Remember that xAI acquired Twitter/X, a failing overvalued business. And then SpaceX acquired xAI for a highly dubious $250 billion even though they’re irrelevant in AI. And today SpaceX’s president talked about merging with Tesla (https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/12/spacex-president-gwynne-sh...), another weakening business.
It seems like a shell game if being played where one company is used to bail out the investors of other companies. With all this merging, shouldn’t there be a case for breaking up SpaceX and not having it become some overly large conglomerate? How are all these dubious moves being blessed by boards of these companies - are they corrupt and stacked with Elon’s friends?
And what of the pay structure Musk has. Will a merger with Tesla trigger its conditions in a dishonest way?
Ultimately, SpaceX is WAY overvalued. Morningstar valued them at roughly half of the IPO price they were seeking (https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/spacex-what-investors-nee...). This spike does not make sense, and people will likely get burned at some point. But Musk will become a trillionaire.
To be clear, companies are valued at whatever people are willing to pay for stocks. Their real financial performance is, as far as I can tell, completely detached from stock price in any real physical form. The only thing that matters is what investors are willing to pay. If that’s true (which it is, right), the stock market is basically just gambling. At which point, rationally, the SpaceX IPO makes sense.
That's already very high. Their profitable businesses are (1) Starlink and (2) Launching satellites. Starlink is growing revenue at maybe 50%, and revenue for launching satellites is growing maybe 10% annually.
But Goldman Sachs, which is leading the IPO process is telling investors that it expected SpaceX’s total revenue to reach $474 billion in 2030, up from $18.7 billion last year. That's 25x growth of revenue in just 4 years.
xAI is a failed company, as is X. Their merger into SpaceX is basically a scam. Elon Musk justified this by saying he is going to send xAI servers into space using SpaceX. This is an unproven idea, not ready for investing.
Elons wealth is entirely in his companies. His worth is what people estimate his shell game is worth. There isnt really an option where Elon can pull the full value out of the company and walk away.
My absolutely normal and financially based reply to you, is getting automatically flagged so its clear some of the YC people who got SpaceX pre-IPO shares ( yes its true...) dont want this discussed.
Buyers know it’s overpriced" would excuse every scammer on Earth (and Mars...)
Every pump scheme works because buyers think they can exit before the collapse. The core is insiders and banks converting asymmetric information and a sci-fi narrative control into exit liquidity.
GameStop was a public market mania. In an IPO insiders and banks package the story, control disclosure, set allocation, collect fees, and dump risk onto later buyers. Calling this voluntary overpayment ignores the mechanism of exit liquidity.
"Buyers know it’s overpriced" would excuse every scammer on Earth (and Mars...)
Every pump scheme works because buyers think they can exit before the collapse. The core is insiders and banks converting asymmetric information and a sci-fi narrative control into exit liquidity.
GameStop was a public market mania. In an IPO insiders and banks package the story, control disclosure, set allocation, collect fees, and dump risk onto later buyers. Calling this voluntary overpayment ignores the mechanism of exit liquidity.
You've got people all over the place saying things like this:
>Bryan Mitchell, in Indianapolis, is among those planning to buy. The 48-year-old marketing executive intends to invest several thousand dollars in the IPO. He has also poured tens of thousands into Baron Partners Fund, which holds a stake in SpaceX.
>“This feels like the appetizer. You have to believe in Elon,” he said. “I’m willing to overpay for it just to say I’m part of the thing.”
Bryan isn't being scammed, Bryan just wants to feel like he's a part of something greater and is willing to pay for that. It's not surprising that space travel would be the thing to inspire vast amounts of retail investors to behave in that manner.
> Bryan isn't being scammed, Bryan just wants to feel like he's a part of something greater and is willing to pay for that. It's not surprising that space travel would be the thing to inspire vast amounts of retail investors to behave in that manner.
Heck, some centuries ago you could buy indulgences to fund the building of St. Peter's Basilica. Maybe the feeling is real, maybe it's to justify the greed to one's self (like you seem to be doing), but just like the Church was selling the idea of a great eternal afterlife to rob you, this company is selling the idea of an interstellar future to do the same.
The church had to actively nag for those indulgences, with SpaceX people have been desperate to get their money in for years and years without SpaceX even asking for it.
> Maybe the feeling is real, maybe it's to justify the greed to one's self (like you seem to be doing)
For what it's worth, I do not own any spcx shares. I just think there's something fascinating happening here, and dismissing it as a mere scam because we dislike Elon Musk would be silly.
> this company is selling the idea of an interstellar future to do the same
It is also, perhaps, one of the easiest and more effective ways in which an individual can vote for such a future.
If only space travel wasn't almost a footnote to SpaceX's IPO. "The thing" Bryan is a part of is the worst and most controversial (and that's quite an accomplishment) of the frontier lab AIs.