The thing i'm not looking forward to is SpaceX will now be beholden to Wall Street. With Startship testing being so public, there's a whole cottage industry of youtubers watching their every move, there's going to be lots of ups and downs on the stock price.
You don't have to believe. If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch.
The IPO will go great, because the company will float a fairly small issuance. The big shareholders will not immediately sell. They will hold on and maybe even buy to support the price.
Then, after 15 days, it will enter the indexes and everyone's 401k will start auto-buying this stock.
You might say this is an obvious flaw in how the indexes work if they start immediately accept a brand new IPOed stock with limited float. You'd be right, which is why they won't list for a year.
> In the United States, SpaceX accounts for five of every six launches into space, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
I found his take on the space data center a bit negative. No idea if it is feasible right now, but you could have made the same jokes and ridicule about the feasibility of electric cars (batteries too weak!) before Elon build Tesla.
And Patrick just lists some reasons why it is currently hard to do. I'm by no means a Elon fan, but if anyone could pull it of it's him, and attempting these hard challenges is a good thing.
Now or never. If the stock market goes bust because of the war then most IPO windows will close or will result in a much lower subscription rate. You can expect a flurry of these in the next few weeks.
With $1.75t valuation & ~$16b in revenues, that's just over 100* revenues. SpaceX recently announced $8b in EBITDA, but I don't think it's a healthy metric for such a hardware-heavy business. Or, like Charlie Munger calls it, BS earnings.
Even if you give SpaceX the benefit of the doubt and assume they'll eventually settle at the profit rates Apple, Google, etc. have (~25%, check it), it'll be $4b in annual profits holding up $1.8t in market cap or roughly 450 PE ratio.
And that's if we give them the same great odds for profitability as America's most successful and profitable firms.
In summary, in the short-term the stock might very likely shoot up to $3t, but in the long-term, it doesn't look very healthy.
SpaceX has reduced the cost of getting a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10 and with their new system (Starship) it's poised further reduce that to 100x. They launch, land and re-use their rockets so often now that what was considered impossible 15 years ago is now routine. They currently put more things into space than the rest of the world combined and by a huge margin. They also have the most advanced internet infrastructure in the world and are poised to replace legacy ISPs and even mobile carriers in the coming decade. Oh, and they're doing all this while making a profit ($16B last year) despite their massive R&D spending and even with the money sink that is xAI their profits will be higher this year. It's hard to say that this isn't one of the most innovative and fast moving companies in the world. $1.75T maybe seems excessive, but less so than a lot of other companies out there.
The jury is still out on Starship. And also a bold claim to say that SpaceX by itself has reduced the cost of a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10. Did it play an important role in that reduction? Sure...
This comment reads like an S-1 pitch deck and almost every claim is false or misleading.
The $16B is not profit its revenue, and I strongly suggest to learn the difference before investing. The $8B figure is EBITDA, also known as, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, AND amortization.
For a company running around 9500 LEO satellites with a less than 5 year lifespan, depreciation is the business.
Their FCC filings show that about 500 satellites deorbited just in the first of half of 2025 alone, and they were all under 5 years old. The estimates for constellation sustenance are currently at $5-8B per year in satellite manufacturing (about $500K each) and launch costs are about $3M each. That is the real capex that EBITDA hides. Net income has never been disclosed and probably for good reason...
And lets not even mention the $19 billion EchoStar acquisition who is almost certainly! not included in the $8 billion EBITDA figures reported...
The most critical is that xAI is excluded from the number. XAI had a $1.46B net loss in Q3 2025 on just $107M in revenue, accelerating from $1B the prior quarter. They were burning $1B a month at the time of filing. This pig was then merged into SpaceX in Feb 2026 along with X/Twitter. So start with $8B EBITDA, subtract $5-8B satellite replacement, subtract $4-6B per year in xAI losses, subtract interest and taxes specially amortization and you are very very deep in the red. Once audited financials go public, every analyst with a calculator and a working brain will see this.
Also the revenue is largely circular... Over 70% of Falcon 9 launches in 2025 were internal Starlink missions so SpaceX is its own biggest customer. Starlink is 70% of total revenue. The so called "launch business" and "internet business" are the same capital cycle booked as two revenue lines ;-)
Replace legacy ISPs? Really? Starlink has 0.2% residential market share after 5 years, with declining ARPU ($85 avg vs $120 US) and congestion already emerging at 10M subs. It is a niche rural/maritime ISP, not an AT&T killer.
And on the valuation? NVIDIA for example, who has an almost actual monopoly on AI chips, with $216B revenue, and $120B net income, at 56% margins, trades at 20x revenue. Tesla…. already considered absurdly overvalued at P/E 355, trades at 15x. Amazon at 3x. Meta at 10x. SpaceX wants 110x !! times revenue, with no audited financials, unknown net income, and a freshly absorbed money losing AI company. Even on bullish 2026 projected revenue of $24B, it's 73x so nearly 4x NVIDIA multiple, and NVIDIA actually prints profit...
Starship on another side is very very far from routine... 11 flights, 5 failures. But notice on thing...In 2025 alone on Flight 7 the upper stage exploded from harmonic vibrations. Then Flight 8 exploded from propellant mixing. Flight 9 was destroyed on reentry...Ship 36 exploded on test stand
...the first V3 booster exploded during pressure testing and was scrapped.
See a pattern here? Each failure from a different root cause. So multiple unsolved failure modes, not iteration. It has never reached orbit, never caught a ship, never demonstrated orbital refueling.
This offering is the most scandalous ever and the structure tells you everything. The filing is confidential, REAL financials only need to go public 15 days before the roadshow. Nasdaq is literally changing its index rules effective May 1 to allow a fast track Nasdaq-100 entry in 15 trading days. This is a rule that never existed before, and is made for this IPO, forcing billions in passive index buying on day one.
Public float is just 3% to 4%. This is one of the tightest floats for any major US IPO in modern history, and I have been following the markets for 20 years. They do 30% retail allocation what is three times the norm and tells you exactly who the target buyer is.
Given this level of rule bending, dont be shocked if the S-1 with real audited numbers quietly drops at the last legally permissible momen...
Smartphones can now connect directly to some LEO satellite services. Apple’s iPhone satellite features work on iPhone 14 and later. It makes me wonder if the evolution of this capability will eventually make Starlink a telecom without the traditional towers.
At some point we'll reach saturation of what we're comfortable putting into LEO, or at least greater pushback from governments leading to regulations in hopes of avoiding that. There's a lot of space junk out there already and they're still pumping out those isp satellites en mass.
Luckily these specific spacex LEO sats decay pretty rapidly (unless they've made them more advanced recently, I haven't followed closely as of late.) So I guess they'll keep themselves busy at least refreshing the fleet.
How will they make money? From governments? With Elon's beliefs, few will be able to afford the vacation trips to space, except a few and they can already do this if they wanted, but haven't in droves.
If anything this just proves that the Overview Effect (traveling to space changes you) is just BS, Bezos and the others never changed.
I'm genuinely waiting to see at what the valuation lands at. The gap between what SpaceX charges per launch and what everyone else charges is so wide that the moat basically is the rocket. Hard to compare against anything even now.
[All: please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. You don't have to like $Company or $Person, but when the banned accounts are posting more thoughtfully than the rest, that's... bad.]
I feel the global instability could easily be very disruptive to SpaceX. Just imagine if Russia gets vindictive and starts destroying these satellites or blowing up their satellites to create orbital debris that could knock satellites out of orbit. A really bad solar storm could be devastating.
Just saying there are some decent risks, and pricing it at 1.75T IPO seems risky enough. I would not take that gamble.
SpaceX does internal sales of stock twice a year, so there will not be pressure from existing stockholders to sell. But there will be buyers. SpaceX is/was a great brand (before it became SpaceTwitter).
> so there will not be pressure from existing stockholders to sell
The IPO is structured as a massive overvaluation event specially for the insiders to unload their holdings. They're never going to get a better opportunity and they know it.
It's going to have a big impact on short-term volatility, but it's going to take a big drop in prices in a month. But I think it's a company that needs to be invested in the long run.
> Money raised from a public offering would most likely help SpaceX finance its long-term goals of launching artificial intelligence data centers into orbit, creating a colony on the moon and getting humans to Mars. These are expensive and unproven endeavors that may take years and billions of dollars to achieve.
Oh my god. When a journalist writes like any of this is remotely plausible within “years” and “billions” of dollars it really downplays the near impossibility of these events happening.
I'm a SpaceX investor, and from reading the comments here, I think most people here are missing why SpaceX has an outrageously high valuation.
SpaceX's valuation only makes sense if you buy into their mission of creating a civilization on Mars, and that the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation is the vehicle that creates this future. If SpaceX achieves this, it would be the most valuable company ever created. It would be worth $10s of trillions.
I personally believe SpaceX has a 70% chance of achieving its Mars ambitions. So I find the current $1.75 trillion valuation very logical, if not a little underpriced.
If you believe there's a SpaceX won't achieve these ambitions, which I'd assume most people in this thread belong to, then you'd assign a <1% chance of this happening. Then you'd value the company based on it's financials, at a more realistic $200B. You'd explain the 8x valuation gap though a mixture of financial engineering and Elon grifting, both of which I agree are happening.
The current $1.75 trillion valuation comes from the ratio of people in camp A to camp B.
If SpaceX is on track to achieve those goals, then why does it need special treatment to be included in fund indexes earlier than it would otherwise be?
The "most valuable company" ever created when talking about a future around 2030-40 is a mindset pre-singularity. Sounds like a caveman back then saying that in 500 years, if their group keeps growing, they will be able to control a whole continent, and have more access to good quality rock for pointy daggers, completely ignoring the fact the world will change in ways they can't fathom at the time.
It is insane to think that this year multiple "startups" are going to IPO at valuations greater than that of the largest company in the world in ~2018. We have printed so much money in that period that these numbers have completely lost touch with reality.
In June? That is why Trump is talking about an Iran ceasefire. Replenish the weapons, flip some companies to the public, then start the war again. Bonus points for disrupting EU energy supplies for longer.
Donald Trump Jr., who already profited from groq, is invested via 1789 capital:
Not to mention that the PayPal mafia is now playing ball with respect to Epstein (Tracey was on all-in downplaying the whole thing), so Musk himself will be in good graces again.
Tesla valuation is about to crater and take most of Musk wealth with it so he needs the over valuation of SpaceX before the other rocket competitors can show that they can replicate what SpaceX is doing at cheaper prices.
It's hard to imagine how SpaceX can be making the reported $8 billion a year in profit[1]. We now see roughly two Starlink reentries per day... The replenishment costs are at least $5M/day just to maintain the current constellation, while the entire customer revenue is ~$20M/day. Guess the real money is in Golden Dome.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 67.8 ms ] threadThe IPO will go great, because the company will float a fairly small issuance. The big shareholders will not immediately sell. They will hold on and maybe even buy to support the price.
Then, after 15 days, it will enter the indexes and everyone's 401k will start auto-buying this stock.
You might say this is an obvious flaw in how the indexes work if they start immediately accept a brand new IPOed stock with limited float. You'd be right, which is why they won't list for a year.
At least they wouldn't until Elon got them to change their rules: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-30/nasdaq-cl...
> In the United States, SpaceX accounts for five of every six launches into space, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
That's why.
https://youtu.be/8rS3fTbC7TE?is=TGpEdM2Y7sknP-cW
Even if you give SpaceX the benefit of the doubt and assume they'll eventually settle at the profit rates Apple, Google, etc. have (~25%, check it), it'll be $4b in annual profits holding up $1.8t in market cap or roughly 450 PE ratio.
And that's if we give them the same great odds for profitability as America's most successful and profitable firms.
In summary, in the short-term the stock might very likely shoot up to $3t, but in the long-term, it doesn't look very healthy.
The $16B is not profit its revenue, and I strongly suggest to learn the difference before investing. The $8B figure is EBITDA, also known as, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, AND amortization.
For a company running around 9500 LEO satellites with a less than 5 year lifespan, depreciation is the business.
Their FCC filings show that about 500 satellites deorbited just in the first of half of 2025 alone, and they were all under 5 years old. The estimates for constellation sustenance are currently at $5-8B per year in satellite manufacturing (about $500K each) and launch costs are about $3M each. That is the real capex that EBITDA hides. Net income has never been disclosed and probably for good reason...
And lets not even mention the $19 billion EchoStar acquisition who is almost certainly! not included in the $8 billion EBITDA figures reported...
The most critical is that xAI is excluded from the number. XAI had a $1.46B net loss in Q3 2025 on just $107M in revenue, accelerating from $1B the prior quarter. They were burning $1B a month at the time of filing. This pig was then merged into SpaceX in Feb 2026 along with X/Twitter. So start with $8B EBITDA, subtract $5-8B satellite replacement, subtract $4-6B per year in xAI losses, subtract interest and taxes specially amortization and you are very very deep in the red. Once audited financials go public, every analyst with a calculator and a working brain will see this.
Also the revenue is largely circular... Over 70% of Falcon 9 launches in 2025 were internal Starlink missions so SpaceX is its own biggest customer. Starlink is 70% of total revenue. The so called "launch business" and "internet business" are the same capital cycle booked as two revenue lines ;-)
Replace legacy ISPs? Really? Starlink has 0.2% residential market share after 5 years, with declining ARPU ($85 avg vs $120 US) and congestion already emerging at 10M subs. It is a niche rural/maritime ISP, not an AT&T killer.
And on the valuation? NVIDIA for example, who has an almost actual monopoly on AI chips, with $216B revenue, and $120B net income, at 56% margins, trades at 20x revenue. Tesla…. already considered absurdly overvalued at P/E 355, trades at 15x. Amazon at 3x. Meta at 10x. SpaceX wants 110x !! times revenue, with no audited financials, unknown net income, and a freshly absorbed money losing AI company. Even on bullish 2026 projected revenue of $24B, it's 73x so nearly 4x NVIDIA multiple, and NVIDIA actually prints profit...
Starship on another side is very very far from routine... 11 flights, 5 failures. But notice on thing...In 2025 alone on Flight 7 the upper stage exploded from harmonic vibrations. Then Flight 8 exploded from propellant mixing. Flight 9 was destroyed on reentry...Ship 36 exploded on test stand ...the first V3 booster exploded during pressure testing and was scrapped.
See a pattern here? Each failure from a different root cause. So multiple unsolved failure modes, not iteration. It has never reached orbit, never caught a ship, never demonstrated orbital refueling.
This offering is the most scandalous ever and the structure tells you everything. The filing is confidential, REAL financials only need to go public 15 days before the roadshow. Nasdaq is literally changing its index rules effective May 1 to allow a fast track Nasdaq-100 entry in 15 trading days. This is a rule that never existed before, and is made for this IPO, forcing billions in passive index buying on day one.
Public float is just 3% to 4%. This is one of the tightest floats for any major US IPO in modern history, and I have been following the markets for 20 years. They do 30% retail allocation what is three times the norm and tells you exactly who the target buyer is.
Given this level of rule bending, dont be shocked if the S-1 with real audited numbers quietly drops at the last legally permissible momen...
Luckily these specific spacex LEO sats decay pretty rapidly (unless they've made them more advanced recently, I haven't followed closely as of late.) So I guess they'll keep themselves busy at least refreshing the fleet.
If anything this just proves that the Overview Effect (traveling to space changes you) is just BS, Bezos and the others never changed.
Providing space launch capability that's 1/10th what NASA charges.
Providing quite good AI at 100 tokens/sec.
[All: please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. You don't have to like $Company or $Person, but when the banned accounts are posting more thoughtfully than the rest, that's... bad.]
Just saying there are some decent risks, and pricing it at 1.75T IPO seems risky enough. I would not take that gamble.
The IPO is structured as a massive overvaluation event specially for the insiders to unload their holdings. They're never going to get a better opportunity and they know it.
Long term SpaceX is all gravity.
But the auto inclusion in Fortune 500 is basically cheating.
I'm a little disappointed now.
Smells like great fiduciary responsibility!
Oh my god. When a journalist writes like any of this is remotely plausible within “years” and “billions” of dollars it really downplays the near impossibility of these events happening.
SpaceX's valuation only makes sense if you buy into their mission of creating a civilization on Mars, and that the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation is the vehicle that creates this future. If SpaceX achieves this, it would be the most valuable company ever created. It would be worth $10s of trillions.
I personally believe SpaceX has a 70% chance of achieving its Mars ambitions. So I find the current $1.75 trillion valuation very logical, if not a little underpriced.
If you believe there's a SpaceX won't achieve these ambitions, which I'd assume most people in this thread belong to, then you'd assign a <1% chance of this happening. Then you'd value the company based on it's financials, at a more realistic $200B. You'd explain the 8x valuation gap though a mixture of financial engineering and Elon grifting, both of which I agree are happening.
The current $1.75 trillion valuation comes from the ratio of people in camp A to camp B.
Donald Trump Jr., who already profited from groq, is invested via 1789 capital:
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/trump-linked-venture-...
Not to mention that the PayPal mafia is now playing ball with respect to Epstein (Tracey was on all-in downplaying the whole thing), so Musk himself will be in good graces again.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/spacex-generated-ab...