9 ms·

A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses

100 points by ddp26 6mo ago

sharemywin 6mo ago
Not bad for about $12-$16B in total actual revenue. net income probably: $1.5B – $3B P/E:500-1000 Of course people will trip overthemselves to buy it up.
- arealaccount 6mo ago
  According to commentators on other threads people with any index funds will be automatically buying, no need to trip over ourselves
  - elevation 6mo ago
    Any funds you'd recommend that would preserve the legacy 1 year watch period?
    - dmoy 6mo ago
      The float adjustment probably handles this for you? The tiny amount of float of that $1.75T means that for any large total market or s&p or whatever fund (VTI, SPY, etc), SpaceX is going to be a minuscule fraction of the fund. Apple has a float of >99%. SpaceX is going to come out with 3-4% float. Since all big serious total market / whatever index funds are float adjusted, this means that SpaceX will be treated more like a company with $45B market cap, not $1.5T or whatever. If you're buying most index funds, you should literally not care about this. If you buy VTI, then SpaceX is going to be like what, <0.1% of the fund? That is noise.
      - spprashant 6mo ago
        I am not smart with stock legal-ese but I pasting something I found in a different article here. > To balance index integrity and investability, Nasdaq proposes a new approach for including and weighting low-float securities (those below 20% free float). Each low-float security’s weight will be adjusted to five times its free float percentage, capped at 100%. Securities with more than 20% free float will continue to be weighted at full, eligible listed market capitalization, while those below 20% free float will be weighted proportionally to preserve investability. > The rule reportedly includes a 5x float multiplier for low-float stocks, which would require passive vehicles to treat SpaceX as if it had significantly more tradable shares than actually exist, essentially forcing funds to chase the price. It sounds to me like a way to increase demand for low float stocks by treating the float higher than it actually is. Glad to hear the explanations about this.
        dmoy 6mo ago
        That's just nasdaq though, yea? VTI follows CRSP, not nasdaq. SPY doesn't follow nasdaq. Etc etc I guess figure out whether QQQ is going to do the 5x float thing?
      - danny_codes 6mo ago
        Which is how Elon gets away with fleecing the retails. Someone with 100k in VTI is giving $100 to Elon at a p/e of 1000. You have to hand it to him, he’s the best grifter we’ve seen in years.
      - conductr 6mo ago
        > If you're buying most index funds, you should literally not care about this. Disagree. Buyers of index funds should care about fiduciary and waste. This is what this seems like at this price. Granted, I’d be more concerned if the fund manager was buying it without a requirement to. The issue still remains about why are we paying so much for this stock? Make it make sense?
        gruez 6mo ago
        >Buyers of index funds should care about fiduciary and waste. This is what this seems like at this price. Right, but the whole point of index funds is that you're letting the market decide what's worth investing/buying (via market cap/free float weightings) and at what price. If you're making calls on what's "waste" or not, then you're no longer a passive investor and you're just picking stocks.
        conductr 6mo ago
        Fiduciary responsibility in this context is a large umbrella of responsibilities. They should be fighting the new nasdaq rules on behalf of us. As you mentioned, this forces them to participate in fleecing the passive fund holding public and undermines the whole point of index funds. I don’t see how a fund manager could just blindly take this rule change and not make a ruckus about how it’s forcing him to break their fiduciary obligations Following the rules of the fund and being index is one thing. Sitting silently as this pump and dump is designed to fleece your clients, is something entirely different. > Starting May 1, 2026, Nasdaq rules allow large IPOs (e.g., top 40 market cap) to join the Nasdaq-100 Index within 15 trading days. This forces index-tracking funds to buy new shares, often at inflated valuations shortly after listing, a "fast entry" rule designed for mega-IPOs like SpaceX or OpenAI
        dh2022 6mo ago
        The market will not drive index fund purchases of SpaceX - the 5x multiplier of the floating shares will. And that’s the rub.
      - NoLinkToMe 6mo ago
        We should differentiate two matters here. 1. are your finances going to be screwed from overpaying for SpaceX IPO shares through your index fund? No because as you say, it's a small fraction of typical index funds. 2. Is this a form of financial malfeasance? I think yes. The average 401k has about $150k in it. Even if just 0.5% goes to SpaceX, that's $750 per American. That's a few hundred billion. It's serious cash. If that's going to overpaying Elon 3x or whatever it is for these shares, that's a travesty. Even if for each individual it's a tiny blip that doesn't show up in the annual ROI graphs, it's a form of corruption. Like the programmer infamous Salami slicing stories at banks. If the SpaceX IPO is wildly overpriced, even if you have just 300k in your account, yo
  - heyitsmedotjayb 6mo ago
    I remember when this happened with Nortel!
- ddp26 6mo ago
  Yeah, it's wild. But it's not like the P/E should be 30, what do you think would be fair? That's the thing about SpaceX, some businesses are real businesses that can be modeled in normal ways, like the government launch contracts, and to some degree starlink. Others, like ~all of xAI, and the starship stuff, are being valued completely independent of revenue. I predict the IPO investors will generally follow the analysis consensus today with those eye-popping numbers.
  - Noaidi 6mo ago
    I mean, shouldn’t the price to earnings ratio be 1? Anything higher or lower is just speculating or other words, gambling.
    - daedrdev 6mo ago
      I actually dont think the world will collapse by next quarter so am willing to bear the risk of doing so by having higher P/E.
    - lotsofpulp 6mo ago
      At the extremes, taking the next step is speculating because you might trip and fall and hit your head.
    - cheschire 6mo ago
      I remember in the 00’s when people would complain about how ridiculous a 30 PE was for tech stocks, and how no other stock was at that ridiculous price point except tech. Guess that starship has sailed.
    - fastball 6mo ago
      Of course not. If the P/E was 1, every single public company would be immediately gobbled up by Private Equity firms, who would make their money back after a few years of operation and the rest would be pure profit.
      - Noaidi 6mo ago
- brentm 6mo ago
  It's hard to imagine this turn into 50-60% short term banger starting from a $1.75T market cap, I wonder if people will actually trip over themselves to buy. I had been thinking I wanted to jump on it to flip but at that price and the macro environment it may end up cratering before a pop. Seems like a sketchy buy.
- sfblah 6mo ago
  I just don't think space is as useful or profitable as people think. Time will tell.
  - Bombthecat 6mo ago
    As long as we don't find a new it energy to get stuff up, I don't think so.
  - pilgrim0 6mo ago
    You could argue that space is highly useful for creating profitable narratives. You could even argue that this is the whole game.
  - jayers 6mo ago
    Profitable remains to be seen, but it is undoubted that the potential resources in the solar system are (pun intended) astronomically valuable. Getting at them is "just" an engineering problem.
  - NoLinkToMe 6mo ago
    I'm also curious as to what the moat really is? It's 24 years old with 16 billion revenue. Suppose you had a warchest and had the option to buy SpaceX at 1750 billion, or to spend a fraction of that to replicate its technology. Could you? I've seen estimates that SpaceX spent less than $50-60 billion in cash during its lifetime. That's in the range of its cumulative revenue + capital raised, too. I just don't really see how this couldn't be replicated, if the market was big enough. But it seems to me that Space isn't that useful yet, and the market isn't that big yet, to the point that it doesn't warrant lots of competitors like the thinking on AI.
    - verzali 6mo ago
      Even the SLS cost less than $50bn to develop, which is a lot, but only a fraction of what SpaceX is apparently worth. Developing a new rocket like the Falcon 9, even a reusable one, would cost a private investor less than $10bn. It would take time, that is the hardest part. But in terms of cash, it is a fraction of this valuation. Then a constellation like Starlink - again, we are talking $10-$15bn. Once you have the rocket, the satellite design is not going to cost much. The challenge is getting the regulatory approvals and getting the launch rate up. Then developing something like Starship, again a few billions, certainly far less than $50 bn. A crew capsule too, that would be a few billion, but probable <$5 bn. For a trillion dollars you could probably throw in a space station (the ISS was about $100bn), a few advanced orbiting telescopes, a human mission to Mars, and maybe an intensive exploration of Europa. Heck, why not land something on Pluto just for kicks.
- lxgr 6mo ago
  But consider that they will eventually own the entire observable universe excluding Earth! /s
malfist 6mo ago
An passive investors are going to get hosed by this thanks to NASDAQ cooking the rules to favor Elon and his band of misfits. No longer will there be a year of price discovery for index funds, 15 days. Meaning index funds have to buy it at the peak of the hype cycle. Will be a huge wealth transfer from mom and pop retirement accounts to the ultra wealthy.
- yandie 6mo ago
  Now I need a fund that will honor a year of price discovery rather than 15 days. Any recommendations?
  - malfist 6mo ago
    Legally, any fund that tracks the NASDAQ 100 must follow the rules set by NASDAQ, so you'd want something that is neither a total market index, nor tracks the NASDAQ. Something like an S&P500 index would work
    - charcircuit 6mo ago
      What law prevents someone from choosing to buy stocks from the NASDAQ 100 however they want for a fund?
      - davey48016 6mo ago
        You can make a mutual fund or ETF with any stocks you want, you just can't call it a NASDAQ 100 fund if you're not tracking the NASDAQ 100 index.
        tonyedgecombe 6mo ago
        Is that really true? It doesn’t sound likely to me. Then again I’m often surprised by this stuff.
        6mo ago
paxys 6mo ago
Everyone is so confident in their reading of tea leaves
- ddp26 6mo ago
  I read your comment as being glib, but in forecasting this I was really puzzled how much to anchor to how analysts tend to value these businesses. I ended up largely deferring to them, e.g. predicting the public will value xAI at $258 billion ($222b - $310b) at time of IPO, even though I've elsewhere been skeptical that xAI should be valued like a frontier AI lab. It's a keynesian beauty contest
righthand 6mo ago
Wall Street, ICE jobs, bs AI valuations, etc is proof that there are just enough stupid people in this country to ruin it all for the rest of us.
rvz 6mo ago
All these IPOs are extremely bearish and mirroring the 2019 race-for-the-exit IPOs out there. Of course once again, you are "not allowed" to be early into pre-IPO companies which is where the actual money is made. The moment several companies start IPOing, you are already too late for those multiples and have to wait for a massive crash until these stocks reach all time lows after IPO.
genidoi 6mo ago
> Starship at $170B is pure option value on technology still in advanced testing. The argument that Starship is somehow an experimental/unproven technology that might fail to materialise was absurd but plausible sounding before flight 1, there were many new technologies simultaneously being deployed to a single launch system in one go. But after 3 tower catches of the booster demonstrating centimetres of guided precision of the entire stack, this is becoming a tired argument. I know the author is not making that case at all here, but it seems like one the core reasons to undervalue SpaceX is that Starship might not work out, and this all sounds exactly like how reusability might not work out for the Falcon 9 from 10 years ago.
- soperj 6mo ago
  > and this all sounds exactly like how reusability might not work out at all for the Falcon 9 from 10 years ago I think a lot of it depends on whether they can make the reuse of the second stage work without having to redo stuff constantly like the shuttle. Reusing the booster will obviously save tons of money and make launches cheaper, but they're competing with themselves here. How big is the launch market with cheaper launches? We don't actually know.
- ddp26 6mo ago
  Yeah, I might have stated this poorly. In the forecast it's just a question of expected value, I don't give almost any probability to "Starship is worthless". My 50% CI on Starship's fair market value at IPO time is $123b - $227b, with a 80% CI even wider, not based on my own modeling, but based on anchoring to analysts that give credible arguments.
- croes 6mo ago
  Compared to Falcon 9 Starship has still more quality issues than the Falcon 9 at the same test stage
- enslavedrobot 6mo ago
  The viability of direct to cell connectivity at scale is unproven. This is actually the core value of SpaceX in the next 3-5 years. The other core value generation product will be financial transactions. It is unproven whether X money will be adopted for friction free transactions across national boundaries and whether the company can compete in the financial services sector.
boringg 6mo ago
Anyone in this thread know how much SpaceX investors got diluted when they bought xAI/GROK?
- jdross 6mo ago
  It was 1T post merger with xAI being 250B of it, SpaceX being 750B
jgbuddy 6mo ago
Were people overpaying 30% for tesla in 2010?
- croes 6mo ago
  Yes, and they still do
  - lotsofpulp 6mo ago
    Tesla's highest market cap in 2010 was $3.3B. Tesla has more net income, sometimes multiples more, per year, from 2021 to 2025. For comparison, it is routine to see sale prices of 3x to 5x revenue for many, many kinds of everyday businesses that have much less potential than Tesla. There are very, very few businesses whose shares one could have purchased in 2010 that performed better over the subsequent 15 years. That is about as objective as one can get about determining whether or not something was under or over valued (in 2010).
    - croes 6mo ago
      because not only the shareholders overpaid but the car buyers too.
  - arein3 6mo ago
    Is musk derangement syndrome a thing?
    - malfist 6mo ago
      No.
    - scottyah 6mo ago
      Yes, and it makes much less sense to me. It boils down to he's rich on paper, and doesn't put on a fake PR mask.
      - arein3 6mo ago
proteal 6mo ago
It’s also one of the thinnest floats IPO’ing. They’re only selling less than 5% of the company. That introduces a lot of sensitivity in the valuation, not to mention there exists a bit of game theory around fund managers needing to join in to maintain nominal returns with their peers. Check out Matt Levine commentary, which goes into more detail (SpaceX Indexing) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-31/are-algae-securities-fraud https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-31/are...
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > They’re only selling less than 5% of the company Wait for the lock-up terms.
- dh2022 6mo ago
  Matt Levine commentary with no paywall: https://archive.ph/OSzvG https://archive.ph/OSzvG
saadn92 6mo ago
The xAI piece is the one that stands out to me. $258B for a lab that's burning $1.46B/quarter against $430M revenue, valued almost entirely on a merger anchor from four months ago.
- jmye 6mo ago
  Even if you think those are standard numbers and you're banking on growth, or whatever, I don't see any way anyone rational (or even a semi-rational AI bull) could convince themselves xAI isn't an absolute garbage company.
- ddp26 6mo ago
  As I wrote in the piece, I'm extremely skeptical that xAI should be valued as if it is a frontier lab. But as you say, going back to the xAI + SpaceX merger, analysts consistently seem to value it as if it is, so I predict the public will too, at IPO time.
  - mikkupikku 6mo ago
    I assume "extremely skeptical" is you being generous, is there anybody other than Elon who says xAI/Grok are SOTA? The only thing anybody says about it is that it's only good for porn, but local models do porn too so xAI has no moat or edge at all as far as I can see.
    - ahahahahah 6mo ago
      > I assume "extremely skeptical" is you being generous I'm not sure that's the case. Every value in this forecast is absurd, I actually think the author is sincere in there feeling that they are being extremely skeptical.
    - ddp26 6mo ago
      There is actually a real bull case for xAI (that I don't endorse), e.g. from people who think that chips & computer is the main determiner of model quality. xAI may plausibly soon have the biggest training apparatus of anyone. I think talent is more important than compute, as I wrote in my Jan 2026 predictions that Anthropic would end up on top this year: https://futuresearch.ai/blog/forecasting-top-ai-lab-2026/ https://futuresearch.ai/blog/forecasting-top-ai-lab-2026/
vesnanomikai 6mo ago
[flagged]
ChrisArchitect 6mo ago
Related: The SpaceX IPO: retail investor notes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47612775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47612775 SpaceX files to go public https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604155
bobtheborg 6mo ago
Having never really looked at valuations, my ignorant mind can get from Starlink's 10M subscribers to a $380B valuation. If you make $100/mo/user that's 12B/yr and that with a higher 50x P/E ratio is 60B. If you go to 100x, that's $120B.
- Octoth0rpe 6mo ago
  Starlink's maritime, roving, airplane, and military options are all much more than $100/mo/user. Not sure how much that closes the gap, but it's _something_. Source: https://starlink.com/business/aviation https://starlink.com/business/aviation ($250->$10k/mo) https://starlink.com/business/maritime https://starlink.com/business/maritime ($250/mo) https://starlink.com/business/mobility https://starlink.com/business/mobility ($65->$540/mo)
  - NoLinkToMe 6mo ago
    But it's actual revenue was $10b in 2025 on 9m customers, so he's pretty much correct. The point I have more issue with is that a 60 or 100 PE ratio only makes sense in a high-growth scenario. Telecoms are valued at 9x by comparison. 60 or 100 only makes sense if you expect it to grow by 10x from here, and face no competition and keep prices this high. And that seems like a bit of a reach. The richest people on the planet live in urban environments in US/EU/Asia, with fast and widespread 5G. Yes, rich people on boats in the pacific, hiking remote mountains, and researchers in Antartica exist, but they're not a market of 200 million people. And even if you get there, that's still just 120b, not 380b valuation.
tliptay 6mo ago
Grok: lots of competitors & my 4th choice in LLM models. Starship: zero competitors & potentially makes humans inter-planetary. Seems crazy if investors put more value on Grok.
- compiler-guy 6mo ago
  These premises may or may not make sense, but the thing that matters is capturable revenue. Humans being interplanetary would be an amazing technical tour de force. But relatively speaking, there isn’t much revenue there.
  - malfist 6mo ago
    These premises may or may not make sense, but the thing that matters is capturable revenue. European settlers being on the north american continent would be an amazing technical tour de force. But relatively speaking, there isn't much revenue there.
    - WalterBright 6mo ago
      Jamestown was a failure. The Pilgrims starved their first year.
      - malfist 6mo ago
        Okay? The US is the largest country market in the world.
        prewett 6mo ago
        I'm not sure that the continental Colonies brought in much revenue, though. The individual colonists could do quite well, but viewed as an financial investment for the British Crown (which they were not, but that's the OP's analogy) I don't think they were very good. Plus, when they wanted to extract revenue via taxes, the Colonies revolted. Eight years of war probably cost a pretty penny, too. (Sourcing my claim is difficult. I include this reference [1], which says that the Caribbean colonies were more profitable than all the continental colonies together. It doesn't comment on the cost of the war.) [1] https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1ay/chapter/consumption-and-trade-in-the-british-atlantic/ https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1ay/chapter/...
lokimedes 6mo ago
I know it’s easy to sit at home being indignant at the internet, but how on earth does an ISP with 10M subscribers and the most expensive infrastructure in the solar system ever come out to be worth $300B? They even have to routinely replenish their “cell towers” as their orbits decay. Any mid-sized country would have multiple cellphone and Internet providers with larger customer bases and less upkeep.
- onlypassingthru 6mo ago
  It's the only ISP that reliably works globally but especially in war zones with zero competitors. How much is your life/sovereignty worth to you?
- scottyah 6mo ago
  How much would it cost you to run wires to the northern tip of Greenland and Antarctica? How about the middle of the Pacific? All of Africa? At the end of the day, that is the alternative. If you think normal ISP ground stations don't need maintenance (especially power), you're missing a lot. Also I know people who have cell towers on their property, and they get paid over a hundred thousand a year just for that.
  - NoLinkToMe 6mo ago
    Sure but this is a shrinking market population, right? We're not talking about 1 billion Chinese, as far as I know there's about 5000 people on Antartica at any point in time. Most of those are concentrated in the same areas meaning a connection can be shared. How that gets you to $300 billion valuation I don't know. I mean if you value a company for its future cashflows, how long will Starlink be the only game in town? Will we not see other rockets/space-internet competitors in 2040 for example, in 15 years from now, from any other company (or even, any other state actor)? I think we will, and I think that timeline is generous. Without a monopoly you're competing the price towards marginal cost to cater to a tiny and shrinking fraction of the world that needs satelite internet. The vast majority of people live in urban environments, particularly among those who can afford internet in the first place, and it's only growing further in that direction. I think Starlink is a wonderful product but there's a reason it has $10b revenue, while telecom companies around the world do more than $1.7 trillion in revenue.[0] [0] https://dgtlinfra.com/top-telecom-companies/ https://dgtlinfra.com/top-telecom-companies/
Octoth0rpe 6mo ago
Does it make sense to value Starship Commercial Launch at $170B, _and_ Falcon 9/Heavy at $100B? I would expect that if Starship achieves its operational goals, then it should quickly deprecate nearly all uses of Falcon, the exceptions being national security launches that require validating the launcher, or Dragon launches for similar reasons. Even those categories are likely on a countdown the moment starship is rapidly reusable.

100 points by ddp26 6mo ago

Not bad for about $12-$16B in total actual revenue. net income probably: $1.5B – $3B P/E:500-1000 Of course people will trip overthemselves to buy it up.

arealaccount 6mo ago
According to commentators on other threads people with any index funds will be automatically buying, no need to trip over ourselves
- elevation 6mo ago
  Any funds you'd recommend that would preserve the legacy 1 year watch period?
  - dmoy 6mo ago
    The float adjustment probably handles this for you? The tiny amount of float of that $1.75T means that for any large total market or s&p or whatever fund (VTI, SPY, etc), SpaceX is going to be a minuscule fraction of the fund. Apple has a float of >99%. SpaceX is going to come out with 3-4% float. Since all big serious total market / whatever index funds are float adjusted, this means that SpaceX will be treated more like a company with $45B market cap, not $1.5T or whatever. If you're buying most index funds, you should literally not care about this. If you buy VTI, then SpaceX is going to be like what, <0.1% of the fund? That is noise.
    - spprashant 6mo ago
      I am not smart with stock legal-ese but I pasting something I found in a different article here. > To balance index integrity and investability, Nasdaq proposes a new approach for including and weighting low-float securities (those below 20% free float). Each low-float security’s weight will be adjusted to five times its free float percentage, capped at 100%. Securities with more than 20% free float will continue to be weighted at full, eligible listed market capitalization, while those below 20% free float will be weighted proportionally to preserve investability. > The rule reportedly includes a 5x float multiplier for low-float stocks, which would require passive vehicles to treat SpaceX as if it had significantly more tradable shares than actually exist, essentially forcing funds to chase the price. It sounds to me like a way to increase demand for low float stocks by treating the float higher than it actually is. Glad to hear the explanations about this.
      - dmoy 6mo ago
        That's just nasdaq though, yea? VTI follows CRSP, not nasdaq. SPY doesn't follow nasdaq. Etc etc I guess figure out whether QQQ is going to do the 5x float thing?
    - danny_codes 6mo ago
      Which is how Elon gets away with fleecing the retails. Someone with 100k in VTI is giving $100 to Elon at a p/e of 1000. You have to hand it to him, he’s the best grifter we’ve seen in years.
    - conductr 6mo ago
      > If you're buying most index funds, you should literally not care about this. Disagree. Buyers of index funds should care about fiduciary and waste. This is what this seems like at this price. Granted, I’d be more concerned if the fund manager was buying it without a requirement to. The issue still remains about why are we paying so much for this stock? Make it make sense?
      - gruez 6mo ago
        >Buyers of index funds should care about fiduciary and waste. This is what this seems like at this price. Right, but the whole point of index funds is that you're letting the market decide what's worth investing/buying (via market cap/free float weightings) and at what price. If you're making calls on what's "waste" or not, then you're no longer a passive investor and you're just picking stocks.
        conductr 6mo ago
        Fiduciary responsibility in this context is a large umbrella of responsibilities. They should be fighting the new nasdaq rules on behalf of us. As you mentioned, this forces them to participate in fleecing the passive fund holding public and undermines the whole point of index funds. I don’t see how a fund manager could just blindly take this rule change and not make a ruckus about how it’s forcing him to break their fiduciary obligations Following the rules of the fund and being index is one thing. Sitting silently as this pump and dump is designed to fleece your clients, is something entirely different. > Starting May 1, 2026, Nasdaq rules allow large IPOs (e.g., top 40 market cap) to join the Nasdaq-100 Index within 15 trading days. This forces index-tracking funds to buy new shares, often at inflated valuations shortly after listing, a "fast entry" rule designed for mega-IPOs like SpaceX or OpenAI
        dh2022 6mo ago
        The market will not drive index fund purchases of SpaceX - the 5x multiplier of the floating shares will. And that’s the rub.
    - NoLinkToMe 6mo ago
      We should differentiate two matters here. 1. are your finances going to be screwed from overpaying for SpaceX IPO shares through your index fund? No because as you say, it's a small fraction of typical index funds. 2. Is this a form of financial malfeasance? I think yes. The average 401k has about $150k in it. Even if just 0.5% goes to SpaceX, that's $750 per American. That's a few hundred billion. It's serious cash. If that's going to overpaying Elon 3x or whatever it is for these shares, that's a travesty. Even if for each individual it's a tiny blip that doesn't show up in the annual ROI graphs, it's a form of corruption. Like the programmer infamous Salami slicing stories at banks. If the SpaceX IPO is wildly overpriced, even if you have just 300k in your account, yo
- heyitsmedotjayb 6mo ago
  I remember when this happened with Nortel!
ddp26 6mo ago
Yeah, it's wild. But it's not like the P/E should be 30, what do you think would be fair? That's the thing about SpaceX, some businesses are real businesses that can be modeled in normal ways, like the government launch contracts, and to some degree starlink. Others, like ~all of xAI, and the starship stuff, are being valued completely independent of revenue. I predict the IPO investors will generally follow the analysis consensus today with those eye-popping numbers.
- Noaidi 6mo ago
  I mean, shouldn’t the price to earnings ratio be 1? Anything higher or lower is just speculating or other words, gambling.
  - daedrdev 6mo ago
    I actually dont think the world will collapse by next quarter so am willing to bear the risk of doing so by having higher P/E.
  - lotsofpulp 6mo ago
    At the extremes, taking the next step is speculating because you might trip and fall and hit your head.
  - cheschire 6mo ago
    I remember in the 00’s when people would complain about how ridiculous a 30 PE was for tech stocks, and how no other stock was at that ridiculous price point except tech. Guess that starship has sailed.
  - fastball 6mo ago
    Of course not. If the P/E was 1, every single public company would be immediately gobbled up by Private Equity firms, who would make their money back after a few years of operation and the rest would be pure profit.
    - Noaidi 6mo ago
brentm 6mo ago
It's hard to imagine this turn into 50-60% short term banger starting from a $1.75T market cap, I wonder if people will actually trip over themselves to buy. I had been thinking I wanted to jump on it to flip but at that price and the macro environment it may end up cratering before a pop. Seems like a sketchy buy.
sfblah 6mo ago
I just don't think space is as useful or profitable as people think. Time will tell.
- Bombthecat 6mo ago
  As long as we don't find a new it energy to get stuff up, I don't think so.
- pilgrim0 6mo ago
  You could argue that space is highly useful for creating profitable narratives. You could even argue that this is the whole game.
- jayers 6mo ago
  Profitable remains to be seen, but it is undoubted that the potential resources in the solar system are (pun intended) astronomically valuable. Getting at them is "just" an engineering problem.
- NoLinkToMe 6mo ago
  I'm also curious as to what the moat really is? It's 24 years old with 16 billion revenue. Suppose you had a warchest and had the option to buy SpaceX at 1750 billion, or to spend a fraction of that to replicate its technology. Could you? I've seen estimates that SpaceX spent less than $50-60 billion in cash during its lifetime. That's in the range of its cumulative revenue + capital raised, too. I just don't really see how this couldn't be replicated, if the market was big enough. But it seems to me that Space isn't that useful yet, and the market isn't that big yet, to the point that it doesn't warrant lots of competitors like the thinking on AI.
  - verzali 6mo ago
    Even the SLS cost less than $50bn to develop, which is a lot, but only a fraction of what SpaceX is apparently worth. Developing a new rocket like the Falcon 9, even a reusable one, would cost a private investor less than $10bn. It would take time, that is the hardest part. But in terms of cash, it is a fraction of this valuation. Then a constellation like Starlink - again, we are talking $10-$15bn. Once you have the rocket, the satellite design is not going to cost much. The challenge is getting the regulatory approvals and getting the launch rate up. Then developing something like Starship, again a few billions, certainly far less than $50 bn. A crew capsule too, that would be a few billion, but probable <$5 bn. For a trillion dollars you could probably throw in a space station (the ISS was about $100bn), a few advanced orbiting telescopes, a human mission to Mars, and maybe an intensive exploration of Europa. Heck, why not land something on Pluto just for kicks.
lxgr 6mo ago
But consider that they will eventually own the entire observable universe excluding Earth! /s

malfist 6mo ago

An passive investors are going to get hosed by this thanks to NASDAQ cooking the rules to favor Elon and his band of misfits. No longer will there be a year of price discovery for index funds, 15 days. Meaning index funds have to buy it at the peak of the hype cycle. Will be a huge wealth transfer from mom and pop retirement accounts to the ultra wealthy.

yandie 6mo ago
Now I need a fund that will honor a year of price discovery rather than 15 days. Any recommendations?
- malfist 6mo ago
  Legally, any fund that tracks the NASDAQ 100 must follow the rules set by NASDAQ, so you'd want something that is neither a total market index, nor tracks the NASDAQ. Something like an S&P500 index would work
  - charcircuit 6mo ago
    What law prevents someone from choosing to buy stocks from the NASDAQ 100 however they want for a fund?
    - davey48016 6mo ago
      You can make a mutual fund or ETF with any stocks you want, you just can't call it a NASDAQ 100 fund if you're not tracking the NASDAQ 100 index.
      - tonyedgecombe 6mo ago
        Is that really true? It doesn’t sound likely to me. Then again I’m often surprised by this stuff.
        6mo ago

paxys 6mo ago

Everyone is so confident in their reading of tea leaves

ddp26 6mo ago
I read your comment as being glib, but in forecasting this I was really puzzled how much to anchor to how analysts tend to value these businesses. I ended up largely deferring to them, e.g. predicting the public will value xAI at $258 billion ($222b - $310b) at time of IPO, even though I've elsewhere been skeptical that xAI should be valued like a frontier AI lab. It's a keynesian beauty contest

righthand 6mo ago

Wall Street, ICE jobs, bs AI valuations, etc is proof that there are just enough stupid people in this country to ruin it all for the rest of us.

rvz 6mo ago

All these IPOs are extremely bearish and mirroring the 2019 race-for-the-exit IPOs out there. Of course once again, you are "not allowed" to be early into pre-IPO companies which is where the actual money is made. The moment several companies start IPOing, you are already too late for those multiples and have to wait for a massive crash until these stocks reach all time lows after IPO.

genidoi 6mo ago

> Starship at $170B is pure option value on technology still in advanced testing. The argument that Starship is somehow an experimental/unproven technology that might fail to materialise was absurd but plausible sounding before flight 1, there were many new technologies simultaneously being deployed to a single launch system in one go. But after 3 tower catches of the booster demonstrating centimetres of guided precision of the entire stack, this is becoming a tired argument. I know the author is not making that case at all here, but it seems like one the core reasons to undervalue SpaceX is that Starship might not work out, and this all sounds exactly like how reusability might not work out for the Falcon 9 from 10 years ago.

soperj 6mo ago
> and this all sounds exactly like how reusability might not work out at all for the Falcon 9 from 10 years ago I think a lot of it depends on whether they can make the reuse of the second stage work without having to redo stuff constantly like the shuttle. Reusing the booster will obviously save tons of money and make launches cheaper, but they're competing with themselves here. How big is the launch market with cheaper launches? We don't actually know.
ddp26 6mo ago
Yeah, I might have stated this poorly. In the forecast it's just a question of expected value, I don't give almost any probability to "Starship is worthless". My 50% CI on Starship's fair market value at IPO time is $123b - $227b, with a 80% CI even wider, not based on my own modeling, but based on anchoring to analysts that give credible arguments.
croes 6mo ago
Compared to Falcon 9 Starship has still more quality issues than the Falcon 9 at the same test stage
enslavedrobot 6mo ago
The viability of direct to cell connectivity at scale is unproven. This is actually the core value of SpaceX in the next 3-5 years. The other core value generation product will be financial transactions. It is unproven whether X money will be adopted for friction free transactions across national boundaries and whether the company can compete in the financial services sector.

boringg 6mo ago

Anyone in this thread know how much SpaceX investors got diluted when they bought xAI/GROK?

jdross 6mo ago
It was 1T post merger with xAI being 250B of it, SpaceX being 750B

jgbuddy 6mo ago

Were people overpaying 30% for tesla in 2010?

croes 6mo ago
Yes, and they still do
- lotsofpulp 6mo ago
  Tesla's highest market cap in 2010 was $3.3B. Tesla has more net income, sometimes multiples more, per year, from 2021 to 2025. For comparison, it is routine to see sale prices of 3x to 5x revenue for many, many kinds of everyday businesses that have much less potential than Tesla. There are very, very few businesses whose shares one could have purchased in 2010 that performed better over the subsequent 15 years. That is about as objective as one can get about determining whether or not something was under or over valued (in 2010).
  - croes 6mo ago
    because not only the shareholders overpaid but the car buyers too.
- arein3 6mo ago
  Is musk derangement syndrome a thing?
  - malfist 6mo ago
    No.
  - scottyah 6mo ago
    Yes, and it makes much less sense to me. It boils down to he's rich on paper, and doesn't put on a fake PR mask.
    - arein3 6mo ago

proteal 6mo ago

It’s also one of the thinnest floats IPO’ing. They’re only selling less than 5% of the company. That introduces a lot of sensitivity in the valuation, not to mention there exists a bit of game theory around fund managers needing to join in to maintain nominal returns with their peers. Check out Matt Levine commentary, which goes into more detail (SpaceX Indexing) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-31/are-algae-securities-fraud https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-31/are...

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> They’re only selling less than 5% of the company Wait for the lock-up terms.
dh2022 6mo ago
Matt Levine commentary with no paywall: https://archive.ph/OSzvG https://archive.ph/OSzvG

saadn92 6mo ago

The xAI piece is the one that stands out to me. $258B for a lab that's burning $1.46B/quarter against $430M revenue, valued almost entirely on a merger anchor from four months ago.

jmye 6mo ago
Even if you think those are standard numbers and you're banking on growth, or whatever, I don't see any way anyone rational (or even a semi-rational AI bull) could convince themselves xAI isn't an absolute garbage company.
ddp26 6mo ago
As I wrote in the piece, I'm extremely skeptical that xAI should be valued as if it is a frontier lab. But as you say, going back to the xAI + SpaceX merger, analysts consistently seem to value it as if it is, so I predict the public will too, at IPO time.
- mikkupikku 6mo ago
  I assume "extremely skeptical" is you being generous, is there anybody other than Elon who says xAI/Grok are SOTA? The only thing anybody says about it is that it's only good for porn, but local models do porn too so xAI has no moat or edge at all as far as I can see.
  - ahahahahah 6mo ago
    > I assume "extremely skeptical" is you being generous I'm not sure that's the case. Every value in this forecast is absurd, I actually think the author is sincere in there feeling that they are being extremely skeptical.
  - ddp26 6mo ago
    There is actually a real bull case for xAI (that I don't endorse), e.g. from people who think that chips & computer is the main determiner of model quality. xAI may plausibly soon have the biggest training apparatus of anyone. I think talent is more important than compute, as I wrote in my Jan 2026 predictions that Anthropic would end up on top this year: https://futuresearch.ai/blog/forecasting-top-ai-lab-2026/ https://futuresearch.ai/blog/forecasting-top-ai-lab-2026/

vesnanomikai 6mo ago

[flagged]

ChrisArchitect 6mo ago

Related: The SpaceX IPO: retail investor notes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47612775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47612775 SpaceX files to go public https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604155

bobtheborg 6mo ago

Having never really looked at valuations, my ignorant mind can get from Starlink's 10M subscribers to a $380B valuation. If you make $100/mo/user that's 12B/yr and that with a higher 50x P/E ratio is 60B. If you go to 100x, that's $120B.

Octoth0rpe 6mo ago
Starlink's maritime, roving, airplane, and military options are all much more than $100/mo/user. Not sure how much that closes the gap, but it's _something_. Source: https://starlink.com/business/aviation https://starlink.com/business/aviation ($250->$10k/mo) https://starlink.com/business/maritime https://starlink.com/business/maritime ($250/mo) https://starlink.com/business/mobility https://starlink.com/business/mobility ($65->$540/mo)
- NoLinkToMe 6mo ago
  But it's actual revenue was $10b in 2025 on 9m customers, so he's pretty much correct. The point I have more issue with is that a 60 or 100 PE ratio only makes sense in a high-growth scenario. Telecoms are valued at 9x by comparison. 60 or 100 only makes sense if you expect it to grow by 10x from here, and face no competition and keep prices this high. And that seems like a bit of a reach. The richest people on the planet live in urban environments in US/EU/Asia, with fast and widespread 5G. Yes, rich people on boats in the pacific, hiking remote mountains, and researchers in Antartica exist, but they're not a market of 200 million people. And even if you get there, that's still just 120b, not 380b valuation.

tliptay 6mo ago

Grok: lots of competitors & my 4th choice in LLM models. Starship: zero competitors & potentially makes humans inter-planetary. Seems crazy if investors put more value on Grok.

compiler-guy 6mo ago
These premises may or may not make sense, but the thing that matters is capturable revenue. Humans being interplanetary would be an amazing technical tour de force. But relatively speaking, there isn’t much revenue there.
- malfist 6mo ago
  These premises may or may not make sense, but the thing that matters is capturable revenue. European settlers being on the north american continent would be an amazing technical tour de force. But relatively speaking, there isn't much revenue there.
  - WalterBright 6mo ago
    Jamestown was a failure. The Pilgrims starved their first year.
    - malfist 6mo ago
      Okay? The US is the largest country market in the world.
      - prewett 6mo ago
        I'm not sure that the continental Colonies brought in much revenue, though. The individual colonists could do quite well, but viewed as an financial investment for the British Crown (which they were not, but that's the OP's analogy) I don't think they were very good. Plus, when they wanted to extract revenue via taxes, the Colonies revolted. Eight years of war probably cost a pretty penny, too. (Sourcing my claim is difficult. I include this reference [1], which says that the Caribbean colonies were more profitable than all the continental colonies together. It doesn't comment on the cost of the war.) [1] https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1ay/chapter/consumption-and-trade-in-the-british-atlantic/ https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1ay/chapter/...

lokimedes 6mo ago

I know it’s easy to sit at home being indignant at the internet, but how on earth does an ISP with 10M subscribers and the most expensive infrastructure in the solar system ever come out to be worth $300B? They even have to routinely replenish their “cell towers” as their orbits decay. Any mid-sized country would have multiple cellphone and Internet providers with larger customer bases and less upkeep.

onlypassingthru 6mo ago
It's the only ISP that reliably works globally but especially in war zones with zero competitors. How much is your life/sovereignty worth to you?
scottyah 6mo ago
How much would it cost you to run wires to the northern tip of Greenland and Antarctica? How about the middle of the Pacific? All of Africa? At the end of the day, that is the alternative. If you think normal ISP ground stations don't need maintenance (especially power), you're missing a lot. Also I know people who have cell towers on their property, and they get paid over a hundred thousand a year just for that.
- NoLinkToMe 6mo ago
  Sure but this is a shrinking market population, right? We're not talking about 1 billion Chinese, as far as I know there's about 5000 people on Antartica at any point in time. Most of those are concentrated in the same areas meaning a connection can be shared. How that gets you to $300 billion valuation I don't know. I mean if you value a company for its future cashflows, how long will Starlink be the only game in town? Will we not see other rockets/space-internet competitors in 2040 for example, in 15 years from now, from any other company (or even, any other state actor)? I think we will, and I think that timeline is generous. Without a monopoly you're competing the price towards marginal cost to cater to a tiny and shrinking fraction of the world that needs satelite internet. The vast majority of people live in urban environments, particularly among those who can afford internet in the first place, and it's only growing further in that direction. I think Starlink is a wonderful product but there's a reason it has $10b revenue, while telecom companies around the world do more than $1.7 trillion in revenue.[0] [0] https://dgtlinfra.com/top-telecom-companies/ https://dgtlinfra.com/top-telecom-companies/

Octoth0rpe 6mo ago

Does it make sense to value Starship Commercial Launch at $170B, _and_ Falcon 9/Heavy at $100B? I would expect that if Starship achieves its operational goals, then it should quickly deprecate nearly all uses of Falcon, the exceptions being national security launches that require validating the launcher, or Dragon launches for similar reasons. Even those categories are likely on a countdown the moment starship is rapidly reusable.