Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

https://www.matteast.io/spacex-escape-velocity.html

by meast • 1 month ago

185 198 1 month ago

SXX2• 1 month ago

You never know what inflation gonna be in futute. In some countries that turned into autocracies with strong and long standing leaders who love traditional values and religion inflation can easily be 30-70% a year.

Then not only 4.3T reachable, but even 43T.

epolanski• 1 month ago

Solid argument to get into the IPO asap. /s

malfist• 1 month ago

Sorry, but I'm not pricing a stock today based on the assumption that this country will turn into a theocratic autocracy with a 70% YoY inflation rate for 15 years.

Besides, if I was pricing that in, I'd be buying indexes and not a specific stock. The 70% YoY inflation would rise all tides. Not just SpaceX.

voidfunc• 1 month ago

Will? It already has turned into one.

sidewndr46• 1 month ago

Isn't SpaceX uniquely in the position to benefit from that kind of government?

marcosdumay• 1 month ago

Nothing the GP said makes SpaceX a better stock. It would just make the promise technically true in a way that doesn't benefit any investor.

Or, in other words, it's a joke.

scottyah11• 1 month ago

But these insane valuations are leading the tide-rising. This is one instrument in inflation because it's "creating" this money from nothing. All the employees that got a $5k bonus 5yrs ago will see it rise to $50k (or more) out of thin air (crazy financial mechanisms).

bluGill• 1 month ago

If inflation is really that high I'm buying hard assets that won't depreciate. Sure I will need some cash, but gold bars in my personal safe suddenly are a great investment (gold is generally a terrible investment, but when inflation is the main concern is is really good)

downrightmike2• 1 month ago

China launched a direct competitor on June 2nd

"China launches debut mission of Falcon 9-like rocket with no advance notice" https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...

Spacex is going to get rekt, China has all the materials and workforce

re-thc2• 1 month ago

Spacex is going to get rekt, China has all the materials and workforce

According to their brief, most of the revenue is going to come from AI!

The rockets are apparently just "minor" now.

bilbo0s• 1 month ago

Well, SpaceX is supposed to be more about AI than low cost orbital launches. At least that’s what their roadshow is claiming.

But either way, yeah, I’m not willing to bet much money on USD4.3T unless we can get some serious financial engineering, (read “circular deals”), going.

Isamu• 1 month ago

China has multiple reusable rocket programs, the reuse will become key to driving down costs.

logancbrown• 1 month ago

This comment is very clearly an exaggeration even if there is a grain of truth to it. You should consider addressing the fact that there can be multiple "leaders" at any given time, and geopolitical boundaries can shape those leaders.

guywithahat• 1 month ago

It's possible SpaceX will get "rekt", but the US has decades of experience and manufacturing processes set up for aerospace, as well as established customers. As long as SpaceX doesn't become heavily unionized I suspect they'll be able to compete strongly with anything China develops.

raincole• 1 month ago

Perhaps at least wait until Long March proves to be recyclable/reuseable before you call it a direct competitor.

axus• 1 month ago

Who's going to buy launch services from CASC besides Chinese companies? Serious question, I don't have an answer in mind.

zuzululu• 1 month ago

at that inflation rate the US dollar would lose its reserve currency status so I doubt it

at some point interest rates should reach double digits like in the 70s following oil crisis

the only crazy scenario for spaceX is it does space exploration/mining and finds something extremely exotic or valuable and sought after.

scottyah11• 1 month ago

I get the feeling that in 5yrs or so if China makes the yuan free-floating it will be more of a reserve currency.

All spaceX has to do is keep being as innovative and industrious as it is now, in the physical world as all other companies are getting very lazy or just working on software. Eventually it'll probably go the way of GE because humans are humans, but I think we have a few decades until more compelling places to work come up.

mohamedkoubaa2• 1 month ago

Reserve currency status is already doomed it's a matter of when not if

thatmf• 1 month ago

Donald Trump said “I love the inflation” after new data showed that inflation jumped to an annual rate of 4.2% in May, the third consecutive monthly increase since the start of the Iran war and a three-year high.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jun/10/inflation-r...

You may be on to something...

jfengel• 1 month ago

I try to be skeptical about quotes, especially when they affirm my preconceptions. So here's the surrounding material:

“You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over, you know I can say it now ... you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil. Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran, until right now.”

OK then.

SecretDreams2• 1 month ago

This is true. We just need to bank on a total economic collapse and all of our SpaceX valuation fantasies can come true.

SXX2• 1 month ago

You'll be surprised how not total economic collapse it is. Population will become poor, but it only good for the strong leader since they wont have time to bother about all this politics stuff.

And country can still run like that for decades. Also get rids you from all the debt since you can easily just pay it all by printing more money.

MikeNotThePope• 1 month ago

4.3T could be the cost of a dozen of eggs by 2040.

Geee• 1 month ago

If all the AI / robotics dreams come true and productivity increases a lot, it'll cause deflationary pressure, which must be balanced with money printing to keep inflation up at 2%. Increased productivity is never allowed to result in cheaper products. For example, CPI deflation 20% -> money printing 22% equals 2% total CPI inflation. Asset prices track the real inflation i.e. they rise by 22%.

sometimelurker• 1 month ago

thx

adding a mode on this that prevents animations would be nice addition tho

Jblx2• 1 month ago

A grammar corrected title might be better as:

"Why SpaceX's 2040 Revenue Forecast of $4.3T is highly unlikely"

mentalfist• 1 month ago

It's amazing we're in a timeline were people let stuff like this happen, against any sane logic.

andruby4• 1 month ago

against any sane logic

The logic is super sane: rich people get richer. rich people in power let other rich people get richer.

The insane part is the population that falls for the lies and votes for this

DenverR2• 1 month ago

The actual takeaway question is "is Elon Musk on a frontier of his own — or is the market extrapolating one proven outlier onto an unproven one?"

The HN title editorializes its own answer to the author's question.

devindotcom• 1 month ago

it's a rhetorical question, not a real one. the author's inclination is clear as day.

DenverR2• 1 month ago

it's written to provoke thought and reflection.

the title does the reflection on behalf of the reader which is a disservice.

bigyabai• 1 month ago

AN ESSAY IN SCROLLS

I'd have preferred the essay. This kind of Claude Code landing page turns people off when the content is otherwise meaningful.

The target audience will be looking for any reason to excuse this logic, and by vibe coding them a website you've given them their reason.

m3kw9• 1 month ago

I know this sounds "bad" but early in Tesla's forcasts, I've seen many "highly unlikely" articles, but Tesla ended up blowing past expectations. This one is tough too, but I hate just dismiss it as unlikely especially with Elon at the helm

JumpinJack_Cash• 1 month ago

Those things were highly unlikely because they accounted for rationality from the consumer's end as well as the political's end and of course Fed and regulators

All 3 went out of the window sometimes around 2015 or so.

itsgonnabebad• 1 month ago

Blown past?

It was only a few years ago people were saying Tesla was going to own the entire car market, and everyone else would go out of business. The Cybertruck was going to be the best selling car of all time, the insurance business was going to be a massive money maker etc.

None of these things happened.

throwawayqqq11• 1 month ago

Elon is a true grand master to blow past shifted goal posts. If people continue to fall for it, he might have success, however you define it.

scottyah11• 1 month ago

It was only a few years ago people were saying Tesla was going to fail spectacularly, that nobody would drive an EV, that no new auto manufacturer could start in USA, that they would blow up into flames at rates way higher than ICE cars, that the CT would never be made, that they'd have to buy their batteries from suppliers that would just crank the prices up.

Eji1700• 1 month ago

I think the only opinion I care about on this will be Aswath Damodaran https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQKIJU7TmTc

I plan to stay the fuck away from it either way, but he's at least someone who's not only good at this stuff, showing their work and approaching it professionally.

I haven't had time to watch the video, but I read through part of the blog post, and seems he believes 1.2T is possible,but I won't know how much I agree with that until I finish reading/watching it all.

It's at, the very least, a professional presentation so it's a hell of a lot easier to see why and what he does/doesn't agree with.

TheOtherHobbes• 1 month ago

Tesla spent almost years scraping by, almost went bankrupt in 2018, had three years of "exceeds expectation" from 2020 to 2023 and is now being murdered by competitors.

A lot of "income" comes from selling regulatory credits, not cars.

FSD is up to v14 and there is no sense in which it's "Full", or is likely to be "Full" any time soon.

The early computer industry created a good few companies which achieved profitability quickly and posted solid YoY expansion for decades.

The histories of SpaceX and Tesla show no evidence of that pattern.

wnmurphy3• 1 month ago

FSD is up to v14 and there is no sense in which it's "Full", or is likely to be "Full" any time soon.

I think the SpaceX IPO is way overvalued, but have you actually tried FSD v14 yourself?

My car has 8-year old hardware running v12, and it handles like 90+% of my driving. When I test drove 14 it blew my mind how good it had gotten in only 8 months of development. In my opinion, there's question that it's "when," not "if."

criddell3• 1 month ago

Do you think full self-driving (level 5) is near? Driving a car is something we teach children to do. Surely FSD has to be getting close, no?

Is this something Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any of the other big AI investors are close to solving?

scottyah11• 1 month ago

murdered by competitors

Is just a downright lie. The Tesla Model Y maintained its title as the world's best-selling vehicle in 2025 across all powertrains, marking its third consecutive year at number one. Even the CT is the best selling EV pickup, the last bestseller could not find a way to sell it profitably.

golem142• 1 month ago

Not a fanboy, but the latest generation Tesla self driving is really quite good. I still don't understand why they still aren't adding lidars now since prices have come down a lot.

stetrain2• 1 month ago

Tesla's own expectation six years ago was that they would be selling 20 million cars annually by 2030:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

Tesla's recent annual car sales:

2023: 1.81M

2024: 1.79M

2025: 1.64M

Elon's failed timeline predictions about self-driving and Robotaxi fleets are too numerous to attempt to cite here.

What has mostly exceeded expectations about Tesla is their stock price compared to actual productivity.

danielovichdk• 1 month ago

I think the US is in such a fucked up place economically, that the stock market is so overheated and will cause grave inflation, but it's the only lever left to pull for the government, that it will cause havoc within the next 10 years.

SpaceX or any of AI companies for that matter is absolutely not worth their money, but they will be carried through by government legislation, because otherwise the economy will be fucked for the US.

SpaceX ... 4.3 trillion...what the fuck are you on about

scottyah11• 1 month ago

I mean, the entire predicted value that the company will be worth is like 6mo of the US budget (>$7 Trillion per year). I don't think that's all that much, even if they accomplish half of what they're all trying to do.

The economy is already F'd because so few people are actually working productively- it's been a laptop-class driven economy since the 80s.

samtp2• 1 month ago

You don't think one company being worth half a year of the biggest country in the world's budget is all that much?

Hard to know how to where to go from there because I find that quite insane.

Havoc2• 1 month ago

otherwise the economy will be fucked for the US.

There is no „for the US“ here. If the US blows up everything does. Even the broadest of World ETFs are super US heavy

ck2• 1 month ago

I'm still struggling with the idea that 4,400 millionaires are going to be created overnight

(out of 22,000 employees)

Because many of them are going to sell sell sell at least half of their shares

Which then means the value will PLUMMET

supertroop• 1 month ago

College roommate worked for nvidia and cashed out last year and retired in his early 50s. Tens of millions in cash. After tax too. Am I jealous? Hell yes.

criddell3• 1 month ago

I take it you are going to be shorting the stock?

damnitbuilds2• 1 month ago

Shorting is not as easy as you think. You have to time it right and you risk big losses.

KNOWING OpenAI et al WILL fail is not enough to make money from that.

scottyah11• 1 month ago

I think most still believe in the mission, especially the ones with that many shares. I get selling enough to buy a house and add some diversity to your portfolio, but you really have to have a dismal outlook to sell all your shares, or even half.

eggplantemoji69• 1 month ago

Isn’t like 90% of their predicted revenue due to their AI products?

mixel• 1 month ago

Yes. And a huge chunk is coming from the new deal with Google AFAIK they are basically only selling compute and the rest is +/- 0 profit or at least not that huge

square_usual2• 1 month ago

[flagged]

grassfedgeek• 1 month ago

Tired of you vibe coding detectives. Who the heck cares? If you don't use AI these days you're not smart. Why call it out, as if you caught them doing something unethical?

slopinthebag• 1 month ago

Because a lot of us don’t want to see AI slop and it’s very useful to have that pointed out in the comments before I waste time clicking on the link and slowly coming to that realization myself.

ceejayoz• 1 month ago

An AI design is an imperfect hint that the copy may also be similarly generated.

SiempreViernes• 1 month ago

You know there's like an entire generation of devs raised hearing "copyright violations are theft, don't do it, it's band"? Unsurprisingly many of these people indeed think that when Anthropic and OpenAI does industrial scale copyright theft that's bad.

Also, calling most of humanity "stupid" is pretty stupid.

shimman5• 1 month ago

eh, am very biased as I design similar sites but I honestly prefer these to what would be likely string of random social media posts.

I like having relevant graphics stickied while text is displayed alongside it (assuming by blog post you mean the typical page-like top to bottom approach).

edit: damn, if these designs are hated what modern approaches do people like? I feel like scroll based text is a relatively unexplored idea compared to the typical blog post.

When it comes to web content, I vastly prefer web like interfaces that you can't reproduce in print.

panzi3• 1 month ago

While I'm not that against to such a web page (when viewing it on a monitor, not a phone) I'd say follow these points:

• Don't hijack any browser functionality. Scrolling shall scroll the document, the end.

• Don't scale something to the screen size, breaking zoom! Especially don't do it so that when zooming causes a different scroll position and then it all jumps to a different slide. WTF!

• Make it accessible!

If you want to make flashy graphics and animations make a game. That is not meant as to belittle games, I love games.

nemomarx2• 1 month ago

I want it to be something you could reproduce in print, though. As close to what I'd get putting it in reader mode as possible.

We've spent a long time optimizing the printed word, including pages with diagrams and illustrations on them. You don't need to reinvent the wheel for every blog

nozzlegear2• 1 month ago

edit: damn, if these designs are hated what modern approaches do people like? I feel like scroll based text is a relatively unexplored idea compared to the typical blog post.

The New York Times generally does the "lots of data, text and graphs in a scrolling presentation" tastefully.

giancarlostoro• 1 month ago

My corporate firewall blocked this due to it being a newly registered domain.

So I can't even see it, I care less about "vibe coding" but it sounds like someone registered a domain just to get attention on their amazing take about why they think they're qualified to tell the world the future.

cactusplant7374• 1 month ago

Next time they should run it by your company before they decide to create a new domain.

dieselgate• 1 month ago

My corporate firewall blocked this due to it being a newly registered domain.

Was surprised mine did not - usually a toss up with HN links. I don't get reasoning just "NONCOMPLIANT ACTION". It is interesting to have a flag telling you the domain is new, though

BLKNSLVR3• 1 month ago

Do you know by which mechanism they recognize newly registered domains in order to block them?

quantified2• 1 month ago

Having read plenty of 1970's and 1980's sci-fi, I feel that clanker is the perfect term.

re-thc2• 1 month ago

Please tell your clanker to just write a blog post instead

You're right to push back on that. Let me get the details instead of hand waving.

root_axis2• 1 month ago

These types of pages have been common long before vibe coding.

xmprt• 1 month ago

But now with vibecoding it feels like the default for articles to have fancy animation, rather than the exception. I guess that by having a fancier presentation it subconsciously legitimizes the content more so you're less likely to critique it as compared to a simple blog post where you pay more attention to the words and can realize that it's very surface level.

square_usual2• 1 month ago

Vibe coding has made them a lot more common. Before, you'd need to put a lot more effort into making a website that worked like this, and it wasn't worth it for a random post. Now this person's entire website is posts like this, and I've seen many more in the past few months.

KoolKat23• 1 month ago

Completely disagree.

I appreciate this website. This format is intentional and serves a purpose.

It's great to see the small web in action.

cousinbryce2• 1 month ago

Here’s a very short list of visual essays I like:

https://thenoisyroom.com/ https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing

This one is good but the content doesn’t speak to me like the above. Would have been nice if OP had added a writing style suggestion to the prompt. Vanilla LLM text is sad

karolist• 1 month ago

"please do things the way I want things to be done"

cousinbryce2• 1 month ago

Why not point your clanker at this and ask for it as a blog post?

dakial1• 1 month ago

...or include a auto-scroll that will go directly to the next content slide (working with keyboard arrows).

d_silin• 1 month ago

SpaceX already blown through a number of "... but this cannot be!" forecasts. Would not discount them easily.

MPSimmons2• 1 month ago

SpaceX's entire history is full of, "there's no way they'll ever do X", followed by them doing it.

They definitely haven't hit all of their goals, but I don't think anything they want to do is impossible, just really difficult.

testing223213• 1 month ago

“Here at SpaceX we specialize in making the impossible merely late.”

-Elon

cycomanic• 1 month ago

Like what? Seriously, nobody thought shouting rockets into space was impossible. Landing a rocket again nobody had thought it impossible. Sure they brought down prices, again nobody thought it impossible. The question is actually is it desirable. Rocket launches are pretty much the worst one can do in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but somehow all technerds are falling all over themselves how great it is.

a_shovel• 1 month ago

Skeptics said SpaceX would fail, but it succeeded. Therefore, skepticism in general is wrong and SpaceX will have an annual revenue of $11 quadrillion by 2030.

kilroy1232• 1 month ago

I was thinking about this lately as well. If you break down their plan of launching a LOT of solar panels into space and strapping a GPU cluster to it. It's not _that_ crazy now.

Prices for solar panels have dropped 90% in the last 10 years.

Price per kilo to Low Earth Orbit has dropped ~50% in the last 10 years.

SpaceX's entire plan is to keep dropping both of these prices down even more with massive solar panel / starship factories.

stephc_int13• 1 month ago

Not the same solar panels. As with most equipment, the constraints are very different in space/orbit, and the suppliers are not the same.

xboxnolifes• 1 month ago

Well outside my field, but I was under the impression that getting the energy into the GPU (solar) was not the problem. The problem is getting the heat out. It takes a lot of surface area to radiate out the heat that GPUs produce. Maybe it ends up economical, but just having it in space adds in a bunch of challenges, not least that once it's up there you can't send in a technician to troubleshoot.

And if solar panels drop another 90%, why not just slap them on earth?

qaq• 1 month ago

it is crazy

einpoklum2• 1 month ago

"solar panel / starship factories"

Oh, sure, both kinds of factories are legitimately slashable as they are totally the same thing. Pretty much. Right? :-(

amluto2• 1 month ago

Here's the thing. Land is cheap in many parts of the world. Solar panels work okay on the ground (not as well as in space). GPUs work better on the ground (MUCH easier to cool). Connectivity is cheaper on the ground (sure, Starlink is amazing, but it doesn't hold a candle to fiber). Maintenance is possible on the ground. Reuse of old equipment is possible on the ground. Batteries are heavy, and they smooth out solar power pretty well on the ground. Oh, and natural gas, which xAI/SpaceX uses in their big datacenters, is cheap on the ground.

So, given that you're bought the GPUs, you could launch them into space, but you have the alternative option of ... not launching them into space.

olyjohn2• 1 month ago

It's still going to be what, $100,000 per ton to launch on Starship?

The AI1 Satellite that SpaceX has shown, is basically one rack. Something like 72 GPUs. Elon himself said it was a "rack in space" more than a datacenter in space. Sure I guess you could launch 100,000 of them and call it a datacenter. But their own graphic shows this thing to be 2 to 2 1/2 tons. So who is gonna spend $200,000 to launch a single rack into space? Get the panels as cheap as you want, the launch cost is still pretty massive just to get 150kw of free power.

I mean maybe my napkin math is way wrong here, but I don't see what the cost savings is.

SecretDreams2• 1 month ago

Just this morning, someone told me SpaceX valuation proponents couldn't possibly be more obtuse; yet, this thread has blown through those expectations.

sleepyguy• 1 month ago

The US consumer cellular subscription service is around 185 billion a year and if you add business/enterprise it is around 225 billion a year. If they were able (highly unlikely) to capture that market in the US alone through Satellite Cellular service, it would be huge revenue stream. Setting up data centers in orbit (easier said than done) would be another huge revenue stream. Setting up facilities to beam down energy to earths surface could also be an opportunity.

If I learned a good lesson, it's never say never....

samtp2• 1 month ago

Setting up data centers in orbit

Still have yet to hear how data centers in space are actually supposed to be a good thing when cooling them is much harder than on earth because they are in a near vacuum with much less heat dissipation.

Setting up facilities to beam down energy to earths surface could also be an opportunity

Also interested to learn how this is done without creating a death ray with potentially catastrophic consequences

So if all the current telcos in the US lose all of their customers and SpaceX captures 100% of them without degrading the current margin/pricing at all, they are 5% of their way to the $4.3t goal. And the only way I can see that happening is from government mandate - which if things don't change I guess never say never. But still a very very very long way off

orwin2• 1 month ago

SpaceX published their datacenter satellite plans, I think they assumed that if they hid their radiators from the sun, they can consider space temperature to be 3-5K. Which is a fairly good assumption if:

- you have a perfect shadow on all side (no light is reflected from a nearby celestial body)

- and nothing is radiating nearby. Earth radiate a lot, I space temperature around the iss is fairly high.

I'm fairly sure the current design either need high temp chips or needs to be far from LEO. Or they will have to make the radiators bigger.

vel0city4• 1 month ago

If they were able (highly unlikely) to capture that market in the US alone through Satellite Cellular service, it would be huge revenue stream

There's practically no way there's enough RF spectrum to handle that many clients from even LEO. There's a reason why carriers are moving to smaller and smaller and smaller cells, and places like sports venues have highly directional antenna arrays to handle the number of active clients. Will there be customers? Sure. Probably a lot! Will it be an actually massive chunk of the overall subscriber base mostly using their networks? Not a chance.

They can't even get capacity up enough to support their rural customers on practically idealized antenna array hardware.

Setting up data centers in orbit (easier said than done) would be another huge revenue stream.

What applications demand that kind of premium on cost of running? Why choose that instead of terrestrial datacenters? What's the overall use-case for why one should bother deploying their applications into a space datacenter? I'm genuinely asking. Aside from needing to ensure low-ish latency to the most remote parts of the world and being willing to pay whatever to have that, I don't get it.

Veserv• 1 month ago

Okay, so in 14 years they replace all cell phone service in the US achieving 6% of the revenue goal. Just have to find another 15 “all cell phone service in US” and do it all in 14 years and we are golden.

Just add a whole Apple worth of revenue yearly and they can just barely make it.

wnmurphy3• 1 month ago

Another factor I don't see mentioned: every Trump policy is inflationary. Deporting the labor base, deterring legal immigration, applying tariffs that were basically derived by taking the trade deficit with a country and dividing by 2, and now locking up 20% of the global oil market by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz.

The Fed's response will have to be to raise rates, which is going to crush the multiple of any stock whose valuation is based on the expectation of massive growth.

killjoywashere• 1 month ago

Elon making outrageous projections? Noooo.....

notorandit• 1 month ago

Please, correct the typo in the title!

0xbadcafebee2• 1 month ago

I don't think some people understand how money works. If you say you're going to have $3.4T in revenue, someone has to have that money, and give it to you. So where is the money? Who has it? Are they spending it somewhere else right now, and will decide to instead spend it on SpaceX later? Or is the money just sitting in savings accounts, strangely not being spent or invested?

And why would they put their money into SpaceX anyway? What has SpaceX said the $3.4T will be based on?

1. Space-based AI datacenters. Yes, they actually said that. Anyone who knows anything about space and datacenters knows this is insane.

2. Starlink. They're saying they're going to make $3.4T by... running an ISP. In space.

3. Starship. They are betting that so many people want to send junk into space that it'll make them $3.4T.

4. Possible Tesla merger. This would definitely bump up the numbers. But Tesla's future depends on cars, AI and robotics. The US's electric car market is in decline (Thanks, Trump!) and BYD is producing cheaper electric cars faster (though US buyers won't buy BYD's, the US electric car market isn't as big as the global market, and is smaller since removing tax rebates). It's clearly not a real AI competitor, if they just rented out their AI datacenters to the competition. And China is churning out robots constantly that actually work and are cheap.

As you can see from other analyses (https://fortune.com/2026/05/31/spacex-tesla-odds-of-merging-...), their cash flow is actually much lower than they claim. The valuations are crazily high. SpaceX/Tesla's claims of how they're going to make money verges on snake oil.

imperialdrive• 1 month ago

If you build it, they will come.

kridsdale12• 1 month ago

The answer to all your questions is that the stock market has been in a mode of price discovery for memes themselves since 2020.

Elon is the meme king.

Mikhail_Edoshin2• 1 month ago

Space based data centers is a cover for space weaponry.

CamperBob2• 1 month ago

s/cover/target

seattle_spring• 1 month ago

Can you elaborate on what you mean?

dmix• 1 month ago

Yep a space anti ballistic missile system (aka Golden Dome and before that Brilliant Pebbles) is likely coming if SpaceX figures out starship and China figures out their Starship clone. Plus maybe a “rods from god” type offensive system if these countries can’t make a deal to avoid space weapons.

0xbadcafebee2• 1 month ago

If that ends up being true, at minimum that's securities fraud. Not really something worth risking with a trillion dollar company

themgt2• 1 month ago

It's funny it concludes "A line is not a law" while the entire page is just lines and charts. If you didn't know anything going in, SpaceX might as well be a company selling toilet paper for all you learned.

I've got no idea what a share of SpaceX is worth today or 14 years from now, but fully reusable rockets are going to be one of the most important engineering achievements in human history, and SpaceX appears far in the lead to getting there first. Ignoring everything else they're at the cutting edge of.

It's really just sad to me how upset how many people are about an IPO. "Imagine what a waste, if the stock market were to overvalue the company dedicated to solving the challenges required to make humanity a multi-planetary species, when this graph clearly shows we could've wisely allocated more of civilization's resources to Saudi Aramco."

iterance• 1 month ago

All things equal I would agree with you. However, all things are not equal.

SpaceX's target 2040 revenue of $4.3T. Let us assume that the US GDP grows at 3% p/a; in 2040 we may project a GDP of around $50T. Naturally, SpaceX would pushing 10% of the total US GDP.

Such a change is possible. It is not out of the question. Companies can and do reach that size, though obviously for mathematical reasons only a small number do. However, the claim that one will reach that size 14 years in advance beggars scrutiny. Simple credulity is not justified and it naturally follows that there will be a large number of people, even people with very bullish outlooks, who do not believe SpaceX will meet target. 30% growth p/a for 14 years would, historically, represent a fantastic rate of return and yet still it falls considerably short of target.

All the same, part of the promise to investors (whether one believes it or not) is that, even if SpaceX were to fall short of target, the long term revenue prospects are so explosive that one can't help but feel it's a good deal. (Is it? Time will tell.)

ai-x2• 1 month ago

Why are you comparing SpaceX revenues to US GDP? (when it's main customers will all have a global footprint)

GDP rates should be nominal (5-6%) not 3%

Also, go back in time and do the same analysis for Anthropic in 2023 or Nvidia in 2021, would you have predicted their current Annual revenue for them?

michaelmrose• 1 month ago

Also we crashed 2000-2002 2008-2009 2020. Although specific causes vary we haven't had 14 good years in a row so even the size of economy may be optimistic.

SpaceX will never be 10% based on rockets.

Rockets will get shit canned in the next crash because it's less important and spacex not having saved sufficiently will get wrecked.

Their 10% basically depends on them getting to super intelligent ai first despite others obviously being more successful.

An actually wildly successful projection would be asking us to imagine they weathered the next crash ok and were very successful at rockets after exiting AI.

nemomarx2• 1 month ago

They aren't being valued on the rockets, though, they're claiming a large TAM based on the ai portion.

if I could invest in just the rockets that would be cool. much less downside risk

mlyle7• 1 month ago

I am upset that I am forced to either rebalance out of NASDAQ and incur significant tax consequences, or bet that SpaceX is about to become nearly 10 percent of GDP and keep exceptional margins while doing it.

I would not voluntarily take that bet, but we have regulatory and financial engineering nearly forcing me to do so.

testing223213• 1 month ago

So you’re upset at the broader system that has allowed that change.

HWR_14• 1 month ago

You could maintain a short SpaceX portion in the approximately same percentage as your NASDAQ ETF. You'd have more slight tax events as you increased or closed out that short position to maintain the percentage, but significantly less than your NASDAQ position's taxes. Then when you sell your ETF you could close out the short to effectively remove SpaceX from the equation.

themgt2• 1 month ago

I am upset that I am forced to either rebalance out of NASDAQ and incur significant tax consequences

Just to quantify, "The projected SpaceX weighting is around 0.6% of QQQ."

So if you have $100,000 invested in QQQ and SpaceX winds up say 4x overvalued, it may eventually wind up costing you as much as $450 (i.e. 1/5th as large a loss you experienced today in QQQ).

lmm• 1 month ago

I'm upset that we allow people like you to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, possibly indefinitely, so anything that makes that harder even "accidentally" is ok by me.

jdhwosnhw• 1 month ago

fully reusable rockets are going to be one of the most important engineering achievements in human history

The number of implicit biases, assumptions, and unsubstantiatable assertions packed into that extremely confident sentence is frankly kind of impressive.

We have no idea how important reusable rockets will end up being, because we have no idea of what the future potential (economical or otherwise) space travel will have. Even Musk’s oft repeated (supposed) personal motivation for space travel (“protection of the species”) will ultimately hinge far more on other, far more important (and as of yet unrealized) technologies than reusable rockets.

Not to mention your implicit comparison of reusable rockets to literally every other extant technology. I mean really - transistors? The written word? RF comms? Indoor plumbing??

bryanlarsen• 1 month ago

Falcon 9 was in a quasi-monopoly position in 2025, and had $4 billion in revenue. That's revenue, not profit. Starship will expand the market, but it would have to expand it by ~1000x to justify the valuation.

andruby4• 1 month ago

Exactly the TAM for rockets just isn't there, and probably never will be.

That's why SpaceX is "betting" so hard on datacenters in space (just build them on earth with solar and batteries), and AI.

I think they know they are pumping the stock and that's a pity because I do think Tesla and SpaceX are really good at scaling industrial production (car factories, rocket factories) and I think they could be really good (the best) at building earth-based datacenters at scale. But it's probably hard to value that at $1.7T

Avshalom• 1 month ago

To Be Fair: this is half of what Morgan Stanley said the metaverse would be worth, clearly they learned to be more bearish...

panzi3• 1 month ago

The animated graphics are fancy, but can anyone with a screen reader tell us how that "looks" to them? The graphics are all one SVG mixed together with different parts set to opacity: 0. The accessibility tree in Firefox gives you all the labels randomly mixed together. If that is how people with screen reader "see" it, its unusable.

Maybe make the graphic aria-hidden and add an empty tag with aria-description (or other kind of tag only screen readers see) describing the current graphic to each slide.

conductr2• 1 month ago

It's insane to me that regulators are just letting the forced bid hack unfold with their heads in the sand as if they are unaware of what's happening or the press it's receiving.

Sometimes there are clever ways to hack the system and the regulators can react and blame poor hindsight, that's not the case here.

root_axis2• 1 month ago

Not that surprising. Reining in regulators is one of the main pillars of the party in power.

conductr2• 1 month ago

Yeah I say that knowing the why, but it doesn’t make the slow motion train wrecks around me any less painful to watch. Makes it more painful actually

Havoc2• 1 month ago

US checks and balances no longer function and with it went sane regulation

andruby4• 1 month ago

The administration has given their orders to the regulators, whether explicit or implicit, and this is playing out exactly as they want it to. This is not "by accident" or "by negligence". This is by design.

maxglute• 1 month ago

The chance of US debasing currency to dig out of debt hole by brrrrting money printer is not zero.

But 15 years is also plenty of time for PRC to establish reusable and lithography to invalidate SpaceX valuation rational by driving terrestrial dc and launch to commodity prices. It's like EVs, anything PRC decides to prioritize industrially, competitors going to have a bad time, but still doesn't stop market for valuating Tesla more than all PRC auto producers combined.

Would not be out of question for finance bros to figure out how to continue decoupling valuation from reality if that keeps system going.

system2• 1 month ago

Vibe coded blog posts will be the end of the internet.

quantified2• 1 month ago

Using Tesla as a reference point for compounded stock value is interesting. From a price/earnings point of view, it's still sort of a meme stock.

strangattractor• 1 month ago

Right on. This only works if you compare it to another extremely aggressively valued company.

einpoklum2• 1 month ago

Is it just me or is does the large US companies stock-trade-based supposed "value" is floating in outer space with little relation to people's lives in reality? This SpaceX valuation is perhaps an outlier even among other multi-Trillion-USD companies, but aren't a lot of the "non-outliers" kind of in a bubble state?

Nevermark• 1 month ago

Wouldn't a decent growth rate in 2040 justify a fraction of the $4.3T with a greater PE/PR?

tcp_handshaker• 1 month ago

Nostradamus would look at a 14 years in advance revenue forecast and say: "This is irresponsible."

moezd• 1 month ago

Tesla grew from two dudes making a sports car in their garage to being a decent EV company, despite many controversies. SpaceX is already propped up with government contracts to ship payloads to ISS. What could potentially justify 40% or so sustained growth of SpaceX? Will they create the asteroid mining industry from scratch (and make every precious metal on Earth worthless... hold on), or will they carry people to multiple planets in Solar System (so what, Mars will stay less habitable than Antarctica until the Sun blows up... hold on), or will they cover the whole world with Starlink satellites, data centers etc (which they are already doing a decent job... hold on)?

What's the secret sauce? What can Musk possibly promise this time around? More memes? He already smoked crack on YouTube, what comes next and why is this worthy of pension funds to invest into?

ndsipa_pomu• 1 month ago

Well, that's a horrible website. I'm not going to even attempt to read any of that scrolling monstrosity.

Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

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