, it's simply cheaper for mobile providers to partner with them than do their own buildout. Currently only 5% of the earth's surface is covered by cellular signals. Starlink will push that up to 85+%, and is backward compatible with existing cellphones.
The question is not if its a good business, the question if its a 2 trillion $ business, and if you only cover the 95% of earth without coverage. That more like a couple 100 billion $ business at best.
Starlink mobile is for rural areas, and the other 90% of the planet that's not well served by traditional terrestrial networks.
And 40% of earth's population live in rural areas, so there is a large market for this kind of service.
You're talking about the wrong product.
I am talking about Starlink mobile, their direct-to-cellphone mobile data offering, not Starlink internet...
Nonetheless even in rural areas there is A LOT of coverage.
And starlink has one sig issue: its bandwidth.
For them to increase bandwdith they need to scale which is expensive and they have to reinvest every 5 years in replacing these satelites.
A fiber layed down can work for a lot longer and can be replaced a lot easier.
In a nutshell: they're serving a market that has less money to spend using more expensive tech than the current industry leaders. Maybe I'm wrong but it doesn't scream "massive profit".
Frequent flyers choose their airlines for a lot of reasons - which airline has the most direct flights from their city, who has the best frequent flyer program, etc. The latency of the Internet is seldom a factor or the difference between 10Mbps and 50Mbps.
Non frequent flyers just buy the cheapest flights. The major three airlines make money off of business travelers, business and first class flights and credit cards.
> I think Airplanes are going to be pretty profitable.
Container ships, military vessels, even fishing expeditions could enjoy an internet connection and cell service.
Worldwide there's roughly 30 million recreational boats, whereas for commercial aircraft carrying people (not cargo) is more like 30k, so different orders if magnitude. It's highly likely boating would be a more profitable industry to satisfy demand for than airlines in the long term. That is unless they're charging exorbitantly more for airline contracts than personal boat use, which is totally possible.
I think SpaceX is an incredible company but at this valuation I’d expect it to have something as pervasive as the iPhone or Nvidia chips. It seems to have only small niches.
SpaceX has the lion's share of the world's launch market, if you include Starlink.
I don't mean this as a gotcha or anything. I imagine rockets are a capital-intensive business. So are datacenters.
Starlink for Land 500GB subscription is $165 per month. https://starlink.com/business/maritime.
That is I think Starlink's target customers are ISP deprived. I asked Gemini estimate the size of that market. It said about 10 million in the US and over a 1 billion worldwide. I assume the Elon is pushing the 1 billion number. The problem I see is that outside the US, not everyone can pay $165 per month for internet.
AFAICT, popular tech companies owned by cult of personalities tend to get overinflated evaluations. I agree that the promise of returns tends to be rosier than reality, but at least SpaceX makes a tangible product and isn't the average AI shilling company with no hope of returns. Here at least they have first mover advantage along with lower scaling costs than their competitors thanks to the rocketry side of the biz. I have enormous respect for what SpaceX has accomplished (even if I'm not a fan of the company's owner, etc.)
I'd be interested to find out exactly where this cost exists. I would expect the majority of the cost (especially in rural/mountainous areas) to be more with power and backhaul, rather than the physical radio gear. Because it's rural, you should be able to easily just use coverage bands (ie 850 MHz or 900 MHz) with relatively high transmission power. This would easily be able to cover 300 km2.
Because of the higher transmission power, and the fact that the tower would be in the middle of nowhere, wouldn't the OPEX be higher, with smaller numbers for CAPEX?
Cell towers aren't very expensive on an ongoing basis, but every few years you're rolling out the next big technology (we went from analog to 1x to 3g to LTE while I was there) and it's a headache.
A star link server has 5 years.
Setting up a terrestrial network is already done and it was relativly easy because you build it up from most profitable to lowest profitable.
Star link only serves 9/10 Million people right now with already 10k satelites whith only a lifetime of 5 years and if this market is profitable, the margins will go down sign due to other competitors. Which are already working on it.
TAM: How big is the market for high speed internet that can pay $1200+/year and isn't already well-served by comcast/at&t/etc? And of course, this is all with finite spectrum too. So you can't serve the major cities.
No doubt there exist buyers. But rural Montana doesn't have that many households. Add that 5 year replacement cycle and Musk's Trump alignment that has Europe building their own for security reasons.
These are US telecoms, the satellites blanket the entire Earth at all times. Lower ARPU, but still. Also, it seems like they're swallowing a large percentage of flight/cruise/military internet. And direct-to-cell data coverage of the entire Earth.
Don't get me wrong, that fucking great business, but its not 'replacing terrestrial ISP' level great.
Did they? I don't really remember that tbh.
Rural areas were the last areas to join the mobile networks.
This is just a practical thing though; why would you build a tower for a community of 900 people when there are still gaps in the major metropolitan areas? It can't all happen simultaneously regardless of how badly we wish it could.
They were off by 100 million.
Even until the 90s some telcos believed that cell usage would never eclipse landlines which would remain the base of their business. It sounds ridiculous today because cell numbers outnumber landlines almost ten to one and have been dominant for over two decades.
Just some quick Googling says that cellphone penetration went from 1% in 1990 to 50% by 1999.
The Motorola Startec was introduced in 1996 and clones came quickly thereafter and were all the rage
Sprint changed that in the late 90s where all calls were 10 cents a minute anywhere you were calling from and too and you stayed on their network.
You don't count R&D as an expense per GAAP, so...
They have claimed $8B in EBITDA, also leaving out the amortization of R&D costs.
Those aren't audited numbers, as far as I know.
I'd always wanted to view affairs from a different lens, though I often feel the people who think everything revolves around bond rates or inflation numbers can miss the social picture of why things happen.
The most-powerful ones for individuals are the micreconomic mechanisms. Understanding how leverage, tranching and moving risk (and reward) across stakeholders and time, work, for instance. The necessary mechanisms and tradeoffs one must make, as well as the ones one should.
If you're looking for a formal model, it's the balance sheet. But not the accountant's. The financier's. Sources and uses, and uses and sources. Payments in, payments out. How do they balance over time; how do they change exposures to different layers of economic and legal control.
The primitives of these models are transactions and people. When you look through them, they're defining human wants and ambitions, faults and fears, patience and mortality.
It’s all basic stuff, often wrapped in jargon to throw people off.
If the fella wants to be properly informed, he needs a very strong understanding of fundamental microeconomic principles, along with macroeconomics. On top of that an understanding of financial accounting.
And… on top of that an understanding of corporate finance and valuation. Aswath Damodaran (look him Up on YouTube) is the go-to person for this.
Only then you will form a complete picture of what’s going on and make well informed statements about the future.
That’s a subject that fills many volumes on accounting, finance and economics. I don’t think you should be looking for one best theory, because there are valid differences of opinion in all these fields.
> I'd always wanted to view affairs from a different lens, though I often feel the people who think everything revolves around bond rates or inflation numbers can miss the social picture of why things happen.
The ‘social picture’ is what’s called welfare economics, which is a whole field in itself. I wouldn’t jump straight into welfare economics though, you’ll probably need to start with introductory economics to understand the basic terminology.
Right now I'm reading Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman and and Joe Knight. There's different versions, but I choose the one "for managers". So far it's done a good job making the material understandable for someone who doesn't have a degree in finance. This the one that's more relevant to the post and will help you start understanding how companies operate at a financial level.
For personal finance I have read
I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi and A Random Walk Down Wallstreet by Burton G. Malkiel. The first sounds "click-batey" but that's because "I will teach you the boring effective way to manage you're finances" doesn't sell. The latter gets more into the weeds on investing. Bother are great (though Random Walk has been edited many times and the beginning of the book has become bloated, so I'd recommend skimming it a bit since it's just history on epic financial crashes).
I'm planning to read:
7 Powers — Hamilton Helmer
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy — Richard Rumelt
The Outsiders — William N. Thorndike Jr.
The Intelligent Investor — Benjamin Graham
The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel
What did you read that worked?
You do not need to study anything else. You can even be very successful in every stages of your life with it.
I'm just stating out on this, so I haven't gotten through everything I want to read yet. Right now I'm reading Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman and and Joe Knight. There's different versions, but I choose the one "for managers". So far it's done a good job making the material understandable for someone who doesn't have a degree in finance. This the one that's more relevant to the post and will help you start understanding how companies operate at a financial level.
For personal finance I have read
I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi and A Random Walk Down Wallstreet by Burton G. Malkiel. The first sounds "click-batey" but that's because "I will teach you the boring effective way to manage you're finances" doesn't sell. The latter gets more into the weeds on investing. Bother are great (though Random Walk has been edited many times and the beginning of the book has become bloated, so I'd recommend skimming it a bit since it's just history on epic financial crashes).
I'm planning to read:
7 Powers — Hamilton Helmer
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy — Richard Rumelt
The Outsiders — William N. Thorndike Jr.
The Intelligent Investor — Benjamin Graham
The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel
It's been interesting so far. The tough part for me is a the literature is all wrapped in "make your company more successful and profitable", and to be honest I couldn't give a shit about it that. I'm doing this for me, and because (especially on the age of AI) understanding this stuff is more important than ever.
*they actually use "Adjusted EBITDA" which is even more nonstandard and means they define the accounting however they want!
90% of the valuation is about Golden Dome
Enron would be proud...Theranos-level Transparency...
> They also have the most advanced internet infrastructure in the world and are poised to replace legacy ISPs and even mobile carriers in the coming decade.
That's quite the claim. I believe Starlink is a great business, the largest sat business for a long while to come (unlike space datacenter) but even if you are, very, very bullish on it, its not enough to justify the price.
You basically need to believe that:
- Launch market to 10x and grow faster then it ever has for decades
- Starlink goes from already being amazing systematically crushing terrestrial competition.
- xAi wins the AI race (this is almost absurdly optimistic)
- AI data-center becoming a insanely thing (also absurdly optimistic)
And even then this is hard to justify. And I certaintly don't believe 3. or 4. And 1 is a stretch. And while I believe in Starlink continued growth, terrestrial infrastructure still has lots of advantages for cities, where most people actually live.
One can easily imagine a similar scenario for cheap kg to orbit.
SpaceX is ahead, but its only technology, and nothing in Falcon 9 or even Starship suggest that nobody else can replicated it.
SpaceX themselves realized that launch itself isn't a big enough business, so they went themselves after space based comms. For SpaceX to stay ahead they would need to be technologically ahead on every single technological advanced.
But with companies like Amazon and so on involved, SpaceX is nothing like Standard Oil that was already the biggest company. SpaceX can not defend its monopoly on launch or space comms.
Comparing them to standard oil is silly.
Maybe some decent revenue offering sat to cell for the traditional carriers.
For the microseconds-chasers, there's microwave relay links, say between Chicago and New York (ref e.g. https://bullseye.ac/blog/economics/inside-the-world-of-high-...). Sending a signal up a few hundred km and down again a few hundred km adds way too much latency, and signal-hopping between fast-moving satellites adds way too much jitter for "such applications".
(and it's an area where it would need orders of magnitude improvements to address the density of cities, it's not really close at the moment)
In the past I've worked on consensus based protocols like the ones used in modern cellular systems; basically edge devices register with a controller system that then coordinates time slots for distribution/use of bandwidth for the limited spectrum. Adds a lot of complexity and requires highly accurate time synchronization mechanisms to have any hope of working, but they certainly could leverage something like that to further increase support at higher densities. That is, if they're not doing that already.
To decrease that latency in high density areas like cities they'd need to reach for something like terrestrial microwave relays to add more connection points from adjacent (in horizon) "freer skies"
And come on 100/10 is not bad despite the other 10gig fiber
On the other hand : "Starlink users typically experience download speeds between 45 and 280 Mbps, with a majority of users experiencing speeds over 100 Mbps. Upload speeds are typically between 10 and 30 Mbps."
That doesn't sound meaningfully different. What is the price difference ?
What I'm saying, is as soon as there is a real competitor pressure, ISPs can upgrade their deployments in under a year or two, even without touching buried copper. Of course they can also choose not to do that too :) .
A normal person will probably never notice the difference between 4g and 5g because of what they use their phone for, and giving every household a proper fiberoptic line is probably a much better quality of life improvement. But ISPs dont want that future. They want everyone to be connected to these neighborhood hubs that don't require last-100m-cables and expensive construction. The same can probably be said for Starlink. It's "Good enough", and that's good enough to get sales. They don't care about the quality of the product they deliver, or if fiberoptics are superior. They care about sales.
I suppose "data centers in space" is the current answer but again, I'm suspicious about its feasibility.
Barring that, until we have another "killer app" besides Starlink, like a giant orbital space station or a moonbase, I'm curious whether there is enough demand.
We used to value businesses by their current returns, usually dividends paid to shareholders. And we treated any statements about their future plans as interesting but not something anyone should trust.
Now we value stocks on what their price will do in the near future, because the primary return to shareholders is an increase in share price, effectively speculation rather than dividends as the method of returning value to shareholders. So we're incentivising companies to be constantly pushing their share price up (rather than paying decent dividends), which does bad things to both the company and the economy as a whole.
It's not how the system was intended to work and we find ourselves on a treadmill of constant growth that is killing everything good.
Only boring stable companies that have no growth like Coca-Cola make sense only valuing without further growth.
The post I was replying to was saying that SpaceX had no growth and therefore little value. That's a mindset that sees companies as speculative assets that are only valuable if their price is set to change in a way that a speculative profit can be made.
SpaceX is making money and doing well, the business fundamentals are working out, and it is valuable because of that. If it turns into a boring, stable, company then that's a good thing - it's less likely to spend $10B of shareholder funds chasing some sci-fi pipe dream (instead of, say, spending $1B testing its assumptions first) in the hope of continuing to be valued as a "high-growth" stock.
The problem with SpaceX is that its valuation is almost entirely driven by its expected future growth. For 2025 SpaceX reported EBITDA of USD 7.5 billion. Other mature aerospace companies (Lockheed, Northman, Airbus, Boeing etc.) are currently valued as ~19x EBITDA (i.e., Market Cap / EBITDA is ~19x). But SpaceX is being valued at 166x EBITDA (USD 1.25 trillion market cap / USD 7.5 billion EBITDA).
What drives this difference in valuation? The answer is quite simple, investors expect the EBITDA to grow and quite rapidly. EBITDA could grow via higher margins (EBITDA margins is EBITDA / Revenue, and for SpaceX it is already a decent 50%), but even at 100% EBITDA margin (i.e., zero operating cost) its valuation multiple would b 83x EBITDA. So the only way to justify SpaceX valuation is if its revenue grows and gorws rapidly.
A quick back of the envelop calculation would shows that investors expect SpaceX revenue to grow at minimum of 65-70% annually for the next 5 years. If the revenue grows at less than that the investors are unlikely to earn a good return on their investment.
Spacex is making $10 billion. That does not give it a value of $1.75 trillion.
The $1.75 trillion value is wholly based on speculation about its future growth.
From my perspective, it's all just collective gambling when it comes down to it for tech IPOs these days. The market trends are just as much a popularity game as they are anything else.
Not true. They have to build a new constellation, every four years, at a cost of 8 billion dollars, and that is not accounted for.
Their main customer is...them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613231
So of course we price businesses based on the expected long term value of the shares, as best as we can guess it. But the fact that a company degrades in value as it "overgrows", and engorges itself to become an entity that can't innovate or do anything efficiently in itself goes into the price too. It's not as if a place like IBM doens't want to grow: We just know they won't.
As for speculation rather than dividends, I suspect the real medium why this happens isn't just need for infinite growth: Again, as growth expectations slow down, price moderates: See Paypal vs Stripe. The issue is mroe of a principal-agent situation, as it's very difficult for the median shareholder to, say, force Zuck to stop spending money on the metaverse. And it's not just at the top level: We have a lot of incentives in organizations for people to push for more hires, even when there's very little value to be had. Anyone with a long career can see how much less tense a growing company is that one that has decided its headcount is stuck for a long time, or possibly shrinking.
Principal Agent problems are just much more annoying to put a blame on, because instead of being able to blame some exec all on their own, we get to look at ourselves too, and how what is good for us differs so much from what is good for employers too. The blame is spread thinly, and the behaviors that would lead to more efficient companies are also worse for workers. Then it's suddenly people easier to like, and we don't like where "try to be profitable at the most optimal size" takes us.
Investing in future prospects encourages companies to plan for the future, rather than extract what they can from the present. The stock price is a big motivation for execs, so they can only invest in R&D if the market understands why it makes sense to spend money now in expectation of future profits.
The East India company (an example of capitalism gone very very wrong) was speculatively founded with £4m (in today’s money) and went on to corner half of global trade.
This rose-tinted past of honest capitalism did not exist.
Capitalism breeds monopolies by rewarding first movers with economic advantages via feedback loop. This is how the system is designed to work, always has been, always will be.
If you buy something, do nothing with it, and then sell it for a profit, we should tax that profit at 90% ish.
Data centers in orbit certainly seem like a pipe dream, but SpaceX certainly has the technology it needs to put them there, and that's a huge competitive advantage (like it was for Starlink) if they do turn out to be feasible.
I'll leave up to the reader to put them on the appropriate list.
He personally might have made money on Cybertrucks, too.
longer list: https://elonmusk.today/
To this, they need humans operating the space side, the base station, they need base stations etc.
It is affected by weather as well.
Its not a 'no-brainer' and while space x showed its somehow a business, amazon and others are entering this space now too. So they never had a first mover financial advantage making big bucks and others are coming which will drive customer base and margin down.
And data center in orbit is not just a pipe dream, its stupid on a whole new level. Smart would have been to build like a DC City in the middle of the USA were its super cheap and introducing the necessary infrastructure to it. But alone the R&D, the sending it up there, solving hard space problems just to not being able to touch hardware when it fails, man thats stupidity on a whole new level.
Dropping the cost to launch (replacement sats etc) by continuing to take greater piece of all total space launches along with large step function capacity refinements with each new rocket generation, means they will continue to push the economics in their favor. $300k/sat might not be worth it, but unless there's a number of back to back unmitigated disasters with their new rockets (totally possible given the cost of getting it wrong) launch costs will continue to drop as they iterate. Even in the worst case where starship never works, they can still salvage and continually refine their current proven designs.
That said, I do not trust their IPO valuations at all. I have enormous respect for what SpaceX has accomplished in such a short time span. When the US government deprioritized further space R&D for all launch vehicles and relied entirely on Russian launch vehicles, I honestly thought it was the end of an era of innovation in space in my (current) country. I'm glad I was wrong to some extent, even if it means an over reliance on the private sector to make further progress.
You may point out that private space ventures sadly have similar problems to ceding to foreign nations, and you wouldn't be wrong. The only silver lining for me is getting to see continued progress in my lifetime. It doesn't take all the sting out of government funding drying up for space launch vehicles, especially when our other budgets like defense are so insane, but I'll take it at face value as a victory for humanity to continually improve space capabilities at scale in any form.
But it would be so much better if the person behind this would have more character.
That said, SpaceX engineers managing to perform impressive feats in manned and unmanned space travel still stands as something to be lauded in my book, even if their leadership deserves none of it. These feats are made _more impressive_ given the poor, child-like behavior found in their particular brand of leadership rather than less.
The employees of SpaceX have made their views about leadership very well known several times now, often with real consequences to themselves and their families. We live in unfortunate times. I'll take my slivers of hope for humanities continued advancement in space travel where I can however, even as it seems the fabric of society further unravels.
There’s no way. Every proposal is either a bid for capital via moonshot enthusiasm or a stalking horse for something else, and these days I wouldn’t be surprised if it was orbital weapons platforms in disguise.
What was the expected value of investing in a colony in the Americas? It’s very hard to quantify. Most of them failed, but some people got very very rich.
I think it's worse than what you're saying. It's almost impossible to have an objective discussion on any technology he touches in a online forum without someone mentioning his behaviors. Godwins law.
And I'll just pre-empt any argument about how Elon is not a neo-nazi because that gesture he did on that stage wasn't a Hitler salute or whatever, I'd suggest any potential person wanting to argue that to save their breath. Or whatever other arguments one can possibly come up with to excuse some of the statements and actions of Elon.
As for an objective discussion about the tech he's involved with, he has objectively ruined any good reputation and potential goodwill people had for... what exactly?
It's fine if all you (impersonal) want to do is talk about how cool SpaceX's rockers and whatnot are, but one shouldn't be surprised if others get uneasy due to the entity behind said rockets or that they wish to discuss that.
To complete the Godwin quota, it's like trying to have an "objective discussion" about the V2 rocket while ignoring that those rockets were built by the quite literal Nazis for their war capacity. And that some of the scientists and engineers working on said project, built by slave labour, ended up in America and the USSR due to operations Paperclip and Osoaviakhim respectively.
Also which jury is still out on starship ? I haven’t read any serious criticism that suggests there are insurmountable technical obstacles to it working. Timelines and the exact final cost-to-orbit are still debatable I guess ?
The achievements of the program so far and the infrastructure currently under construction in Starbase and the cape are seriously impressive. This is no speculative, skunkworks endeavour.
> Also which jury is still out on starship ? I haven’t read any serious criticism that suggests there are insurmountable technical obstacles to it working. Timelines and the exact final cost-to-orbit are still debatable I guess ?
There are also other space companies outside of SpaceX who have innovated and reduced the cost of mass to orbit.
Just trying to add the perspective that while yes, SpaceX is impressive, there are also other companies and this hero-like worship of SpaceX (or any other company/person) is not great.
They should be easy to name then. I can’t think of any. Can you?
I hate the guy. I think spacex is revolutionary. Both can be true. It doesn’t mean I am hero worshipping anyone or any company.
For anything beyond Earth orbit, they also need to demonstrate orbital refueling.
I've seen articles raising technical concerns about all of these, but I'm not enough of an expert myself to have an opinion.
The $16B is not profit its revenue, and I strongly suggest to learn the difference before investing. The $8B figure is EBITDA, also known as, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, AND amortization.
For a company running around 9500 LEO satellites with a less than 5 year lifespan, depreciation is the business.
Their FCC filings show that about 500 satellites deorbited just in the first of half of 2025 alone, and they were all under 5 years old. The estimates for constellation sustenance are currently at $5-8B per year in satellite manufacturing (about $500K each) and launch costs are about $3M each. That is the real capex that EBITDA hides. Net income has never been disclosed and probably for good reason...
And lets not even mention the $19 billion EchoStar acquisition who is almost certainly! not included in the $8 billion EBITDA figures reported...
The most critical is that xAI is excluded from the number. XAI had a $1.46B net loss in Q3 2025 on just $107M in revenue, accelerating from $1B the prior quarter. They were burning $1B a month at the time of filing. This pig was then merged into SpaceX in Feb 2026 along with X/Twitter. So start with $8B EBITDA, subtract $5-8B satellite replacement, subtract $4-6B per year in xAI losses, subtract interest and taxes specially amortization and you are very very deep in the red. Once audited financials go public, every analyst with a calculator and a working brain will see this.
Also the revenue is largely circular... Over 70% of Falcon 9 launches in 2025 were internal Starlink missions so SpaceX is its own biggest customer. Starlink is 70% of total revenue. The so called "launch business" and "internet business" are the same capital cycle booked as two revenue lines ;-)
Replace legacy ISPs? Really? Starlink has 0.2% residential market share after 5 years, with declining ARPU ($85 avg vs $120 US) and congestion already emerging at 10M subs. It is a niche rural/maritime ISP, not an AT&T killer.
And on the valuation? NVIDIA for example, who has an almost actual monopoly on AI chips, with $216B revenue, and $120B net income, at 56% margins, trades at 20x revenue. Tesla…. already considered absurdly overvalued at P/E 355, trades at 15x. Amazon at 3x. Meta at 10x. SpaceX wants 110x !! times revenue, with no audited financials, unknown net income, and a freshly absorbed money losing AI company. Even on bullish 2026 projected revenue of $24B, it's 73x so nearly 4x NVIDIA multiple, and NVIDIA actually prints profit...
Starship on another side is very very far from routine... 11 flights, 5 failures. But notice on thing...In 2025 alone on Flight 7 the upper stage exploded from harmonic vibrations. Then Flight 8 exploded from propellant mixing. Flight 9 was destroyed on reentry...Ship 36 exploded on test stand ...the first V3 booster exploded during pressure testing and was scrapped.
See a pattern here? Each failure from a different root cause. So multiple unsolved failure modes, not iteration. It has never reached orbit, never caught a ship, never demonstrated orbital refueling.
This offering is the most scandalous ever and the structure tells you everything. The filing is confidential, REAL financials only need to go public 15 days before the roadshow. Nasdaq is literally changing its index rules effective May 1 to allow a fast track Nasdaq-100 entry in 15 trading days. This is a rule that never existed before, and is made for this IPO, forcing billions in passive index buying on day one.
Public float is just 3% to 4%. This is one of the tightest floats for any major US IPO in modern history, and I have been following the markets for 20 years. They do 30% retail allocation what is three times the norm and tells you exactly who the target buyer is.
Given this level of rule bending, dont be shocked if the S-1 with real audited numbers quietly drops at the last legally permissible moment, maybe minutes before the IPO? ensuring hype and retail commitments are fully baked, before anyone really looks at what the financials actually say.
It will be a wildly successful IPO. Same playbook as Tesla 2010, just with more zeros and fewer functioning prototypes.
And I don't think the multiple failure causes mean they aren't iterating. They're making changes with every launch. It might mean that everything's a tradeoff, and a lot of times when you fix one thing, you create a problem somewhere else. Building a fully, rapidly reusable rocket is a really difficult task.
Something you didn't mention is that even on the "successful" flights they suffered some damage on reentry. They'll have to fix that if they want rapid reuse, which is essential for the super low costs Elon estimates.
I'm not sure what you mean by "never caught a ship" but they did catch a landing first stage with their launch tower, which was a pretty fancy trick nobody had tried before.
Solid comment on the ISP business but this is straight up bullshit. They absolutely better have different root causes. That’s exactly what iteration looks like. Blowing up subsequent ships for the same problem would be incompetence.
Also the ship has very explicitly been held from an orbital trajectory to ensure predictable reentry in the event of no re-engine light. It’s very apparent from external analysis it was capable of the extra few seconds of engine runtime for an elliptical orbit.
Wouldn't it be worse if it was all from the same root cause. That would suggest they can't figure out how to fix the problem. Multiple failures with different root causes provide almost optimal experimental data. I'm not saying the failures are necessarily good for SpaceX, but we are seeing progress and a willingness to push the envelope.
This IPO makes me more worried about the future of SpaceX then experimental rockets blowing up. That said, I can see why some people will invest in SpaceX, SpaceX has a significant lead in the space race and may end up gaining a near monopoly on access to space.
I'll stop there, because Musk is much-loved by the internet, but to pull on this string of systemic risk, let me see if I can walk through my thoughts here:
Nasdaq Inc. (the exchange operator) and Nasdaq-100 (the index) are not independent entities with separate interests. Nasdaq owns and operates the index. A SpaceX listing would be a major win for Nasdaq, reinforcing its dominance in IPOs and billions in licensing fees - Invesco QQQ Trust alone has over $300 billion. Every basis point of licensing fee on that is enormous static income. When SpaceX says "change the rules for me or I list on NYSE," that's a threat to both the exchange listing fees and the downstream index licensing revenue.
So the competition here is between index operators (SP500 is actively managed by an actual steering group, so rules changes aren't as big a whoop) for who can net the biggest pool of new shares so that their passive income on index license fees can get maximally farmed. The actual thing the money comes from - retail index investors - don't figure in this equation at all. It's a systemic risk of replacing actively managed funds with consumer 401k products, risk that requires active legislation and law enforcement for there to even be a fair marketplace; markets require regulations, after all[1].
If you're thinking this sounds a little like the competition between the ratings agencies circa 2008 to see who can award the most AAA ratings, you're in the right ballpark. It wouldn't even be possible if SpaceX wasn't onboarding basically every big player in this travesty: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup. In fact, I suspect that this cabal of villains are the ones testing the x{N} float idea that has everyone up in arms - they see a golden plan here to smash the window and hit the road before the sirens go off.
And that's the problem with invasives. They don't participate in the system at hand; they monkey with the fundamentals. Compete with other plants? Nah, I poison all the soil where I grow. Not enough substrate? Kill all the vertebrates with symbiont viruses so the world turns into Fungusland. And even if the retail investor wins, that means a massive flight from NASDAQ, which even I have been double checking in my tiny little pool of casino winnings. But triggering a flight from every index everywhere? That would not be bright. But, well, that's the other thing about invasives, right? They're not long term thinkers.
[1] I suppose this has become a political point too, hasn't it? Well, ride with me for a bit.
If you follow the war in Ukraine, there is absolutely no denying that Starlink is a total gamechanger. Mostly because it's inherently hard to jam, but also got acceptable latency allowing for unrestricted FPV strikes. Because of this, Ukraine seems to have achieved Russian air-defense degradation to the point of limited "free hunting" in the deep.
In that use case, even "AI in space" kinda make sense to me, for future drone developments. One-way drones don't have to waste expensive compute for autonomy, when the compute can be in space above. This would save one RTT for drone control, too. For cheap, jamming resistant swarm (semi-)autonomy, to overwhelm AD, it seems like the perfect solution.
The cat is out of the bag, there is no way the military will ever let go of this capability. Cheap drones are the future, LEO sats provide the comms. There will be long running service contracts.
I see the civilian use rather as a "peace time" subsidiary, now, but the main customer will be the military. And due to SpaceX's launch platform and commercial offering, it's giving the US a hard technological edge in warfare, since it's difficult to afford a LEO sat network without cheap launches and civilian co-pay.
I am too stupid to make a proper economic argument, but it seems like a clever and sustainable business model :D Would love to hear your thoughts!
Famous last words. https://t.me/kcpn2014/3890 The [Russian] Analytical Center of KCPN has conducted a large-scale study of the [Ukrainian] hidden military infrastructure, which provides Ukrainian forces with stable communications along the entire line of contact. The focus is on the “BakhmutTelecom” project — a military mobile network operator (3G and 4G) that was deployed practically under our noses back in 2023. We often attribute many of the enemy’s successes to Starlink, although in reality these are the result of organizational, not technological, advantages.
The civilian cover for “BakhmutTelecom” is J&Y LLC, which in fact serves as infrastructure for purely military tasks. The network comprises around 2,500 towers, 36 or 50 meters tall, arranged in three tiers. They are interconnected via underground fiber-optic cables and microwave relay links.
Yet, the Russian cut-off from Starlink was incredibly notable, organizationally and the recovered FP-1/FP-2 drones featured Starlink terminals, so no use denying that.
Ukraine certainly didn't build 3G/4G in occupied territory. Consider the radio horizon for a 50m tower. In proximity to targets, it absolutely can be jammed, and Russia is very capable of doing so. We see none of that in those deep strikes. Those drones seem to be completely resistant to EW, which implies a connection from above (can only be effectively jammed from above AFAIK). The latency seems notable, but stable.
Now, of course, Starlink alone wouldn't have defeated AD by itself, magically. That's mostly good strategy and intel. However, Starlink made those FP-1/FP-2 deep strikes way more effective and simple (compared to using relays and mesh networking, hoping EW hasn't caught up). Starlink allows to have stable video feeds until impact. No need for autonomy, radio tracking, terrain mapping... just a reusable pilot and a cheap drone. That's huge and a significant tech advantage. If Russia had this (and the intel) for their overwhelming numbers of Geran drones, Ukraine would be in a very bad situation, I think.
Apart from that, Starlink was also instrumental in exfiltrating information about the Iranian protests. It's just a jamming/censorship resistant technology evidently effective against most competent adversaries.
That said, due to the importance of Starlink, I think escalation to/focus on orbit denial attacks seems likely, for any nation which can't afford their own LEO sat network, or existentially utilizes censorship/information control. Especially since (low) LEO debris will deorbit rather timely, it's not exactly a permanent damage to human space flight. Therefore Starlink's military success may be self-limiting and temporal, since the satellites themself are not at all immune to asymmetric attacks.
Luckily these specific spacex LEO sats decay pretty rapidly (unless they've made them more advanced recently, I haven't followed closely as of late.) So I guess they'll keep themselves busy at least refreshing the fleet.
The sad reality I'm coming to realize is that there is very little real and quality analysis, critical but with open eyes on the future. Most of it is just pandering to crowds. The war in Iran is the latest example - you have one side saying Iran is almost done, and the other that they're winning. Who's right? Doesn't matter, being correct is not the point.
I'm convinced we're in some kind of propaganda machine right now.
>> before Elon build Tesla.
He bought the company, they already had electric cars.
The IPO will go great, because the company will float a fairly small issuance. The big shareholders will not immediately sell. They will hold on and maybe even buy to support the price.
Then, after 15 days, it will enter the indexes and everyone's 401k will start auto-buying this stock.
You might say this is an obvious flaw in how the indexes work if they start immediately accept a brand new IPOed stock with limited float. You'd be right, which is why they won't list for a year.
At least they wouldn't until Elon got them to change their rules: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-30/nasdaq-cl...
You will be an investor in spacex and xai which it bought.
Fun fact, Xai net loss 6 billion dollars per year and SpaceX net profit 8 billion on a good year (https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-xai-posts-net-quart... https://www.globalbankingandfinance.com/spacex-registers-tak...)
If you remember xai, it's that company currently being sued for the undressing kids feature (https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/895639/x... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_sexual_deepfake_scandal) in its flagship product. By the way the feature is still enabled apparently
Is there something about why spacex wants to go public ? if not then this is definitely about xai... to hide unprofitability and offload it on general public ASAP.
So you've got a full year to wait on that index fund, assuming they don't cave.
They have instituted rules and gone back on them eventually (most notably for several years they had a "no going public with different classes of voting shares designed to allow control forever, if IPO is after today" rule that they eventually dropped) but they are generally pretty good about following rules.
- "Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait."
Honoré de BalzacFor general investors if this is going to eventually happen, the earlier the indexes buy in the better. Otherwise more sophisticated investors will buy ahead of the indexes and grab the profit.
Edit: wait, but QQQ is float adjusted?
What are the biggest not-float-adjusted index funds?
If the index fund is tracking some proxy that is float weighted, isn't that what matters? At least when it comes to people's money.
They track a float weighted approximation of it
(Typically - I thought QQQ did based on your earlier comment, but it also is float weighted)
blind purchases are not going to happen. people assume passive indexing is brainless, but it isnt.
There are ways to gain exposure to a single stock without directly purchasing shares, options and swaps being the most common. Owning the actual shares makes things easy for the fund operators, but there are other ways.
The market simply doesn’t have enough people actively investing because it rewards mass stupidity over generating meaningful returns.
https://companiesmarketcap.com
Can you provide an example of any of the businesses on that are on that list due to "mass stupidity"? They all seem to operate factories, employ many highly qualified people, and make a material difference in many or even most people's lives around the world.
Meanwhile, SNAP has returned -14.98% per year to its shareholders since it IPO'd (Jun 3 2017), and at an $8.27B market cap, it makes up a negligible portion of any broad market index fund, so not sure how SNAP's shareholders have been rewarded by mass stupidity, especially given that the founders still own half of the business. They would have been far better off liquidating their shares and investing in SP500.
I spent many words explaining that the list of businesses at the top are basically at the top of their game, worldwide.
The company has recently successfully executed at making and selling a new type of product, so it is not unreasonable for investors to bet on further advancements.
Or maybe they think the leader is just sufficiently willing to be or adept at being corrupt that they will also benefit from his shenanigans.
The investment thesis for Tesla is absurd. They built the market cap on hype and it got big enough that it remains a force. It’s a flailing company, kept afloat by bullshit.
The bigger issue is the death of small cap. Massive venture, sovereign wealth and PE funds don’t need the public market capital anymore, so they harvest the vslue and spit out the company late in the value cycle.
Snap, cool as it is, is a social media loser. The investors cashed out their shares to the public, who took the loss.
Maybe, or maybe they are one of the few businesses people want to bet on to be able to create new streams of revenue. Intel used to be big, and now it isn’t. It being big didn’t help stop its demise.
> The investors cashed out their shares to the public, who took the loss.
They didn’t. The biggest investors, the founders, still have almost 50% of the shares. Also, SNAP peaked at $131B in September 2021, 2 years after SNAP went public at $27B.
Would you have written then that “The investors cashed out their shares to the public, who took the loss”?
Of course not. Because index fund investors did not cause it to go to $131B, and they didn’t cause it to go to $6B.
> so they harvest the vslue and spit out the company late in the value cycle.
So SNAP executives IPO’d at $27B, and over the next 4 years, the market cap increased to $131B, which anyone in the public could have benefited from.
Yet now you are saying SNAP execs are wrong for selling their equity over time?
It doesn’t seem like there is any winning here for SNAP’s executives, even though they gave the public the ability to quadruple their money in 4 years. What more can you ask for?
Nevermind SpaceX, which at least have some importance for US defense industry, but xAI ? We will be investing in Elon's private venture, at the price that he himself set and which is at least 2 orders of magnitude too high...
But then you'd also be basically betting against the entire tech sector, and really the entire US economy and against the value add of AI. That kind of bet is much more difficult to swallow.
I am confident some companies will make bank with AI. I am also confident xAI is not one of those.
It's as if you said "if you don't think Lycos is a good business you don't think search engines can work in general".
This is only further demonstrated by their excellent leverage of Gemini. Google continues to succeed at being Google.
No, I’m no Google fan, but it’s revisionist history to say they didn’t have the best search engine.
The problem was that yahoo killed it. They shut down its crawler and it started going stale.
Plus they didn't have as good a solution to index spam as Google's pagerank.
It was basically a story of product developing a lead, getting sold for a quick buck, then the acquirer shuts down innovation and tries to milk it, with bad timing because google was chomping at its heels.
I'm not trying to rewrite history either, but this makes me wonder how deeply the Google lore really affected some people.
I'm in my late 30s, so fair enough. I was there, but not really "there" to see what happened. My understanding and memory was that there was good word-of-mouth in the 90s because it was marginally better. By around 2000, the media was strongly pushing this narrative about Google being this great technological triumph with their PageRank algorithm. This coincided with AdWords being rolled out, dotcom hype, and people generally taking SEO more seriously while Google was best positioned to take advantage.
Now, I'm not saying I know much but I'd be very surprised to hear that nobody else ever thought about setting up a scheme with Markov chains to measure "link juice". That seems like low-hanging fruit for just about any students excited about the topic, but again what do I know. To me, the Google story was always more of a business success than anything else. They got so much praise and so effectively leveraged their nerd cred that people optimized for their results and it all snowballed from there.
This time around with LLMs, they can't claim to have the best. The space is way too volatile. What they can say is everyone uses it because everyone eventually searches on Google, if not by default. Google just has to be good enough and the easiest to use.
Then Google hit. Materially every person who used it stopped using their previous favorite search engine within 1-2 uses. It spread like wildfire. It was fast, accurate, and the results weren't cluttered (aka lightweight, aka friendly for people on dialup). Some competitors at the time were showing display ads on search results pages.
Google did not have to advertise that I can recall. It was like one day, search was like the auto market : lots of makes, types, etc. The next day it was all Google. It happened really fast in my recollection.
And to your point -- as far as I can recall, the big competitors simply did not try to clone Google. They kept their cluttered pages and did not optimize performance. Excite pivoted to home Internet via a merger with @Home.
A couple of close analogs you may have seen up close. AWS for having a lane virtually to themselves for a long time. Azure & Google & IBM etc. didn't really even suit up until AWS was entrenched reminds me of Yahoo! etc. sticking to their portal strategy well past its sell-by. ChatGPT for the speed of adoption. Google was like a combination of these two.
The word of mouth was real. I was working in tech at the time, and had Google recommended to me by a mate. I tried it, and it rocked. This would be about 1996, I guess, somewhen around then.
Every techie converted to Google, and we converted our friends and family. Sure they got media coverage, but remember at that time journos had very little clue about tech and relied on their techie friends and family for tips about what was going on. And, obviously, the internet was the big story at the time. I would absolutely not be surprised if it turned out that Google paid nothing for media coverage and were fighting off journos clamouring for interviews.
As far as I'm aware, PageRank was a completely unique innovation that no-one else had done or tried before. There may have been imitators, but they never got the traction that Google did.
By 2000, and AdWords and all the rest, Google was already the dominant search engine, at least with tech folks. SEO was just beginning around this time, because of that dominance.
And yeah, Gemini is an also-ran, despite all the money and tech expertise Google have thrown at it. It'll be interesting to see if they cancel it, like they have other products that have not done as well in the market (G+ being the classic case). Same for Meta (and, well, Meta).
I built in 1996 as an internship, it all ran as some perl scripts, and I had no idea what I was doing, of course, I was 17. I just thought it was clever to use the links between pages as a signal to the search engine. I'd never heard of citation analysis.
The internet had just blown up. CompSci programs at major universities were still teaching Fortran and COBOL. Linux had its very first release in 1991 I think (when the initial Google folks were in high school), people knew what BSD stood for back then, web protocols were not horribly dissimilar to the Wild West, and don’t even get me started on web standards.
In addition to all of that, they actually fixed search. There was this golden era where searching worked. The other responses you’ve had so far are much more enlightening than mine, I’m spent. I didn’t meant to come off as an ass, it’s interesting to hear your perspective on this.
I was orders of magnitude better. It is that simple.
I think google's thing was that they got the idea, the math, and the way to do it in a practical way at scale.
I'm a bit older than you and I remember when google came out and it was so far ahead of the competition it was unbelievable.
So Google's current trajectory does not bode well for them, as far as I'm concerned.
I think Google _did_ succeed as a better search engine, but ,y point was just that even if you think a company won't do well it does not imply the whole sector won't.
You can consider the example of Nikola/electric trucks, if you disagree on google/search engines :)
That's not the whole explanation for their success, though. They could have cratered after that for all sorts of reasons. A large part of how they succeeded was the discovery of the ad model. A lot of people forget that ads were all manually negotiated before Google offered self-serve ad creation (Overture did the bidding system first, but Google was better).
They also starting building on "big data" very early on; AdWords reused the same tech that drove relevance ranking (PageRank and click-through feedback loop), so by the time competitors were scrambling to compete, Google had amassed tons of organic data that were only available thanks to their scale, and not something competitors could bootstrap.
But none of that would have mattered if the product wasn't good. I started using Google around 1998. The childish design was off-putting at first, and made me feel uncertain about whether it was a serious brand that would last — this was the age where new search engines appeared all the time (I used HotBot a lot myself) — but the search quality and speed was undeniable.
Surely you're going to buy long Put options with that confidence, right?
And if the thesis of "it's going to look good for the first 15 days" holds, you can indeed be very profitable by e.g. buying ATM puts. (The problem being that markets don't like sticking to time tables just to accommodate your investment thesis ;)
So yes, you'll be able to take a bearish position fairly shortly after the IPO.
But for the folks who are dead convinced it's all just a scam and it will quickly collapse, that's a way to put their money where their mouth is.
Hasn't the surprising lack of value add been discussed with increasing frequency?
Politically, it differs quite a bit from other models.[0] It's right leaning, although it's closer neutral than other models, defining what neutral is a challenge though.
twitter data is 70%+ bots (probably more than that now)
I don't think calling defining neutral a 'challenge' does the question justice - neutral will always be context-dependent, and what may be in the center of the Overton window of one society may be unpopular or even highly illegal in a different society.
Maybe that shows up as being more right leaning than the competition.
see: democratic people's republic of korea, the chinese communist party, american first
If you’re not one of the nerds stuck in 2014, and still enthralled with the Elon reality field and the Mars grift, taxi grift, robot laundry grift, etc, it’s pretty obvious.
The company is irrelevant. The focus should be on the money making scheme
(actually, 46,565.74 right now)
Gotta be accurate. Just saying 50,000 implies her incoherent rant was even a little bit based in reality.
It’s being extensively talked about and debated. It hasn’t entered the mainstream discourse because it’s too technical.
It needs to enter the inbox of a grand jury docket.
Aware of what? A rule change that has been asked for long before Elon stepped foot into the White House? Just because the collective brain rot and Elon Derangement Syndrome on BlueSky is calling it a "scandal" doesn't make it so.
SpaceX are widely reported to be planning to raise $75Billion in new capital. It may seem small a % for the valuation target. However that is about 3 times previous highest raise of $29B when Saudi Aramco went public few years back. The market simply may not be that deep[1]
There is a good chance this one becomes the Wework of this decade. The valuation, amount being raised, cooling interests in AI, and middle eastern capital changing priorities, interest rate outlook for the rest of the decade. These are all strong head winds to overcome even when not raising the largest ever amount in an IPO.
That is not say that it is destined to fail, Elon is excellent salesman of vision when fundamentals are weak, There is no better proof than Tesla P/E .
It is by no means clear this would be successful or not. The valuation, funds being raised, future growth potential are all not based on just SpaceX core businesses which would have been an easy sell.
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[1] i.e. it could be still under-subscribed even if everyone buys into the vision, growth projections, is comfortable with valuation gets fully onboard including retail.
Even in this best case scenario SpaceX would have to sell at the lower end of the target range or go even lower and still end up being short matter what, because there could simply be not enough money in the market.
SpaceX has dramatically lowered the cost of launching things into space. They are still the leader here. They can put a kg into orbit cheaper than anyone, even heavily subsidized state operations (EU and China).
Their order book continues to be full. Every single launch vehicle they roll off the line was pre-sold years ago, including its re-use flights.
I agree that Elon is their biggest potential problem and a big risk but their launch business is sound and wildly successful. If you believe access to space will be a growing segment of the economy in the future it isn't exactly a bad investment.
I remember all the people putting Tesla down when they IPO'd. I bought $4k of stock (all I could afford at that time). Sold $100k of it a few years ago, still have the other half worth near $220k. Their numbers at IPO time were garbage and it wasn't clear they would even survive. Then they started shipping hundreds of thousands then a million cars.
YMMV, consider all sides and make your own judgement. Just be careful about trusting the anti-SpaceX case. Even if everyone is technically correct about them it can still be a huge miss not to invest! The future is not static and if they can put the raised capital to productive use the IPO could end up being a fantastic deal. And FWIW I also agree the largest immediate risk is they are over-valued. Only time will tell on that front.
These people and their endeavors are thoroughly, irredeemably corrupt. It’s nice you got a taste, but their impact on society has been calamitous, and will take decades to recover (if at all).
In 2024 66% of their launches were for Starlink. So it’s not quite correct to suggest there’s a vibrant external market for their product, a lot of it is sort of self dealing.
There is a very large demand for launch services. SpaceX balances launching customers and launching Starlink. It's not like they give every launch slot to customers and then launches Starlink whenever there's an opening they couldn't fill.
It's not like they're subsidizing some experimental internal project. Starlink is the majority of their profits and growing fast.
The problem is launch market is not worth 1.5+ trillion though, you need much more than just starlink and all the satellites today to justify that .
You and other early investors who had the opportunity to get in early may come of well in this and it was a good bet then.
However it is hard to see why rest of us should get in at $1.5T, the downside risks are far more than upside potential at this price .
It seems logical that there could/will be far more demand for launch if the price were lower. Prices are quite extreme currently, a standard 3U cubesat (loaf of bread size) is $300k and that's just for orbit.
There could be lots of startups that want to try robotic space mining but launch costs just make that mostly impossible currently so there are only a select few. It's like valuing the Dutch East India company based on the trade volumes in 1603. Of course people are not going to be buying much pepper or nutmeg if it costs them weeks of labor, but build lots of reusable ships, and with each voyage, more people can afford your pepper and nutmeg until it's a common household item.
discounted future cash flows is discounted by risk. There is a lot of risk on growing future revenue is the point.
>seems logical that there could/will be far more demand for launch if the price were lower.
This thesis hasn't played out much in the 10 years since Falcon landed in first 2015.
The non Starlink component of revenue has not massively grown beyond what size the market in 2015 to today. SpaceX isn't lowering launch price to induce demand beyond out being the cheapest just by enough, they would be going lower if cost was the only barrier for more revenue.
It not that businesses aren't possible there at lower launch prices. Starlink is testament that it is.
The problem is that rest of the world is not able to innovate fast enough to take advantage of it even after 10 years. The industry struggles with things like manufacturing satellites at scale or raising money for it, or executing on innovation etc.
What that means for SpaceX is that even if launch costs are cheaper than now, the launch market simply may not grow quick enough for the valuation number to make sense. They would need to enter a lot of new markets directly and be their own launch customer beyond Starlink. This comes with its own set of execution, regulatory and other risks. The data-center[1] in space play is an attempt to do this.
Either DC play or something else, they will need to find and sustain a large business to grow, maybe they will, maybe not.
It is not very clear now and that is a lot of risk so any future cash flow projection has to be discounted heavily.
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[1] I am not qualified to comment on the technical feasibility, however to analyze the company finances that is not needed, it is just one more risk factor, depending on how you feel you can assign 0 or 1 or anything in between.
It did play out: there are many more launches today, it's 5x in 20 years. The 75% of SpaceX starlink launches (which account for nearly 50% of all launches) were quietly financed by their other launch customers, exactly because the real cost to launch dropped so much.
That doesn't mean you're wrong, but you do seem to forget that SpaceX, as its own customer, knows the number of launches is going to rise exponentially. They obviously choose to manufacture for where the market _will be_, while you don't see the market before its there. Which is good for them.
Even the most highly company in the world Nvidia is less than 3x that valuation, so it's not a good comparison with Tesla's IPO.
It's very different from WeWork which was basically just subletting office space with beer taps. At least SpaceX had done significant stuff with the rockets and Starlink.
My comment was that it is possible that by trying/becoming public SpaceX also will go through that same process once their numbers become available.
Wow that was a polite way to say that
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/ai-goldman-sachs-stocks-ind...
SPXXAI, which lets you invest in the S&P 500 benchmark index minus all things AI
It won’t exclude from regular indexes, but it will exclude from the direct indexing. I’ve been using it to exclude NVDA ever since it peaked (or at least reached the peak valuation I’m comfortable with)
Wealthfront’s portfolio minimum used to be $100k, but I think they have a new direct indexing product with a $5k minimum.
I looked into it, but there are gotchas with wash sale rules and taxes. You really need $500k-$1M to avoid tracking errors. End of the day, the overhead seemed more problematic than the problem, so I ended up increasing my global allocation instead.
- buy shortly after the IPO, ideally less than 15 days
- and sell less than 6 months later when lockups would end and insiders are set to cash out?
If you own a NASDAQ fund or total US stock market fund, you will have exposure to SpaceX.
This is not a given.
Many people have many different kinds of investments inside a 401k. Your 401k can own a rental property. Or gold. Or, in a more mundane scenario, the Russell 2000.
If it weren't for the glacial pace of plan administrators and plan holding companies there would be an opportunity for a fund provider to offer "S&P500exSpaceX". It's just another index, after all ...
“Industry professionals, including asset managers and institutional passive portfolio managers, were mostly supportive of the Fast Entry proposal and proposed timing,” Nasdaq said in the statement.
15 days vs 90 days isn't some huge shift nor is it inherently some "flaw." These changes have been asked for long before Elon entered the White House.
Smells like great fiduciary responsibility!
So SpaceX will be listed and soon on the index. He learned how getting into S&P500 index was a rocket ship for Tesla. So he bent the rules for SpaceX.
So when the market crashes. It’s gonna be fast because of a couple of tech companies.
Let’s see if OpenAI has enough clout and billions to bribe SEC to bend rules for them.
Every year US becomes more of a Banana republic.
It could be a good thing as it is very diversified but it can also open the whole thing up to a lot of risk factors.
https://www.aravolta.com/blog/datacenters-in-space
As it stands, most if not all institutional and journalistic research around this topic I would consider compromised because they’re in some way or another financially interested in this becoming the next big thing. Aravolta included. That’s why most articles will counter each hard constraint with a handful of hopeful speculations.
As for pure scientific analysis, like the Scott Manley one, they tend to entertain themselves too much with the physics and mathematics and forget the economics behind it all.
Take Google’s own paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468) that estimates that launch costs, just to roughly match data center energy costs on earth, would need to reach 200USD/kg, which requires a 10 fold cost reduction relative to the current launch costs of Falcon 9. And that is to launch a _disposable_ server into orbit, that will disintegrate after a few years and likely have hardware failures well before that.
And these servers are not anything like a “data center”, and they won’t run the applications that we are already scrambling to find demand in earth. No, these would theoretically run some ultra-niche, highly experimental workloads maybe for NASA or the military. That alone can’t possibly justify the investment, at least not for the retail investor that actually expects a positive ROI. Nevertheless the tech elite and their pet journalists are more than happy to sell this fantasy to the average people.
Hell, I’m still waiting for Project Natick to materialize, Microsoft’s data center on the ocean, which makes far, far more sense than data centers on frigging space. Still they didn’t manage to make that one work in any meaningful sense.
Idk, building in the ocean seems a lot harder to me than space. Salt water is ridiculously corrosive, extreme pressure, etc. And one of the main justifications for this is massively increasing the output of solar and making it consistently output its nameplate capacity, which space is great for, and ocean is terrible for. The only benefit for that one I can see is some power savings on cooling, and a whole boatload of drawbacks, whereas we might not be able to keep up with demand with terrestrial power. So I can totally see why they never bothered to complete their subsea datacenter.
They’re definitely not aiming to put niche applications up, they want to run models by the bucketful.
I don’t see how the economics make it impossible? To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s something that’s going to end up happening, I have no idea if it will, but I don’t see how it’s structurally impossible, and I can see some things to commend it if token usage volumes grow like I think they will.
Without even going into the numbers, terrestrial data centers have significant cost advantages. They don't have to spend $$$$$$$ to get to orbit. They can upgrade and/or fix components easily (likely safe to assume a hypothetical orbital DC would plan to never replace anything). They don't have to pay for the full capex of their power generation facilities. Lower-latency Internet. Heat dissipation is a (possibly unsolved?) problem. For every input cost to a data center, moving it to orbit massively increases that cost.
From a pure engineering standpoint: orbital data centers are not optimized to solve any common problem faced by data center operators or users. Permitting can get difficult in parts of the US, but at least permitting is a solved problem.
But let's say they need to stay in the US. Are DC operators offering to buy down utility capex costs so that existing residents don't see a spike in rates? If not, obviously that is going to create opposition as nobody wants their utility bills to rise rapidly. It would probably be cheaper & easier to e.g. write a check to Southern Company to prevent rate hikes directly tied to their DC than to put a DC in space.
The math also barely pencils? IF Starship hits its $100/kg, getting a single rack of servers to orbit will cost ~$100k. A 500MW data center might have ~5k racks, so ~$500m to orbit. SpaceX estimates $100/kg - $300/kg so it could be $1.5B - $2B just to put the racks in orbit, plus the cost of the servers, plus the cost of the actual orbital data center itself, plus the cost of getting the orbital data center to orbit. That's getting into the "hand every resident a check for $100k in exchange for their county approving the permit" territory.
And it’s not that simple, building out power generation is very constrained, the interconnection queue is years long in many places, and the current backlog for new natural gas turbines is multiple years right now. Fixing the permitting isn’t impossible with some political will, but energy permitting reform is something that’s been bandied around for years in Congress and hasn’t made it across the finish line. EPRA almost made it at the end of last Congress but that session ended before it did. Hopefully it makes it this time, everyone should contact their congresspeople and ask them to support energy permitting reform.
And we are talking about AI Datacenters, they are a lot less latency dependend than websites.
Alone the idea that Musk would be able to break through any burocrazy for space stuff and sets up a supply chain for everything space is easier than just setting up some energy and fiber, feels ridicoulys
Anyway, is it technically possible? Yes. My suspicion is it's at best a wash vs building on the ground. Applying a similar price premium & similar engineering resources to a ground-based system is likely to deliver much more predictable results.
Tech obviously can have success at lobbying. The TikTok ban IIRC got 90 votes in the Senate. I'm sure the total cost of the required astroturf campaign was much less than launching a single orbital DC.
A GB300 costs about 70k, a rack is 72 of them.
The cost to launch is less than 2% overhead. Its is extremely feasible.
https://youtu.be/FlQYU3m1e80?si=nUMhO-lDny_VpG0D&t=1065
(YouTube auto transcribe)
> ... but how do you scale this up right 20 kow used to be enough to power a full rack of computer gear but we're seeing predictions now of 100 kilowatts per rack and that's just one rack in a data center racks right the 48U 19in rack which is you know big and it's just dense with computers how does that fit into a flat satellite well it turns out that like 19in rack is about 50 cm wide it's about 1 m deep per unit and if you've got a 24 1/2 square meter satellite and you take all your one U units and stack them ...
One rack per satellite doesn't seem like it is that compelling of a story.
Put a 100 kW rack in my basement in the winter and hook up the power and I'll be happy to deal with the waste heat for several months (and then ship it to somewhere in the southern hemisphere).
Meta has increasingly ephemeral digital mindshare and no AI play. SpaceX has a near monopoly on access to the rest of the galaxy.
The real question is what comes first: viable commercial large scale infrastructure in space that might create new demand for SpaceX launches, or the competition?
SpaceX is pitching their own orbital data centres as a ready to go source of demand for lots and lots of Starship launches, but the unit economics of those vs boring old ground-based server racks and solar farms look dubious even before one considers just how convenient a justification it is rolling Elon's loss making businesses into the IPO.
You don't do that without pre-planning or being very very good at what you do, but most of the competition (including those that will fail) is targeting that. They don't need to scale as big or as fast as SpaceX to deliver enough comms satellites to orbit to kill any hopes of Starlink becoming a permanent low-latency connectivity monopolist. Plus of course most competitors in the connectivity space are able to spend a fraction of their overall hardware budget launching on SpaceX...
Lol, the classic "I can build a reusable rocket in a weekend" comment.
I get and appreciate that sentiment. Musk currently has a controlling interest in SpaceX. Do you expect that to change after the IPO? Thanks!
A big part of how SpaceX did what they did is that they weren't beholden to institutional pressures. They could afford to take major risks. This may change when a pool of investors who don't care about space and just want the line to go up end up being stakeholders.
/not a finance or investment expert just my observations and feelings
Investors have been doing this since SpaceX first raised outside funding. American capital markets are not that risk averse.
But of course we also know that Musk-run public companies are immune to normal dynamics of worrying about next quarter's returns (or even worrying about the CEO publicly torching his brand equity) so the very last thing I'd imagine happening is SpaceX becoming risk averse and profitability focused
Fidelity has been an investor since 2014. The only new money flows will be index and retail; everyone else has had access for years.
The risks they care about will be more "Starlink growth slows" or "orbital datacentre has horrible operating economics" than "Starship launch anomaly" though, and I agree it'll make zero difference to how SpaceX operates both because Elon isn't afraid to tank valuations and because retail loves him unconditionally. And the bull case for SpaceX is still stronger than the bull case for Tesla which happily trades at valuations north of $1b.
They will save Elons shitty AI investment by making the public bag holders.
This is Patrick Boyle, he's not AI generated? Why did you feel like the speaker is AI generated?
The community noticed he rarely blinks and he ran with the gag and edited all of them out.
If anything this just proves that the Overview Effect (traveling to space changes you) is just BS, Bezos and the others never changed.
Providing space launch capability that's 1/10th what NASA charges.
Providing quite good AI at 100 tokens/sec.
Bullshit. You're not going to be faster than fiber from orbit, with congested bandwidth.
> Providing space launch capability that's 1/10th what NASA charges.
NASA isn't in the commercial launch space.
> Providing quite good AI at 100 tokens/sec.
It's the weakest of the slop machines.
And yet, who will use it? You need something to put on the rocket. Seems the vast majority of stuff they’re putting on rockets is their own assets.
What is groks market share? 1%?
SpaceX's valuation only makes sense if you buy into their mission of creating a civilization on Mars, and that the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation is the vehicle that creates this future. If SpaceX achieves this, it would be the most valuable company ever created. It would be worth $10s of trillions.
I personally believe SpaceX has a 70% chance of achieving its Mars ambitions. So I find the current $1.75 trillion valuation very logical, if not a little underpriced.
If you believe there's a SpaceX won't achieve these ambitions, which I'd assume most people in this thread belong to, then you'd assign a <1% chance of this happening. Then you'd value the company based on it's financials, at a more realistic $200B. You'd explain the 8x valuation gap though a mixture of financial engineering and Elon grifting, both of which I agree are happening.
The current $1.75 trillion valuation comes from the ratio of people in camp A to camp B.
This video gives an overview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3hPH_bc0Ww but it strongly underrepresents the role of robotics.
I however also believe that enough people will be lining up to buy whatever fantasy Musk sells (look at the Tesla stock as a shining example).
So I think SpaceX is still going to be a great investment if you can manage to get it at or below IPO price.
I wouldn't follow the majority for advice. They're not aware of what's happening. Take Starlink V3 direct-to-cell as an example, I believe less than 5% of the general public even knows what this is (even after a massive marketing campaign), and even fewer understand how it works.
When will that be? There are so many unsolved problems with Mars that creating a civilization on Mars will probably be decades or centuries away. Creating an autonomous station on Antarctica or the moon is child's play compared to Mars. And we are far away from that too.
People's attention will shift to obtaining resources from outer space, which leads to more demand for space exploration, and then space manufacturing to avoid polluting earth. Then the general sentiment towards a lunar/Mars colony will trend towards positive, and people will desire to run away from political problems on Earth. So significant investment towards building a Mars colony will happen then.
The technical problems with a Mars colony are not insurmountable, it's completely possible to build a colony with 2026 technology, just the cost is too high. Better technology (robots) and innovations (i.e. upgraded Starship) will push the cost down.
The asteroid belt likely contains more easily-obtained rare metals that also don’t have to escape Mars’ terminal velocity.
Reading a comment like the grandparent’s while we’re surrounded by many tangible crises on earth is sickening. Especially many of them manufactured by the same man who the grandparent comment seems to deify (DOGE AIDS funding).
Anyway, I find myself feeling contempt for the people in this industry pretty often.
When poverty is defined as the lower quintile of income, poverty cannot be eliminated.
There will always be uncivilized people.
There are always be some people better off than others.
There will always be people smarter/handsomer/stronger/etc. than others.
There will always be people who want to destroy things.
There will always be people who take risks and ruin their lives.
There will always be alcoholics and drug addicts.
Consider how the standard of living has improved enormously over the last 200 years, yet nobody is satisfied.
That's because it's unnecessary. It's cheaper to just ship supplies in.
Yet looking back, colonialism was probably the most profitable venture ever undertaken. All three of them ended up becoming key allies and instrumental trading partners.
Think on a longer time scale.
Mars has a lot of rocks.
Yet today it's the 13th largest economy on earth.
Think on a longer time scale.
On a longer timescale would it only be spaceX on Mars?
In fact, Australia already had people living on it.
It’s funny, I hear the exact same phrasing used when justifying Tesla’s valuation. “It only makes sense if…” … if you ignore what the actual, physical business does today, and picture it doing something entirely different, beyond its current capabilities (robotaxis, androids, etc)
The difference with this pie-in-the-sky ambition (Mars Colony) is that I don’t even understand how it would be profitable if achieved. What do you get from a Mars colony? What on earth (no pun intended) could you extract from it that would command that amount of value? This isn’t like colonization of the americas, where there was a trove of readily available natural resources to extract and sell back to the mainland markets - nothing is going to get shipped back from Mars any time soon. A Mars colony could only be supported through significant public investment - so is the valuation justified via the expectation that SpaceX will be the primary vehicle for public investment in Mars exploration, or through the centuries-long payback period of founding a self-sustaining civilization? Or both?
My rationale is, when SpaceX actually launches the first Mars mission, the price will go hyperbolic. It will be the stock pump of the century. I estimated what valuation it would hit (~$5 trillion at the time), then looked at the current valuation, realized this will 50x in the next two decades, and concluded it would make a great investment.
Turns out the real overpopulation is in places people want to live.
I think most people don't realize how inherently unstable our society is, and how quickly civilization can devolve.
Nuclear war is a huge issue. We've had three conflicts this decade that could have led to a nuclear war. All of which are still unresolved.
I'm kicking myself for engaging with this at all, but that's poor reasoning if you're worried about nuclear war. The risk of MAD forces a detente, if there were a (perceived) hedge against it, that increases the likelihood of MAD happening.
If nuclear war happens, Mars colonies depend on expensive, technical supply chains on Earth that will be destroyed.
We take for granted a whole damn planet where water falls from the sky, food and fuel come out of the ground and there's abundant amount of replenishing atmospheric O2 available for ubiquitous reaction and combustion.
Without resupply from a nuked Earth, you're left with the fact that food, manufacturing, construction, etc all depend on, at the very least, atmospheric oxygen, and Mars will never hold a meaningful atmosphere. Without atmospheric oxygen, and thus combustion, when it comes to supply chains required for existing anywhere, you aren't building infrastructure, you aren't growing food without nutrient supplies, and you aren't manufacturing sustainably, efficiently, or at all.
And that ignores that Martian dust and soil is toxic[1] to life, which requires even more resources to mitigate, remove, keep out/off of people and living things, and even more resources to treat and maintain the soil if you ever want to use it to grow food.
Earth is the one shot people have, and a nuked Earth is infinitely more habitable than Mars. Even the bottom of the ocean is more habitable than Mars. It just does not make sense as a backup option to Earth. And if Mars is a pipe dream, life isn't leaving this solar system and surviving independently as anything resembling humans.
You have to pick one side, not both.
I wish I had the guts to just lie to investors with a bald face. I personally think Musk is an underachiver.
you can respond with actual substantiative points, but don't make stuff up.
None of this is "fake." You simply neglected to include it. I'm expanding the scope to include a realistic scenario since realism seems so easily lost in these conversations.
During the age of exploration, the mortality rate of crew on long-distance voyages was 30 to 50%. An example of this is the first circumnavigation of Earth by Magellan, in which 90% of his crew died, including Magellan himself. He lost 4 of his 5 ships.
This egregiously high risk of death did not stop or slow down the wave of colonialism.
Tesla ended up here because Musk got bored with it and was distracted by his shiny new toy: Twitter. And running a large car manufacturer requires skill, competence and careful attention, all of which Musk lacks.
Also on any given day Musk in deep in the K hole.
Starlink is close to causing the kessler syndrome. https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...
When I was young and naive I believed Elon, at least I've figured out his shtick now, plus his connections with that man.
Regulate them.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/spacex-generated-ab...
*they actually use "Adjusted EBITDA" which is even more nonstandard and means they define the accounting however they want!
The IPO is structured as a massive overvaluation event specially for the insiders to unload their holdings. They're never going to get a better opportunity and they know it.
Long term SpaceX is all gravity.
Will mankinds's mouth be larger than its stomach?
Found the Emperor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa
> In the United States, SpaceX accounts for five of every six launches into space, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
That's why.
Data centers generate enormous heat that needs to be disposed off. In space you have nowhere to conduct heat to, because there's nothing there. You are basically sitting in insulation.
Your only option is to radiate the heat away, which is comparatively super slow. Space stations have a real problem getting rid of heat.
Oh boy. Even the smallest amount of logic applied to this concept reveals that it is pure nonsense.
Even if you leave out the massive cost of lifting the equipment into space, the maintenance problem (there isn't any, you just de-orbit), the effects of various radiation on CPUs and RAM, there is of course the most intractable problem of all: space is a vacuum and there is no efficient way to dissipate heat.
It's more Musk BS, a limp fig leaf to cover up his self-dealing buying Twitter and xAI with SpaceX stock.
I'm a little disappointed now.
But the auto inclusion in Fortune 500 is basically cheating.
Just saying there are some decent risks, and pricing it at 1.75T IPO seems risky enough. I would not take that gamble.
And to most everything else
Sounds like lots of demand for new launches from the military-industrial complex.
> imagine if Russia gets vindictive and starts destroying these satellites
Space is big. It’s almost always cheaper to individually target satellites than to try and blanket orbits. And with Starship vs ASAT, the cheap drones are the satellites. Russia would bankrupt itself trying to sink Starlink and Starshield.
(They would also set a precedent that would let the U.S. deny China a LEO constellation.)
The problem is that even one satellite could start the Kessler syndrome due to how many are currently in orbit, and the numbers are expected to keep increasing rapidly - everyone wants their "sovereign" Starlink now that it has been shown to be feasible and performant.
No, it can’t. Not in LEO. Militaries have searched for these one-shot solutions; there is no known orbital system for which it works. (In LEO.)
The only fuck-you orbits are in GEO.
Starlink already accounts for these (e.g. https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/18/starlinks_method_of_d... ), and in any case they are put in orbit so that they eventually fall back to earth in case control is lost.
Donald Trump Jr., who already profited from groq, is invested via 1789 capital:
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/trump-linked-venture-...
Not to mention that the PayPal mafia is now playing ball with respect to Epstein (Tracey was on all-in downplaying the whole thing), so Musk himself will be in good graces again.
Oh my god. When a journalist writes like any of this is remotely plausible within “years” and “billions” of dollars it really downplays the near impossibility of these events happening.
I'm not arguing that it's a good idea, but that is the idea.
still seems like a daft idea all in all, or a very distant one at least.
Even if you give SpaceX the benefit of the doubt and assume they'll eventually settle at the profit rates Apple, Google, etc. have (~25%, check it), it'll be $4b in annual profits holding up $1.8t in market cap or roughly 450 PE ratio.
And that's if we give them the same great odds for profitability as America's most successful and profitable firms.
In summary, in the short-term the stock might very likely shoot up to $3t, but in the long-term, it doesn't look very healthy.
[All: please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. You don't have to like $Company or $Person, but when the banned accounts are posting more thoughtfully than the rest, that's... bad.]
reads headline again
Oh. Probably all the money burnt in AI training and data centers.
4 different levels to unpack: Literal IPO question, Epstein cover-up (gov. won't just do it), aliens (X-Files) cover-up, and finally the Elon-Epstein connection (email files thread to host him at SpaceX).
idgaf about the company. sure they proved the space and moved the space forward just like Tesla did with electric cars but why did it have to be Elon?
they're only (sic) going for 75 billion. with an evaluation in the trillion mark.
This is just more speculative investment. you'll see this again in another year or so with a bigger evaluation on it... it's how the modern economy now "works".
As whole I find that valuation just insane, but seemingly if you only offer tiny enough slice with enough hype it might bump prices to something that really make no sense at all...
Its fleecing because it basically takes everybody's money and gives it to support musk's money loser xai. SpaceX net profit 8 billion per year (previous years much less) and Xai was net losing 1.5 billion per quarter.
I, for one, much prefer to earn a 9% return without expending any effort or thought at all.
(The current value of around 25% of global GDP doesn't even include the 1.75 trillion SpaceX which alone would be another almost 1%...)
ETF expense ratios are small but still mean retail will underperform anyway. It's an unfortunate situation all around.
Sorry, "xAI, a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX".
2.) SpaceX made $16B in profit last year, despite its enormous R&D costs and is on track for $20B this year, despite the losses from AI. People still wise to invest in Google despite their AI business still being a huge loss
Perhaps. But that's a huge undersell. "just the one that caught flak"? No. The one with nearly zero guardrails. Where users could trivially create underage porn, bestiality, etc., using prompts that you could put into any other AI and just say "does this image generation prompt seem likely to create legally problematic content?"
No, Captain Free Speech said fuck it, let's roll.
With a tiny float the price will almost certainly go up as a limited number of enthusiastic investors buy in. The plan is to then line up the lockup expirations so they sell into the index re-balance, a ton of new non-discretionary demand to match the new supply.
It's manipulation.
But as soon as they IPO, that's a signal to head for the exit before it all collapses again.
They would need a very good story to sell to investors.