The other day I was thinking: "if Musk disappears tomorrow would the valuation still be in the same ballpark?". I don't think so at all. In this context, it feels like even 150 Billions would be a big stretch considering revenue and forecasts. The coming IPOs and numbers are completely detached from reality and we are all in for a crash that will make 2008 look like a walk in the park.
Wild that the guy whose decisions are directly responsible for driving profitability into the ground is somehow the reason these companies have 300+ PE valuations.
Proves the point that skills don't matter results do, if a monkey manages to make better milkshake and you fire the chef, you didn't really improve the kitchen.
But that's what we do in stock and markets and well whatever we are living through, sometimes bad decisions can have good results because you were right place right time. if it happens more than once, that doesn't mean it was incredible it just means the bias works.
If 1% of the innovators had access to levels of cheap capital Musk has had, we might be living in a different reality.
SamAltman for all his faults brought trillion dollar NLP systems to reality by sheer ability to raise capital.
Everyone believes if things go south Musk can raise another Trillion somehow. And honestly I wouldn't bet against the guy.
This all assumes there was some skill involved. Instead, this along with gamestop and a few other meme stocks are showing that the stock market simply isn't as rational as finance experts have wanted to pretend.
This is a bitcoin stock market. Things are valued entirely based on what others are willing to buy for. They are not valued based on any attribute of the underlying asset. Exactly like bitcoin, it's whim and whimsy which is driving prices.
It's group gambling at this point. Everyone is betting that there won't be a run on the market.
Skills do matter. It’s just a different type of skill. Merit doesn’t matter - but even that’s a bit arguable - if the merit is decided based on what someone is creating value for their shareholders and value is entirely defined by stock price, it seems to be working well too.
Their launch business has a dominant market position but is not run for profit and xAI is loosing money. Starlink is the only segment earning real money: $7.2 billion in adjusted EBITDA. So 150 Billions seems "realistic" when taking Musk out of the equation. Maybe 150 to 250 billions would be better as a range if you want to be really optimistic.
The total market size might be low this year or the next. But, for better or worse, humans will continue to push into the unknown.
Reusable rockets will change the economics of space travel beyond recognition. Jevon’s paradox will strike hard and fast. Starlink is the initial proof of this.
Maybe Starship will be the first to achieve the fabled dream of rapid reusability. Maybe not. Either way, it’s a tractable engineering problem at this point and the path has been made pretty clear.
I have no idea what the valuation of SpaceX should be. But, in general, I’d bet a lot on the launch industry growing enormously in the coming decades.
"If the guy with insider access to the Kleptocracy left would this thing be as valuable" is a resounding NO when you're selling exploding space ships and a 3rd tier AI, a service that consumers continue to find complicated at best.
SpaceX sells starlink. That's probably the most valuable part of SpaceX by far based on recurring revenue. While they've made spaceflight reasonably cheap and reliable for a particular category of payloads - clearly there wasn't phantom demand just waiting to be launched.
Given the IPO, I suspect they're hitting the wall with regards to new starlink signups, and SpaceX is done growing.
SpaceX has $6.6B adjusted EBITDA, which, at a premium multiplier would probably put it somewhere around 80-150 billion as a company.
SpaceX was launching a modest % of the LEO constellation but after the Blue Origin failure, SpaceX is the only launch provider who can fill that gap and actually let LEO deliver on contracted time.
Please don't misunderstand me, I'm no Musk sycophant though I do love SpaceX and Starlink. I want us to have multiple providers of super cheap space launch capabilities and multiple diverse LEO satellite constellations (3-4 on a global scale makes sense I think?).
I'm sure BlueOrigin will get there some day and I'm sure LEO will get there too (maybe even in the 2028 window if they expand their SpaceX launch partnership).
The biggest competitor to Starlink is, ironically, traditional fiber.
When COVID hit, I knew a lot of engineers who decided to move to rural areas / small farms, because they could leverage Starlink to work remotely.
Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it was amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup.
I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there were people willing to pay a premium for faster-than-radio internet. So, unless they manage to be cheaper and faster than fiber, I don't think there is much of an endgame there.
Starlink isn’t for areas served by fiber it’s for areas that don’t have have good Internet access available, which are far larger than the area served by fiber.
Starlink isn’t for areas served by fiber, it’s for areas that do not have have good Internet access available, which are far larger than the area served by fiber.
> Falcon 9 first-stage boosters have been landed and recovered 616 times out of 629 attempts, including synchronized recoveries of the side-boosters of most Falcon Heavy flights.
>Forcing it into our retirement funds, 401ks and IRAs.
Not just forcing it into. Forcing the funds to fight for it betting the stock rice higher and higher in a runaway style - the effect created by limited float and high valuation as the funds tracking indexes would try to get the amount reflecting the proportion of the valuation of the company vs. the whole tracked index valuation, and with such huge valuation the limited float leads to the price rise (similar to the short squeeze) and the higher the price on the float the higher the valuation, rinse and repeat...
That's exactly what happened with Nortel in the dotcom crash. Everyone's pension and retirement tied up in a company that couldn't turn a profit and was, at its peak, 38% of the TSE300.
I don't think dominating an index to anywhere close to that degree is likely here, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some similar strategies being used. Changing the rules is already from the Nortel playbook: The Nortel Rule allowed index funds to have over 10% of their holdings in a single stock.
Some index funds are not obligated to perfectly replicate the index by buying shares, FXAIX (Fidelity S&P 500 mutual fund) has the option to use futures, swaps, options, and statistical sampling in addition to buying equity shares to try and replicate the returns of the index.
I think this is poor advice. Its share of the index will be relatively small and if it is indeed a dud, the index will organically rebalance. If you’re a long-term investor, this would just be a temporary blip. On the other hand, if this is thr opposite of a dud, you’ll get the benefit of that.
Sure, it'll only be ~2% of the index if it opens where they want to. But in the downside case where it meanders long enough for significant amounts of its stock to make it in to public hands and then goes to 10x revenue (i.e. down 90%) , you've allowed a company to engineer dramatic changes in index rules resulting in a transfer ~1% of S&P 500 market cap from index funder holders to its bagholders^W privileged insiders^W^W investors.
Yes a -1% day should be nothing to a long term holder. Yes they're buying the market; if the market is wrong they shouldn't really have any recourse. But one can also understand that a -1% day that accrues ~entirely to the benefit a small group, who appear to have engineered that outcome has much more emotional valence than a typical down down. It doesn't feel like a bad day on the market, it feels like a heist.
> I think this is poor advice. Its share of the index will be relatively small and if it is indeed a dud, the index will organically rebalance.
If a 1 to $1.5t IPO that was fast tracked onto the S&P500 and then hoovered up a bunch of index fund money becomes a dud, the organic rebalance is going to start with a full reassessment of if index funds and the S&P can be TRUSTED.
Its very possible it will be more than a blip, although to be fair if it isn't it's going to be the sort thing you aren't going to dodge.
If one wants to gamble on the grift, that is what options are for. Otherwise, we might as well start adding NFTs to the indexes if fundamentals do not matter. Luck for some, risk management for others. Regardless, informed consent is important imho. Relevant precedence is ETFs that exclude Big Tech.
https://www.defianceetfs.com/xmag/ ("XMAG, the first ETF designed to provide investors with exposure to the S&P 500, excluding the “Magnificent 7” (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla). XMAG offers a unique opportunity for investors to access the broader market while reducing concentration risk in these dominant tech stocks.")
In 2025 VOO returned 17.82% vs VOOG returned 22.11%. XMAG’s trailing 1-year return through late 2025 was around 9–15% depending on the measurement date, as the Mag 7 dragged badly in early 2025.
VOOG has returned 18.28%/yr over 10 years vs 15.63%/yr for VOO, a meaningful gap driven almost entirely by Mag 7 dominance. XMAG has no 10-year track record.
Certainly, you have done well over the last ~18-24 months if you have exposure to the AI investment exuberance (VOO), just as you did well if you had exposure to certain securities during ZIRP or the pandemic. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
Which you only know in hindsight, in the context of this performance benchmark. In that time frame, we had zero interest rate policy, a global pandemic, and now an AI bubble. "Will the conditions or events that led to my historical returns continue?" is a material component of forward looking exposure decisioning when investing.
> Luck for some, risk management for others. Regardless, informed consent is important imho. Relevant precedence is ETFs that exclude Big Tech.
Yup. Coupling this change with "oh, and btw, we also want the option to be able to only put out annual or biannual earnings reports not quarterly" means "We want to offload even more risk."
There are many dubious companies in the S&P500. I don’t see the point in getting selectively heated about this one when everyone seems to be okay with the others.
That’s the way indexes roll. I don’t invest in indexes for this reason.
There is a separate structural issue with indexes that is being ignored here. Indexes were never really designed to accommodate companies going public so late with high revenue growth. A couple decades ago companies went public when they were so small that they could grow into the index. This reflects changes in the nature and structure of the capital markets, these new IPOs are just a manifestation of this reality.
Also given how the S&P weights, it'll have about as much sway as DoorDash.
Annoying they pushed it into the indexes, but like you said, we've also never had a company come out in the 1T range or even the x00B range. These indexes are supposed to represent the market and can't ignore a 1T market cap company for very long.
EDIT
One other thing to add, is that we still do not know what the stock will price at. It's already come down once, and as more information comes out it can continue to come down until it's finally priced the day before the first trading day.
>Forcing it into our retirement funds, 401ks and IRAs.
Do you think people buying the SP 500 are forced to buy Apple? Dell? Workday?
I see headlines like "401k holders forced to by SpaceX" and think "WTF, that is crazy." Then I look at the article and it just says its being added to the SP500.
You may not like that it's being added to the SP500 but no one is saying you are forced to buy any other companies being added to it. I can't believe people are just running with this narrative as-if its logically consistent with what they believe. It's manipulation.
> Musk advisers have reached out to major index providers seeking ways to secure earlier inclusion in market benchmarks to lift shares
> Advisers for the company, which recently merged with xAI, have reached out to major index providers, including Nasdaq, to discuss how SpaceX and this year’s other hot startups might join key indexes sooner than normal, according to people familiar with the matter.
> SpaceX hopes to skirt traditional rules in an effort to bring liquidity to its shareholders sooner as part of its planned IPO. SpaceX advisers have sought index policy changes that would fast-track its entry into major indexes for the company and benefit other highly-valued private companies, the people said.
This is simply not _companies being added to SP500, etc._ as you say. This is forceful change of the rules so these companies can reap benefits and it optics is that funds are being _forced_ to buy in.
With the change to only five days of being publicly traded requirements, incentivising market makers to keep a high valuation becomes very cheap.
After five days the index funds have to buy at the last price making it final.
In other words even if the vast majority of the market believes it's worth much less, they can force a high price and force basically everyone to hold it via retirement funds.
> For broad indexes like the S&P 500, it would be impractical or expensive for an investor to construct the right proportions in a portfolio. Index funds do the work by holding a representative sample of the securities. S&P 500 index funds, the most popular and oldest such funds in the U.S., mimic the moves of the stocks in the S&P 500, which covers about 80% of all U.S. equities by market cap.3
So while yes, people are parroting things they don't understand, so are you.
You've been missing important parts of the articles, or perhaps the ones you've seen aren't very informative. The concern is that SpaceX reached out to the indexes to get the rules changed (https://www.reuters.com/business/nasdaq-proposes-fast-entry-...); under the old rules, they would have had to wait much longer before being added. This doesn't prove anything wrong, but it's pretty suspicious, because why should SpaceX care if they are or are not in some particular list of stocks?
Patrick is my youtube finance news GOAT. Hilarious and deeply detailed videos on some of the craziest shit going on in finance. If you're interested in the nitty gritty details of portfolio management, he also has a bunch of lectures at the beginning of his channel pre-"content creator"-era that are like sitting in a university classroom. Very good stuff.
Unfortunately I have very little knowledge of the historical stock market and if this order of magnitude of bullshit valuation has ever occurred before.
Holy crap is that an amusing/depressing video. Assuming the financial shenanigans outlined in it are even partially accurate, how the heck is this getting allowed?
When it comes to dealing with the abuse of power by those who hold power, the question is not "who's allowing them to do this?", it's "who's going to stop them?".
I want to buy options against QQQ so badly -- but Tesla has traded at a crazy multiple of revenue/profits for a very long time, so I'm wondering if Elon/AI hype will keep these stocks high longer than I want to pay the risk premium for (options).
Scuttlebutt I've heard is that the revenue mechanism of the whole complex is essentially a gigantic depreciation machine. Starlink sats de-orbiting all by themselves get considered "depreciation". That one mechanism basically gives you a Saturn V sized firehose of tax holidays, because satellites aren't cheap, yo, and you can make all sorts of deals to essentially spread that around.
Is it true? I got no idea.
Supposedly, Tesla had some unique money games that vastly blew up their cash flow early on, less a car company and more a sort of tax arbitrage. So maybe it's in character.
The SpaceX IPO has a tiny 5% float and only a $75 billion raise target. There are enough morons in the world that they will compete to buy and push the valuation up. It's all a stupid financial trick to make Elon a paper trillionaire.
Tesla is a meme stock like GameStop, but for a good fraction of America, so the market cap can be much larger. As long as TSLA owners don't care about the stock defying gravity, it will continue to do so.
Why short QQQ when SpaceX will only be 2% (according to a poster above), when many of the other companies in the index are tech and chip companies, such as NVDA, which are going gang-busters? Even if SpaceX went bankrupt you'd only see a 2% drop, which is easily covered by all the AI chip companies going up. If you think SpaceX is overvalued, buy options against it directly.
> I think we're still a ways away from CEOs admitting that AI actually can't cut the cost of human capital in half
On the contrary, I think it certainly can. In the sense that productivity per person can be doubled. You could fire half your workforce and do nearly the same output.
Trouble is, everyone who does that will get outcompeted by everyone who didn't fore their workforce, and instead doubled their output.
We've seen it before with factories and computerization.
What's that old saw the investors use? The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent? You can bet on the fundamentals or you can bet on other investors.
The fact that Tesla's stock price is so evidently detached from the performance of the company itself makes me wonder whether or not a public SpaceX will cause those investors who are just trying to ride the Musk train to exit Tesla stock and dump everything they can into SpaceX instead.
There’s simply no version of financial reality that values this company at over 1T. Even 780B is extremely generous based on the current financial picture and a very optimistic view of the future.
The AI IPOs are broadly in the same ballpark, and if they IPO at less than the last private valuation (a real possibility absent a perfect setup) that triggers a whole bunch of other messes.
The window to get all these things closed before it all comes crashing down is closing, hence the sudden rush to IPO.
> There’s simply no version of financial reality that values this company at over 1T.
Aswath Damodaran recently (pre S-1) valued SpaceX at $1.2T [1] - yeah I was shocked as well. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to dig into his numbers. But yeah, there's your _financial reality_.
Indeed and it’s almost sad. The core of SpaceX is an amazing engineering company with real assets and a serious moat. Thats realistically maybe worth 250-400B-ish as a serious hardcore company.
Then there’s all this other hype and nonsense tacked on to make a franken-company that’s just making a circus of the core story.
> Indeed and it’s almost sad. The core of SpaceX is an amazing engineering company with real assets and a serious moat.
Completely. As if "We dominate the space launch and satellite internet markets" isn't enough, they're trying to tack on all this hypothetical stuff to inflate the valuation. Maybe some of it will come true in 50-100 years, but I'd bet a lot of it won't (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...) because telling the future is hard.
It'll be a real shame if the core, cool engineering that's happening at spaceX gets compromised by all the shenanigans going on elsewhere.
You're repeating tired quotes without even understanding what they mean. The quote "longer than you can stay solvent" refers to short selling. Here you are using it in the opposite context: to describe a long position. It makes no sense. How exactly would a non leveraged long position get margin called?
I think this comes down to a disagreement about what "long term" means. In finance, I would suggest a _lower_ bound on long term is 10 years. More comfortably, I'd suggest something like 20-30 years. This is long enough to ride out most depressions, and it is still fits within a persons working life-time. It also roughly matches the scale at which people should be planning for retirement and long-term care (imagine if you started your retirement planning just 10 years from retirement, it would be very difficult). So I think neither BTC's not TSLA's hype has reached long-term yet. They have been around long enough to meet some of these timelines, but the excessive hype really hasn't been so long -- maybe 5 years or so.
Can we stop just repeating quotes like those over and over. If you have thoughts, please articulate them, its pretty frustrating to see the same exact quotes repeated over and over whenever there is a submission stock related
> As is the case with Elon's companies (and a bit of the market itself), it feels like any logical valuation has no impact on the actual stock price.
Has this type of phenomenon been studied or formalized in any way by economists? I mean specifically how a cult of personality develops around a single individual causing the market to lose its shit. Or the increasing meme-ification of financial instruments.
These are both uniquely 21st century phenomena. But I'm not familiar enough with finance / economics to know what to read up on to understand what is going on.
The irrational exuberance around Tesla was at least somewhat grounded in reality. There were some possible future(s) where it was really going to take off and completely redefine the auto industry. Then of course things went really off the rails with the Cybertruck, pivot to robotics, and just seemingly giving up on their existing line of business to go chasing whatever bong fueled dream Musk is having this quarter.
SpaceX is on a whole new level of bullshit. I think all these guys know how to do is double down. If the hype isn't working, its not stupid and big enough, so you start talking about transhumanism and singularity and other BS in your SEC filings.
Without Musk, they wouldn't have squandered their market advantage with high-profile failure after high-profile failure. They would have released a good enough pickup truck in 2017. They wouldn't have spent a whole decade gaslighting everyone about self-driving cars.
The real reason Tesla was remarkable, and why Musk bought into it, was that they released a mass-market electric car that didn't look and perform like a vacuum cleaner and that got an okay range for commuting. That was the value proposition. China can now exceed those design parameters at a wholesale price of about $8k USD.
While I agree with the sentiment that SpaceX today is not worth anywhere near 1T+, it's worth understanding that:
a) SpaceX is currently trading at ~>1.5T in secondary markets
and
b) most of what the market is reacting to is the _chance_ that SpaceX goes on to become one of the largest companies in the world.
Remember the reaction when Facebook IPOed? It was hilariously overpriced (at the time, on paper, based on existing revenues) and yet here we are. A 1% chance of earning a trillion dollars is worth 10B - SpaceX can more accurately be thought of as a 10% chance of earning 10T rather than a nominal everyday business.
Facebook's IPO was something like ~20x revenue and 100x earnings. If SpaceX IPOs at $1.5T, that's nearly 80x revenue and if you buy their 'adjusted' EBITDA figures, 230x earnings. Not quite an order of magnitude, but substantially 'worse' financially.
Same here. I’ve had an IRA and 401k since I was 21 and I’m 59 now (but still feel as smart as a 21 year old). I doubt I’ll see my lifetime of investment go up in smoke, just a big hill: up super high for a few years and then back to 2024 levels by 2030.
My understanding is that the S-1 showed a Q1 loss of xAI of $2.47 billion in Q1. But with the Anthropic Colossus-I rental agreement at $1.25B/month or $3.75B/quarter, xAI should now be net-neutral to cash-flow positive.
If Colossus-II rents networked GB-200s, that could be up to +$47B/year at $9/hour/GB-200 for 555,000 GB-200s. For reference, current rental rates are $10-$27/hour for the same hardware. With Anthropic at a 55% month-over-month growth rate (implying a $150B/year run rate by August, or, more likely, sometime in late 2026), it seems very possible that xAI could be highly profitable as the only available compute resource.
I'm not saying +$47B Colossus-II deal will happen, but even a small fraction of that remains highly material to xAI economics. xAI is likely already cashflow neutral. (Where am I wrong?)
the xAi revenue comes from renting their infrastructure to their biggest competitor. Anthropic is going to IPO for aprox 1/2 the valuation, is profitable, and can cancel the contract with 90 days notice.
Personally I think the valuation is detached from the company itself. In theory Tesla's valuation is too high, but it doesn't seem to be coming down any time soon. Plus there seems to be ways to manipulate stock prices when you control such a highly valued company, to the extent that the stock price reflects actions taken in the stock market more than the underlying assets and balance sheets.
This exposes a fundamental (and obvious) problem with not just SpaceX but the OAI and ANT IPOs as well. Their valuations are massive far beyond what the existing GAAP revenue and profit can justify, forcing large percentages of the valuation to rely on multiple future events not only happening but happening on the upper-end of any reasonable probability curve based on real-world priors.
While all IPO valuations rely on forward-looking expectations, IPOs this large don't usually rely this much, on this many forward expectations for which there are so few real-world comps or priors to inform estimates. In short, when the error bars are in danger of swamping the signal, wild swings are likely. I expect more than one of these three to drop at least 10% relative to the overall market at some point in their first 18 months. All the potential upside (and probably much more) is already priced in. So taking this bet at the IPO price requires valuations most worry are already too high not only being correct but too low by quite a lot. To paraphrase Alice in Wonderland, these valuations require 'believing as many as six unlikely things before breakfast.'
That said, I'll also predict that one of them will be trading >50% higher than its first year low ten years later (vs the overall market). Basically, they are all hugely overvalued in the ~3 year time frame but one may turn out to have been undervalued in 10 years. So, regardless don't buy any of them at IPO. If you're interested in one or more of them, wait for it to drop >10% vs the market and then re-evaluate for early indicators it might be 'the one'.
That's going to be interesting to see if others follow this as an anchor or buy more into the hype. Regardless it's still a large multiple of earnings...
The risk here is severely overblown. Low earth orbit is self-cleaning with atmospheric drag. There’s comparatively little in MEO and even in a catastrophic Kessler syndrome scenario it’s still safe to transit through. Polluting higher orbits is so far beyond our current capabilities that it’s not even worth discussing.
Low earth orbit includes orbits that take from hours to centuries to decay, depends a lot on altitude/apogee/perigee. Starlink for multiple reasons places satellites in the range where it takes ~5 years to decay, thankfully. Kessler syndrome is real though, and satellites do collide or break apart in LEO.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone downplay Kessler syndrome so matter-of-factly. Has anti-doomerism spread to nearly every topic, or is Kessler syndrome really something whose severity has been massively overstated? Opportunity to shift my priors I suppose.
Kessler syndrome is way overstated. One way to tell is talk about it closing off space. That can't happen, it is possible to cross debris bands with low danger.
People also don't talk about different orbits. We can use higher low earth orbits if lower orbits are blocked.
Also, it is possible to clean up debris. The low cost launch means lower cost cleanup. My understanding is that big objects are most dangerous cause they would cause a lot of debris.
Kessler syndrome doesn't "work" with the orbits these sats sit in. Even left dead and tumbling, the sats would re-enter by their own in ~5 years time. Even less with the recent lowering of their operational orbits.
Also, a common misunderstanding of orbital mechanics (probably amplified by otherwise great cinematography, but poor physics depictions movie Gravity) is that after a collision things move to higher orbits and thus remain up there forever / change planes and affect other satellites. But that's not how it works, the orbit gets elongated, but the periapsis remains the same (or slightly lower), so the things / parts / pieces still re-enter the atmosphere. And the satellites are grouped in rings, with different inclinations, making it extremely hard to reach one from the other.
Also also, space is like really really big. Plenty of space (hah) to put lots of rings of satellites and coordinate between themselves up there. The operators are the first ones who care about it, and they're slowly improving the existing systems, in both tracking (and access to tracking) and automated collision avoidance. Having 10k sats up there makes you good at keeping them separated.
To take the opposite angle of the other reply, if we lock ourselves in with trash, then orbit will be fucked for everyone. That's not something that SpaceX could plant their flag in and then be the only one to use it. If Kessler syndrome happens, SpaceX would be just as worthless as any competitors they might currently have an edge over.
Well let’s brace for a bunch of tweets against morningstar from the man in charge. I don’t think it matters to the retail investors though, they would all pour money into it. At least that’s my guess
I waited for the Google IPO, but did not pre-order. I looked at the price on the first day of trading and decided it was overvalued (at about $100.00). GOOG today is worth about 200x the IPO price, so I guess I was wrong...
I keep seeing this comment on all these spacex posts, can someone ELI5 to me why the pension funds are going to be forced to buy this? (do they not have free will on what they buy?)
SpaceX made fast index inclusion a condition of where it listed. Nasdaq changed its index rules so that instead of having to wait months to a year, SpaceX can enter an index after 15 trading days.
Index funds track an index mechanically. If you run an S&P 500 fund, you have to mirror the S&P 500. If a company gets added to the index, every fund tracking the index must buy it to match the index -- there is no discretion. Pension funds hold a lot of index funds.
So the causal chain is that pension funds track indexes, indexes have to buy the companies in the index, SpaceX got a fast path to the indexes. SpaceX will launch and pension funds will buy the stock, presumably propping up the stock price.
It would take a lot for pension funds to undo this and would be the opposite of index investing.
And to try and expand on why an index would include a waiting period in it's rules, my limited understanding is it's to give the public markets time to follow the company and review several quarters of financial results to stabilize the valuation in relation to those results before getting included in the index.
By bypassing the rules this way they are making people doubt the security of index funds, which would damage the market just by association. Anyone who cared about the stability of these instruments would categorically deny such a request. It seems to say a lot about the market makers in general that this is being allowed.
If the rule change goes through then SpaceX could be added to an index such as the S&P 500, where many (most?) pension funds invest. "S&P 500 has been considering a rule change to waive the earnings requirement and shorten the seasoning period for mega-cap IPOs like SpaceX." "Pension funds allocate 30% to 50% of their total portfolios to broad U.S. equities [in the form of index funds.]"
401ks and pension funds have large amounts of money in index funds.
Major indexes like VTI will buy SpaceX after a waiting period as long as it satisfies other rules (and there have been some rule changes in various indexes to make something with low float like SpaceX eligible for inclusion).
However, most indexes are float-adjusted, meaning that they will adjust the amount of shares of a company in the index based on their float, not their total shares. So, they will initially pick up small amount of weight/shares around the IPO.
The NASDAQ-100 has been bending over backwards to cater to SpaceX, which makes some sense because they want it listed on their exchange. They changed their inclusion rules to include a fast-track for IPOs. This type of mechanism isn't uncommon in other large indexes (VTI has had fast-track rules for a long time) but the timing does make it appear that they changed their rules for SpaceX.
Other providers have made changes to float requirements for inclusion.
The NASDAQ-100 (QQQ being the popular ETF tracking it) is also not float adjusted and, instead, has some capping rules for low-float securities. I haven't done any projections but it seems that NASDAQ-100/QQQ will pickup more shares than the float-adjusted indexes.
A lot of people in the US only have a 401k which is their pension for this discussion (there are very important differences, but for this discussion we can ignore them). In their 401k an index fund is almost always your best investment, so you should be concerned with anything that makes an index fund a worse investment since it harms you.
Pensions have strong and weird investment rules, and you have no control over what they do other than law. This makes them generally a worse investment (but if you live longer than average they are great anyway) so a 401k is better for most.
Pensions buy big indexes in part because of the exact policies that were reversed to let SpaceX in; the behavior is not an immutable law of nature.
OTOH, the changes may expose them to SpaceX before they could reasonably rebalance their holdings, even if they were to stop buying the affected indexes immediately.
in theory, people that do this for a living know this? shouldn't they all be raising the red flags on this, as opposed to say just people on hackernews?
No, because the indices are free-float weighted not cap weighted. The float planned for SpaceX is tiny. If it were purchased by the indices at 1.7T on Monday and went to zero on Tuesday, the amount of value lost by the funds would be barely larger than the normal daily fluctuation of the market.
A lot of them have rules forcing them to have some amount of exposure to indexes of a market, or all entries in a market.
There are MAJOR rule changes made to allow them to do this (90 day wait-time reduced to 5 days, financial stability requirements lowered or removed), which is why automated rules like that were created ("oh, if they make it to X, they were already vetted for Y, Z").
A lot of people are throwing a lot of trust and reputation on the bonfire to make this happen.
If the bait and switch of xAI quotas continue, I would not expect their inference services to succeed.
Before getting SuperGrok I had a premium subscription.
After forking over $300 payment (annual) for SuperGrok, my quota was drastically cut immediately. As soon as I paid. This is for going from premium ($8 / month) to Super; the way cheaper premium counterintuitively had a much higher quota. Much. Versus $30/month, SuperGrok has a much lower quota and it’s been getting worse, even as xAI has surplus inference capacity to sell to Anthropic. I want Premium back, but I fear they have cut it back. To talk numbers: 35 videos every 90 minutes in premium versus after paying $$, around 30 videos per DAY in “Super” lol Grok. Granted a paltry 10 or so… it varies… of the videos are higher resolution than premium but that doesn’t matter because premium had unlimited upscaling, now gone. I’ve complained. Silence.
So I don't fundamentally care if SpaceX is overvalued or not. Like, that's on you for whatever you want to invest in or not.
What I object to is all the rule changes by NASDAQ to essentially fix the IPO so massive pension funds and index funds are forced to invest in it. There have been multiple submissions about this but in short small floats are normally prohibited for index inclusion (not anymore), the trading days required for price discovery have been dropped to almost zero, the voting share structure would be an issue, the insider lockouts have been fixed and on it goes.
There should be extra scrutiny for a trillion dollar company.
SpaceX does have the Falcon 9, which is the completely dominant launch platform and first-stage reusability gives it an almost unbeatable advantage. Starlink has a lot of potential if satellite handsets can get small and cheap enough to compete with 5G effectively. Obital data centers are bullshit. Starship is going to be a significant drain on finances and the program as a whole faces significant headwinds.
The big problem is xAI. It's a significant drain on SpaceX (costing allegedly $1B+/month). SpaceX would be a better company without it. But it's only there to rescue Elon from his disastrous Twitter purchase and the xAI investors from Elon's first bailout (of himself).
There's almost no point in trying to figure out what a valuation should be because in many cases, nobody cares. Tesla is the posterchild for that.
Ultimately it was inevitable that as passive investing got more and more popular, people would seek to game it. Not that I'm happy about it, but if this works, it is probably just the beginning of sneaky ways being found to trick passive money into taking on way more risk than it intended to. And of course passive investors are passive, so they may not even notice, and probably won't fight back until the inevitable crash.
I think there's going to be blowback from this because this is "every other horse can only use three of their legs" levels of fixing.
I looked into the how the rule-changing works. NASDAQ is what's called a Self-Regulating Organization ("SRO") in the legislation so it has a lot of power. Were it a government agency, it would be more difficult. Technically, the SEC has to approve all rule changes by SROs but in this administration in particular, that's just going to be a rubber stamp. By the way here's a speech the head of the SEC previously gave about deregulation of capital markets [1].
I was also curious if Loper Bright had changed anything here but it appears not. The sstatuory language here is clear rather than intentionally or unintentionally ambiguous.
So the funds can technically challenge any such rules. They have standing. But the bar is difficult and I don't see it happening.
But if this goes badly, what I think you'll see is changes in governance by pension funds that'll be reflected by Vanguard and Blackrock, which is "index-like" funds that have stricter governance with rules closer to what was the case before these rule changes were rammed through. I could be wrong. I hope I'm not.
I think the most likely scenario is that there eventually will be the changes you describe, but if not enough people squeal now, then it won't be until after a bunch of people lose their savings either because of this or some follow on scam that finds a way to take advantage of passive money.
OG SpaceX is growing at 7% YoY. That is not a business that commands a 150x revenue multiple. xAI is arguably shrinking. StarLink has a bunch of heavy lifting to do and unless it keeps growing 40% YoY for 10 years, law of large numbers be damned.
The other day I was thinking: "if Musk disappears tomorrow would the valuation still be in the same ballpark?". I don't think so at all. In this context, it feels like even 150 Billions would be a big stretch considering revenue and forecasts. The coming IPOs and numbers are completely detached from reality and we are all in for a crash that will make 2008 look like a walk in the park.
Wild that the guy whose decisions are directly responsible for driving profitability into the ground is somehow the reason these companies have 300+ PE valuations.
Proves the point that skills don't matter results do, if a monkey manages to make better milkshake and you fire the chef, you didn't really improve the kitchen.
But that's what we do in stock and markets and well whatever we are living through, sometimes bad decisions can have good results because you were right place right time. if it happens more than once, that doesn't mean it was incredible it just means the bias works.
If 1% of the innovators had access to levels of cheap capital Musk has had, we might be living in a different reality.
SamAltman for all his faults brought trillion dollar NLP systems to reality by sheer ability to raise capital.
Everyone believes if things go south Musk can raise another Trillion somehow. And honestly I wouldn't bet against the guy.
This all assumes there was some skill involved. Instead, this along with gamestop and a few other meme stocks are showing that the stock market simply isn't as rational as finance experts have wanted to pretend.
This is a bitcoin stock market. Things are valued entirely based on what others are willing to buy for. They are not valued based on any attribute of the underlying asset. Exactly like bitcoin, it's whim and whimsy which is driving prices.
It's group gambling at this point. Everyone is betting that there won't be a run on the market.
Everything is valued by what people are willing to pay for it.
The myth of the stock market was that value was tied to the performance or potential of the company whose ownership you were taking a part of.
Skills do matter. It’s just a different type of skill. Merit doesn’t matter - but even that’s a bit arguable - if the merit is decided based on what someone is creating value for their shareholders and value is entirely defined by stock price, it seems to be working well too.
(Not that I agree this is right)
It seems like a suicide pact for the companies like Tesla and Musk ... they need each other and then things get worse ...
>I don't think so at all. In this context, it feels like even 150 Billions would be a big stretch considering revenue and forecasts.
How are you valuating SpaceX?
Their launch business has a dominant market position but is not run for profit and xAI is loosing money. Starlink is the only segment earning real money: $7.2 billion in adjusted EBITDA. So 150 Billions seems "realistic" when taking Musk out of the equation. Maybe 150 to 250 billions would be better as a range if you want to be really optimistic.
The stock market is not about current results, it’s about future results.
SpaceX has more future upside than any company I can think of…
How? The total market for space flight is low. Satellite internet is nice but again small. Is this just all grok?
The total market size might be low this year or the next. But, for better or worse, humans will continue to push into the unknown.
Reusable rockets will change the economics of space travel beyond recognition. Jevon’s paradox will strike hard and fast. Starlink is the initial proof of this.
Maybe Starship will be the first to achieve the fabled dream of rapid reusability. Maybe not. Either way, it’s a tractable engineering problem at this point and the path has been made pretty clear.
I have no idea what the valuation of SpaceX should be. But, in general, I’d bet a lot on the launch industry growing enormously in the coming decades.
Starlink is growing. Valuation is too high, but it is growing.
Not at >100x revenue, presumably.
"If the guy with insider access to the Kleptocracy left would this thing be as valuable" is a resounding NO when you're selling exploding space ships and a 3rd tier AI, a service that consumers continue to find complicated at best.
SpaceX sells starlink. That's probably the most valuable part of SpaceX by far based on recurring revenue. While they've made spaceflight reasonably cheap and reliable for a particular category of payloads - clearly there wasn't phantom demand just waiting to be launched.
Given the IPO, I suspect they're hitting the wall with regards to new starlink signups, and SpaceX is done growing.
SpaceX has $6.6B adjusted EBITDA, which, at a premium multiplier would probably put it somewhere around 80-150 billion as a company.
There are competitors to Starlink arriving now.
For example, the Australian government has selected Project Kepler (now called Amazon Leo) to provide broadband services to the Australian Outback.
https://www.nbnco.com.au/corporate-information/media-centre/...
And geopolitical shenanigans in Ukraine with Musk and Starlink means that it may not be a reliable partner.
And LEO is using SpaceX to launch.
SpaceX was launching a modest % of the LEO constellation but after the Blue Origin failure, SpaceX is the only launch provider who can fill that gap and actually let LEO deliver on contracted time.
Please don't misunderstand me, I'm no Musk sycophant though I do love SpaceX and Starlink. I want us to have multiple providers of super cheap space launch capabilities and multiple diverse LEO satellite constellations (3-4 on a global scale makes sense I think?).
I'm sure BlueOrigin will get there some day and I'm sure LEO will get there too (maybe even in the 2028 window if they expand their SpaceX launch partnership).
I for one am sure that BlueOrigin will never get there.
The biggest competitor to Starlink is, ironically, traditional fiber.
When COVID hit, I knew a lot of engineers who decided to move to rural areas / small farms, because they could leverage Starlink to work remotely.
Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it was amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup.
I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there were people willing to pay a premium for faster-than-radio internet. So, unless they manage to be cheaper and faster than fiber, I don't think there is much of an endgame there.
Starlink isn’t for areas served by fiber it’s for areas that don’t have have good Internet access available, which are far larger than the area served by fiber.
Starlink isn’t for areas served by fiber, it’s for areas that do not have have good Internet access available, which are far larger than the area served by fiber.
> The Falcon 9 has [...] 641 successful launches, 2 in-flight failures, 1 partial failure and 1 pre-flight destruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9
> Falcon 9 first-stage boosters have been landed and recovered 616 times out of 629 attempts, including synchronized recoveries of the side-boosters of most Falcon Heavy flights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
Yeah, oh and hello, Bernie!
IMHO, still too much. Someone posted this link [1] recently.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI
Additional concern is the push to get it added to indices immediately. Forcing it into our retirement funds, 401ks and IRAs.
>Forcing it into our retirement funds, 401ks and IRAs.
Not just forcing it into. Forcing the funds to fight for it betting the stock rice higher and higher in a runaway style - the effect created by limited float and high valuation as the funds tracking indexes would try to get the amount reflecting the proportion of the valuation of the company vs. the whole tracked index valuation, and with such huge valuation the limited float leads to the price rise (similar to the short squeeze) and the higher the price on the float the higher the valuation, rinse and repeat...
That's exactly what happened with Nortel in the dotcom crash. Everyone's pension and retirement tied up in a company that couldn't turn a profit and was, at its peak, 38% of the TSE300.
I don't think dominating an index to anywhere close to that degree is likely here, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some similar strategies being used. Changing the rules is already from the Nortel playbook: The Nortel Rule allowed index funds to have over 10% of their holdings in a single stock.
Some index funds are not obligated to perfectly replicate the index by buying shares, FXAIX (Fidelity S&P 500 mutual fund) has the option to use futures, swaps, options, and statistical sampling in addition to buying equity shares to try and replicate the returns of the index.
There's a variety of ETFs that won't include it by default. Now convince all the retirees you know to switch their retirement account over to those...
The best you can do is avoid the exposure with changes to your portfolio composition while everyone else gets grifted. It's regrettable.
I think this is poor advice. Its share of the index will be relatively small and if it is indeed a dud, the index will organically rebalance. If you’re a long-term investor, this would just be a temporary blip. On the other hand, if this is thr opposite of a dud, you’ll get the benefit of that.
Sure, it'll only be ~2% of the index if it opens where they want to. But in the downside case where it meanders long enough for significant amounts of its stock to make it in to public hands and then goes to 10x revenue (i.e. down 90%) , you've allowed a company to engineer dramatic changes in index rules resulting in a transfer ~1% of S&P 500 market cap from index funder holders to its bagholders^W privileged insiders^W^W investors.
Yes a -1% day should be nothing to a long term holder. Yes they're buying the market; if the market is wrong they shouldn't really have any recourse. But one can also understand that a -1% day that accrues ~entirely to the benefit a small group, who appear to have engineered that outcome has much more emotional valence than a typical down down. It doesn't feel like a bad day on the market, it feels like a heist.
> I think this is poor advice. Its share of the index will be relatively small and if it is indeed a dud, the index will organically rebalance.
If a 1 to $1.5t IPO that was fast tracked onto the S&P500 and then hoovered up a bunch of index fund money becomes a dud, the organic rebalance is going to start with a full reassessment of if index funds and the S&P can be TRUSTED.
Its very possible it will be more than a blip, although to be fair if it isn't it's going to be the sort thing you aren't going to dodge.
Nothing wrong with finding a low-cost large cap ETF that matches your investing preferences.
So basically the whole ESG craze from a few years ago?
Sure, or there are faith based ones now - I personally invest in PTL
$PTL "screens" for:
* air quality
* environmental risk
* GHG emissions
* ecological impact
* product sustainability
https://www.inspireetf.com/screening
yet weights ExxonMobil, the 21st largest company:
https://companiesmarketcap.com/
as by far their 2nd largest holding:
https://www.inspireetf.com/etf/ptl
If one wants to gamble on the grift, that is what options are for. Otherwise, we might as well start adding NFTs to the indexes if fundamentals do not matter. Luck for some, risk management for others. Regardless, informed consent is important imho. Relevant precedence is ETFs that exclude Big Tech.
https://www.defianceetfs.com/xmag/ ("XMAG, the first ETF designed to provide investors with exposure to the S&P 500, excluding the “Magnificent 7” (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla). XMAG offers a unique opportunity for investors to access the broader market while reducing concentration risk in these dominant tech stocks.")
https://www.aboutschwab.com/mss/story/how-investing-and-gamb... ("Investing and gambling can both be fun. But they are not the same.")
(none of this is investing advice, educational purposes only)
In 2025 VOO returned 17.82% vs VOOG returned 22.11%. XMAG’s trailing 1-year return through late 2025 was around 9–15% depending on the measurement date, as the Mag 7 dragged badly in early 2025.
VOOG has returned 18.28%/yr over 10 years vs 15.63%/yr for VOO, a meaningful gap driven almost entirely by Mag 7 dominance. XMAG has no 10-year track record.
Certainly, you have done well over the last ~18-24 months if you have exposure to the AI investment exuberance (VOO), just as you did well if you had exposure to certain securities during ZIRP or the pandemic. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
Since its September 2010 inception, VOO is up +816% in nominal total return, or +15.1%/yr annualized.
The 10-year total return is 327%, and the 15-year average annual return is 14.4%.
Hard to beat.
Which you only know in hindsight, in the context of this performance benchmark. In that time frame, we had zero interest rate policy, a global pandemic, and now an AI bubble. "Will the conditions or events that led to my historical returns continue?" is a material component of forward looking exposure decisioning when investing.
> Luck for some, risk management for others. Regardless, informed consent is important imho. Relevant precedence is ETFs that exclude Big Tech.
Yup. Coupling this change with "oh, and btw, we also want the option to be able to only put out annual or biannual earnings reports not quarterly" means "We want to offload even more risk."
There are many dubious companies in the S&P500. I don’t see the point in getting selectively heated about this one when everyone seems to be okay with the others.
That’s the way indexes roll. I don’t invest in indexes for this reason.
There is a separate structural issue with indexes that is being ignored here. Indexes were never really designed to accommodate companies going public so late with high revenue growth. A couple decades ago companies went public when they were so small that they could grow into the index. This reflects changes in the nature and structure of the capital markets, these new IPOs are just a manifestation of this reality.
Also given how the S&P weights, it'll have about as much sway as DoorDash.
Annoying they pushed it into the indexes, but like you said, we've also never had a company come out in the 1T range or even the x00B range. These indexes are supposed to represent the market and can't ignore a 1T market cap company for very long.
EDIT
One other thing to add, is that we still do not know what the stock will price at. It's already come down once, and as more information comes out it can continue to come down until it's finally priced the day before the first trading day.
>Forcing it into our retirement funds, 401ks and IRAs.
Do you think people buying the SP 500 are forced to buy Apple? Dell? Workday?
I see headlines like "401k holders forced to by SpaceX" and think "WTF, that is crazy." Then I look at the article and it just says its being added to the SP500.
You may not like that it's being added to the SP500 but no one is saying you are forced to buy any other companies being added to it. I can't believe people are just running with this narrative as-if its logically consistent with what they believe. It's manipulation.
WSJ article from February 2026 [1]:
> Musk advisers have reached out to major index providers seeking ways to secure earlier inclusion in market benchmarks to lift shares
> Advisers for the company, which recently merged with xAI, have reached out to major index providers, including Nasdaq, to discuss how SpaceX and this year’s other hot startups might join key indexes sooner than normal, according to people familiar with the matter.
> SpaceX hopes to skirt traditional rules in an effort to bring liquidity to its shareholders sooner as part of its planned IPO. SpaceX advisers have sought index policy changes that would fast-track its entry into major indexes for the company and benefit other highly-valued private companies, the people said.
This is simply not _companies being added to SP500, etc._ as you say. This is forceful change of the rules so these companies can reap benefits and it optics is that funds are being _forced_ to buy in.
[1] https://archive.is/es8U7
With the change to only five days of being publicly traded requirements, incentivising market makers to keep a high valuation becomes very cheap.
After five days the index funds have to buy at the last price making it final.
In other words even if the vast majority of the market believes it's worth much less, they can force a high price and force basically everyone to hold it via retirement funds.
> Apple? Dell? Workday?
How long after their IPOs were they added to the appropriate indexes? Did the rules change specifically for them?
> Do you think people buying the SP 500 are forced to buy...
If it's an index fund, like the vast majority of pension/roth/etc funds, then yes, yes they are. It's literally the whole point of an index fund.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/indexfund.asp
> For broad indexes like the S&P 500, it would be impractical or expensive for an investor to construct the right proportions in a portfolio. Index funds do the work by holding a representative sample of the securities. S&P 500 index funds, the most popular and oldest such funds in the U.S., mimic the moves of the stocks in the S&P 500, which covers about 80% of all U.S. equities by market cap.3
So while yes, people are parroting things they don't understand, so are you.
You've been missing important parts of the articles, or perhaps the ones you've seen aren't very informative. The concern is that SpaceX reached out to the indexes to get the rules changed (https://www.reuters.com/business/nasdaq-proposes-fast-entry-...); under the old rules, they would have had to wait much longer before being added. This doesn't prove anything wrong, but it's pretty suspicious, because why should SpaceX care if they are or are not in some particular list of stocks?
Do you understand that they literally changed the inclusion rules for SpaceX? Not even remotely comparable to Apple, Dell, or Workday.
Patrick is my youtube finance news GOAT. Hilarious and deeply detailed videos on some of the craziest shit going on in finance. If you're interested in the nitty gritty details of portfolio management, he also has a bunch of lectures at the beginning of his channel pre-"content creator"-era that are like sitting in a university classroom. Very good stuff.
I knew it was going to be Patrick Boyle before I even clicked.
It was either that or Casual Finance.
300B given its revenues would be a huge stretch. 780B is ridiculous. 1.5T is science fiction.
Have you seen teslas EPS?
Unfortunately I have very little knowledge of the historical stock market and if this order of magnitude of bullshit valuation has ever occurred before.
Best comment below: (15k likes)
>> In space no one can hear you scam
I'm extremely unlikely to click on a YT links without some decent context of what I can expect.
Holy crap is that an amusing/depressing video. Assuming the financial shenanigans outlined in it are even partially accurate, how the heck is this getting allowed?
It's allowed because the people in charge are making a ton of money and the people who aren't have been convinced that regulating the market is bad.
> how the heck is this getting allowed
When it comes to dealing with the abuse of power by those who hold power, the question is not "who's allowing them to do this?", it's "who's going to stop them?".
I want to buy options against QQQ so badly -- but Tesla has traded at a crazy multiple of revenue/profits for a very long time, so I'm wondering if Elon/AI hype will keep these stocks high longer than I want to pay the risk premium for (options).
Scuttlebutt I've heard is that the revenue mechanism of the whole complex is essentially a gigantic depreciation machine. Starlink sats de-orbiting all by themselves get considered "depreciation". That one mechanism basically gives you a Saturn V sized firehose of tax holidays, because satellites aren't cheap, yo, and you can make all sorts of deals to essentially spread that around.
Is it true? I got no idea.
Supposedly, Tesla had some unique money games that vastly blew up their cash flow early on, less a car company and more a sort of tax arbitrage. So maybe it's in character.
The SpaceX IPO has a tiny 5% float and only a $75 billion raise target. There are enough morons in the world that they will compete to buy and push the valuation up. It's all a stupid financial trick to make Elon a paper trillionaire.
Tesla is a meme stock like GameStop, but for a good fraction of America, so the market cap can be much larger. As long as TSLA owners don't care about the stock defying gravity, it will continue to do so.
Why short QQQ when SpaceX will only be 2% (according to a poster above), when many of the other companies in the index are tech and chip companies, such as NVDA, which are going gang-busters? Even if SpaceX went bankrupt you'd only see a 2% drop, which is easily covered by all the AI chip companies going up. If you think SpaceX is overvalued, buy options against it directly.
I'm with you on this. I think the market bubble can stay alive and well a lot longer than you can survive an open short position.
I think we're still a ways away from CEOs admitting that AI actually can't cut the cost of human capital in half.
> I think we're still a ways away from CEOs admitting that AI actually can't cut the cost of human capital in half
On the contrary, I think it certainly can. In the sense that productivity per person can be doubled. You could fire half your workforce and do nearly the same output.
Trouble is, everyone who does that will get outcompeted by everyone who didn't fore their workforce, and instead doubled their output.
We've seen it before with factories and computerization.
The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.
What's that old saw the investors use? The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent? You can bet on the fundamentals or you can bet on other investors.
The fact that Tesla's stock price is so evidently detached from the performance of the company itself makes me wonder whether or not a public SpaceX will cause those investors who are just trying to ride the Musk train to exit Tesla stock and dump everything they can into SpaceX instead.
There’s simply no version of financial reality that values this company at over 1T. Even 780B is extremely generous based on the current financial picture and a very optimistic view of the future.
The AI IPOs are broadly in the same ballpark, and if they IPO at less than the last private valuation (a real possibility absent a perfect setup) that triggers a whole bunch of other messes.
The window to get all these things closed before it all comes crashing down is closing, hence the sudden rush to IPO.
> There’s simply no version of financial reality that values this company at over 1T.
Aswath Damodaran recently (pre S-1) valued SpaceX at $1.2T [1] - yeah I was shocked as well. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to dig into his numbers. But yeah, there's your _financial reality_.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhY5EF1_LjQ
> The AI IPOs
To be clear, the Space X prospectus seems to claim it IS an AI IPO.
Indeed and it’s almost sad. The core of SpaceX is an amazing engineering company with real assets and a serious moat. Thats realistically maybe worth 250-400B-ish as a serious hardcore company.
Then there’s all this other hype and nonsense tacked on to make a franken-company that’s just making a circus of the core story.
> Indeed and it’s almost sad. The core of SpaceX is an amazing engineering company with real assets and a serious moat.
Completely. As if "We dominate the space launch and satellite internet markets" isn't enough, they're trying to tack on all this hypothetical stuff to inflate the valuation. Maybe some of it will come true in 50-100 years, but I'd bet a lot of it won't (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...) because telling the future is hard.
It'll be a real shame if the core, cool engineering that's happening at spaceX gets compromised by all the shenanigans going on elsewhere.
As is the case with Elon's companies (and a bit of the market itself), it feels like any logical valuation has no impact on the actual stock price.
The market can stay insane longer than you can stay solvent.
In the short term the market is a popularity machine but in the long term it is a weighing machine.
You're repeating tired quotes without even understanding what they mean. The quote "longer than you can stay solvent" refers to short selling. Here you are using it in the opposite context: to describe a long position. It makes no sense. How exactly would a non leveraged long position get margin called?
> in the long term it is a weighing machine.
This has not been the case for a long time.
What do you suppose is BTC's correct valuation? How about TSLA?
> > in the long term it is a weighing machine.
> This has not been the case for a long time.
I think this comes down to a disagreement about what "long term" means. In finance, I would suggest a _lower_ bound on long term is 10 years. More comfortably, I'd suggest something like 20-30 years. This is long enough to ride out most depressions, and it is still fits within a persons working life-time. It also roughly matches the scale at which people should be planning for retirement and long-term care (imagine if you started your retirement planning just 10 years from retirement, it would be very difficult). So I think neither BTC's not TSLA's hype has reached long-term yet. They have been around long enough to meet some of these timelines, but the excessive hype really hasn't been so long -- maybe 5 years or so.
If the scales are only checked after the heat death of the universe, does it even matter?
If the market can’t actually detect crooks and charlatans until long after they have stolen investors money, its ability to be “correct” is worthless.
Can we stop just repeating quotes like those over and over. If you have thoughts, please articulate them, its pretty frustrating to see the same exact quotes repeated over and over whenever there is a submission stock related
That’s like 90% of this site. Roll with it.
It’s not and I won’t
> As is the case with Elon's companies (and a bit of the market itself), it feels like any logical valuation has no impact on the actual stock price.
Has this type of phenomenon been studied or formalized in any way by economists? I mean specifically how a cult of personality develops around a single individual causing the market to lose its shit. Or the increasing meme-ification of financial instruments.
These are both uniquely 21st century phenomena. But I'm not familiar enough with finance / economics to know what to read up on to understand what is going on.
The irrational exuberance around Tesla was at least somewhat grounded in reality. There were some possible future(s) where it was really going to take off and completely redefine the auto industry. Then of course things went really off the rails with the Cybertruck, pivot to robotics, and just seemingly giving up on their existing line of business to go chasing whatever bong fueled dream Musk is having this quarter.
SpaceX is on a whole new level of bullshit. I think all these guys know how to do is double down. If the hype isn't working, its not stupid and big enough, so you start talking about transhumanism and singularity and other BS in your SEC filings.
Can you image how much better Tesla would be doing if musk was no longer involved?
Without Musk, they wouldn't have squandered their market advantage with high-profile failure after high-profile failure. They would have released a good enough pickup truck in 2017. They wouldn't have spent a whole decade gaslighting everyone about self-driving cars.
The real reason Tesla was remarkable, and why Musk bought into it, was that they released a mass-market electric car that didn't look and perform like a vacuum cleaner and that got an okay range for commuting. That was the value proposition. China can now exceed those design parameters at a wholesale price of about $8k USD.
While I agree with the sentiment that SpaceX today is not worth anywhere near 1T+, it's worth understanding that:
a) SpaceX is currently trading at ~>1.5T in secondary markets
and
b) most of what the market is reacting to is the _chance_ that SpaceX goes on to become one of the largest companies in the world.
Remember the reaction when Facebook IPOed? It was hilariously overpriced (at the time, on paper, based on existing revenues) and yet here we are. A 1% chance of earning a trillion dollars is worth 10B - SpaceX can more accurately be thought of as a 10% chance of earning 10T rather than a nominal everyday business.
Facebook's IPO was something like ~20x revenue and 100x earnings. If SpaceX IPOs at $1.5T, that's nearly 80x revenue and if you buy their 'adjusted' EBITDA figures, 230x earnings. Not quite an order of magnitude, but substantially 'worse' financially.
Most sober post ive read on this topic
Man I'm so eager to find out how all this unfolds and when does the music stop for Elon and his shenanigans.
Same here. I’ve had an IRA and 401k since I was 21 and I’m 59 now (but still feel as smart as a 21 year old). I doubt I’ll see my lifetime of investment go up in smoke, just a big hill: up super high for a few years and then back to 2024 levels by 2030.
> I’m 59 now (but still feel as smart as a 21 year old)
Any tips?
As time passes it seems it will more likely end when any living being ends.
He'll only be a multibillionare instead of a trillionaire?
Which is still 10x what it is worth
Based on what?
Revenue. (Or forecast revenue, take your pick.)
revenue has been "rockets - good. starlink - great. ai - big loss"
Why is "ai-big loss"?
My understanding is that the S-1 showed a Q1 loss of xAI of $2.47 billion in Q1. But with the Anthropic Colossus-I rental agreement at $1.25B/month or $3.75B/quarter, xAI should now be net-neutral to cash-flow positive.
If Colossus-II rents networked GB-200s, that could be up to +$47B/year at $9/hour/GB-200 for 555,000 GB-200s. For reference, current rental rates are $10-$27/hour for the same hardware. With Anthropic at a 55% month-over-month growth rate (implying a $150B/year run rate by August, or, more likely, sometime in late 2026), it seems very possible that xAI could be highly profitable as the only available compute resource.
I'm not saying +$47B Colossus-II deal will happen, but even a small fraction of that remains highly material to xAI economics. xAI is likely already cashflow neutral. (Where am I wrong?)
the xAi revenue comes from renting their infrastructure to their biggest competitor. Anthropic is going to IPO for aprox 1/2 the valuation, is profitable, and can cancel the contract with 90 days notice.
Oh, I would far prefer to own Anthropic's stock than SpaceX's.
Just make your point. You think it’s appropriately valued or undervalued, right?
Personally I think the valuation is detached from the company itself. In theory Tesla's valuation is too high, but it doesn't seem to be coming down any time soon. Plus there seems to be ways to manipulate stock prices when you control such a highly valued company, to the extent that the stock price reflects actions taken in the stock market more than the underlying assets and balance sheets.
This exposes a fundamental (and obvious) problem with not just SpaceX but the OAI and ANT IPOs as well. Their valuations are massive far beyond what the existing GAAP revenue and profit can justify, forcing large percentages of the valuation to rely on multiple future events not only happening but happening on the upper-end of any reasonable probability curve based on real-world priors.
While all IPO valuations rely on forward-looking expectations, IPOs this large don't usually rely this much, on this many forward expectations for which there are so few real-world comps or priors to inform estimates. In short, when the error bars are in danger of swamping the signal, wild swings are likely. I expect more than one of these three to drop at least 10% relative to the overall market at some point in their first 18 months. All the potential upside (and probably much more) is already priced in. So taking this bet at the IPO price requires valuations most worry are already too high not only being correct but too low by quite a lot. To paraphrase Alice in Wonderland, these valuations require 'believing as many as six unlikely things before breakfast.'
That said, I'll also predict that one of them will be trading >50% higher than its first year low ten years later (vs the overall market). Basically, they are all hugely overvalued in the ~3 year time frame but one may turn out to have been undervalued in 10 years. So, regardless don't buy any of them at IPO. If you're interested in one or more of them, wait for it to drop >10% vs the market and then re-evaluate for early indicators it might be 'the one'.
That's going to be interesting to see if others follow this as an anchor or buy more into the hype. Regardless it's still a large multiple of earnings...
There's a finite supply of space before we lock ourselves in with trash
The risk here is severely overblown. Low earth orbit is self-cleaning with atmospheric drag. There’s comparatively little in MEO and even in a catastrophic Kessler syndrome scenario it’s still safe to transit through. Polluting higher orbits is so far beyond our current capabilities that it’s not even worth discussing.
Low earth orbit includes orbits that take from hours to centuries to decay, depends a lot on altitude/apogee/perigee. Starlink for multiple reasons places satellites in the range where it takes ~5 years to decay, thankfully. Kessler syndrome is real though, and satellites do collide or break apart in LEO.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone downplay Kessler syndrome so matter-of-factly. Has anti-doomerism spread to nearly every topic, or is Kessler syndrome really something whose severity has been massively overstated? Opportunity to shift my priors I suppose.
Kessler syndrome is way overstated. One way to tell is talk about it closing off space. That can't happen, it is possible to cross debris bands with low danger.
People also don't talk about different orbits. We can use higher low earth orbits if lower orbits are blocked.
Also, it is possible to clean up debris. The low cost launch means lower cost cleanup. My understanding is that big objects are most dangerous cause they would cause a lot of debris.
Kessler syndrome doesn't "work" with the orbits these sats sit in. Even left dead and tumbling, the sats would re-enter by their own in ~5 years time. Even less with the recent lowering of their operational orbits.
Also, a common misunderstanding of orbital mechanics (probably amplified by otherwise great cinematography, but poor physics depictions movie Gravity) is that after a collision things move to higher orbits and thus remain up there forever / change planes and affect other satellites. But that's not how it works, the orbit gets elongated, but the periapsis remains the same (or slightly lower), so the things / parts / pieces still re-enter the atmosphere. And the satellites are grouped in rings, with different inclinations, making it extremely hard to reach one from the other.
Also also, space is like really really big. Plenty of space (hah) to put lots of rings of satellites and coordinate between themselves up there. The operators are the first ones who care about it, and they're slowly improving the existing systems, in both tracking (and access to tracking) and automated collision avoidance. Having 10k sats up there makes you good at keeping them separated.
To take the opposite angle of the other reply, if we lock ourselves in with trash, then orbit will be fucked for everyone. That's not something that SpaceX could plant their flag in and then be the only one to use it. If Kessler syndrome happens, SpaceX would be just as worthless as any competitors they might currently have an edge over.
Well let’s brace for a bunch of tweets against morningstar from the man in charge. I don’t think it matters to the retail investors though, they would all pour money into it. At least that’s my guess
I waited for the Google IPO, but did not pre-order. I looked at the price on the first day of trading and decided it was overvalued (at about $100.00). GOOG today is worth about 200x the IPO price, so I guess I was wrong...
GOOG was a $20B company against a $10T S&P 500. SpaceX is going to be a $2T company against a $60T S&P 500.
I sold tesla when it hit 80 the first time
While I love this, Morningstar isn't a fiduciary
Related:
Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368187
If a bear craps in the woods and nobody is around to interview it, is the bear still bearish?
Doesn't matter, as soon as they can they'll shove it into the indexes, meaning pension funds all over the world will be let holding the bag.
I keep seeing this comment on all these spacex posts, can someone ELI5 to me why the pension funds are going to be forced to buy this? (do they not have free will on what they buy?)
SpaceX made fast index inclusion a condition of where it listed. Nasdaq changed its index rules so that instead of having to wait months to a year, SpaceX can enter an index after 15 trading days.
Index funds track an index mechanically. If you run an S&P 500 fund, you have to mirror the S&P 500. If a company gets added to the index, every fund tracking the index must buy it to match the index -- there is no discretion. Pension funds hold a lot of index funds.
So the causal chain is that pension funds track indexes, indexes have to buy the companies in the index, SpaceX got a fast path to the indexes. SpaceX will launch and pension funds will buy the stock, presumably propping up the stock price.
It would take a lot for pension funds to undo this and would be the opposite of index investing.
And to try and expand on why an index would include a waiting period in it's rules, my limited understanding is it's to give the public markets time to follow the company and review several quarters of financial results to stabilize the valuation in relation to those results before getting included in the index.
That’s my understanding too, it’s for price discovery
By bypassing the rules this way they are making people doubt the security of index funds, which would damage the market just by association. Anyone who cared about the stability of these instruments would categorically deny such a request. It seems to say a lot about the market makers in general that this is being allowed.
If the rule change goes through then SpaceX could be added to an index such as the S&P 500, where many (most?) pension funds invest. "S&P 500 has been considering a rule change to waive the earnings requirement and shorten the seasoning period for mega-cap IPOs like SpaceX." "Pension funds allocate 30% to 50% of their total portfolios to broad U.S. equities [in the form of index funds.]"
There is some truth to it.
401ks and pension funds have large amounts of money in index funds.
Major indexes like VTI will buy SpaceX after a waiting period as long as it satisfies other rules (and there have been some rule changes in various indexes to make something with low float like SpaceX eligible for inclusion).
However, most indexes are float-adjusted, meaning that they will adjust the amount of shares of a company in the index based on their float, not their total shares. So, they will initially pick up small amount of weight/shares around the IPO.
The NASDAQ-100 has been bending over backwards to cater to SpaceX, which makes some sense because they want it listed on their exchange. They changed their inclusion rules to include a fast-track for IPOs. This type of mechanism isn't uncommon in other large indexes (VTI has had fast-track rules for a long time) but the timing does make it appear that they changed their rules for SpaceX.
Other providers have made changes to float requirements for inclusion.
The NASDAQ-100 (QQQ being the popular ETF tracking it) is also not float adjusted and, instead, has some capping rules for low-float securities. I haven't done any projections but it seems that NASDAQ-100/QQQ will pickup more shares than the float-adjusted indexes.
People confuse pension funds with index funds. Index funds will buy SpaceX once it is added to the index.
A lot of people in the US only have a 401k which is their pension for this discussion (there are very important differences, but for this discussion we can ignore them). In their 401k an index fund is almost always your best investment, so you should be concerned with anything that makes an index fund a worse investment since it harms you.
Pensions have strong and weird investment rules, and you have no control over what they do other than law. This makes them generally a worse investment (but if you live longer than average they are great anyway) so a 401k is better for most.
The big indexes will buy SpaceX soon. If pensions buy big indexes, which they do, they will own SpaceX indirectly.
Pensions buy big indexes in part because of the exact policies that were reversed to let SpaceX in; the behavior is not an immutable law of nature.
OTOH, the changes may expose them to SpaceX before they could reasonably rebalance their holdings, even if they were to stop buying the affected indexes immediately.
Thanks for the responses; next question...
in theory, people that do this for a living know this? shouldn't they all be raising the red flags on this, as opposed to say just people on hackernews?
No, because the indices are free-float weighted not cap weighted. The float planned for SpaceX is tiny. If it were purchased by the indices at 1.7T on Monday and went to zero on Tuesday, the amount of value lost by the funds would be barely larger than the normal daily fluctuation of the market.
My question exactly. So far it seems like they are either incompetent or nihilistic, both of which exclude them from my trust.
A lot of them have rules forcing them to have some amount of exposure to indexes of a market, or all entries in a market.
There are MAJOR rule changes made to allow them to do this (90 day wait-time reduced to 5 days, financial stability requirements lowered or removed), which is why automated rules like that were created ("oh, if they make it to X, they were already vetted for Y, Z").
A lot of people are throwing a lot of trust and reputation on the bonfire to make this happen.
$7.8B would be a very fair valuation.
Musk fanboi here.
If the bait and switch of xAI quotas continue, I would not expect their inference services to succeed.
Before getting SuperGrok I had a premium subscription.
After forking over $300 payment (annual) for SuperGrok, my quota was drastically cut immediately. As soon as I paid. This is for going from premium ($8 / month) to Super; the way cheaper premium counterintuitively had a much higher quota. Much. Versus $30/month, SuperGrok has a much lower quota and it’s been getting worse, even as xAI has surplus inference capacity to sell to Anthropic. I want Premium back, but I fear they have cut it back. To talk numbers: 35 videos every 90 minutes in premium versus after paying $$, around 30 videos per DAY in “Super” lol Grok. Granted a paltry 10 or so… it varies… of the videos are higher resolution than premium but that doesn’t matter because premium had unlimited upscaling, now gone. I’ve complained. Silence.
Do not, do not, subscribe to xAI services.
So I don't fundamentally care if SpaceX is overvalued or not. Like, that's on you for whatever you want to invest in or not.
What I object to is all the rule changes by NASDAQ to essentially fix the IPO so massive pension funds and index funds are forced to invest in it. There have been multiple submissions about this but in short small floats are normally prohibited for index inclusion (not anymore), the trading days required for price discovery have been dropped to almost zero, the voting share structure would be an issue, the insider lockouts have been fixed and on it goes.
There should be extra scrutiny for a trillion dollar company.
SpaceX does have the Falcon 9, which is the completely dominant launch platform and first-stage reusability gives it an almost unbeatable advantage. Starlink has a lot of potential if satellite handsets can get small and cheap enough to compete with 5G effectively. Obital data centers are bullshit. Starship is going to be a significant drain on finances and the program as a whole faces significant headwinds.
The big problem is xAI. It's a significant drain on SpaceX (costing allegedly $1B+/month). SpaceX would be a better company without it. But it's only there to rescue Elon from his disastrous Twitter purchase and the xAI investors from Elon's first bailout (of himself).
There's almost no point in trying to figure out what a valuation should be because in many cases, nobody cares. Tesla is the posterchild for that.
Ultimately it was inevitable that as passive investing got more and more popular, people would seek to game it. Not that I'm happy about it, but if this works, it is probably just the beginning of sneaky ways being found to trick passive money into taking on way more risk than it intended to. And of course passive investors are passive, so they may not even notice, and probably won't fight back until the inevitable crash.
I think there's going to be blowback from this because this is "every other horse can only use three of their legs" levels of fixing.
I looked into the how the rule-changing works. NASDAQ is what's called a Self-Regulating Organization ("SRO") in the legislation so it has a lot of power. Were it a government agency, it would be more difficult. Technically, the SEC has to approve all rule changes by SROs but in this administration in particular, that's just going to be a rubber stamp. By the way here's a speech the head of the SEC previously gave about deregulation of capital markets [1].
I was also curious if Loper Bright had changed anything here but it appears not. The sstatuory language here is clear rather than intentionally or unintentionally ambiguous.
So the funds can technically challenge any such rules. They have standing. But the bar is difficult and I don't see it happening.
But if this goes badly, what I think you'll see is changes in governance by pension funds that'll be reflected by Vanguard and Blackrock, which is "index-like" funds that have stricter governance with rules closer to what was the case before these rule changes were rammed through. I could be wrong. I hope I'm not.
[1]: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2026/04/22/speech-by-chair-a...
> But if this goes badly,
I think the most likely scenario is that there eventually will be the changes you describe, but if not enough people squeal now, then it won't be until after a bunch of people lose their savings either because of this or some follow on scam that finds a way to take advantage of passive money.
OG SpaceX is growing at 7% YoY. That is not a business that commands a 150x revenue multiple. xAI is arguably shrinking. StarLink has a bunch of heavy lifting to do and unless it keeps growing 40% YoY for 10 years, law of large numbers be damned.
I might be interested in SpaceX if they hadn't saddled it with xAI.
Honestly this sounds about right for an innovative spaceflight/ISP company saddled with a failing AI lab and a toxic social media website.