SpaceX files to go public

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/technology/spacex-ipo-elon-musk.html

by nutjob2 • 4 months ago

400 554 4 months ago

chasd003• 4 months ago

The thing i'm not looking forward to is SpaceX will now be beholden to Wall Street. With Startship testing being so public, there's a whole cottage industry of youtubers watching their every move, there's going to be lots of ups and downs on the stock price.

Diederich• 4 months ago

SpaceX will now be beholden to Wall Street

I get and appreciate that sentiment. Musk currently has a controlling interest in SpaceX. Do you expect that to change after the IPO? Thanks!

ACCount37• 4 months ago

I expect that the amount of "good influence" institutional shareholders can exert on SpaceX leadership and operations is about zero, and the amount of "bad influence" is more than that. Thus, the only way this can affect SpaceX's leadership is negative.

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.

chasd003• 4 months ago

I get the feeling investors are going to watch Starship explode and explode while it's being developed without understanding the trial/error, hardware rich, approach SpaceX takes and not like it. That's going to hurt the stock price and therefore hurt the company. Before, when Starship exploded people just pointed and laughed at Musk but SpaceX kept going. For better or for worse it doesn't really bother him, don't forget he got literally laughed out of the room when he proposed a re-usable orbital booster. Now those people actually matter because they'll sell/short and kill the stock price and therefore materially hurt the company. I replied to a sibling about Tesla, remember the shorts nearly killed Tesla before it even had a chance. The technology was there and the concept proven but the shorters almost killed the whole thing. IMO Tesla went public way too early and it almost cost them everything. idk what SpaceX has to gain by going public, are they hurting for cash? Based on the pace of development in Boca Chica it doesn't appear so.

/not a finance or investment expert just my observations and feelings

moogly• 4 months ago

What makes you think this will be different from Tesla?

chasd003• 4 months ago

None and that's the problem, the shorts almost killed Tesla for no other reason than being short. I think watching Starship after Starship blow up while being tested when investors don't really understand what they're looking at is going to be bad for the stock price. In a public traded company so goes the stock price so goes the business.

jordanb2• 4 months ago

You don't have to believe. If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch.

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...

throwaway2902• 4 months ago

If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch

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.

lokar11• 4 months ago

The SpaceX profit is EBITDA, not real. And presumably includes massive starlink depreciation and stock based comp.

saalweachter• 4 months ago

Only NASDAQ so far; S&P 500 is apparently "reviewing its rules" but hasn't changed them yet.

So you've got a full year to wait on that index fund, assuming they don't cave.

lokar11• 4 months ago

Also, would individual funds that track the S&P have left themselves some wiggle room to delay this if they wanted?

testbjjl• 4 months ago

Cave? That’s the boring company, this is the space company.

therealdrag0• 4 months ago

Didn’t Sp500 drag their feet for a long time before adding Tesla?

Betelbuddy4• 4 months ago

Uter and complete corruption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389233

  - "Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait."

          Honoré de Balzac

Saline95153• 4 months ago

"The secret of greath wealths with unknown causes is a forgotten crime, because it was properly done" for those who don't speak french.

bryanlarsen• 4 months ago

The flaw is the limited float. Indexes will be forced to buy a huge number of shares which don't exist, driving up the price.

For 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.

lokar11• 4 months ago

if they weighted (fully) by float (perhaps the average float from the trailing 90 days to the re-balance) it would not be as easy to game. The Nasdaq is accounting for float, but not completely.

barumrho• 4 months ago

Do the ETF managers have no discretion in determining when to buy? I was under the impression that they usually handle these changes to indices gradually even under normal circumstances.

nh23423fefe• 4 months ago

of course they do. read any prospectus for a FUND and funds track INDEXES using rules. inclusion in some index doesn't hamstring anyone.

blind purchases are not going to happen. people assume passive indexing is brainless, but it isnt.

quickthrowman2• 4 months ago

The operators of the fund are allowed to do whatever they outlined in the prospectus to track the index, some funds allow futures, options, and swaps along with equity shares to maintain parity with the index.

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.

t0mas882• 4 months ago

They do, but one performance metric for these ETFs is tracking error. So they want to try to match the index closely.

fermentation• 4 months ago

This is absolutely vile. The xAi merger made no sense and this is forcing working class people into purchasing risky assets from a known scammer.

g-technology• 4 months ago

It does when you look at it with a few less zeros… it’s like a broke person floating checks for payday loans.

mosura• 4 months ago

Ever since SNAP the whole IPO show has been a transparent scam to game the index funds.

The market simply doesn’t have enough people actively investing because it rewards mass stupidity over generating meaningful returns.

lotsofpulp5• 4 months ago

Based on the list of businesses at the top, the stock market seems like it rewards profit margin and profits, by businesses that sell meaningful products and services.

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.

https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/?ticker=SNAP

TheAlchemist• 4 months ago

I really wish more people were aware of this. It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about.

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...

lacy_tinpot3• 4 months ago

In order to be incredulous at xAI, you'd have to be incredulous of the AI business in general, which is fair.

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.

sroussey2• 4 months ago

Just call it what it is: SpaceTwitter

Spooky236• 4 months ago

Well, we elected a bunch of criminals, and Elon fired everyone who regulates this. The SEC was gutted like a fish, and contract terminations resulted in a large percentage of FINRA staff being laid off.

JumpCrisscross9• 4 months ago

It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about

It’s being extensively talked about and debated. It hasn’t entered the mainstream discourse because it’s too technical.

aeternum2• 4 months ago

There are enough Elon haters that you can rest assured there will be an inverse ETF so that you can easily hedge away your index exposure if you really want to.

MagicMoonlight• 4 months ago

He's strapped them together because xAI is about to go bankrupt and has fuck all, so this way he can dump it on the bag holders.

throwawaypath3• 4 months ago

I really wish more people were aware of this. It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about.

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.

manquer4• 4 months ago

float a fairly small issuance

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.

---

[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.

xenadu02• 4 months ago

I think you have to temper the skepticism a bit though.

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.

tim333• 4 months ago

There is a good chance this one becomes the Wework of this decade.

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.

bandrami• 4 months ago

excellent salesman of vision when fundamentals are weak

Wow that was a polite way to say that

stickfigure• 4 months ago

Serious question: Is there some ETF that is "Index of S&P500 minus anything that smells like Musk"?

delecti• 4 months ago

Yes, kinda. Goldman Sachs launched that under the symbol SPXXAI last month. I'm not totally sure how to actually invest in it yet though.

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/ai-goldman-sachs-stocks-ind...

CactusBlue• 4 months ago

If you have a big enough portfolio, direct indexing (using something like Frec or Wealthfront) could be an interesting option, and weighting the companies that you don't want at 0.

Spooky236• 4 months ago

If you have $100k, you can do it with direct indexing at Schwab. The management fee is 0.40%.

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.

dahinds• 4 months ago

The cheapest option might be to buy the index and sell short the appropriate amount of Musk companies.

sethops1• 4 months ago

There is XMAG, but beware the expense ratio is much higher than the mainstream indices.

paxys4• 4 months ago

Direct indexing is pretty easy these days.

cosmicgadget• 4 months ago

The indexes buy based on market cap or float?

tonfa• 4 months ago

Most serious index do float, nasdaq has somewhat different rules (but it's a weird index...)

abeppu• 4 months ago

ok so it seems pretty bad that they changed the index rules both to allow spacex in early and the wonky weighting stuff. But if one already has index-based things that are likely to be captive on the wrong side of this, and one wanted to benefit or at least balance out, to confirm my limited understanding the goal would be:

- 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?

actionfromafar• 4 months ago

So that’s what he’s been busy with. I was hoping it was Ketamine.

nick__m• 4 months ago

Thank you for posting that. I also read that on some less authoritative source I don't remember. It's truly scandalous. I wish ETFs will revolt and apply the old rule for inclusion, but I have no illusion it will happen.

quickthrowman2• 4 months ago

SpaceX will not be part of the S&P 500 when it lists, so you can avoid owning SpaceX for now by sticking with non-NASDAQ funds. IIRC it would take about a year for SpaceX to qualify for the S&P 500, four consecutive profitable quarters is needed I believe.

If you own a NASDAQ fund or total US stock market fund, you will have exposure to SpaceX.

browningstreet• 4 months ago

They’re notably going for a large issuance.

georgeecollins• 4 months ago

But a low stock float. I once had a meeting with a guy who said his company was worth $100m. How did he get that valuation? He sold 0.4 % of stock to friends and family at $400k.

derwiki• 4 months ago

My 401k has BrokerageLink set up and invests in VT/VTI. It takes less than 15 days so if your company offers BrokerageLink, you can avoid investing in SpaceX.

rsync• 4 months ago

"If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch."

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 ...

bilsbie• 4 months ago

I can see both sides of it though. The old rule made more sense when companies ipo’d at small valuations. It could be argued it’s wrong to keep one the top five market cap companies off the sp500 for a year.

throwawaypath3• 4 months ago

Initial public offerings whose market capitalizations rank within the Nasdaq 100’s top members will normally be eligible to be included after 15 days of trading, Nasdaq said in a statement. The timeline is shortened from at least three months currently.

“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.

raw_anon_11117• 4 months ago

Most people don’t have their money in the NASDAQ. They have it in the S&P 500. SpaceX hasn’t been fast tracked into it.

HWR_14• 4 months ago

Why do people keep claiming that every 401k invests in the NASDAQ 100? Few do, and you probably have a choice of a couple of 401k plans, at least one of which will not include SpaceX.

slowmovintarget• 4 months ago

Rabble rabble... debt... rabble rabble... xAI burning revenue...

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.

indoordin0saur8• 4 months ago

And likely soon to be the world's biggest ISP, (they probably already are by some metrics)

ctoa• 4 months ago

They are nowhere near the world's biggest ISP by any metrics, what are you talking about?

panick21_6• 4 months ago

Maybe go look up how large the space launch market is ... you might learn something.

wg0• 4 months ago

Is it a scandal? https://youtu.be/8rS3fTbC7TE

catlikesshrimp• 4 months ago

The speaker seems to be generated by AI. Edit: I not pro musk, but the run of the mill pictures aren't needed.

Imustaskforhelp• 4 months ago

The speaker seems to be generated by AI

This is Patrick Boyle, he's not AI generated? Why did you feel like the speaker is AI generated?

superjan• 4 months ago

Patrick Boyle (fund manager, professor, youtuber) recently discussed this IPO on his channel. Informative and entertaining.

https://youtu.be/8rS3fTbC7TE?is=TGpEdM2Y7sknP-cW

lokar11• 4 months ago

And despite popular opinion, he is not an AI :)

sakagami04• 4 months ago

I used to watch him a lot, but he started talking about AI (I work at a big lab) and it was all wrong, so I'm not sure if I can trust his analysis anymore :(

porridgeraisin• 4 months ago

Gell man amnesia

locallost• 4 months ago

He packages things to present them as analytical, but it's really just click bait for people to hear something they want to hear. He did a take over a year ago on why the EV revolution crashed with such gems as presenting less growth (but still growth) as lower sales. The comment section was full of never EV crowd who got their fix that everything will be alright and that nothing will change. Of course a year later there were booming sales worldwide.

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.

keiferski2• 4 months ago

Unfortunately it's kind of impossible for a YouTube to make weekly/bi-weekly videos that are actually in-depth to an expert level. The best thing you can do is interview experts, but even then, everyone has their own biases.

aosaigh• 4 months ago

What was he wrong about?

torlok• 4 months ago

I stopped watching him because I don't understand why a competent finance expert is slinging ads for earbuds and quick meals. Feels like he's just making "Youtube content" rather than anything serious.

dgellow4• 4 months ago

Also, famous rapper

niklasd• 4 months ago

I found his take on the space data center a bit negative. No idea if it is feasible right now, but you could have made the same jokes and ridicule about the feasibility of electric cars (batteries too weak!) before Elon build Tesla. And Patrick just lists some reasons why it is currently hard to do. I'm by no means a Elon fan, but if anyone could pull it of it's him, and attempting these hard challenges is a good thing.

Betelbuddy4• 4 months ago

A space data center is a technical impossibility. And your hero is an idiot, as you can see here when he explains cooling, at the end of the video: https://youtu.be/trgn7s5-YHc

> before Elon build Tesla.

He bought the company, they already had electric cars.

jacquesm• 4 months ago

Now or never. If the stock market goes bust because of the war then most IPO windows will close or will result in a much lower subscription rate. You can expect a flurry of these in the next few weeks.

churchill• 4 months ago

With $1.75t valuation & ~$16b in revenues, that's just over 100* revenues. SpaceX recently announced $8b in EBITDA, but I don't think it's a healthy metric for such a hardware-heavy business. Or, like Charlie Munger calls it, BS earnings.

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.

indoordin0saur8• 4 months ago

SpaceX has reduced the cost of getting a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10 and with their new system (Starship) it's poised further reduce that to 100x. They launch, land and re-use their rockets so often now that what was considered impossible 15 years ago is now routine. They currently put more things into space than the rest of the world combined and by a huge margin. 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. Oh, and they're doing all this while making a profit ($16B last year) despite their massive R&D spending and even with the money sink that is xAI their profits will be higher this year. It's hard to say that this isn't one of the most innovative and fast moving companies in the world. $1.75T maybe seems excessive, but less so than a lot of other companies out there.

luke5441• 4 months ago

I don't see how replacing mobile carriers with space based infrastructure is physically possible.

tristanj15• 4 months ago

It's not meant to replace terrestrial networks, it's a space-based alternative that serves areas carriers have no financial incentive to cover. Terrestrial cellular towers cost between $150k to $500k per tower, and are not economically feasible in less populated areas. There are also many dead-zones in mountainous regions, since cell signals are blocked by mountains.

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.

x0x0• 4 months ago

It doesn't not seem like anything approaching a lucrative business.

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.

pnw5• 4 months ago

5G Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) is already part of the 5G standard. It's not a replacement for terrestrial carriers, it's an expansion that enables devices to be always connected and select the appropriate terrestrial vs satellite connection transparently. ~75% of the land mass on Earth has no cell coverage, ~90% if you include the oceans. It's the same transition in theory that we had from landlines to cell towers.

RealityVoid• 4 months ago

It has technical merit and it is impressive. But I doubt it's worth that much. I guess Musk has the talent of pushing and getting what he wants, so I guess we'll see how it plays out. I'm just afraid for the future is SpaceX in these crazy crazy times.

jppope• 4 months ago

thats the game though. Elon is selling a "slice of the future" and everyone starts having FOMO... the result is a P/E ratio of 300 or whatever crazy number. We will all agree that the company isn't worth that, but theres a bunch of people happy to buy meme stocks that will make a ton of money without the slightest idea of how to value stocks. Botton line an asset is worth what people are willing to pay for it.

projektfu5• 4 months ago

$16B is the top line gross revenue number.

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.

pnw5• 4 months ago

Audited financials would be released with the S-1. But it's very unlikely that they are not audited given the amount of money they have raised.

scuff3d4• 4 months ago

No related to this conversation, but I just started reading some books on finance and I actually know what most of those terms mean now! Lol

infinitewars2• 4 months ago

That article claiming $8b profit is indeed mislabeling EBITDA as profit. EBITDA removes any recurring replenishment costs, the cost of building the satellite, launching the satellite, the user equipment manufacturing and returns, all ground infrastructure build and replacement, all employee stock compensation (not counted!), no advertising costs (and they've actually had to do a lot of that lately to scrounge customers that are remote enough that their network isn't too congested to serve), no taxes are counted (though they get out of that because they have no profit!). Not to mention payments servicing all their debt and Starship development.

*they actually use "Adjusted EBITDA" which is even more nonstandard and means they define the accounting however they want!

rotiron• 4 months ago

Arn't R&D costs expensed as incurred under GAAP?

panick21_6• 4 months ago

Sure, but factor of 10 cheaper in a market that is tiny still isn't that much. Even if you assume a 10x market size increase, its still tiny.

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.

le-mark4• 4 months ago

I fully expect Jevons paradox to hold for cheap kg to orbit. Spacex could be the monopoly transportation provider of the Solar Alliance. Yes that’s fanciful, but it illustrates the potential.

dawnerd• 4 months ago

Hey are absolutely not replacing “legacy” isps and certainly not mobile. Even if they had perfect coverage, sat signals are way too sensitive to obstructions.

baby_souffle• 4 months ago

If anything they'll go for the lucrative customers that _need_ a signal to go faster through vacuum than through glass.

Maybe some decent revenue offering sat to cell for the traditional carriers.

laughing_man5• 4 months ago

True. They're replacing legacy ISPs in areas where your choices are high latency geostationary satellite service, dialup, or DSL where the nearest DSLAM is far enough away that it may as well be dialup.

rcxdude3• 4 months ago

And density is limited. Starlink cannot more than a tiny fraction of a city.

e-topy• 4 months ago

No, but they are replacing bad ISPs. I have a relative in Brussels, while there is 10gig fiber on a nearby street, he's stuck on 100/10 coax, and to add insult to injury, Starlink is cheaper.

petterroea• 4 months ago

To be fair, in Tokyo I see a lot of ISPs pushing 5g routers. Many buildings have fiberoptics pulled to the basement and then use VDSL for the last meters, and I bet they'd rather move everyone over to 5G than have to start actually installing proper fiberoptic internet. In Norway, 5g has been advertised as something groundbreaking and radical. We have been told "now surgery is finally possible with mobile networks" (hospitals don't have fiberoptics??) and similar. Very Apple 2010s "The ipad can now be used by (good person) to do (good thing)"-like. But nobody cares, real users don't see any benefit.

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.

drzaiusx1115• 4 months ago

They do make internet convenient and somewhat reliable for places that had no other options (on my boat, etc.) But I doubt they can displace wired or microwave relays, and why would they? On-earth systems are much cheaper to maintain even if the cost to LEO reduces by another order of magnitude.

keeda• 4 months ago

Their technical accomplishments are doubtlessly notable, but does the expected business growth justify this valuation? Honest question, how many things do we really need to send up there that reducing the cost to orbit by 100x will trigger Jevon's paradox and lead to 100x more launches?

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.

marcus_holmes5• 4 months ago

Personally, I think that valuing businesses by their expected growth is doing really bad things to our society.

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.

WalterBright7• 4 months ago

For many decades, the only way the commercial aviation business survived was carrying the mail.

laughing_man5• 4 months ago

Starlink seems like a no-brainer at this late date, but I remember thinking "He'll never be able to make money from internet satellites. This has to be some kind of scam. Look what happened to Irridium."

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.

mr_toad2• 4 months ago

but does the expected business growth justify this valuation?

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.

themafia4• 4 months ago

The difference between an Arianne and SpaceX launch is 10%, not 10x.

andreime• 4 months ago

muskians will never use real math

fidelramos• 4 months ago

Is that accounting for SpaceX stages being reusable? Honest question.

MPSimmons2• 4 months ago

Difference in cost per launch, cost per mass, or payload capacity?

mbix77• 4 months ago

All your comments are about Elon Musk. Weird.

Valakas_2• 4 months ago

In a world where it's trendy to hate on Musk, it's good there are people that provide some balance.

indoordin0saur8• 4 months ago

The last few were but they were all in regards to this front page news story

shafyy2• 4 months ago

The jury is still out on Starship. And also a bold claim to say that SpaceX by itself has reduced the cost of a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10. Did it play an important role in that reduction? Sure...

danw19794• 4 months ago

Who else “played a role” in Falcon 9 reducing the cost of mass to orbit, exactly ? I guess some public money went their way ?

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.

johnbarron• 4 months ago

This comment reads like an S-1 pitch deck and almost every claim is false or misleading.

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.

enopod_• 4 months ago

Best comment I read on SpaceX in a long time

DennisP4• 4 months ago

Those are a lot of great points but I'll nitpick a couple things. While it's true that Starship has never reached orbit, they have reached orbital velocity several times. They could have gone into orbit if they'd aimed in that direction, but they didn't because it's a test rocket and they didn't want it to stay up there if anything went wrong.

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.

kortilla• 4 months ago

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.

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.

sfeng• 4 months ago

The only thing I can argue with is the thoughts on Starship. Each ship failing in a new way is exactly what you'd expect to see from a research project fixing one issue at a time and progressing a bit further until the next issue crops up. I would be much more concerned to see _the same_ failure happen over and over with no clear plan to resolve the issue.

EthanHeilman• 4 months ago

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.

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.

lopsotronic2• 4 months ago

Where the heck is the mild-mannered retail investor going to go if they bork up all the indices?

jijijijij2• 4 months ago

How to do you factor in the military demand for Starlink?

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!

a-b• 4 months ago

Smartphones can now connect directly to some LEO satellite services. Apple’s iPhone satellite features work on iPhone 14 and later. It makes me wonder if the evolution of this capability will eventually make Starlink a telecom without the traditional towers.

drzaiusx1115• 4 months ago

At some point we'll reach saturation of what we're comfortable putting into LEO, or at least greater pushback from governments leading to regulations in hopes of avoiding that. There's a lot of space junk out there already and they're still pumping out those isp satellites en mass.

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.

conception2• 4 months ago

Yes humanity has a great track record of taking care of the commons.

indoordin0saur8• 4 months ago

They decay out of orbit by design

b3ing• 4 months ago

How will they make money? From governments? With Elon's beliefs, few will be able to afford the vacation trips to space, except a few and they can already do this if they wanted, but haven't in droves.

If anything this just proves that the Overview Effect (traveling to space changes you) is just BS, Bezos and the others never changed.

polski-g• 4 months ago

Providing Internet to the entire world that's faster than fiber.

Providing space launch capability that's 1/10th what NASA charges.

Providing quite good AI at 100 tokens/sec.

johneth• 4 months ago

Providing Internet to the entire world that's faster than fiber.

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.

danny_codes3• 4 months ago

Yeah.. they aren’t going to provide internet to the world faster than fiber. There are a few use-cases that make sense. Almost everyone who has money already has faster internet than LEO internet can provide.

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%?

dimator• 4 months ago

I know we're supposed to assume good faith comments here on HN, but god damn...

convexly4• 4 months ago

I'm genuinely waiting to see at what the valuation lands at. The gap between what SpaceX charges per launch and what everyone else charges is so wide that the moat basically is the rocket. Hard to compare against anything even now.

bmau5• 4 months ago

Valuations are always more of an art than a science but in what world is SpaceX worth more than Meta today? Maybe the $1.75T is to find that world.

convexly4• 4 months ago

The valuation only makes sense if you price in Starlink becoming a top 3 telecom and Starship opening up entirely new markets. Possible, sure, but the launch business alone doesn't get you anywhere near 1.75T. They're betting the multiple on revenue lines that don't fully exist yet.

bpodgursky2• 4 months ago

I mean... in what world is it worth less?

Meta has increasingly ephemeral digital mindshare and no AI play. SpaceX has a near monopoly on access to the rest of the galaxy.

paxys4• 4 months ago

In the same world where Tesla is worth more than every other automaker in the world combined.

notahacker4• 4 months ago

That feels like a surprisingly weak moat though; costs have already fallen to the point where launch isn't the biggest cost of space hardware any more, the competition is hotting up, and whilst launch costs give Starlink an advantage over other LEO satcomms constellations, other countries have strategic incentives to underwrite the existence of that competition, and once those assets have been sent to space it's a straight fight for subscribers in a remote broadband connectivity market which is definitely real but also looks... actually not that huge, relative to a trillion dollar valuation, unless they're able to drop their prices to wired broadband levels without service degradation. Launch cadence is a bigger advantage for SpaceX than cost, but again something other entities plausibly will match, when the demand is there.

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.

convexly4• 4 months ago

The cadence point is understated. SpaceX launched 130+ times in 2025. The next closest was around 15. That's not a gap that closes in 2-3 years even with heavy subsidies, because it's not just the rocket, you need to account for the operational framework of doing it every 3 days.

moralestapia• 4 months ago

That feels like a surprisingly weak moat though

Lol, the classic "I can build a reusable rocket in a weekend" comment.

dang• 4 months ago

[stub for offtopicness]

[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.]

mtharrison2• 4 months ago

What's in the SpaceX Files and why aren't they already public?

throwaway858256• 4 months ago

The big numbers are the cost to train a frontier LLM and the GPU cost per hour.

charcircuit• 4 months ago

Sensitive financial information. It is normal for companies to file confidentiality to avoid leaking information early.

riffraff6• 4 months ago

the truth social is out there

MisterTea• 4 months ago

Details of alien encounters and abductions, paranormal and psychic phenomena, as well as crypto-zoology and curious human abilities.

reads headline again

Oh. Probably all the money burnt in AI training and data centers.

SunshineTheCat• 4 months ago

That is what I'm talking about, finally someone is asking the real questions.

1970-01-01• 4 months ago

Outstanding comment.

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).

righthand3• 4 months ago

Just more pedophiles and their supporters.

gigatexal• 4 months ago

ugh he's going to be worth > 1T and go on to have even more influence than before. this is so bad for society.

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?

throwaway858256• 4 months ago

Trying to dump on the market before the bubble pops.

outside23442• 4 months ago

Not sure why you are being downvoted. This is exactly what is happening and why OpenAI is trying to IPO to dump their garbage as well.

throwawaypath3• 4 months ago

I netted six figures selling options to doomers like you last year. Please keep this energy up.

CalChris• 4 months ago

This is structured so that Musk becomes the first trillionaire.

Detrytus• 4 months ago

Yeah, that's probably the only reason for SpaceX going public.

Ekaros• 4 months ago

On one hand I do take some enjoyment of suckers being fleeced. But on other hand I know who this all will benefit so I really can't do that.

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...

throwaway858256• 4 months ago

The suckers being fleeced are every pension fund in the world. They're demanding the S&P includes them faster to force ETF owners to buy in before the price tanks.

skeeter20202• 4 months ago

Unless you literally have nothing, YOU are one of the millions being fleeced. Pensions & retirement funds, any index fund that comes remotely close to technology, any equity you own in a venture in tech, any industry that via very short linkages is connected. Good luck avoiding this.

rvz• 4 months ago

They are going IPO close to Elon's birthday (26th or 29th June) aren't they? Like they did with Tesla.

But as soon as they IPO, that's a signal to head for the exit before it all collapses again.

indoordin0saur8• 4 months ago

TSLA is up 300x from what it IPO'd at

outside23442• 4 months ago

I hate that I will have to invest in this crap with my retirement index funds

torginus3• 4 months ago

Does this mean that before june SpaceX will do something highly noteworthy, to justify the IPO price?

WarmWash• 4 months ago

Elon will announce roborockets that pick you up and fly you to Mars in under 12 hours while you hypersleep in the ExaShip. Production starts definitely next year.

mrlonglong• 4 months ago

If it goes public, does that means Musk won't own any of it? Can we rip it out of his filthy hands?

nly• 4 months ago

Likely only a shameful % of the company will float.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 months ago

Bollocks valuation. There isn't that much demand for space and it's not that profitable.

nickvec• 4 months ago

A space company in the pursuit of profit... what could possibly go wrong.

kakflelajf74• 4 months ago

How can I avoid my retirement and index funds being a part of this garbage?

nutjob25• 4 months ago

Maybe someone will start selling a Nasdaq minus Musk index fund.

JumpCrisscross9• 4 months ago

Don’t buy it. If you don’t have enough money to directly index, don’t waste time trying to pick stocks or time the market.

mrinterweb• 4 months ago

I feel the global instability could easily be very disruptive to SpaceX. Just imagine if Russia gets vindictive and starts destroying these satellites or blowing up their satellites to create orbital debris that could knock satellites out of orbit. A really bad solar storm could be devastating.

Just saying there are some decent risks, and pricing it at 1.75T IPO seems risky enough. I would not take that gamble.

intrasight• 4 months ago

very disruptive to SpaceX

And to most everything else

JumpCrisscross9• 4 months ago

imagine if Russia gets vindictive and starts destroying these satellites

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.)

plqbfbv2• 4 months ago

It’s almost always cheaper to individually target satellites than to try and blanket orbits.

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.

plqbfbv2• 4 months ago

A really bad solar storm could be devastating.

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.

nutjob25• 4 months ago

Bloomberg link if you can't read the NYT: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-01/spacex-is...

sroussey2• 4 months ago

SpaceX does internal sales of stock twice a year, so there will not be pressure from existing stockholders to sell. But there will be buyers. SpaceX is/was a great brand (before it became SpaceTwitter).

nutjob25• 4 months ago

so there will not be pressure from existing stockholders to sell

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.

panick21_6• 4 months ago

I love space and they are an amazing company that I have been following for almost 2 decades, but I wouldn't touch that IPO with a 10 foot pool.

But the auto inclusion in Fortune 500 is basically cheating.

beej71• 4 months ago

Man, did I parse that badly. "Space(X files) to go public."

I'm a little disappointed now.

jrmg• 4 months ago

I wonder how many here are aware that SpaceX (not Musk) now owns X Corp. (nee Twitter), via its ownership of xAI.

Smells like great fiduciary responsibility!

NelsonMinar• 4 months ago

You should see Tesla's rooftop solar business!

nojvek• 4 months ago

Let’s not forget the Republican govt + DOGE fired anyone with a spine at SEC.

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.

bpodgursky2• 4 months ago

On what grounds would the SEC actually block the merger? It's not anticompetitive, it's not even vertical integration. They can't stop things just for being dumb.

HerbManic3• 4 months ago

I have long suspected that the next major move will be to roll Tesla into Space X, thus completing the Musk consolidation. After that is when it gets interesting as the whole staggeringly massive business has to be profitable long term.

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.

ktokw• 4 months ago

It's going to have a big impact on short-term volatility, but it's going to take a big drop in prices in a month. But I think it's a company that needs to be invested in the long run.

pilgrim03• 4 months ago

Money raised from a public offering would most likely help SpaceX finance its long-term goals of launching artificial intelligence data centers into orbit, creating a colony on the moon and getting humans to Mars. These are expensive and unproven endeavors that may take years and billions of dollars to achieve.

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.

hattmall3• 4 months ago

What possible reasonable benefit would there be to datacenters in space? Why would that even be a concept at all?

thrance• 4 months ago

It's a convenient way to merge AI and spacetech, two hot topics to the retared investor class that rules our world. The reality and feasibility of it doesn't matter.

erulabs2• 4 months ago

Genuinely: regulation. Every other benefit is conceptual at best. If SpaceX controls the entire heavy launch market _and_ they control data-centers in space, then absolutely no one on earth is in a position to control or regulate such a data-center except SpaceX themselves.

I'm not arguing that it's a good idea, but that is the idea.

erulabs2• 4 months ago

Technically if it takes 500 years and $17T it is still possible within "years" and "billions"

seydor2• 4 months ago

I think it s more important to question their profitability

tristanj15• 4 months ago

I'm a SpaceX investor, and from reading the comments here, I think most people here are missing why SpaceX has an outrageously high valuation.

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.

ensen• 4 months ago

is there an article or document covering the value proposition and realistic timeline of Mars colonization available to read somewhere ? i certainly think it's good for humanity to do it but as a casual observer i imagine it will cost a lot of money over the next ~20 years as opposed to making any.

tristanj15• 4 months ago

I don't know one off the top of my head, I learned most of my information about space and SpaceX from youtube, mainly from Scott Manley and Noise In Space.

This video gives an overview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3hPH_bc0Ww but it strongly underrepresents the role of robotics.

paxys4• 4 months ago

I believe there's a 0% chance SpaceX will achieve any of this, at least in my lifetime.

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.

daveguy2• 4 months ago

Good to know. So if you're in the majority and figured out Musk is full of shit, don't invest.

tristanj15• 4 months ago

Not a good metric imo. The majority of people have no interest in, and have no idea what's happening at SpaceX or in the space industry in general. Any predictions they have are based on vibes, not evidence.

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.

khriss2• 4 months ago

Issue is, Musk is making pretty much every one invest by forcing indexes to bend the rules and include SpaceX into their ranks thus forcing index funds to buy at the early public valuation of SpaceX.

vjvjvjvjghv3• 4 months ago

"I personally believe SpaceX has a 70% chance of achieving its Mars ambitions."

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.

tristanj15• 4 months ago

In the 2040s. The upcoming wave of robotics will push the cost of goods down enormously low, robotics + need for compute + cheap goods will cause a huge increase in demand for raw resources; mining on earth will not be able to keep pace & environmentalists will get generally upset about environmental destruction caused by resource extraction.

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.

datsci_est_20152• 4 months ago

The ocean floor is more habitable than Mars.

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.

WalterBright7• 4 months ago

Creating an autonomous station on Antarctica or the moon is child's play compared to Mars.

That's because it's unnecessary. It's cheaper to just ship supplies in.

fwip2• 4 months ago

And having a colony on Mars will be profitable because of...?

tristanj15• 4 months ago

Was the British colonization and funding of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia profitable? All three colonies were not profitable for decades after their formation.

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.

7e• 4 months ago

A civilization on Mars would not create value. It would be a money incinerator. Mars is a shithole with nothing to offer humanity economically or in quality of life. Quite the opposite, in fact.

tristanj15• 4 months ago

250 years ago, you could make this exact argument about the British colonization of Australia, and it would be entirely correct. The early colony was a pure fiscal drain on Britain with almost no return.

Yet today it's the 13th largest economy on earth.

Think on a longer time scale.

WalterBright7• 4 months ago

Jamestown was a total failure, too.

plaidfuji• 4 months ago

SpaceX's valuation only makes sense if

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?

tristanj15• 4 months ago

My belief is that Mars will be colonized for ideological reasons, not for profit. A Mars colony won't be profitable. But it will be colonized, mostly for prestige, and also because of overcrowding & pollution, which will become bigger issues in the coming decades.

khriss2• 4 months ago

Uh, how exactly would SpaceX make money from a Mars colony?

themafia4• 4 months ago

"If everything goes perfectly according to plan over the next 30 years and they don't literally kill anyone through an accident it has huge value."

I wish I had the guts to just lie to investors with a bald face. I personally think Musk is an underachiver.

tristanj15• 4 months ago

that's a fake quote and not at all related to anything I wrote.

calvinsun1102• 4 months ago

70% is way too high.

Iolaum• 4 months ago

If SpaceX is on track to achieve those goals, then why does it need special treatment to be included in fund indexes earlier than it would otherwise be?

Valakas_2• 4 months ago

The "most valuable company" ever created when talking about a future around 2030-40 is a mindset pre-singularity. Sounds like a caveman back then saying that in 500 years, if their group keeps growing, they will be able to control a whole continent, and have more access to good quality rock for pointy daggers, completely ignoring the fact the world will change in ways they can't fathom at the time.

dgellow4• 4 months ago

How does a mars colony justify such a valuation? You have a gap in your explanation, that’s taken for granted, but why?

danny_codes3• 4 months ago

We don’t even know if humans can survive effectively in Mar’s gravity. This effort is still deep in science fiction land.

paxys4• 4 months ago

It is insane to think that this year multiple "startups" are going to IPO at valuations greater than that of the largest company in the world in ~2018. We have printed so much money in that period that these numbers have completely lost touch with reality.

asgh1287• 4 months ago

In June? That is why Trump is talking about an Iran ceasefire. Replenish the weapons, flip some companies to the public, then start the war again. Bonus points for disrupting EU energy supplies for longer.

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.

xbmcuser• 4 months ago

Tesla valuation is about to crater and take most of Musk wealth with it so he needs the over valuation of SpaceX before the other rocket competitors can show that they can replicate what SpaceX is doing at cheaper prices.

a538058b• 4 months ago

I would like to have what you're having please

orbitalmentos• 4 months ago

It's hard to imagine how SpaceX can be making the reported $8 billion a year in profit[1]. We now see roughly two Starlink reentries per day... The replenishment costs are at least $5M/day just to maintain the current constellation, while the entire customer revenue is ~$20M/day. Guess the real money is in Golden Dome.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/spacex-generated-ab...

infinitewars2• 4 months ago

That article claiming $8b profit is mislabeling EBITDA as profit. EBITDA removes any recurring replenishment costs, the cost of building the satellite, launching the satellite, the user equipment manufacturing and returns, all ground infrastructure build and replacement, all employee stock compensation (not counted!), no advertising costs (and they've actually had to do a lot of that lately to scrounge customers that are remote enough that their network isn't too congested to serve), no taxes are counted (though they get out of that because they have no profit!). Not to mention payments servicing all their debt and Starship development.

*they actually use "Adjusted EBITDA" which is even more nonstandard and means they define the accounting however they want!

alsetmusic• 4 months ago

Great idea to let the guy who was just found guilty of manipulating markets to have another public company. That's gonna be great.

maxnevermind• 4 months ago

I wonder if this ends up like Tesla - China copies it and makes it cheaper - GG if not protected by huge tariffs/bans. It seems like US these days is just a testing ground for new tech that later scaled further and optimized in China. Are there any hard moats protecting SpaceX from that?

ashot• 4 months ago

maybe the rocket science?

nutjob25• 4 months ago

I wonder if this ends up like Tesla

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.

seydor2• 4 months ago

Twitter going public again .... that will change the tone

simonebrunozzi• 4 months ago

The Artemis II launch, despite the heat shield risk, is clearly a way to hype up the general retail investor before the SpaceX IPO. I really hope that nothing bad happens to the astronauts up there... but if it does, shame on NASA, and shame on everyone else involved. Big money, unfortunately, always wins.

tmatsuzaki• 4 months ago

In space development, I don’t think there are any competitors at SpaceX’s level at the moment. On top of that, they are trying to do something most people would never even imagine: building data centers in space using SpaceX’s technology. If that becomes a reality, they will almost certainly dominate when it comes to energy.

Sammi• 4 months ago

Nobody's trying to build data centers in space because it makes no sense. It's a pure grift.

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.

nutjob25• 4 months ago

If that becomes a reality

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.

pfannkuchen• 4 months ago

But I’m not done reading the Epstein files yet, I can’t take any more files going public!

dev1ycan• 4 months ago

Starship is the biggest scam in the history of spaceflight, it was never about getting to the moon or mars or even towards other points on Earth (or space tourism) but lowering the cost of sending military and other dual use technologies to Low Earth Orbit.

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.

deafpolygon• 4 months ago

Elon is itching to cash out.

wormius• 4 months ago

Can't wait til the precious minerals market crash from asteroid mining goes kaboom, and just like that old tale about the king who left a wake of gold in his hajj, which ended up destroying the economy. In Cairo specifically.

Will mankinds's mouth be larger than its stomach?

Found the Emperor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa

ausbah• 4 months ago

maybe? if the LLM craze for the past cpl years has biased my thinking in anyway it’s that making a previously expensive technology more accessible will just drive demand for it up

SpaceX files to go public

Related Stories