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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

That's kind of the whole point of a stock market. If you already had a solid revenue stream, you wouldn't need investment.

These numbers would be kind of typical for a software play, since the great thing about software is that you write it once and then sell it many times. They're making a similar assertion for hardware: "fund rocket ship design, and sell it many times (i.e. lots of launches)".

The weird looking part to he is cramming xAI into it. It's a completely different business with little overlap that I can see, in a crowded market that they are far from leading.

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> The weird looking part to he is cramming xAI into it. It's a completely different business with little overlap that I can see, in a crowded market that they are far from leading.

My personal theory is that Musk wants to roll up all his companies into a mega corporation that he fully controls, and this is part of the process. I expect Tesla and SpaceX to merge years down the line.

Of course, the counter to this thesis is that he didn't roll in Neuralink or Boring Company. But its probably that these three companies + Tesla are the ones he's most passionate about.

Raising the market cap of Tesla is one of the requirements for Musk's nearly $1 trillion pay package. Merging companies is a lot easier than trying to sell more cars or non-existent robots.

These numbers would be ridiculous even for a software play. < 20B in revenue at almost 2T valuation? That's almost 100x revenue multiples at a not so great revenue growth rate.

xAI "acquired" Twitter, so rolling it into SpaceX is a way to hide a badly distressed asset inside a potential moneymaker and hope nobody notices. Like mortgage backed securities.

Then keep rolling in more money losers. Like Nortel.

There were talks in the past about spinning Starlink out. Perhaps the thinking that led them to keep Starlink in is the same thinking about their new data center business (what they got from xAI and will grow in orbit in the future)

putting tesla robots on the moon ran by LLMs seems to be a pretty coherent overall plan, I don't think it's different

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