The criticism seems politically motivated. Considering what happened to Blue Origin, SpaceX's success is commendable. Although I agree $1.8T seems crazy.
I don't think it's politically motivated at all. My impression of this IPO is that it's designed to inflate SpaceX's perceived value by offering very limited float and aggressively seeking to capture passive money by bargaining for inclusion in indices it would not otherwise be eligible for. Speaking as a passive investor myself, I want my money nowhere near this company until it meets the old eligibility criteria.
The "space economy" is not yet a certainty, other than in the mind of science fiction fans. (Unsurprisingly, hard to reach irradiated rocks of undifferentiated boring minerals in a cold vacuum are of negligible value to humans here on Earth.)
Even if the Star Trek utopian future materialises, it is very likely to be a long time from now.
1. SpaceX has competitors. Most are making reusable rockets.
2. SpaceX has no moat.
3. The concept of money itself might change dramatical by the time SpaceX becomes a multi-planetary mega corporation. Investing now may not return returns in any meaningful sense.
True, and that's exactly the reason why people want to buy this stock now.
If future returns were already (almost) certain, they would have been priced in and you couldn't make any money with this stock.
This is a classic high risk / high reward stock. IF the space economy takes off you might 10X your investment. If it doesn't, you might lose most of it.
Rich people (who own most of the stock market) can afford to make such high risk bets, because they can afford to lose the money and thus many will make that bet.
If the space economy expands + if spacex continue to hold market share + if it can do so while increasing profitably against increasing competition in the future. And considering the argument is for "the most valuable company", if spacex can do all of the above while other non-space related companies that are hugely profitable slow down their paces of innovation, spacex could be the most valuable company ever.
Why do people believe SpaceX is trying to democratize space flight? Thats demonstrably false if you actually listen to the things Elon says. He wants to go to Mars so he can setup the equivalent of the racist gated community he grew up in. That way he and his rich friends can escape there once being on earth is no longer tenable.
The SpaceX S-1 contradicts your claim by including an optimistic "TAA" (total addressable market) figure for "the space industry". Which falls heavily short of your claim. While the SpaceX claimed total TTA is mostly (like 80%) AI-powered "enterprise applications" which don't exist and are not related to space data centers or whatever.
Also, starlink is stupid as a long-term play. Do you really think tossing satellites up into to space and replacing them every few years is cheaper or more sustainable than just building out wired infrastructure on the ground that can be used for decades? Plus, the is a finite limit to how much they can scale based in physics.
It doesn't matter if it's successful or not. Their space business is worth virtually nothing on paper and the funding structures and profit/loss accounts are scary.
While the Starship project may be struggling, Falcon 9 is still a massive success, with a successful launch every couple of weeks, making up most of humanity's access to space/LEO right now.
And Starlink is a pretty big deal, particularly in a time of conflict where undersea cables are very vulnerable.
If Elon hadn't shifted so far to the right, these threads would be near-universally praising SpaceX despite Starship's struggles.
A symptom of his fickle nature and erratic behavior, as well as general poor impulse control, all of which rightfully make people skittish with their money and question his judgment.
I dont think he was fickle with this one. He was remarkably consistent.
He had period where he though he can become hero for the democrats due to green cars. It did not worked, neither democrats nor left accepted him as unconditional hero.
The racism, the villingness to cause harm to get more power for himself were there whole time. He was far right the whole time, just became more extreme and open when it stopped being disadvantage.
He also loudly proclaimed support for trans rights and called out people on Twitter who didn’t, as well as other progressive issues. It wasn’t just “green cars.” So either he was just being a cynic/lying, which is bad. Or he suddenly became a bigot, which is also bad.
But it’s at the whim of someone who I think nobody can describe as stable or trustworthy. Starlink the technology is great, Starlink the company has a massive weight attached to it.
Falcon 9 is a serendipitous technical success for a rocket that wasn't designed to land and be reused. It is an operational success. Whether that makes it a financial success is very questionable.
Starship is meant to answer all those questions about design intent and financial viability and then some. It could readily turn out to be an example of second system syndrome.
Interesting definition of "struggling", as in "managed to catch the largest booster rocket ever built with by snatching it mid air, and land the largest space ship in the ocean using a belly flop maneuver that everyone said was crazy and would never work".
Overall, the rocket launching part of SpaceX is making a loss. Starship R&D is, despite being cheaper than traditional old space development, still *very* expensive.
If Starship wasn't being developed (either because it worked and replaced Falcon or just if they stop), they wouldn't be making a loss on rockets.
The 'struggle' is that they seem to have regressed from that point, and that the scale of Starship is perhaps too big for a 'fail fast, iterate rapidly' approach.
Especially now that every failure results in a massive wave of negative publicity
Most of the 1.8T hype is not at all related to the rocketry business. Well, I suppose if you buy the "AI DCs in space" pitch they could be somewhat related.
What's political is a policy change to "fast track" companies into the Nasdaq 100. Spacex is the first to benefit from this loophole that allows them to be added to indexes almost immediately after listing, which likely is a license to steal a bunch of regular folks retirement money. Elon Musk doesn't need more ways to steal people's money.
The unfortunate thing is, a lot of people have no idea this rule change has gone into effect, and that they're about to get fleeced by a bunch of professional investors.
It's legalized theft, and the victims are people least able to defend themselves from it. Most people have no idea what's in their retirement accounts, or track very closely what's being tracked by the index funds they've been told for decades was the safest way to invest in the stock market for non-pros.
>Akademikerpension also said the governance structure of SpaceX was "extremely deficient", adding that Elon Musk is expected to control more than 80% of the voting rights while simultaneously serving as chief executive officer, chief technology officer and chair of the board.
I think you'll find the whole valuation of the S&P500 is built upon retirement accounts. Yours. Mine.
In other words, look one level deeper and you'll see it's not the S&P500 that's overvalued. It's you and me and 100 million other people desperately attempting to make sure young people pay for them for 20-30 years when they're old.
And then you calculate it out ... and see it's not happening. No matter what the number on the account says.
Zuck was in roughly the same position and they didn’t put out a statement skipping that IPO. The valuation criticism is more valid but this line belies political motivation.
More than 10times higher (possible valuation), 10+ years of Musk showing what kind of liability he is and at that time Zuck didn't have all the main CxO positions.
Google too, and this was in the long term best interests of shareholders.
Imagine in 2010 if investors had real transparency into how much money YouTube or Maps was losing, along with the governance structures to enforce their concerns.
Musk appears far less predictibile, more volatile than Zuck. Musk also got directly involved in US politics aligned with of a man who singlehandedly butchered US relations with almost everyone in the world. A man who threatened Denmark with taking their territory by force.
You’re calling it “political motivation” as some sort of blind hate or vendetta out of principle, cutting off the nose to spite the face. But you can no longer separate Musk from politics and aggression towards Denmark.
The pension fund’s assessment looks entirely valid, objective and justifiable to me. But for anyone who personally favors Musk and his political views any dismissal will look politically motivated. It’s easy to cry foul. In this light your shallow dismissal might be just as politically motivated.
The political motivation is on Musks part. There's no unpolitical view of a man who ransacked the US government and is propping up far-right movements all over Europe.
There's a lot of it. But I also see a lot more skepticism of Musk and the rest of the intellectual dork web. Flirting with fascism was edgy. Now it's just icky.
HN is, at the time of writing, over 48 million posts over nearly two decades. Whatever you want to notice, you'll notice plenty of examples of. So, sure, I guess there has been plenty of "simping" over the years on HN. There has also been plenty of the opposite of it. As someone who reads the comments (particularly the most emotionally charged ones) every day, the sentiment towards prominent tech companies and leaders has been leaning decidedly negative on HN for several years.
Yep I'm a moderator and we're reading all the threads all the time, so we get a sense of the overall sentiment. Yes we read the worst comments because they're the ones that needour attention with respect to account penalties and bans. But we still read over all the threads, so we'd see it if there was a large "simping" contingent or tred. But we don't see that; what we see instead generally aligns with HN's reputation for being critical, skeptical, cynical and, at times, curmudgeonly. Much that has its roots in HN's "hacker" ethos, which is anti-establishment by definition. There is a good amount of positivity and enthusiasm too, but barely ever for major companies and rich/powerful figures it's most commonly for small teams and freelance/indie developers who have built a cool project or useful tool. We are thinking about what kind of data analysis would be good to publish.