SpaceX has more future upside than any company I can think of…
Nobody is making a profit in space. Not even Starlink. Once you add in the costs of sustaining their constellation, it barely scrapes by into profitability by underestimating launch costs and an over optimistic projection of future costs.
Starlink can't serve more than a small fraction of an urban population because each bird has a pretty low capacity limit, and terrestrial wireless keeps chipping away at their TAM out in the countryside. Terrestrial wireless infrastructure has a track record of declining costs. The rate at which it eats up the customers Starlink is counting on accelerates.
Reusable rockets will change the economics of space travel beyond recognition. Jevon’s paradox will strike hard and fast. Starlink is the initial proof of this.
Maybe Starship will be the first to achieve the fabled dream of rapid reusability. Maybe not. Either way, it’s a tractable engineering problem at this point and the path has been made pretty clear.
I have no idea what the valuation of SpaceX should be. But, in general, I’d bet a lot on the launch industry growing enormously in the coming decades.
xAI is burning through a tremendous amount of money.
it is getting propped up right now through leasing compute to Anthropic, which isn't really AI sector profitability. even if the AI bubble doesn't collapse, Anthropic is unlikely to want to keep shovelling money at its competitor.
and right now the xAI+x business segment is getting propped up by a couple billion a year in sustainable revenue from social media, making it look better than it should.
the core SpaceX/Starlink business itself looks pretty amazing and could probably justify $600B-$1T valuations, having roughly comparable financials to something like Visa, particularly if you removed the Starship development costs. but to say xAI is a boat anchor is probably being overly charitable... like if your boat anchor was a supertanker that was sinking into the abyss.