[pandoro]

The other day I was thinking: "if Musk disappears tomorrow would the valuation still be in the same ballpark?". I don't think so at all. In this context, it feels like even 150 Billions would be a big stretch considering revenue and forecasts. The coming IPOs and numbers are completely detached from reality and we are all in for a crash that will make 2008 look like a walk in the park.

[ryandvm]

Wild that the guy whose decisions are directly responsible for driving profitability into the ground is somehow the reason these companies have 300+ PE valuations.

[minraws]

Proves the point that skills don't matter results do, if a monkey manages to make better milkshake and you fire the chef, you didn't really improve the kitchen.

But that's what we do in stock and markets and well whatever we are living through, sometimes bad decisions can have good results because you were right place right time. if it happens more than once, that doesn't mean it was incredible it just means the bias works.

If 1% of the innovators had access to levels of cheap capital Musk has had, we might be living in a different reality.

SamAltman for all his faults brought trillion dollar NLP systems to reality by sheer ability to raise capital.

Everyone believes if things go south Musk can raise another Trillion somehow. And honestly I wouldn't bet against the guy.

[cogman10]

This all assumes there was some skill involved. Instead, this along with gamestop and a few other meme stocks are showing that the stock market simply isn't as rational as finance experts have wanted to pretend.

This is a bitcoin stock market. Things are valued entirely based on what others are willing to buy for. They are not valued based on any attribute of the underlying asset. Exactly like bitcoin, it's whim and whimsy which is driving prices.

It's group gambling at this point. Everyone is betting that there won't be a run on the market.

[_DeadFred_]

It has always been gambling. The non-gambling version was grandma holding dividend stocks. Any stock that isn't one you buy for dividends is gambling. The whole point of index funds is spread out the odds.

[glimshe]

Everything is valued by what people are willing to pay for it.

[cogman10]

The myth of the stock market was that value was tied to the performance or potential of the company whose ownership you were taking a part of.

[twiceaday]

Value is tied to how people assess value. They used to assess it on the performance or potential of the company whose ownership you were taking a part of. Now speculation plays a much bigger role. This seems predictably correlated with distance to last deep crash.

[8ytecoder]

Skills do matter. It’s just a different type of skill. Merit doesn’t matter - but even that’s a bit arguable - if the merit is decided based on what someone is creating value for their shareholders and value is entirely defined by stock price, it seems to be working well too.

(Not that I agree this is right)

[moate]

"If the guy with insider access to the Kleptocracy left would this thing be as valuable" is a resounding NO when you're selling exploding space ships and a 3rd tier AI, a service that consumers continue to find complicated at best.

[altcognito]

SpaceX sells starlink. That's probably the most valuable part of SpaceX by far based on recurring revenue. While they've made spaceflight reasonably cheap and reliable for a particular category of payloads - clearly there wasn't phantom demand just waiting to be launched.

Given the IPO, I suspect they're hitting the wall with regards to new starlink signups, and SpaceX is done growing.

SpaceX has $6.6B adjusted EBITDA, which, at a premium multiplier would probably put it somewhere around 80-150 billion as a company.

[guidedlight]

There are competitors to Starlink arriving now.

For example, the Australian government has selected Project Kepler (now called Amazon Leo) to provide broadband services to the Australian Outback.

https://www.nbnco.com.au/corporate-information/media-centre/...

And geopolitical shenanigans in Ukraine with Musk and Starlink means that it may not be a reliable partner.

[AdamJacobMuller]

And LEO is using SpaceX to launch.

SpaceX was launching a modest % of the LEO constellation but after the Blue Origin failure, SpaceX is the only launch provider who can fill that gap and actually let LEO deliver on contracted time.

Please don't misunderstand me, I'm no Musk sycophant though I do love SpaceX and Starlink. I want us to have multiple providers of super cheap space launch capabilities and multiple diverse LEO satellite constellations (3-4 on a global scale makes sense I think?).

I'm sure BlueOrigin will get there some day and I'm sure LEO will get there too (maybe even in the 2028 window if they expand their SpaceX launch partnership).

[g8oz]

I for one am sure that BlueOrigin will never get there.

[AdamJacobMuller]

I hope you are wrong, or at least that someone else does it.

I'm very happy for SpaceX's success but a monopoly on space launch capacity benefits nobody, SpaceX included.

[jampa]

The biggest competitor to Starlink is, ironically, traditional fiber.

When COVID hit, I knew a lot of engineers who decided to move to rural areas / small farms, because they could leverage Starlink to work remotely.

Last year, when I asked whether they still liked Starlink, all of them said it was amazing, but they had gotten fiber coverage in their area from a local provider, so they don't use it anymore, or just use it as a backup.

I think Starlink was a huge demand signal that there were people willing to pay a premium for faster-than-radio internet. So, unless they manage to be cheaper and faster than fiber, I don't think there is much of an endgame there.

[Recurecur]

Starlink isn’t for areas served by fiber, it’s for areas that do not have have good Internet access available, which are far larger than the area served by fiber.

[Recurecur]

Starlink isn’t for areas served by fiber it’s for areas that don’t have have good Internet access available, which are far larger than the area served by fiber.

[pu_pe]

Far larger and less populated. The point of the comment is to illustrate that the TAM is small and shrinking rather than the opposite.

[shpx]

> The Falcon 9 has [...] 641 successful launches, 2 in-flight failures, 1 partial failure and 1 pre-flight destruction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9

> Falcon 9 first-stage boosters have been landed and recovered 616 times out of 629 attempts, including synchronized recoveries of the side-boosters of most Falcon Heavy flights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

[duxup]

It seems like a suicide pact for the companies like Tesla and Musk ... they need each other and then things get worse ...

[nonethewiser]

>I don't think so at all. In this context, it feels like even 150 Billions would be a big stretch considering revenue and forecasts.

How are you valuating SpaceX?

[pandoro]

Their launch business has a dominant market position but is not run for profit and xAI is loosing money. Starlink is the only segment earning real money: $7.2 billion in adjusted EBITDA. So 150 Billions seems "realistic" when taking Musk out of the equation. Maybe 150 to 250 billions would be better as a range if you want to be really optimistic.

[Recurecur]

The stock market is not about current results, it’s about future results.

SpaceX has more future upside than any company I can think of…

[Zigurd]

If you were looking for future upside in space, you will face the same disappointment that everyone enthusiastic about space manufacturing has had for four decades now. Space manufacturing is even in the SpaceX S-1. They're really scraping the bottom of the hype barrel.

Nobody is making a profit in space. Not even Starlink. Once you add in the costs of sustaining their constellation, it barely scrapes by into profitability by underestimating launch costs and an over optimistic projection of future costs.

Starlink can't serve more than a small fraction of an urban population because each bird has a pretty low capacity limit, and terrestrial wireless keeps chipping away at their TAM out in the countryside. Terrestrial wireless infrastructure has a track record of declining costs. The rate at which it eats up the customers Starlink is counting on accelerates.

[UncleMeat]

How? The total market for space flight is low. Satellite internet is nice but again small. Is this just all grok?

[dwaltrip]

The total market size might be low this year or the next. But, for better or worse, humans will continue to push into the unknown.

Reusable rockets will change the economics of space travel beyond recognition. Jevon’s paradox will strike hard and fast. Starlink is the initial proof of this.

Maybe Starship will be the first to achieve the fabled dream of rapid reusability. Maybe not. Either way, it’s a tractable engineering problem at this point and the path has been made pretty clear.

I have no idea what the valuation of SpaceX should be. But, in general, I’d bet a lot on the launch industry growing enormously in the coming decades.

[ndsipa_pomu]

The increasing amount of space debris will likely change the economics of getting satellites into space and keeping them there. The more junk there is, the more likely that it's going to hit something and create yet more debris.

[bagels]

Starlink is growing. Valuation is too high, but it is growing.

[UncleMeat]

"Growing" and "more future upside than any other company" are very different things.

[johneth]

The stock market is not about future results, it's about gambling, especially over the last decade.

[dualvariable]

> and xAI is loosing money.

xAI is burning through a tremendous amount of money.

it is getting propped up right now through leasing compute to Anthropic, which isn't really AI sector profitability. even if the AI bubble doesn't collapse, Anthropic is unlikely to want to keep shovelling money at its competitor.

and right now the xAI+x business segment is getting propped up by a couple billion a year in sustainable revenue from social media, making it look better than it should.

the core SpaceX/Starlink business itself looks pretty amazing and could probably justify $600B-$1T valuations, having roughly comparable financials to something like Visa, particularly if you removed the Starship development costs. but to say xAI is a boat anchor is probably being overly charitable... like if your boat anchor was a supertanker that was sinking into the abyss.

[remus]

Not at >100x revenue, presumably.

[mcmoor]

Elon Musk seems like an ultimate counterexample of a person that "deserves" his dozens of billions of dollars. Because his name alone for some reason raises the percepted value of a company by that much amount. No amount of one person's or even dozens' hard labour will be able to match this. Of course it may come crashing anytime and Ponzi also had a similar kind of "productivity", but it really shows that not all labours are equal.

[Zigurd]

It's also the boys who never grew out of cheesy science fiction. Elon became their cult leader. Together they turned both Tesla and SpaceX into meme stocks. Meme stocks are amusing when they just mess with finance bros. But we've let the game get out of control.