“Shocking nobody” I would add… This is an obvious Musk scam and anyone with financial knowledge called it as such ever since it’s been on the table. Why else lobby and change the NASDAQ listing rules for instance?
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/what-happens-to-ipos-over-th...
In a world where retail basically has no access to true IPO pricing, I don't think this is untrue for the majority of investors.
Jamming SpaceX directly into a bunch of indexes just because Musk wanted it (and everyone is a coward or complicit) stunk of "scam" in a very different way, though.
What do you think will happen to SpaceX share prices when roughly 18x the number of shares at IPO are released?
From a company that only made $18bn in sales last year and lost $5bn. For reference, Aramark, a company basically nobody has heard of made as much money and even turned a $0.5bn profit.
SpaceX shouldn't be worth more than $30 in 1 year's time.
Of course, irrationality can be an extremely strong force, so let's see.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-revenue/...
You've just told me that "the financials of an incompetent commercial food service provider" are better than those of SpaceX.
Aramark is profitable and SpaceX is wildly unprofitable[1] :-)))
* * *
[1] Almost nothing SpaceX does points at SpaceX scaling to huge profitability. The rocket business is super capital intensive and losing money. And its biggest customer by far is Starlink. Starlink is profitable, but even so, if Starlink hiccups, SpaceX rocketry goes kaput. Oh, the second biggest customer is the US government, and you only need one hostile US administration for that business to go away. xAI is a 2-bit player in the AI space and it's losing money hand over fist.
Yes but TSLA will be self-driving in Mars soon and therefore.... profit!
Can you name even one example in the last 50 years?
That said, I'm also not sure how accurate that is.
I was responding to the person pointing to this as confirmation of the long-running social-media-populist narrative surrounding this IPO. I consider that confirmation bias. I was not responding to the narrative itself, on which my only positions are: a prior against social media populism, a prior towards our financial institutions, a prior against trusting Musk, and a prior against trusting our current governance.
Very few IPOs changed the rules to allow themselves to be incuded in significant indexes far faster than the rules previously allowed, and then slipped below their initial offering.
There's also the Tesla (potential) self dealing where SpaceX bought a bunch of Cybertrucks and appears to be leasing them to employees for cheap as a perk.
Not even remotely. Many startups IPO with no profit (though not all), but there is nearly always a credible business plan and a semi-rational valuation.
None of this is the case for spcx. They claim their TAM is about the size of the entire GPD of the USA and that they'll soon have 1T/yr in profits. All based on... nothing. The numbers are wildly unrealistic by a multiple never before seen. Oh and full self driving will be here before end of this year, trust them.
Second, I don't know the details but it's extremely unlikely that most SpaceX folks have been able to sell any shares. Typically there's a 90–180 restricted window where pre-IPO holders are not allowed to sell.
The limited float could theoretically drive up, but as I noted, it wasn't added to the Nasdaq 100 until two days ago, so it's not something we can really attribute to that.
Btw, I loathe Elon Musk as a human, but am just clarifying some facts.
Investors who do have conviction here most likely see this as the platform vehicle for everything else coming through the pipeline. Again I could not buy into that but I think it’s a far cry from a scam.
Like spacex isn't going to be the world's first 100 trillion dollar company because there isn't that much money. That's nearly as high as the global GDP.
Crazy growth rates are not possible.
That doesn't really matter. As we saw with crypto valuations, market cap is just number of shares * last price.
If you have 1 trillion shares and one is traded for $100 you have a 100 trillion market cap.
The point was just this: you don't need $100 trillion to actually exist for that market cap to be possible.
It's almost as if SpaceX would have to use another planet's resources to generate money for that valuation. Oh wait...
They’re thinking “Tesla stock trades at absurd P/E for no reason other than vibes… this one might, too!”
For example, he's talking about data centers in space as the "everything else coming through the pipeline" and space data centers are an obvious engineering boondoggle, but sound cool to people that don't know anything about data center design or the challenges of space engineering (ie heat rejection)
Plenty of companies have traded at prices that assumed almost everythign would go right. Most of those expectations eventually proved wrong but that doesn't retroactively make them scams.
If the argument is that space data centers or some of these future initiatives are technically unrealistic, then criticize those ideas on their merits. If they're impossible or economically irrational, the market will eventually price that in, even if it takes a long time horizon.
Fuck, even Grok would have told him this.
The SpaceX IPO was intentional deception - no doubt.
You may be passionate enough to say intentional deception no doubt. I would argue I am happy to let the market figure it out. It may take a while but eventually over a long enough horizon it should figure it out.
SPCX says their TAM is $29 Trillion, an intentionally deceptive number. Anything they say about Mars is an intentional deception, at least until they develop a lander or a habitat or select one (1) astronaut for this.
There is a difference in wearing rose colored glasses and saying wild shit to deceive people.
1) The price is insane
2) The price is a work of great financial engineering
3) The price isn’t a scam
Or Musk pushing NASDAQ & co to fast track SpaceX into their indexes, to force institutional investors to buy SpaceX?
Or about Musk & others weakening analyst protection through the current US administration cutting legal failsafes so that now basically every analyst on the market never releases negative share projections?
At which point do we accept that these billionaires push these systems until they crack, "legally", because they buy the people making the laws.
The first points are just facts. Not "harshest classifications".
I like to think in shades of gray and I am somewhere in the middle. Tesla? Amazing product, crazy valuation. SpaceX, some of the underlying products are indeed very valuable but the valuation is again out of this world, no pun intended. The market can stay irrational a lot longer than I can stay solvent. Would never take a short against Elon but I also would never invest into his businesses.
Just so we're clear: You think that the only company selling EVs in the USA for a net profit is a scam?
What do you call Rivian, Lucid, Fisker, Bolinger, Lordstown, Slate, and Aptera?
Slate has been conspicuously silent about orders since the day after launch. Lucid is on the brink of bankruptcy. Fisker has gone bankrupt... twice. Lordstown no longer exists (with assets purchased for pennies on the dollar by their former CEO). Aptera has reorganized more times than I can count, and has been planning to release their product any day now for over 10 years!
Rivian actually lost a lawsuit this year for misleading investors about the potential profitability of their product leading up to IPO. An IPO which raised more money in one fell swoop than all the external funding Tesla had in their entire existence. By your own metric, is Rivian not a bigger scam than Tesla?
By the way, a bad fact for Rivian in that case was that they sexually harassed a female exec, who turned around and revealed (in her own lawsuit against them, just weeks before IPO) that the expected ASP of the R1 would be less than the production cost. Oops.
And, somehow, Tesla is the problem. Yea, that makes sense.
You asked how the ideas fit together. I explained. Now you’re telling me they must be inconsistent without identifying the contradiction. I typically don’t deal in feelings in these types of topics but I am aware this is a very passionate topic and person for many. That’s just not me. Good luck with your efforts.
For a public company that is certainly true. The valuation is determined by the market as a whole, so there can be no fraud.
But the fraud is in the profitability claims, such as 1T/yr in just a few years, which are clearly completely fabricated nonsense. No company officer should be allowed to make such claims without being removed from office.
Any other company officer in a fortune 100 company would be removed from office if they made claims like this. The single reason he isn't is because he owns something like 80 something percent of voting power.
So in other words, yes, it's a scam.
1. Have you seen what the Chinese have come up with? https://x.com/pronounced_kyle/status/2075526710003413004
2. None of these things are, where the money is supposed to come from in the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI
I don't know the future, nor do I give investing advise. I don't want this stock.
I have no opinion on whether other companies might catch up to them (either tomorrow or 10 years from now), but your quote is a completely accurate statement about the world as it exists today.
If you read the IPO prospectus, none of theses things is were the money is supposed to be earned in the future. The money comes from the 3rd pillar, AI. Again AI is the biggest loss maker they have.
I would not invest in their launch services, nor in their AI. But I would invest in StarLink if they spun it off and if it were decently priced.
I was hoping you were headed to "...beyond scam" into serious fraud or something. Regardless how this is categorized, everyone (banks, stock market, the executive branch) is complicit, and I think SpaceX stock should have stayed off the public market.
If you spot the regulator looking the other way and try to sneak one past, is that legitimate, or sketchy? What if you recently had the influence to make them look the other way or be under-resourced?
You could argue 'treason' is a better word than 'scam'.
If everyone loses their money it will be a scam. If people get rich he will be a financial engineer.
These aren't two different things. The winning side will make up reasons why they are right, and the losing side will make up excuses why they were wrong.
No matter what, your money is going to Elon and friends. That's one of the schemes.
There's plenty of other schemes too, like merging in Twitter and an AI company to confuse investors and inflate valuations.
I'm not calling it a scam either. I'm saying it entirely depends on whether this insane level of scheming causes people to lose a trillion dollars or gain a trillion dollars, then history will be rewritten to match the narrative.
Same with all his other companies.
so was Madoff
“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” —- Mark Twain
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48374430
(SpaceX shorts have made ~$4B in profits on paper so far, as of this comment)
Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48948435 - July 2026
SPCX is now Wall Street's most shorted new stock - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48938001 - July 2026
Short sellers notch $15.5B profit as SpaceX shares slip - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49021030 - July 2026
Elon bought them an imaginary horse ...
Seems like if the company is really doing great you'd want to retain ownership. Raise from bonds or something. Put simply, if it's valuable why would anyone sell it?
Tesla isn’t behaving rationally, there is no way to tell whether SpaceX will behave rationally or not.
It seems like it’s becoming somewhat more rational, but all these stocks just seem to be incomprehensible to me.
I own no Musk stock and never short anything.
I don’t think that affects the opinion I stated in any way.
> "I think SpaceX is a solid well run company"
This should be all the proof you need that it's a scam. Here's why:
The company isn't "SpaceX" it's "SpaceXAI", and nearly all of the valuation comes from the "AI" component, not the "SpaceX" component.
That said, he needs the wealth to keep the whole machine from falling over. One element might be stable but the rest is overstretched and about to go bankrupt at any minute. He is doing this to get back control of Tesla while also investing in AI and not exploding.
He is running forward falling and his wealth legs need to keep up or it all goes down hard (and takes a bunch of bagholders with)
Spending it is not the goal, having the wealth is.
Remember the ridiculous Tesla compensation package that he demanded? That's about having wealth, it's not about spending it.
And if he spent only 300M and was able to elect president with it, more power to him. He must know something about efficiency as others spending so much more couldn't do it. Ridiculous points. I can bring them up too.
And in this case the topic of discussion is how one specific individual spends their money - so Biden and Democrats and whatever other axe you have to grind is totally irrelevant.