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.
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.
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.
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'.
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!”
so was Madoff
Same with all his other companies.
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.