[Retric]

Tesla’s numbers looked vastly more reasonable.

“In 2025, SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue, with its Starlink satellite internet service accounting for $11.39 billion, or 61% of total sales.”

Tesla had higher revenue number in at the start of 2019, when it had a market cap of ~0.06 trillion. Further Tesla was highly volatile in 2021 despite huge earnings growth with some people bank when it fell from 1.2T to 0.34T before recovering.

[mattmaroon]

Tesla’s P/E ratio is currently 365. They have less than 1% market share, and declining, weak profits, products that seem to be suffering from weak updates and brand harm due to Elon’s politics, and competitors outpacing them from all sides.

Toyota’s P/E is under ten. They’ll make more money selling cars this quarter than TSLA will in ten years.

TSLA prices have never been within an order of magnitude of reasonable. They’ve been publicly traded for so long that some of the people legally driving them weren’t born when they IPOed. They’re not a startup and haven’t been in a while.

[Retric]

I agree Tesla’s stock is horribly overvalued, it’s the poster child for the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

My point is as a benchmark it still makes SpaceX look like a bad investment.

[mattmaroon]

Right and my point is that whether or not it’s a bad investment makes absolutely no difference to the people who own the shares because the price is divorced from that. SpaceX shares only have to stay irrational for six months for this rule change to have had no effect.

[Retric]

Ok that seems like a reasonable argument, but it’s got a glaring hole.

The reason for these rules is lockup periods. There’s presumably many people really want to sell significant SpaceX stock at the current price who can’t yet. Effectively August 2026 is going to add more stock to the market and that’s going to continue for a while.

Such post IPO volatility is the justification for indexes to wait, and honestly it’s a very good argument IMO.

[pclmulqdq]

Yes, Tesla was ridiculous at the time, but Tesla’s valuation at the time is normal for tech companies these days. However, the main comparison, which Elon has been trying desperately to escape, is traditional automakers. If you compare how out-of-line Tesla’s PE and PS ratios are against Toyota and other car makers, it’s about the same ratio as SpaceX to tech companies today.