I'm assuming this is vibe coded, because it's got a bunch of the usual tells, so to the people who do this: can you please stop making stupid scrolling presentations where I can see less than a slide of information at a time? Please tell your clanker to just write a blog post instead, or better yet, write it yourself.
My corporate firewall blocked this due to it being a newly registered domain.
So I can't even see it, I care less about "vibe coding" but it sounds like someone registered a domain just to get attention on their amazing take about why they think they're qualified to tell the world the future.
> My corporate firewall blocked this due to it being a newly registered domain.
Was surprised mine did not - usually a toss up with HN links. I don't get reasoning just "NONCOMPLIANT ACTION". It is interesting to have a flag telling you the domain is new, though
So a realtime whois lookup is performed when the request to the DNS server is made, and if the domain was only registered within X days/weeks, then return 0.0.0.0 (or other such blocking method).
See, I've outbuilding tried compiling lists of newly registered domains to use as block lists, bit they're very large lists that my under-spec systems struggle to deal with. As such, I scaled back / shelved the project.
Looks like Adguard DNS and NextDNS offer blocking NRDs as an option in their paid services. I shall be looking into this further.
Ive been out of the authoritative dns game for a while, but asi recall…
Larger providers can also get bulk zone access for TLD’s and whois/registrar data. For this use case it’s relatively easy to create a time based filter on that. Anything that’s “new” will be de facto absent from your “allow” check and create an implicit deny.
Then your large IT provider or recursive DNS system will probably layer in RPZ where they can insert explicit denies at resolution time. Either based on QNAME, RDATA, zone, etc.
Vibe coding has made them a lot more common. Before, you'd need to put a lot more effort into making a website that worked like this, and it wasn't worth it for a random post. Now this person's entire website is posts like this, and I've seen many more in the past few months.
But now with vibecoding it feels like the default for articles to have fancy animation, rather than the exception. I guess that by having a fancier presentation it subconsciously legitimizes the content more so you're less likely to critique it as compared to a simple blog post where you pay more attention to the words and can realize that it's very surface level.
This one is good but the content doesn’t speak to me like the above. Would have been nice if OP had added a writing style suggestion to the prompt. Vanilla LLM text is sad
eh, am very biased as I design similar sites but I honestly prefer these to what would be likely string of random social media posts.
I like having relevant graphics stickied while text is displayed alongside it (assuming by blog post you mean the typical page-like top to bottom approach).
edit: damn, if these designs are hated what modern approaches do people like? I feel like scroll based text is a relatively unexplored idea compared to the typical blog post.
When it comes to web content, I vastly prefer web like interfaces that you can't reproduce in print.
While I'm not that against to such a web page (when viewing it on a monitor, not a phone) I'd say follow these points:
• Don't hijack any browser functionality. Scrolling shall scroll the document, the end.
• Don't scale something to the screen size, breaking zoom! Especially don't do it so that when zooming causes a different scroll position and then it all jumps to a different slide. WTF!
• Make it accessible!
If you want to make flashy graphics and animations make a game. That is not meant as to belittle games, I love games.
I don't disagree with those, and I'm able to do them myself but what do you mean by this?
"• Don't hijack any browser functionality. Scrolling shall scroll the document, the end."
How would you consider the page hijacking scroll functionality? You can scroll down normally. There are animations based on scroll position, maybe that's what you meant?
I mean the animated graphics and some other hackery going on when you try to zoom. It thinks to detect a different scroll position and jumps to a different slide. Also means you can't convert it to a PDF or print it, if you want to (though I wouldn't want to do that).
> edit: damn, if these designs are hated what modern approaches do people like? I feel like scroll based text is a relatively unexplored idea compared to the typical blog post.
The New York Times generally does the "lots of data, text and graphs in a scrolling presentation" tastefully.
Any articles that demonstrate this? Haven't read the NYT in like 15 years. Only vaguely familiar with the data viz that Mike Bostock created while there, and only because he shared them on a defunct blocks site.
I want it to be something you could reproduce in print, though. As close to what I'd get putting it in reader mode as possible.
We've spent a long time optimizing the printed word, including pages with diagrams and illustrations on them. You don't need to reinvent the wheel for every blog
I mean if you want print views (reader mode in firefox works well if the dev took the time to structure everything semantically), definitely use the print functionality. Maybe I'm one of the last people that still makes print media queries, but I do find value in them especially since they're quite easy to make.
You never know what inflation gonna be in futute. In some countries that turned into autocracies with strong and long standing leaders who love traditional values and religion inflation can easily be 30-70% a year.
You'll be surprised how not total economic collapse it is. Population will become poor, but it only good for the strong leader since they wont have time to bother about all this politics stuff.
And country can still run like that for decades. Also get rids you from all the debt since you can easily just pay it all by printing more money.
> Donald Trump said “I love the inflation” after new data showed that inflation jumped to an annual rate of 4.2% in May, the third consecutive monthly increase since the start of the Iran war and a three-year high.
I try to be skeptical about quotes, especially when they affirm my preconceptions. So here's the surrounding material:
“You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over, you know I can say it now ... you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil. Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran, until right now.”
Sorry, but I'm not pricing a stock today based on the assumption that this country will turn into a theocratic autocracy with a 70% YoY inflation rate for 15 years.
Besides, if I was pricing that in, I'd be buying indexes and not a specific stock. The 70% YoY inflation would rise all tides. Not just SpaceX.
If inflation is really that high I'm buying hard assets that won't depreciate. Sure I will need some cash, but gold bars in my personal safe suddenly are a great investment (gold is generally a terrible investment, but when inflation is the main concern is is really good)
But these insane valuations are leading the tide-rising. This is one instrument in inflation because it's "creating" this money from nothing. All the employees that got a $5k bonus 5yrs ago will see it rise to $50k (or more) out of thin air (crazy financial mechanisms).
I get the feeling that in 5yrs or so if China makes the yuan free-floating it will be more of a reserve currency.
All spaceX has to do is keep being as innovative and industrious as it is now, in the physical world as all other companies are getting very lazy or just working on software. Eventually it'll probably go the way of GE because humans are humans, but I think we have a few decades until more compelling places to work come up.
> All spaceX has to do is keep being as innovative and industrious as it is now
SpaceX seemed to lose a big step when Musk got involved in DOGE. I don't know if key people left or what, but the pace seem to slow considerably, and the successes also seemed to come to a crashing halt.
In the sense that all things end, sure. But for the forseeable future the dollar will be the world's reserve currency because 1) the US economy is still the biggest, and furthermore we have a big trade deficit and 2) the dollar is still the least worst currency out there.
If all the AI / robotics dreams come true and productivity increases a lot, it'll cause deflationary pressure, which must be balanced with money printing to keep inflation up at 2%. Increased productivity is never allowed to result in cheaper products. For example, CPI deflation 20% -> money printing 22% equals 2% total CPI inflation. Asset prices track the real inflation i.e. they rise by 22%.
This comment is very clearly an exaggeration even if there is a grain of truth to it. You should consider addressing the fact that there can be multiple "leaders" at any given time, and geopolitical boundaries can shape those leaders.
Well, SpaceX is supposed to be more about AI than low cost orbital launches. At least that’s what their roadshow is claiming.
But either way, yeah, I’m not willing to bet much money on USD4.3T unless we can get some serious financial engineering, (read “circular deals”), going.
We've seen through Tesla that software, government regulation, and to a smaller degree build quality are the only moats against China that still currently hold.
It's possible SpaceX will get "rekt", but the US has decades of experience and manufacturing processes set up for aerospace, as well as established customers. As long as SpaceX doesn't become heavily unionized I suspect they'll be able to compete strongly with anything China develops.
Tesla grew from two dudes making a sports car in their garage to being a decent EV company, despite many controversies. SpaceX is already propped up with government contracts to ship payloads to ISS. What could potentially justify 40% or so sustained growth of SpaceX? Will they create the asteroid mining industry from scratch (and make every precious metal on Earth worthless... hold on), or will they carry people to multiple planets in Solar System (so what, Mars will stay less habitable than Antarctica until the Sun blows up... hold on), or will they cover the whole world with Starlink satellites, data centers etc (which they are already doing a decent job... hold on)?
What's the secret sauce? What can Musk possibly promise this time around? More memes? He already smoked crack on YouTube, what comes next and why is this worthy of pension funds to invest into?
It's insane to me that regulators are just letting the forced bid hack unfold with their heads in the sand as if they are unaware of what's happening or the press it's receiving.
Sometimes there are clever ways to hack the system and the regulators can react and blame poor hindsight, that's not the case here.
The administration has given their orders to the regulators, whether explicit or implicit, and this is playing out exactly as they want it to. This is not "by accident" or "by negligence". This is by design.
It's funny it concludes "A line is not a law" while the entire page is just lines and charts. If you didn't know anything going in, SpaceX might as well be a company selling toilet paper for all you learned.
I've got no idea what a share of SpaceX is worth today or 14 years from now, but fully reusable rockets are going to be one of the most important engineering achievements in human history, and SpaceX appears far in the lead to getting there first. Ignoring everything else they're at the cutting edge of.
It's really just sad to me how upset how many people are about an IPO. "Imagine what a waste, if the stock market were to overvalue the company dedicated to solving the challenges required to make humanity a multi-planetary species, when this graph clearly shows we could've wisely allocated more of civilization's resources to Saudi Aramco."
I am upset that I am forced to either rebalance out of NASDAQ and incur significant tax consequences, or bet that SpaceX is about to become nearly 10 percent of GDP and keep exceptional margins while doing it.
I would not voluntarily take that bet, but we have regulatory and financial engineering nearly forcing me to do so.
I am upset that I am forced to either rebalance out of NASDAQ and incur significant tax consequences
Just to quantify, "The projected SpaceX weighting is around 0.6% of QQQ."
So if you have $100,000 invested in QQQ and SpaceX winds up say 4x overvalued, it may eventually wind up costing you as much as $450 (i.e. 1/5th as large a loss you experienced today in QQQ).
You are arguing I should be fine losing $500 so Elon can cash out? Because - and I hope this doesn't seem uncharitable - some sci-fi fantasy about space colonies?
You could maintain a short SpaceX portion in the approximately same percentage as your NASDAQ ETF. You'd have more slight tax events as you increased or closed out that short position to maintain the percentage, but significantly less than your NASDAQ position's taxes. Then when you sell your ETF you could close out the short to effectively remove SpaceX from the equation.
I'm upset that we allow people like you to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, possibly indefinitely, so anything that makes that harder even "accidentally" is ok by me.
I would rather capital gains be taxed at income rates but indexed to inflation. I am fine with that being a fair bit more.
But ripping off pension funds so you can tax me more, as a side effect of enriching people that engage in these shennanigans, doesn’t seem like a great move.
I am upset that it is not a great bet and that retail investors and pensions are being forced to take it. Let’s not pretend that this is not regulatory capture and financial engineering by techbros.
> fully reusable rockets are going to be one of the most important engineering achievements in human history
The number of implicit biases, assumptions, and unsubstantiatable assertions packed into that extremely confident sentence is frankly kind of impressive.
We have no idea how important reusable rockets will end up being, because we have no idea of what the future potential (economical or otherwise) space travel will have. Even Musk’s oft repeated (supposed) personal motivation for space travel (“protection of the species”) will ultimately hinge far more on other, far more important (and as of yet unrealized) technologies than reusable rockets.
Not to mention your implicit comparison of reusable rockets to literally every other extant technology. I mean really - transistors? The written word? RF comms? Indoor plumbing??
All things equal I would agree with you. However, all things are not equal.
SpaceX's target 2040 revenue of $4.3T. Let us assume that the US GDP grows at 3% p/a; in 2040 we may project a GDP of around $50T. Naturally, SpaceX would pushing 10% of the total US GDP.
Such a change is possible. It is not out of the question. Companies can and do reach that size, though obviously for mathematical reasons only a small number do. However, the claim that one will reach that size 14 years in advance beggars scrutiny. Simple credulity is not justified and it naturally follows that there will be a large number of people, even people with very bullish outlooks, who do not believe SpaceX will meet target. 30% growth p/a for 14 years would, historically, represent a fantastic rate of return and yet still it falls considerably short of target.
All the same, part of the promise to investors (whether one believes it or not) is that, even if SpaceX were to fall short of target, the long term revenue prospects are so explosive that one can't help but feel it's a good deal. (Is it? Time will tell.)
Why are you comparing SpaceX revenues to US GDP? (when it's main customers will all have a global footprint)
GDP rates should be nominal (5-6%) not 3%
Also, go back in time and do the same analysis for Anthropic in 2023 or Nvidia in 2021, would you have predicted their current Annual revenue for them?
Outgrowing GDP for awhile— especially from a smaller base— is certainly possible. It is much less likely to do it from a long time from already large revenue.
If you looked at Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft valuation around 2007 (before the crash), you'd asked the same question about the large base. But here we are.
Also we crashed 2000-2002 2008-2009 2020. Although specific causes vary we haven't had 14 good years in a row so even the size of economy may be optimistic.
SpaceX will never be 10% based on rockets.
Rockets will get shit canned in the next crash because it's less important and spacex not having saved sufficiently will get wrecked.
Their 10% basically depends on them getting to super intelligent ai first despite others obviously being more successful.
An actually wildly successful projection would be asking us to imagine they weathered the next crash ok and were very successful at rockets after exiting AI.
Falcon 9 was in a quasi-monopoly position in 2025, and had $4 billion in revenue. That's revenue, not profit. Starship will expand the market, but it would have to expand it by ~1000x to justify the valuation.
Exactly the TAM for rockets just isn't there, and probably never will be.
That's why SpaceX is "betting" so hard on datacenters in space (just build them on earth with solar and batteries), and AI.
I think they know they are pumping the stock and that's a pity because I do think Tesla and SpaceX are really good at scaling industrial production (car factories, rocket factories) and I think they could be really good (the best) at building earth-based datacenters at scale. But it's probably hard to value that at $1.7T
Yes. And a huge chunk is coming from the new deal with Google AFAIK they are basically only selling compute and the rest is +/- 0 profit or at least not that huge
I don't think some people understand how money works. If you say you're going to have $3.4T in revenue, someone has to have that money, and give it to you. So where is the money? Who has it? Are they spending it somewhere else right now, and will decide to instead spend it on SpaceX later? Or is the money just sitting in savings accounts, strangely not being spent or invested?
And why would they put their money into SpaceX anyway? What has SpaceX said the $3.4T will be based on?
1. Space-based AI datacenters. Yes, they actually said that. Anyone who knows anything about space and datacenters knows this is insane.
2. Starlink. They're saying they're going to make $3.4T by... running an ISP. In space.
3. Starship. They are betting that so many people want to send junk into space that it'll make them $3.4T.
4. Possible Tesla merger. This would definitely bump up the numbers. But Tesla's future depends on cars, AI and robotics. The US's electric car market is in decline (Thanks, Trump!) and BYD is producing cheaper electric cars faster (though US buyers won't buy BYD's, the US electric car market isn't as big as the global market, and is smaller since removing tax rebates). It's clearly not a real AI competitor, if they just rented out their AI datacenters to the competition. And China is churning out robots constantly that actually work and are cheap.
As you can see from other analyses (https://fortune.com/2026/05/31/spacex-tesla-odds-of-merging-...), their cash flow is actually much lower than they claim. The valuations are crazily high. SpaceX/Tesla's claims of how they're going to make money verges on snake oil.
Yep a space anti ballistic missile system (aka Golden Dome and before that Brilliant Pebbles) is likely coming if SpaceX figures out starship and China figures out their Starship clone. Plus maybe a “rods from god” type offensive system if these countries can’t make a deal to avoid space weapons.
If they ever start actually hurling massive objects to the orbit then these will be weapons. The data center functionality will be imitated remotely, if necessary.
See "Starlink is a way to give internet to whales" and "Pokémon is a fun little game" maybe "to train delivery robots as a surprise by-product nobody foresaw" and other such stories.
The animated graphics are fancy, but can anyone with a screen reader tell us how that "looks" to them? The graphics are all one SVG mixed together with different parts set to opacity: 0. The accessibility tree in Firefox gives you all the labels randomly mixed together. If that is how people with screen reader "see" it, its unusable.
Maybe make the graphic aria-hidden and add an empty tag with aria-description (or other kind of tag only screen readers see) describing the current graphic to each slide.
I think the US is in such a fucked up place economically, that the stock market is so overheated and will cause grave inflation, but it's the only lever left to pull for the government, that it will cause havoc within the next 10 years.
SpaceX or any of AI companies for that matter is absolutely not worth their money, but they will be carried through by government legislation, because otherwise the economy will be fucked for the US.
SpaceX ... 4.3 trillion...what the fuck are you on about
I mean, the entire predicted value that the company will be worth is like 6mo of the US budget (>$7 Trillion per year). I don't think that's all that much, even if they accomplish half of what they're all trying to do.
The economy is already F'd because so few people are actually working productively- it's been a laptop-class driven economy since the 80s.
Another factor I don't see mentioned: every Trump policy is inflationary. Deporting the labor base, deterring legal immigration, applying tariffs that were basically derived by taking the trade deficit with a country and dividing by 2, and now locking up 20% of the global oil market by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz.
The Fed's response will have to be to raise rates, which is going to crush the multiple of any stock whose valuation is based on the expectation of massive growth.
Is it just me or is does the large US companies stock-trade-based supposed "value" is floating in outer space with little relation to people's lives in reality? This SpaceX valuation is perhaps an outlier even among other multi-Trillion-USD companies, but aren't a lot of the "non-outliers" kind of in a bubble state?
College roommate worked for nvidia and cashed out last year and retired in his early 50s. Tens of millions in cash. After tax too. Am I jealous? Hell yes.
I think most still believe in the mission, especially the ones with that many shares. I get selling enough to buy a house and add some diversity to your portfolio, but you really have to have a dismal outlook to sell all your shares, or even half.
You realize there will be people on the other end wanting and/or being forced to buy buy buy right? They aren't selling into a vacuum.
People seem to have a weak grasp on how supply and demand dynamics actually work in a market. Price doesn't magically plummet; people need to agree to buy and sell at a given price.
The chance of US debasing currency to dig out of debt hole by brrrrting money printer is not zero.
But 15 years is also plenty of time for PRC to establish reusable and lithography to invalidate SpaceX valuation rational by driving terrestrial dc and launch to commodity prices. It's like EVs, anything PRC decides to prioritize industrially, competitors going to have a bad time, but still doesn't stop market for valuating Tesla more than all PRC auto producers combined.
Would not be out of question for finance bros to figure out how to continue decoupling valuation from reality if that keeps system going.
I know this sounds "bad" but early in Tesla's forcasts, I've seen many "highly unlikely" articles, but Tesla ended up blowing past expectations. This one is tough too, but I hate just dismiss it as unlikely especially with Elon at the helm
Tesla spent almost years scraping by, almost went bankrupt in 2018, had three years of "exceeds expectation" from 2020 to 2023 and is now being murdered by competitors.
A lot of "income" comes from selling regulatory credits, not cars.
FSD is up to v14 and there is no sense in which it's "Full", or is likely to be "Full" any time soon.
The early computer industry created a good few companies which achieved profitability quickly and posted solid YoY expansion for decades.
The histories of SpaceX and Tesla show no evidence of that pattern.
Is just a downright lie. The Tesla Model Y maintained its title as the world's best-selling vehicle in 2025 across all powertrains, marking its third consecutive year at number one. Even the CT is the best selling EV pickup, the last bestseller could not find a way to sell it profitably.
> The Tesla Model Y maintained its title as the world's best-selling vehicle in 2025 across all powertrains
No, the RAV-4 won that title. Its also pretty easy to make that claim when you're only making practically two models of vehicles compared to most other companies with several models. A single car selling well isn't necessarily telling the whole story.
> Even the CT is the best selling EV pickup
Easy to do when 20%+ are being bought by the ownership's other companies.
The CT is a massive failure measured by their own stated expectations. They stated they'd sell somewhere between 250,000-500,000 units a year. They ended up selling only a bit over 20,000 last year.
FWIW, the F-150 Lightning outsold the CT for 2025.
> FSD is up to v14 and there is no sense in which it's "Full", or is likely to be "Full" any time soon.
I think the SpaceX IPO is way overvalued, but have you actually tried FSD v14 yourself?
My car has 8-year old hardware running v12, and it handles like 90+% of my driving. When I test drove 14 it blew my mind how good it had gotten in only 8 months of development. In my opinion, there's question that it's "when," not "if."
Yes, I hear lots of people saying Tesla's "FSD" product can drive by itself already.
Yet if the car crashes while in FSD mode, it is still you who are legally the driver and you who will be responsible. You are the driver, regardless of what the name of the car's software is.
This can be contrasted with e.g. Mercedes' offering, which is actually self-driving, and where Mercedes is responsible if the car crashes (The limitation in that case, of course, is the very limited roads and conditions where that software will actually be enabled.).
So, yes: Until Tesla (or someone else) actually takes responsibility while the car drives itself, and the "driver" is legally just a passenger, it is not a fully self-driving car. If you ever take your attention away from the road while using FSD you are breaking the law, which says that as the driver, you must always pay attention.
That has always been the question since Elon started making self-driving claims back in 2016. If you believed him any time up until now you'd have been wrong and potentially own a car that will never drive without a responsible human in the driver's seat.
Another question is how many resources each "self-driving" car needs to complete its task. All of the major self-driving taxi providers do have monitoring staff who need to intervene occasionally to get the car unstuck from some situations.
If you need to pay one monitor per 10 cars you can run a taxi service in specific markets but it's pretty hard to roll that out to a fleet of millions of personally-owned cars.
Not a fanboy, but the latest generation Tesla self driving is really quite good. I still don't understand why they still aren't adding lidars now since prices have come down a lot.
Well, it it works well enough, I don't care too deeply. But it's clear to me that the self driving on the older hardware changes it's personalty depending on something I cannot figure out (software updates? Light conditions?). From confident formula-1 driver to nervous granny. This unpredictability is very unnerving to me. Like having a teenager drive my car.
I rented a tesla with the new hardware for a week and it was awesome. But they could just update the model overnight and give me a nasty surprise. That's ... not a very happy thought.
It was only a few years ago people were saying Tesla was going to own the entire car market, and everyone else would go out of business. The Cybertruck was going to be the best selling car of all time, the insurance business was going to be a massive money maker etc.
It was only a few years ago people were saying Tesla was going to fail spectacularly, that nobody would drive an EV, that no new auto manufacturer could start in USA, that they would blow up into flames at rates way higher than ICE cars, that the CT would never be made, that they'd have to buy their batteries from suppliers that would just crank the prices up.
I plan to stay the fuck away from it either way, but he's at least someone who's not only good at this stuff, showing their work and approaching it professionally.
I haven't had time to watch the video, but I read through part of the blog post, and seems he believes 1.2T is possible,but I won't know how much I agree with that until I finish reading/watching it all.
It's at, the very least, a professional presentation so it's a hell of a lot easier to see why and what he does/doesn't agree with.
Those things were highly unlikely because they accounted for rationality from the consumer's end as well as the political's end and of course Fed and regulators
All 3 went out of the window sometimes around 2015 or so.
The US consumer cellular subscription service is around 185 billion a year and if you add business/enterprise it is around 225 billion a year. If they were able (highly unlikely) to capture that market in the US alone through Satellite Cellular service, it would be huge revenue stream. Setting up data centers in orbit (easier said than done) would be another huge revenue stream. Setting up facilities to beam down energy to earths surface could also be an opportunity.
If I learned a good lesson, it's never say never....
Still have yet to hear how data centers in space are actually supposed to be a good thing when cooling them is much harder than on earth because they are in a near vacuum with much less heat dissipation.
> Setting up facilities to beam down energy to earths surface could also be an opportunity
Also interested to learn how this is done without creating a death ray with potentially catastrophic consequences
So if all the current telcos in the US lose all of their customers and SpaceX captures 100% of them without degrading the current margin/pricing at all, they are 5% of their way to the $4.3t goal. And the only way I can see that happening is from government mandate - which if things don't change I guess never say never. But still a very very very long way off
SpaceX published their datacenter satellite plans, I think they assumed that if they hid their radiators from the sun, they can consider space temperature to be 3-5K. Which is a fairly good assumption if:
- you have a perfect shadow on all side (no light is reflected from a nearby celestial body)
- and nothing is radiating nearby. Earth radiate a lot, I space temperature around the iss is fairly high.
I'm fairly sure the current design either need high temp chips or needs to be far from LEO. Or they will have to make the radiators bigger.
Okay, so in 14 years they replace all cell phone service in the US achieving 6% of the revenue goal. Just have to find another 15 “all cell phone service in US” and do it all in 14 years and we are golden.
Just add a whole Apple worth of revenue yearly and they can just barely make it.
> If they were able (highly unlikely) to capture that market in the US alone through Satellite Cellular service, it would be huge revenue stream
There's practically no way there's enough RF spectrum to handle that many clients from even LEO. There's a reason why carriers are moving to smaller and smaller and smaller cells, and places like sports venues have highly directional antenna arrays to handle the number of active clients. Will there be customers? Sure. Probably a lot! Will it be an actually massive chunk of the overall subscriber base mostly using their networks? Not a chance.
They can't even get capacity up enough to support their rural customers on practically idealized antenna array hardware.
> Setting up data centers in orbit (easier said than done) would be another huge revenue stream.
What applications demand that kind of premium on cost of running? Why choose that instead of terrestrial datacenters? What's the overall use-case for why one should bother deploying their applications into a space datacenter? I'm genuinely asking. Aside from needing to ensure low-ish latency to the most remote parts of the world and being willing to pay whatever to have that, I don't get it.
Skeptics said SpaceX would fail, but it succeeded. Therefore, skepticism in general is wrong and SpaceX will have an annual revenue of $11 quadrillion by 2030.
I was thinking about this lately as well. If you break down their plan of launching a LOT of solar panels into space and strapping a GPU cluster to it. It's not _that_ crazy now.
Prices for solar panels have dropped 90% in the last 10 years.
Price per kilo to Low Earth Orbit has dropped ~50% in the last 10 years.
SpaceX's entire plan is to keep dropping both of these prices down even more with massive solar panel / starship factories.
Here's the thing. Land is cheap in many parts of the world. Solar panels work okay on the ground (not as well as in space). GPUs work better on the ground (MUCH easier to cool). Connectivity is cheaper on the ground (sure, Starlink is amazing, but it doesn't hold a candle to fiber). Maintenance is possible on the ground. Reuse of old equipment is possible on the ground. Batteries are heavy, and they smooth out solar power pretty well on the ground. Oh, and natural gas, which xAI/SpaceX uses in their big datacenters, is cheap on the ground.
So, given that you're bought the GPUs, you could launch them into space, but you have the alternative option of ... not launching them into space.
This is exactly why Starlink is successful. If we had decent regulations, and had actual good internet on the ground, why would we bother going to outer space? The truth is that it's cheaper to build an ISP in space to work around the corruption that has kept all these monopolies in power.
I'm under the assumption that Starlink will never provide more than one percent of the mobile bandwidth in a developed country. Because they can't match dense antenna webs in cities. Am I wrong?
Well outside my field, but I was under the impression that getting the energy into the GPU (solar) was not the problem. The problem is getting the heat out. It takes a lot of surface area to radiate out the heat that GPUs produce. Maybe it ends up economical, but just having it in space adds in a bunch of challenges, not least that once it's up there you can't send in a technician to troubleshoot.
And if solar panels drop another 90%, why not just slap them on earth?
It's still going to be what, $100,000 per ton to launch on Starship?
The AI1 Satellite that SpaceX has shown, is basically one rack. Something like 72 GPUs. Elon himself said it was a "rack in space" more than a datacenter in space. Sure I guess you could launch 100,000 of them and call it a datacenter. But their own graphic shows this thing to be 2 to 2 1/2 tons. So who is gonna spend $200,000 to launch a single rack into space? Get the panels as cheap as you want, the launch cost is still pretty massive just to get 150kw of free power.
I mean maybe my napkin math is way wrong here, but I don't see what the cost savings is.
Just this morning, someone told me SpaceX valuation proponents couldn't possibly be more obtuse; yet, this thread has blown through those expectations.
Like what? Seriously, nobody thought shouting rockets into space was impossible. Landing a rocket again nobody had thought it impossible. Sure they brought down prices, again nobody thought it impossible. The question is actually is it desirable. Rocket launches are pretty much the worst one can do in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but somehow all technerds are falling all over themselves how great it is.
"Landing a rocket again nobody had thought it impossible."
Erm, ESA thought it was a dream:
"Twenty years ago, before SpaceX had launched a single rocket, Richard Bowles, a sales director of the European Arianespace launch consortium, said SpaceX’s ambition to launch, recover and reuse rockets, cutting the price of launches in half, was a dream.
‘SpaceX primarily sems to be selling a dream. Which is good, we should all dream,’ he said. ‘I think reusability is a dream… How am I going to respond to a dream?… First of all you don’t wake people up. They have to wake up on their own… They’re not supermen. Whatever they can do, we can do.’"
I'm assuming this is vibe coded, because it's got a bunch of the usual tells, so to the people who do this: can you please stop making stupid scrolling presentations where I can see less than a slide of information at a time? Please tell your clanker to just write a blog post instead, or better yet, write it yourself.
My corporate firewall blocked this due to it being a newly registered domain.
So I can't even see it, I care less about "vibe coding" but it sounds like someone registered a domain just to get attention on their amazing take about why they think they're qualified to tell the world the future.
> My corporate firewall blocked this due to it being a newly registered domain.
Was surprised mine did not - usually a toss up with HN links. I don't get reasoning just "NONCOMPLIANT ACTION". It is interesting to have a flag telling you the domain is new, though
Do you know by which mechanism they recognize newly registered domains in order to block them?
It's a whois lookup, registrars provide that information.
So a realtime whois lookup is performed when the request to the DNS server is made, and if the domain was only registered within X days/weeks, then return 0.0.0.0 (or other such blocking method).
See, I've outbuilding tried compiling lists of newly registered domains to use as block lists, bit they're very large lists that my under-spec systems struggle to deal with. As such, I scaled back / shelved the project.
Looks like Adguard DNS and NextDNS offer blocking NRDs as an option in their paid services. I shall be looking into this further.
Ive been out of the authoritative dns game for a while, but asi recall…
Larger providers can also get bulk zone access for TLD’s and whois/registrar data. For this use case it’s relatively easy to create a time based filter on that. Anything that’s “new” will be de facto absent from your “allow” check and create an implicit deny.
Then your large IT provider or recursive DNS system will probably layer in RPZ where they can insert explicit denies at resolution time. Either based on QNAME, RDATA, zone, etc.
Next time they should run it by your company before they decide to create a new domain.
These types of pages have been common long before vibe coding.
Vibe coding has made them a lot more common. Before, you'd need to put a lot more effort into making a website that worked like this, and it wasn't worth it for a random post. Now this person's entire website is posts like this, and I've seen many more in the past few months.
But now with vibecoding it feels like the default for articles to have fancy animation, rather than the exception. I guess that by having a fancier presentation it subconsciously legitimizes the content more so you're less likely to critique it as compared to a simple blog post where you pay more attention to the words and can realize that it's very surface level.
...or include a auto-scroll that will go directly to the next content slide (working with keyboard arrows).
Why not point your clanker at this and ask for it as a blog post?
Having read plenty of 1970's and 1980's sci-fi, I feel that clanker is the perfect term.
> Please tell your clanker to just write a blog post instead
You're right to push back on that. Let me get the details instead of hand waving.
Completely disagree.
I appreciate this website. This format is intentional and serves a purpose.
It's great to see the small web in action.
Here’s a very short list of visual essays I like:
https://thenoisyroom.com/ https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing
This one is good but the content doesn’t speak to me like the above. Would have been nice if OP had added a writing style suggestion to the prompt. Vanilla LLM text is sad
"please do things the way I want things to be done"
eh, am very biased as I design similar sites but I honestly prefer these to what would be likely string of random social media posts.
I like having relevant graphics stickied while text is displayed alongside it (assuming by blog post you mean the typical page-like top to bottom approach).
edit: damn, if these designs are hated what modern approaches do people like? I feel like scroll based text is a relatively unexplored idea compared to the typical blog post.
When it comes to web content, I vastly prefer web like interfaces that you can't reproduce in print.
While I'm not that against to such a web page (when viewing it on a monitor, not a phone) I'd say follow these points:
• Don't hijack any browser functionality. Scrolling shall scroll the document, the end.
• Don't scale something to the screen size, breaking zoom! Especially don't do it so that when zooming causes a different scroll position and then it all jumps to a different slide. WTF!
• Make it accessible!
If you want to make flashy graphics and animations make a game. That is not meant as to belittle games, I love games.
I don't disagree with those, and I'm able to do them myself but what do you mean by this?
"• Don't hijack any browser functionality. Scrolling shall scroll the document, the end."
How would you consider the page hijacking scroll functionality? You can scroll down normally. There are animations based on scroll position, maybe that's what you meant?
I mean the animated graphics and some other hackery going on when you try to zoom. It thinks to detect a different scroll position and jumps to a different slide. Also means you can't convert it to a PDF or print it, if you want to (though I wouldn't want to do that).
> edit: damn, if these designs are hated what modern approaches do people like? I feel like scroll based text is a relatively unexplored idea compared to the typical blog post.
The New York Times generally does the "lots of data, text and graphs in a scrolling presentation" tastefully.
Any articles that demonstrate this? Haven't read the NYT in like 15 years. Only vaguely familiar with the data viz that Mike Bostock created while there, and only because he shared them on a defunct blocks site.
I want it to be something you could reproduce in print, though. As close to what I'd get putting it in reader mode as possible.
We've spent a long time optimizing the printed word, including pages with diagrams and illustrations on them. You don't need to reinvent the wheel for every blog
I mean if you want print views (reader mode in firefox works well if the dev took the time to structure everything semantically), definitely use the print functionality. Maybe I'm one of the last people that still makes print media queries, but I do find value in them especially since they're quite easy to make.
You never know what inflation gonna be in futute. In some countries that turned into autocracies with strong and long standing leaders who love traditional values and religion inflation can easily be 30-70% a year.
Then not only 4.3T reachable, but even 43T.
This is true. We just need to bank on a total economic collapse and all of our SpaceX valuation fantasies can come true.
You'll be surprised how not total economic collapse it is. Population will become poor, but it only good for the strong leader since they wont have time to bother about all this politics stuff.
And country can still run like that for decades. Also get rids you from all the debt since you can easily just pay it all by printing more money.
> Donald Trump said “I love the inflation” after new data showed that inflation jumped to an annual rate of 4.2% in May, the third consecutive monthly increase since the start of the Iran war and a three-year high.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jun/10/inflation-r...
You may be on to something...
I try to be skeptical about quotes, especially when they affirm my preconceptions. So here's the surrounding material:
“You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over, you know I can say it now ... you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil. Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran, until right now.”
OK then.
I don't even, I can't, what?
4.3T could be the cost of a dozen of eggs by 2040.
Sorry, but I'm not pricing a stock today based on the assumption that this country will turn into a theocratic autocracy with a 70% YoY inflation rate for 15 years.
Besides, if I was pricing that in, I'd be buying indexes and not a specific stock. The 70% YoY inflation would rise all tides. Not just SpaceX.
Nothing the GP said makes SpaceX a better stock. It would just make the promise technically true in a way that doesn't benefit any investor.
Or, in other words, it's a joke.
If inflation is really that high I'm buying hard assets that won't depreciate. Sure I will need some cash, but gold bars in my personal safe suddenly are a great investment (gold is generally a terrible investment, but when inflation is the main concern is is really good)
Until SpaceX finds that golden asteroid.
True believers will leverage themselves all the way to the moon by selling gold calls so they can buy more SpaceX calls.
But these insane valuations are leading the tide-rising. This is one instrument in inflation because it's "creating" this money from nothing. All the employees that got a $5k bonus 5yrs ago will see it rise to $50k (or more) out of thin air (crazy financial mechanisms).
Will? It already has turned into one.
Isn't SpaceX uniquely in the position to benefit from that kind of government?
at that inflation rate the US dollar would lose its reserve currency status so I doubt it
at some point interest rates should reach double digits like in the 70s following oil crisis
the only crazy scenario for spaceX is it does space exploration/mining and finds something extremely exotic or valuable and sought after.
I get the feeling that in 5yrs or so if China makes the yuan free-floating it will be more of a reserve currency.
All spaceX has to do is keep being as innovative and industrious as it is now, in the physical world as all other companies are getting very lazy or just working on software. Eventually it'll probably go the way of GE because humans are humans, but I think we have a few decades until more compelling places to work come up.
> All spaceX has to do is keep being as innovative and industrious as it is now
SpaceX seemed to lose a big step when Musk got involved in DOGE. I don't know if key people left or what, but the pace seem to slow considerably, and the successes also seemed to come to a crashing halt.
Some principled people left when he made his big heel turn into openly promoting ethnonationalist authoritarianism.
Pretty sure some other principled people stayed behind and are using the field manual[1].
[1] https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184
This kind of thing has happened at Meta.
Reserve currency status is already doomed it's a matter of when not if
People have been saying this for decades now. In 1999 the dollar was ~55% of the global foreign exchange reserves. In Q4 of 2025 it was at ~56%.
https://en.macromicro.me/collections/23654/dedollarization/1...
People have been right for decades
In the sense that all things end, sure. But for the forseeable future the dollar will be the world's reserve currency because 1) the US economy is still the biggest, and furthermore we have a big trade deficit and 2) the dollar is still the least worst currency out there.
It’s always been a matter of when.
If all the AI / robotics dreams come true and productivity increases a lot, it'll cause deflationary pressure, which must be balanced with money printing to keep inflation up at 2%. Increased productivity is never allowed to result in cheaper products. For example, CPI deflation 20% -> money printing 22% equals 2% total CPI inflation. Asset prices track the real inflation i.e. they rise by 22%.
China launched a direct competitor on June 2nd
"China launches debut mission of Falcon 9-like rocket with no advance notice" https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
Spacex is going to get rekt, China has all the materials and workforce
This comment is very clearly an exaggeration even if there is a grain of truth to it. You should consider addressing the fact that there can be multiple "leaders" at any given time, and geopolitical boundaries can shape those leaders.
Perhaps at least wait until Long March proves to be recyclable/reuseable before you call it a direct competitor.
Who's going to buy launch services from CASC besides Chinese companies? Serious question, I don't have an answer in mind.
Well, SpaceX is supposed to be more about AI than low cost orbital launches. At least that’s what their roadshow is claiming.
But either way, yeah, I’m not willing to bet much money on USD4.3T unless we can get some serious financial engineering, (read “circular deals”), going.
We've seen through Tesla that software, government regulation, and to a smaller degree build quality are the only moats against China that still currently hold.
Tesla build quality? Early Chinese EV's were a joke, but Tesla's aren't exactly built reliably either
Once you learn how to spot their misaligned panels it becomes impossible not to
> Spacex is going to get rekt, China has all the materials and workforce
According to their brief, most of the revenue is going to come from AI!
The rockets are apparently just "minor" now.
That must be a mistake, revenue isn't the word for the money you're going to throw in the furnace.
China has multiple reusable rocket programs, the reuse will become key to driving down costs.
yeah, and it will slice $T off of spacex easily
It's possible SpaceX will get "rekt", but the US has decades of experience and manufacturing processes set up for aerospace, as well as established customers. As long as SpaceX doesn't become heavily unionized I suspect they'll be able to compete strongly with anything China develops.
Solid argument to get into the IPO asap. /s
Tesla grew from two dudes making a sports car in their garage to being a decent EV company, despite many controversies. SpaceX is already propped up with government contracts to ship payloads to ISS. What could potentially justify 40% or so sustained growth of SpaceX? Will they create the asteroid mining industry from scratch (and make every precious metal on Earth worthless... hold on), or will they carry people to multiple planets in Solar System (so what, Mars will stay less habitable than Antarctica until the Sun blows up... hold on), or will they cover the whole world with Starlink satellites, data centers etc (which they are already doing a decent job... hold on)?
What's the secret sauce? What can Musk possibly promise this time around? More memes? He already smoked crack on YouTube, what comes next and why is this worthy of pension funds to invest into?
It's insane to me that regulators are just letting the forced bid hack unfold with their heads in the sand as if they are unaware of what's happening or the press it's receiving.
Sometimes there are clever ways to hack the system and the regulators can react and blame poor hindsight, that's not the case here.
The administration has given their orders to the regulators, whether explicit or implicit, and this is playing out exactly as they want it to. This is not "by accident" or "by negligence". This is by design.
Not that surprising. Reining in regulators is one of the main pillars of the party in power.
Yeah I say that knowing the why, but it doesn’t make the slow motion train wrecks around me any less painful to watch. Makes it more painful actually
US checks and balances no longer function and with it went sane regulation
It's amazing we're in a timeline were people let stuff like this happen, against any sane logic.
> against any sane logic
The logic is super sane: rich people get richer. rich people in power let other rich people get richer.
The insane part is the population that falls for the lies and votes for this
It's funny it concludes "A line is not a law" while the entire page is just lines and charts. If you didn't know anything going in, SpaceX might as well be a company selling toilet paper for all you learned.
I've got no idea what a share of SpaceX is worth today or 14 years from now, but fully reusable rockets are going to be one of the most important engineering achievements in human history, and SpaceX appears far in the lead to getting there first. Ignoring everything else they're at the cutting edge of.
It's really just sad to me how upset how many people are about an IPO. "Imagine what a waste, if the stock market were to overvalue the company dedicated to solving the challenges required to make humanity a multi-planetary species, when this graph clearly shows we could've wisely allocated more of civilization's resources to Saudi Aramco."
I am upset that I am forced to either rebalance out of NASDAQ and incur significant tax consequences, or bet that SpaceX is about to become nearly 10 percent of GDP and keep exceptional margins while doing it.
I would not voluntarily take that bet, but we have regulatory and financial engineering nearly forcing me to do so.
I am upset that I am forced to either rebalance out of NASDAQ and incur significant tax consequences
Just to quantify, "The projected SpaceX weighting is around 0.6% of QQQ."
So if you have $100,000 invested in QQQ and SpaceX winds up say 4x overvalued, it may eventually wind up costing you as much as $450 (i.e. 1/5th as large a loss you experienced today in QQQ).
You are arguing I should be fine losing $500 so Elon can cash out? Because - and I hope this doesn't seem uncharitable - some sci-fi fantasy about space colonies?
You could maintain a short SpaceX portion in the approximately same percentage as your NASDAQ ETF. You'd have more slight tax events as you increased or closed out that short position to maintain the percentage, but significantly less than your NASDAQ position's taxes. Then when you sell your ETF you could close out the short to effectively remove SpaceX from the equation.
I'm upset that we allow people like you to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, possibly indefinitely, so anything that makes that harder even "accidentally" is ok by me.
I would rather capital gains be taxed at income rates but indexed to inflation. I am fine with that being a fair bit more.
But ripping off pension funds so you can tax me more, as a side effect of enriching people that engage in these shennanigans, doesn’t seem like a great move.
So you’re upset at the broader system that has allowed that change.
I am upset that it is not a great bet and that retail investors and pensions are being forced to take it. Let’s not pretend that this is not regulatory capture and financial engineering by techbros.
I’m not pretending anything.
You are upset the system is weak and can be captured/manipulated by the rich.
It is always good to accurately identify what you are upset at so you know where to direct your energy.
Plenty of places to direct it. I can be upset both at those cheating -and- the referees.
If SpaceX is such a great business, it should be able to win legitimately.
They aren't being valued on the rockets, though, they're claiming a large TAM based on the ai portion.
if I could invest in just the rockets that would be cool. much less downside risk
> fully reusable rockets are going to be one of the most important engineering achievements in human history
The number of implicit biases, assumptions, and unsubstantiatable assertions packed into that extremely confident sentence is frankly kind of impressive.
We have no idea how important reusable rockets will end up being, because we have no idea of what the future potential (economical or otherwise) space travel will have. Even Musk’s oft repeated (supposed) personal motivation for space travel (“protection of the species”) will ultimately hinge far more on other, far more important (and as of yet unrealized) technologies than reusable rockets.
Not to mention your implicit comparison of reusable rockets to literally every other extant technology. I mean really - transistors? The written word? RF comms? Indoor plumbing??
All things equal I would agree with you. However, all things are not equal.
SpaceX's target 2040 revenue of $4.3T. Let us assume that the US GDP grows at 3% p/a; in 2040 we may project a GDP of around $50T. Naturally, SpaceX would pushing 10% of the total US GDP.
Such a change is possible. It is not out of the question. Companies can and do reach that size, though obviously for mathematical reasons only a small number do. However, the claim that one will reach that size 14 years in advance beggars scrutiny. Simple credulity is not justified and it naturally follows that there will be a large number of people, even people with very bullish outlooks, who do not believe SpaceX will meet target. 30% growth p/a for 14 years would, historically, represent a fantastic rate of return and yet still it falls considerably short of target.
All the same, part of the promise to investors (whether one believes it or not) is that, even if SpaceX were to fall short of target, the long term revenue prospects are so explosive that one can't help but feel it's a good deal. (Is it? Time will tell.)
Why are you comparing SpaceX revenues to US GDP? (when it's main customers will all have a global footprint)
GDP rates should be nominal (5-6%) not 3%
Also, go back in time and do the same analysis for Anthropic in 2023 or Nvidia in 2021, would you have predicted their current Annual revenue for them?
Outgrowing GDP for awhile— especially from a smaller base— is certainly possible. It is much less likely to do it from a long time from already large revenue.
If you looked at Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft valuation around 2007 (before the crash), you'd asked the same question about the large base. But here we are.
* GOOG's revenue grew from 16.6B in 2007 to 402B in 2025 for a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 20.4%
* AMZN: 11.7B to 717B = 24.8%
* AAPL: 24B to 416B = 18.6%
* MSFT: 49.7B to 245B = 10.2%
SpaceX is claiming they will grow by 41.5% !! That's double GOOG's growth and 4x MSFT's growth.
But none of any of those has grown at the pace from that large base necessary to justify this kind of valuation.
Also we crashed 2000-2002 2008-2009 2020. Although specific causes vary we haven't had 14 good years in a row so even the size of economy may be optimistic.
SpaceX will never be 10% based on rockets.
Rockets will get shit canned in the next crash because it's less important and spacex not having saved sufficiently will get wrecked.
Their 10% basically depends on them getting to super intelligent ai first despite others obviously being more successful.
An actually wildly successful projection would be asking us to imagine they weathered the next crash ok and were very successful at rockets after exiting AI.
Falcon 9 was in a quasi-monopoly position in 2025, and had $4 billion in revenue. That's revenue, not profit. Starship will expand the market, but it would have to expand it by ~1000x to justify the valuation.
Exactly the TAM for rockets just isn't there, and probably never will be.
That's why SpaceX is "betting" so hard on datacenters in space (just build them on earth with solar and batteries), and AI.
I think they know they are pumping the stock and that's a pity because I do think Tesla and SpaceX are really good at scaling industrial production (car factories, rocket factories) and I think they could be really good (the best) at building earth-based datacenters at scale. But it's probably hard to value that at $1.7T
Using Tesla as a reference point for compounded stock value is interesting. From a price/earnings point of view, it's still sort of a meme stock.
Right on. This only works if you compare it to another extremely aggressively valued company.
Isn’t like 90% of their predicted revenue due to their AI products?
Yes. And a huge chunk is coming from the new deal with Google AFAIK they are basically only selling compute and the rest is +/- 0 profit or at least not that huge
I don't think some people understand how money works. If you say you're going to have $3.4T in revenue, someone has to have that money, and give it to you. So where is the money? Who has it? Are they spending it somewhere else right now, and will decide to instead spend it on SpaceX later? Or is the money just sitting in savings accounts, strangely not being spent or invested?
And why would they put their money into SpaceX anyway? What has SpaceX said the $3.4T will be based on?
1. Space-based AI datacenters. Yes, they actually said that. Anyone who knows anything about space and datacenters knows this is insane.
2. Starlink. They're saying they're going to make $3.4T by... running an ISP. In space.
3. Starship. They are betting that so many people want to send junk into space that it'll make them $3.4T.
4. Possible Tesla merger. This would definitely bump up the numbers. But Tesla's future depends on cars, AI and robotics. The US's electric car market is in decline (Thanks, Trump!) and BYD is producing cheaper electric cars faster (though US buyers won't buy BYD's, the US electric car market isn't as big as the global market, and is smaller since removing tax rebates). It's clearly not a real AI competitor, if they just rented out their AI datacenters to the competition. And China is churning out robots constantly that actually work and are cheap.
As you can see from other analyses (https://fortune.com/2026/05/31/spacex-tesla-odds-of-merging-...), their cash flow is actually much lower than they claim. The valuations are crazily high. SpaceX/Tesla's claims of how they're going to make money verges on snake oil.
Space based data centers is a cover for space weaponry.
If that ends up being true, at minimum that's securities fraud. Not really something worth risking with a trillion dollar company
Yep a space anti ballistic missile system (aka Golden Dome and before that Brilliant Pebbles) is likely coming if SpaceX figures out starship and China figures out their Starship clone. Plus maybe a “rods from god” type offensive system if these countries can’t make a deal to avoid space weapons.
Can you elaborate on what you mean?
If they ever start actually hurling massive objects to the orbit then these will be weapons. The data center functionality will be imitated remotely, if necessary.
See "Starlink is a way to give internet to whales" and "Pokémon is a fun little game" maybe "to train delivery robots as a surprise by-product nobody foresaw" and other such stories.
Reusable missiles. Reusable claims of missiles being fired…
s/cover/target
The answer to all your questions is that the stock market has been in a mode of price discovery for memes themselves since 2020.
Elon is the meme king.
If you build it, they will come.
The animated graphics are fancy, but can anyone with a screen reader tell us how that "looks" to them? The graphics are all one SVG mixed together with different parts set to opacity: 0. The accessibility tree in Firefox gives you all the labels randomly mixed together. If that is how people with screen reader "see" it, its unusable.
Maybe make the graphic aria-hidden and add an empty tag with aria-description (or other kind of tag only screen readers see) describing the current graphic to each slide.
Well, that's a horrible website. I'm not going to even attempt to read any of that scrolling monstrosity.
Please, correct the typo in the title!
To Be Fair: this is half of what Morgan Stanley said the metaverse would be worth, clearly they learned to be more bearish...
Wouldn't a decent growth rate in 2040 justify a fraction of the $4.3T with a greater PE/PR?
Elon making outrageous projections? Noooo.....
The actual takeaway question is "is Elon Musk on a frontier of his own — or is the market extrapolating one proven outlier onto an unproven one?"
The HN title editorializes its own answer to the author's question.
it's a rhetorical question, not a real one. the author's inclination is clear as day.
it's written to provoke thought and reflection.
the title does the reflection on behalf of the reader which is a disservice.
I think the US is in such a fucked up place economically, that the stock market is so overheated and will cause grave inflation, but it's the only lever left to pull for the government, that it will cause havoc within the next 10 years.
SpaceX or any of AI companies for that matter is absolutely not worth their money, but they will be carried through by government legislation, because otherwise the economy will be fucked for the US.
SpaceX ... 4.3 trillion...what the fuck are you on about
> otherwise the economy will be fucked for the US.
There is no „for the US“ here. If the US blows up everything does. Even the broadest of World ETFs are super US heavy
I mean, the entire predicted value that the company will be worth is like 6mo of the US budget (>$7 Trillion per year). I don't think that's all that much, even if they accomplish half of what they're all trying to do.
The economy is already F'd because so few people are actually working productively- it's been a laptop-class driven economy since the 80s.
You don't think one company being worth half a year of the biggest country in the world's budget is all that much?
Hard to know how to where to go from there because I find that quite insane.
A grammar corrected title might be better as:
"Why SpaceX's 2040 Revenue Forecast of $4.3T is highly unlikely"
thx
adding a mode on this that prevents animations would be nice addition tho
Nostradamus would look at a 14 years in advance revenue forecast and say: "This is irresponsible."
Vibe coded blog posts will be the end of the internet.
Another factor I don't see mentioned: every Trump policy is inflationary. Deporting the labor base, deterring legal immigration, applying tariffs that were basically derived by taking the trade deficit with a country and dividing by 2, and now locking up 20% of the global oil market by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz.
The Fed's response will have to be to raise rates, which is going to crush the multiple of any stock whose valuation is based on the expectation of massive growth.
> AN ESSAY IN SCROLLS
I'd have preferred the essay. This kind of Claude Code landing page turns people off when the content is otherwise meaningful.
The target audience will be looking for any reason to excuse this logic, and by vibe coding them a website you've given them their reason.
Is it just me or is does the large US companies stock-trade-based supposed "value" is floating in outer space with little relation to people's lives in reality? This SpaceX valuation is perhaps an outlier even among other multi-Trillion-USD companies, but aren't a lot of the "non-outliers" kind of in a bubble state?
I'm still struggling with the idea that 4,400 millionaires are going to be created overnight
(out of 22,000 employees)
Because many of them are going to sell sell sell at least half of their shares
Which then means the value will PLUMMET
College roommate worked for nvidia and cashed out last year and retired in his early 50s. Tens of millions in cash. After tax too. Am I jealous? Hell yes.
I think most still believe in the mission, especially the ones with that many shares. I get selling enough to buy a house and add some diversity to your portfolio, but you really have to have a dismal outlook to sell all your shares, or even half.
I take it you are going to be shorting the stock?
Shorting is not as easy as you think. You have to time it right and you risk big losses.
KNOWING OpenAI et al WILL fail is not enough to make money from that.
[delayed]
You realize there will be people on the other end wanting and/or being forced to buy buy buy right? They aren't selling into a vacuum.
People seem to have a weak grasp on how supply and demand dynamics actually work in a market. Price doesn't magically plummet; people need to agree to buy and sell at a given price.
The chance of US debasing currency to dig out of debt hole by brrrrting money printer is not zero.
But 15 years is also plenty of time for PRC to establish reusable and lithography to invalidate SpaceX valuation rational by driving terrestrial dc and launch to commodity prices. It's like EVs, anything PRC decides to prioritize industrially, competitors going to have a bad time, but still doesn't stop market for valuating Tesla more than all PRC auto producers combined.
Would not be out of question for finance bros to figure out how to continue decoupling valuation from reality if that keeps system going.
I know this sounds "bad" but early in Tesla's forcasts, I've seen many "highly unlikely" articles, but Tesla ended up blowing past expectations. This one is tough too, but I hate just dismiss it as unlikely especially with Elon at the helm
Tesla's own expectation six years ago was that they would be selling 20 million cars annually by 2030:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
Tesla's recent annual car sales:
2023: 1.81M
2024: 1.79M
2025: 1.64M
Elon's failed timeline predictions about self-driving and Robotaxi fleets are too numerous to attempt to cite here.
What has mostly exceeded expectations about Tesla is their stock price compared to actual productivity.
Tesla spent almost years scraping by, almost went bankrupt in 2018, had three years of "exceeds expectation" from 2020 to 2023 and is now being murdered by competitors.
A lot of "income" comes from selling regulatory credits, not cars.
FSD is up to v14 and there is no sense in which it's "Full", or is likely to be "Full" any time soon.
The early computer industry created a good few companies which achieved profitability quickly and posted solid YoY expansion for decades.
The histories of SpaceX and Tesla show no evidence of that pattern.
> murdered by competitors
Is just a downright lie. The Tesla Model Y maintained its title as the world's best-selling vehicle in 2025 across all powertrains, marking its third consecutive year at number one. Even the CT is the best selling EV pickup, the last bestseller could not find a way to sell it profitably.
> The Tesla Model Y maintained its title as the world's best-selling vehicle in 2025 across all powertrains
No, the RAV-4 won that title. Its also pretty easy to make that claim when you're only making practically two models of vehicles compared to most other companies with several models. A single car selling well isn't necessarily telling the whole story.
> Even the CT is the best selling EV pickup
Easy to do when 20%+ are being bought by the ownership's other companies.
The CT is a massive failure measured by their own stated expectations. They stated they'd sell somewhere between 250,000-500,000 units a year. They ended up selling only a bit over 20,000 last year.
FWIW, the F-150 Lightning outsold the CT for 2025.
> FSD is up to v14 and there is no sense in which it's "Full", or is likely to be "Full" any time soon.
I think the SpaceX IPO is way overvalued, but have you actually tried FSD v14 yourself?
My car has 8-year old hardware running v12, and it handles like 90+% of my driving. When I test drove 14 it blew my mind how good it had gotten in only 8 months of development. In my opinion, there's question that it's "when," not "if."
Yes, I hear lots of people saying Tesla's "FSD" product can drive by itself already.
Yet if the car crashes while in FSD mode, it is still you who are legally the driver and you who will be responsible. You are the driver, regardless of what the name of the car's software is.
This can be contrasted with e.g. Mercedes' offering, which is actually self-driving, and where Mercedes is responsible if the car crashes (The limitation in that case, of course, is the very limited roads and conditions where that software will actually be enabled.).
So, yes: Until Tesla (or someone else) actually takes responsibility while the car drives itself, and the "driver" is legally just a passenger, it is not a fully self-driving car. If you ever take your attention away from the road while using FSD you are breaking the law, which says that as the driver, you must always pay attention.
> Until Tesla (or someone else) actually takes responsibility while the car drives itself
Were you aware they're already doing exactly this in Austin and Dallas?
They've also had multiple crashes in very few miles driven.
Yeah, there's ~40 of them in Dallas, and they're highly geofenced.
Seems pretty small for a platform they're so confident about.
> it's "when," not "if."
That has always been the question since Elon started making self-driving claims back in 2016. If you believed him any time up until now you'd have been wrong and potentially own a car that will never drive without a responsible human in the driver's seat.
Another question is how many resources each "self-driving" car needs to complete its task. All of the major self-driving taxi providers do have monitoring staff who need to intervene occasionally to get the car unstuck from some situations.
If you need to pay one monitor per 10 cars you can run a taxi service in specific markets but it's pretty hard to roll that out to a fleet of millions of personally-owned cars.
I hope you've filled out your will.
Its so good that's why they've got tons of robotaxis all over the place.
Oh, they only have a tiny fleet in a few cities which are still mostly monitored? Strange.
Do you think full self-driving (level 5) is near? Driving a car is something we teach children to do. Surely FSD has to be getting close, no?
Is this something Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any of the other big AI investors are close to solving?
Google is the farthest down the line.
It seems crazy that AIs are doing all these impressive things yet struggles with something we teach children to do.
Not a fanboy, but the latest generation Tesla self driving is really quite good. I still don't understand why they still aren't adding lidars now since prices have come down a lot.
You’re talking about a company that removed the rain sensor and made their automatic wipers use neural nets and cameras instead.
Well, it it works well enough, I don't care too deeply. But it's clear to me that the self driving on the older hardware changes it's personalty depending on something I cannot figure out (software updates? Light conditions?). From confident formula-1 driver to nervous granny. This unpredictability is very unnerving to me. Like having a teenager drive my car.
I rented a tesla with the new hardware for a week and it was awesome. But they could just update the model overnight and give me a nasty surprise. That's ... not a very happy thought.
Blown past?
It was only a few years ago people were saying Tesla was going to own the entire car market, and everyone else would go out of business. The Cybertruck was going to be the best selling car of all time, the insurance business was going to be a massive money maker etc.
None of these things happened.
Elon is a true grand master to blow past shifted goal posts. If people continue to fall for it, he might have success, however you define it.
It was only a few years ago people were saying Tesla was going to fail spectacularly, that nobody would drive an EV, that no new auto manufacturer could start in USA, that they would blow up into flames at rates way higher than ICE cars, that the CT would never be made, that they'd have to buy their batteries from suppliers that would just crank the prices up.
I think the only opinion I care about on this will be Aswath Damodaran https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQKIJU7TmTc
I plan to stay the fuck away from it either way, but he's at least someone who's not only good at this stuff, showing their work and approaching it professionally.
I haven't had time to watch the video, but I read through part of the blog post, and seems he believes 1.2T is possible,but I won't know how much I agree with that until I finish reading/watching it all.
It's at, the very least, a professional presentation so it's a hell of a lot easier to see why and what he does/doesn't agree with.
lol, Elon is that you?
Those things were highly unlikely because they accounted for rationality from the consumer's end as well as the political's end and of course Fed and regulators
All 3 went out of the window sometimes around 2015 or so.
The US consumer cellular subscription service is around 185 billion a year and if you add business/enterprise it is around 225 billion a year. If they were able (highly unlikely) to capture that market in the US alone through Satellite Cellular service, it would be huge revenue stream. Setting up data centers in orbit (easier said than done) would be another huge revenue stream. Setting up facilities to beam down energy to earths surface could also be an opportunity.
If I learned a good lesson, it's never say never....
> Setting up data centers in orbit
Still have yet to hear how data centers in space are actually supposed to be a good thing when cooling them is much harder than on earth because they are in a near vacuum with much less heat dissipation.
> Setting up facilities to beam down energy to earths surface could also be an opportunity
Also interested to learn how this is done without creating a death ray with potentially catastrophic consequences
So if all the current telcos in the US lose all of their customers and SpaceX captures 100% of them without degrading the current margin/pricing at all, they are 5% of their way to the $4.3t goal. And the only way I can see that happening is from government mandate - which if things don't change I guess never say never. But still a very very very long way off
SpaceX published their datacenter satellite plans, I think they assumed that if they hid their radiators from the sun, they can consider space temperature to be 3-5K. Which is a fairly good assumption if:
- you have a perfect shadow on all side (no light is reflected from a nearby celestial body)
- and nothing is radiating nearby. Earth radiate a lot, I space temperature around the iss is fairly high.
I'm fairly sure the current design either need high temp chips or needs to be far from LEO. Or they will have to make the radiators bigger.
Okay, so in 14 years they replace all cell phone service in the US achieving 6% of the revenue goal. Just have to find another 15 “all cell phone service in US” and do it all in 14 years and we are golden.
Just add a whole Apple worth of revenue yearly and they can just barely make it.
> If they were able (highly unlikely) to capture that market in the US alone through Satellite Cellular service, it would be huge revenue stream
There's practically no way there's enough RF spectrum to handle that many clients from even LEO. There's a reason why carriers are moving to smaller and smaller and smaller cells, and places like sports venues have highly directional antenna arrays to handle the number of active clients. Will there be customers? Sure. Probably a lot! Will it be an actually massive chunk of the overall subscriber base mostly using their networks? Not a chance.
They can't even get capacity up enough to support their rural customers on practically idealized antenna array hardware.
> Setting up data centers in orbit (easier said than done) would be another huge revenue stream.
What applications demand that kind of premium on cost of running? Why choose that instead of terrestrial datacenters? What's the overall use-case for why one should bother deploying their applications into a space datacenter? I'm genuinely asking. Aside from needing to ensure low-ish latency to the most remote parts of the world and being willing to pay whatever to have that, I don't get it.
SpaceX already blown through a number of "... but this cannot be!" forecasts. Would not discount them easily.
Skeptics said SpaceX would fail, but it succeeded. Therefore, skepticism in general is wrong and SpaceX will have an annual revenue of $11 quadrillion by 2030.
I was thinking about this lately as well. If you break down their plan of launching a LOT of solar panels into space and strapping a GPU cluster to it. It's not _that_ crazy now.
Prices for solar panels have dropped 90% in the last 10 years.
Price per kilo to Low Earth Orbit has dropped ~50% in the last 10 years.
SpaceX's entire plan is to keep dropping both of these prices down even more with massive solar panel / starship factories.
Here's the thing. Land is cheap in many parts of the world. Solar panels work okay on the ground (not as well as in space). GPUs work better on the ground (MUCH easier to cool). Connectivity is cheaper on the ground (sure, Starlink is amazing, but it doesn't hold a candle to fiber). Maintenance is possible on the ground. Reuse of old equipment is possible on the ground. Batteries are heavy, and they smooth out solar power pretty well on the ground. Oh, and natural gas, which xAI/SpaceX uses in their big datacenters, is cheap on the ground.
So, given that you're bought the GPUs, you could launch them into space, but you have the alternative option of ... not launching them into space.
But now there's massive opposition to building on land.
If you just build in space no one will be able to hold up those permits.
For what it's worth I don't disagree with you.
This depends on ridiculously low costs to orbit. But there truly is unlimited power up there from the sun.
This is exactly why Starlink is successful. If we had decent regulations, and had actual good internet on the ground, why would we bother going to outer space? The truth is that it's cheaper to build an ISP in space to work around the corruption that has kept all these monopolies in power.
I'm under the assumption that Starlink will never provide more than one percent of the mobile bandwidth in a developed country. Because they can't match dense antenna webs in cities. Am I wrong?
Well outside my field, but I was under the impression that getting the energy into the GPU (solar) was not the problem. The problem is getting the heat out. It takes a lot of surface area to radiate out the heat that GPUs produce. Maybe it ends up economical, but just having it in space adds in a bunch of challenges, not least that once it's up there you can't send in a technician to troubleshoot.
And if solar panels drop another 90%, why not just slap them on earth?
> if solar panels drop another 90%, why not just slap them on earth?
Because you need batteries then.
Not the same solar panels. As with most equipment, the constraints are very different in space/orbit, and the suppliers are not the same.
It's still going to be what, $100,000 per ton to launch on Starship?
The AI1 Satellite that SpaceX has shown, is basically one rack. Something like 72 GPUs. Elon himself said it was a "rack in space" more than a datacenter in space. Sure I guess you could launch 100,000 of them and call it a datacenter. But their own graphic shows this thing to be 2 to 2 1/2 tons. So who is gonna spend $200,000 to launch a single rack into space? Get the panels as cheap as you want, the launch cost is still pretty massive just to get 150kw of free power.
I mean maybe my napkin math is way wrong here, but I don't see what the cost savings is.
It won't work btw, unless they don't put the satellites in LEO. Earth radiate away big time (it's like 200K in earth shadow in LEO
"solar panel / starship factories"
Oh, sure, both kinds of factories are legitimately slashable as they are totally the same thing. Pretty much. Right? :-(
it is crazy
Just this morning, someone told me SpaceX valuation proponents couldn't possibly be more obtuse; yet, this thread has blown through those expectations.
SpaceX's entire history is full of, "there's no way they'll ever do X", followed by them doing it.
They definitely haven't hit all of their goals, but I don't think anything they want to do is impossible, just really difficult.
“Here at SpaceX we specialize in making the impossible merely late.”
-Elon
Like what? Seriously, nobody thought shouting rockets into space was impossible. Landing a rocket again nobody had thought it impossible. Sure they brought down prices, again nobody thought it impossible. The question is actually is it desirable. Rocket launches are pretty much the worst one can do in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but somehow all technerds are falling all over themselves how great it is.
Yeah but with Starlink I can watch YouTube on a remote Pacific island! (I never visit remote Pacific islands).
"Landing a rocket again nobody had thought it impossible."
Erm, ESA thought it was a dream:
"Twenty years ago, before SpaceX had launched a single rocket, Richard Bowles, a sales director of the European Arianespace launch consortium, said SpaceX’s ambition to launch, recover and reuse rockets, cutting the price of launches in half, was a dream.
‘SpaceX primarily sems to be selling a dream. Which is good, we should all dream,’ he said. ‘I think reusability is a dream… How am I going to respond to a dream?… First of all you don’t wake people up. They have to wake up on their own… They’re not supermen. Whatever they can do, we can do.’"
https://spectator.com/article/spacex-has-put-europe-to-shame...