An passive investors are going to get hosed by this thanks to NASDAQ cooking the rules to favor Elon and his band of misfits.
No longer will there be a year of price discovery for index funds, 15 days. Meaning index funds have to buy it at the peak of the hype cycle. Will be a huge wealth transfer from mom and pop retirement accounts to the ultra wealthy.
All these IPOs are extremely bearish and mirroring the 2019 race-for-the-exit IPOs out there.
Of course once again, you are "not allowed" to be early into pre-IPO companies which is where the actual money is made.
The moment several companies start IPOing, you are already too late for those multiples and have to wait for a massive crash until these stocks reach all time lows after IPO.
> Starship at $170B is pure option value on technology still in advanced testing.
The argument that Starship is somehow an experimental/unproven technology that might fail to materialise was absurd but plausible sounding before flight 1, there were many new technologies simultaneously being deployed to a single launch system in one go.
But after 3 tower catches of the booster demonstrating centimetres of guided precision of the entire stack, this is becoming a tired argument.
I know the author is not making that case at all here, but it seems like one the core reasons to undervalue SpaceX is that Starship might not work out, and this all sounds exactly like how reusability might not work out for the Falcon 9 from 10 years ago.
1. Tesla was priced at $2.5b end of 2010.
2. Tesla started production that year of the model S, with nearly 500km range and 0-100 in 4.4 seconds, still competitive 16 years later. It was an obvious disruption of a proven market.
3. that car market was valued at half a trillion at the time.
So Tesla being valued at 0.5% of the market, with disruptive technology, seems fine. Of course it was a moonshot, but hindsight is 20/20.
But what is the total market here that it's stepping into? Seems like SpaceX is servicing the majority of the market for years, yet it just has 16 billion revenue. How that gets you to 1.75 trillion, I don't know.
It’s also one of the thinnest floats IPO’ing. They’re only selling less than 5% of the company. That introduces a lot of sensitivity in the valuation, not to mention there exists a bit of game theory around fund managers needing to join in to maintain nominal returns with their peers.
The xAI piece is the one that stands out to me. $258B for a lab that's burning $1.46B/quarter against $430M revenue, valued almost entirely on a merger anchor from four months ago.
Most of the numbers seen arbitrary to me. Why is Starship worth $170bn? Based on what analysis? Why 38x earnings for Starlink? Maybe the AI has some justification, but the way it is presented just looks flimsy.
Having never really looked at valuations, my ignorant mind can get from Starlink's 10M subscribers to a $380B valuation. If you make $100/mo/user that's 12B/yr and that with a higher 50x P/E ratio is 60B. If you go to 100x, that's $120B.
I know it’s easy to sit at home being indignant at the internet, but how on earth does an ISP with 10M subscribers and the most expensive infrastructure in the solar system ever come out to be worth $300B? They even have to routinely replenish their “cell towers” as their orbits decay.
Any mid-sized country would have multiple cellphone and Internet providers with larger customer bases and less upkeep.
Does it make sense to value Starship Commercial Launch at $170B, _and_ Falcon 9/Heavy at $100B? I would expect that if Starship achieves its operational goals, then it should quickly deprecate nearly all uses of Falcon, the exceptions being national security launches that require validating the launcher, or Dragon launches for similar reasons. Even those categories are likely on a countdown the moment starship is rapidly reusable.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 36.8 ms ] threadnet income probably: $1.5B – $3B
P/E:500-1000
Of course people will trip overthemselves to buy it up.
No longer will there be a year of price discovery for index funds, 15 days. Meaning index funds have to buy it at the peak of the hype cycle. Will be a huge wealth transfer from mom and pop retirement accounts to the ultra wealthy.
Of course once again, you are "not allowed" to be early into pre-IPO companies which is where the actual money is made.
The moment several companies start IPOing, you are already too late for those multiples and have to wait for a massive crash until these stocks reach all time lows after IPO.
The argument that Starship is somehow an experimental/unproven technology that might fail to materialise was absurd but plausible sounding before flight 1, there were many new technologies simultaneously being deployed to a single launch system in one go.
But after 3 tower catches of the booster demonstrating centimetres of guided precision of the entire stack, this is becoming a tired argument.
I know the author is not making that case at all here, but it seems like one the core reasons to undervalue SpaceX is that Starship might not work out, and this all sounds exactly like how reusability might not work out for the Falcon 9 from 10 years ago.
1. Tesla was priced at $2.5b end of 2010. 2. Tesla started production that year of the model S, with nearly 500km range and 0-100 in 4.4 seconds, still competitive 16 years later. It was an obvious disruption of a proven market. 3. that car market was valued at half a trillion at the time.
So Tesla being valued at 0.5% of the market, with disruptive technology, seems fine. Of course it was a moonshot, but hindsight is 20/20.
But what is the total market here that it's stepping into? Seems like SpaceX is servicing the majority of the market for years, yet it just has 16 billion revenue. How that gets you to 1.75 trillion, I don't know.
Check out Matt Levine commentary, which goes into more detail (SpaceX Indexing) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-31/are...
The SpaceX IPO: retail investor notes
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47612775
SpaceX files to go public
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604155
Starship: zero competitors & potentially makes humans inter-planetary.
Seems crazy if investors put more value on Grok.
Any mid-sized country would have multiple cellphone and Internet providers with larger customer bases and less upkeep.