This is nuts. Can someone explain this cos I just don’t get it. Why would you invest in a company if its well established that its unlikely you’ll ever make a profit or even get that money back??
- Buy stock when it’s valued at $1.75 trillion
- Elon says on twitter he thinks it will be worth $3 trillion soon
- Some idiots buy stock, price goes up
- You sell
- Profit
You can keep doing this as long as there’s a bigger idiot down the line. If you’re still holding the stock when it collapses you’re the biggest idiot and you lose.
SpaceXs initial valuation is so large it will distort the market, and they changed the rules so the index funds will all buy shares automatically to balance their portfolios, which will shoot the price up and balloon the valuation even further, then Elon and the investors that helped him buy twitter can sell at ludicrous prices at the expense of American 401ks and and passive managed pension funds.
It’s a trillion dollar rug pull in broad daylight.
Well… with the help of a lot of naive investors, some pedophile politicians and the amount of drugs he’s taking, everything is in the realm of possibilities
Inflation will be 60x soon enough.
It will grow more than that when we finally admit geo-engineering is the only way to deal with climate change and we’ll have to use SpaceX to send sun-blocking shit into orbit.
I’m all for spacing capitalists, but I don’t think there’s enough of them to blot out the sun.
I can’t wait for my 401k to lose a significant chunk of its value within the next 5 years because some chud at Fidelity needed to ride Elon to the moon. And also the AI crash.
The S&P 500 rejected adding SpaceX though. So no worries from them but when AI crashes and burns so will your 401k.
No idea how US pensions work… But can’t you change the funds?
I sold the default fund and moved it into non US stuff.
If only you could change the currency it’s held in. I have little faith the dollar will be accepted by anyone when I’m retirement age.
majority of his is government contracts.
in order to achieve that they’d have to hire pretty much the entire aerospace industry. everyone in the usa with any expertise in rockets or satellites. im doing my part by never working for that fucking fascist piece of shit.
I’m sorry to i form you that they plan to have a majority of their business revenue come from their AI division, not their satellite division and definitely not their rocket division
Right, but hear me out: I know that SpaceX is impossibly overvalued and that makes me smart. So what if I bought some SpaceX stock, waited for some rubes to buy the stock from me at higher price and then I cashed out? Since I’m so smart, I’m sure I could get in and get out before the whole thing falls apart. /s
Never understood the business model for SpaceX and Starlink. Huge capital and operational costs without a clear understanding of who is paying for it.
The business model is armament. Future warfare uses land and air drones and they require network access, which Starlink provides and they’re much more difficult to jam than ground-based network facilities.
Yeah. Are they really expecting me to believe we can‘t have wide spread fiber that has fairly little maintenance costs but we can totally afford weekly space rocket launches to maintain Starlink? And Starlink is supposed to be an affordable option while still being profitable? Yeah, sure buddy. Totally doesn‘t sound like a hyperloop-esque pipe dream. /s
Stsrlink is about the only thing in the company pulling in solid revenue. There’s a good analysis on https://newspaceeconomy.ca/2026/05/30/what-is-starlinks-financial-performance
But basically it’s a subscription service which they can sell around most of the planet and compete with infrastructure heavy services (as in expensive to replace them). They also have a lot of enterprise customer usecases (like agriculture and construction) as well as cashcow government (army).
Their growth is actually massive compared to last year, and starlink itself is already profitable. Their economy gets better with the investment in the rocket tech. Starship will be able to lift 20x the amount of starlink than falcon 9, apparently also cheaper, while the next gen starlink sats will also be able to serve a lot more customers. That’ll drive their operating cost down, while allowing selling more.
(Just to be clear, spacex as a company is still hot garbage because of the bundling of x and xai and also probably the control structure giving musk all the power while not even holding majority stake, the above is just about starlink and the rocket tech.)
The problem with Starlink is it’s only ever a niche service. There’s a limit to how many satellites you can have in the sky over paying subscribers (as opppsed to, say, deserts or oceans) - I did some back of the envelope maths that put it at about 15 million subscribers with acceptable speeds, maybe double that with terrible service.
By comparison, Deutsche Telekom in Germany alone has 5 times as many mobile subscribers, and a similar number of fixed-line broadband. Amd best of all, Deutsche Telekom doesn’t need to replace all its infrastructure every 5 years when it falls to Earth.
So on what possible basis does Starlink warrant a “to the moon” valuation, and traditional providers don’t? Traditional providers can serve more consumers, at lower cost, with better return on assets…
Starlink, and batshit ideas about datacentres in space, exist for one reason: US infrastructure is complete shit. It would almost certainly be long-run a better investment to fix the power, water, and telecomms infrastructure on the ground, but right now you have a government that would rather private companies fire money into space than pay taxes.
the business model today is to sell satellite internet
in rural areas, satellite internet is cheaper than cable internet if the distance to the nearest town is large enough.
I understand the business pretty well, my issue is where the money is coming from to pay for it the huge costs. It may be there are enough users to sustain it and at what point will it saturate and stagnate?
the market will saturate for sure but they charge each month so they keep making revenue nevertheless
yeah, and they’ve made billions off of it.
at this rate, it’ll only take a century or two to scratch the dent on the enormous costs!
have you actually looked at the numbers of cost and revenue, or are you just talking out of your ass?
reuters: SpaceX generated about $8 billion in profit on $15 billion to $16 billion of revenue last year
SpaceX’s annual capital expenditures quintupled in two years, hitting $20.7 billion in 2025, fueled by simultaneous Starship launch infrastructure and AI data center buildouts.
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/eye-watering-sum-spacex-spent-124427519.html
but that debt # includes stopgap loans before the IPO
costs will only go up from here, so by all means, give musko some of your money. what could go wrong?
For Starlink and SpaceX, I can probably understand the business model, considering the race to getting more satellites to orbit be it for surveying or in case of Starlink stable Internet anywhere. But anything beyond that, like data centers in space I just ridiculous. No way that their valuation is anywhere near what it is realistically.
Starlink is basically a military tech that is too expensive even for the US military, so it was sold to gullible investors as a great deal… It won’t ever be profitable, at least not near the level that was promised. But it might turn out to be essential during a few wars.
I look at Starlink where currently about 6 spacecraft deorbit a week and need replacement as a huge operational cost. Many SpaceX launches are Starlink launches, it raises the question of whether this is a circular or self fulfilling industry.
As far as I understood, I always thought that they just used other people’s rockets to piggyback their own satellites to space basically for free
Haven’t heard that though you need a lot of other launches with space available….
Its actually a great business model as they need to do actual test flights to build better rockets and instead of that being pure R&D expenses, its supplemented by launching Starlink satellites which generate their own revenue for the company.
Great theory, but the Falcon 9 is already a proven design and most of SpaceX’s R&D is going to the starship, which uses completely different engines and which has blown up or disintegrated just as much as its successfully gotten above the atmosphere. It’s also never actually completed an orbit or delivered a gram of anything to orbit.
Starlink is a useful tool to boost launch numbers precisely so investors think things are better than they actually are. Originally SpaceX burned through government and private investor money. Now that they’ve blown through the entire Artemis budget the interim director of nasa gave them through blatant corruption, and launched even more billion dollar fireworks using private investor money, they are desperately trying to convince the public for more fireworks funds.
I suppose that it is that dependence upon Starlink to boost launch numbers makes me suspicious of the books. The whole thing just feels ponzie scheme.
It’s a FOMO play for morons.
The entire valuation is that they say that they can find $28T of businesses on mars and the moon, that that creating these business ideas is something they can do repeatably.
To be fair, you’re only a moron if you are considering it a “hold forever” stock. If you get out in time, or even if you miss-time it, that’s just gambling, which only makes you a moron if you can’t afford the loss.
No single stock should be a hold forever play (unless you count ETFs as a single stock)
A steady dividend stock might be a hold forever stock. Especially if you don’t want to realize the capital gains of the stock’s appreciation.
It’s one single stock for one company, there is still high risk of extreme losses over a very long time
Starlink is massively profitable, look at their balance sheets. It’s very simple, their users pay them a lot of money to access the internet. Far, far more than the launch costs to maintain the constellation.
Their defense launch business is also profitable, though I haven’t checked how much.
The Starship development and stupid acquisitions (xai) have been a money pit though.
Starlink is the only part of SpaceX operations that turns a profit.
Rocket launches do not, and xAi is a bottomless money pit just like every other AI venture.
I don’t think that’s quite true. (Happy to be proven wrong if somebody has better numbers than me.)
From what I can see the launch business generated $4.1 billion, but profits in that segment are negative because the $3 billion in Starship development costs are lumped in to that. The overall loss (-$600 million) would instantly turn into great profit if they decided to give up on Starship.
But for sure, xAi is a nightmare. Absolutely Elon trying to bail himself out again.
Generated 4.1 billion with a profit of how much?
And how much money did they get from the US government?
The best numbers I can find are from 2024, when Starlink made a total of $72 million in profit.
Not great numbers though, as the article explains. It only talks about the cost of the end user hardware and providing the service, so the profit is against those expenses. It doesn’t factor in the cost of launches and satellites.
I don’t think Starlink includes their launch fees, leaving that on SpaceX side of the balance sheet. But I haven’t read details.
And doesn’t SpaceX now also own xAI and Xitter? He’s trying to offload his terrible investments.
Reusable vehicles meant something like 1/20 the per-launch costs of the pre-existing competition? No matter what you want to pay to have put in space, the supplier who reuses equipment will have a huge advantage.
And starlink? Satellite internet access for remote properties used to have all the latency of a return trip to geostationary orbit. Starlink is a massive advantage compared to that.
You’re not wrong, they were kinda burning money to create a business model. I’m a space fanboy though so I’m glad someone is doing it.
Pretty sad that musk is involved at all, but he started it. More sad that it now has the ai cancer stuck to it.
Still I want humans to go beyond earth and I guess I’m willing to let th devil do it
That’s 59% growth annually, every year, for 10 years straight.
Any miss or early miss throws the schedule off significantly.
Pretty close to Moore’s Law, a doubling approximately every 18 months.
“Just trust me, bro.”
One more data center bro I swear
I can do this with two hands closed bro 👍
Doesn’t matter, at this rate, what will even be here in a decade?
AI.
If they can get to an astroid with some titanium or other rare minerals, they can probably be worth it. But I don’t see that happening in my lifetime
the moment that rare minerals become plentiful, they devalue. you can’t get a trillionaire with asteroid mining
Getting there isn’t a problem. The problem is what you do once you’re there. There’s no way to mine an asteroid and bring those minerals back to earth and I don’t see any way for that to change for quite a long time.
Mining such an asteroid will only destroy the metals’ market value into oblivion by nullifying it rarity.
Debeers model? Artificial scarcity
I’m not so sure. That would certainly be the case if you had access to it all at once, but that’s almost certainly not how it would work. Just like how we don’t have access to all of it’s that’s available on earth at once. It’ll be more like a new mine opening up.
This is assuming we don’t mine multiple asteroids at once or open a ton of new mines on a single asteroid. We may get there at some point but that won’t be how it starts. It’ll almost certainly start as a one off, if it gets there at all.
Want my money? Give me Elon’s stock.
If stock per-capita cannot be done, de-capita could be arranged.
