[casey2]

SpaceX insiders have so many shares, once they can they are going to dump hard, get ready for another -$1T. Morningstar says $780 billion.

Clown show:

Raymond James - $800

Morgan Stanley - $300

Deutsche Bank - $255

JPMorgan - $225

Goldman Sachs - $205

Citi - $200

[hx8]

$200b seems very low for a company with this level of capital investment. They did 167 launches last year. It's one of the few industries where US is outproducing China. We have both more launches and heavier launches.

Put another way, the US spent $250b~ (inflation adjusted) dollars on the shuttle program, and we get much more output from SpaceX than we did for Shuttle.

[Zsfe510asG]

The list contains target share prices, not market cap. $200 is way above the current $125.

The launch number is irrelevant. Starlink is SpaceX's largest customer and that is a problem. The revenue from launches is not great. The xAI fantasies are unproven.

[lukeschlather]

SpaceX's annual revenue is estimated at $40B for 2026. A comparison might be Lockheed Martin, with annual revenue of $75B in 2025, and a market cap of $120B. So I wouldn't say $200B sounds low at all, even if their revenue doubles (twice, since $40B is actually a projection where they were doing $20B last year, though it's apples and oranges with the acquisition of Musk's failing companies.)

[FloorEgg]

Comparing revenue, without at least also comparing revenue growth rates and leverage ratios is really nonsense financial analysis.

It was the same thing with Tesla. Everyone screaming when Tesla had. $20bn market cap how they were extremely over valued because their car sales revenue paled in comparison to the other car manufacturers and yet their market cap was in the same ballpark. It was such a joke and so obviously unprofessional / dishonest. The traditional automakers were all nearly insolvent (tens to hundreds of billions of debt) and had stagnant growth. At the time Tesla had no debt and was growing consistently ~70% a year. Anyone willing to actually analyze and see the truth and not just read headlines and repeat them could have seen it.

[lukeschlather]

I think Lockheed Martin is less leveraged than either SpaceX or Tesla. Also SpaceX just folded in several of Musk's companies that seemed questionably solvent. I really have zero clue how to value the resulting mess of liabilities and highly questionable revenue streams mixed with very solid ones, but $200B doesn't sound unreasonable. $1.6T sounds very high. My intention behind comparing to Lockheed Martin was to presume revenue would double for two consecutive years, which I viewed as reasonably charitable.

[FloorEgg]

I haven't done a financial deep dive into SpaceX since all the consolidation, been focused on other things, so I really don't know how to price it either. It feels overpriced to me too.

That said, I would expect SpaceX to grow at a compound rate much faster and for longer than any legacy competitor such as Lockheed.

[oblio]

Tesla car sales peaked in 2023 and have declined since. They've retired the models S, X, and the CyberCab is barely selling.

Tesla also peaked at about 15% of Toyota sales. Tesla profit margins are now comparable to regular car manufacturers. Robots are a pipe dream. Robotaxis are a decade into the future as a meaningful business.

How exactly does Tesla's market cap make any sense?

[FloorEgg]

Everything you said sounds about right to me.

The point I was making was based on a reference to their market cap when it was $20bn in 2018. At the time there was overwhelming and biased negative sentiment about how it was over-valued at the time that wasn't based on a sound analysis.

Funny enough, I think the answer to your question may be in what happened back then.

In 2018 Tesla had a dominant technological advantage in EVs and a strong brand. There was overwhelming anti-tesla investment propaganda, and history's largest short position against them. When a company is over-shorted and then increases in intrinsic value instead of going bankrupt, those shorts covering will put further upwards pressure on the share price. So for at least a while, maybe a long while, the company will be over valued to correct for the previous over-shorting.

[OrvalWintermute]

Reusable launch vehicles were in their infancy during the Shuttle program days.

Multiple launch vehicles and crew vehicles exist now, and more are on their way.

Taking tech from TRL1 to TRL9 with 2.5million moving parts in it is vastly different from coming up with another TRL9 design.

[manquer]

As the other poster said it is guidance from analysts. The Raymond one at the top equates to $10T valuation

[bakies]

How do they come up with these numbers?

[stackghost]

That's actually a great question. Valuation of public companies is part science, part art, and part total bullshit. You can go way down the rabbit hole on this sort of thing.

In days of yore you'd look at the fundamentals like:

- ability of the firm to service its debt

- profitability ratios

- revenue growth

- total addressable market

- competition

- market dynamics

etc.

You'd also pore over their quarterly and annual regulatory findings and see what's in the MD&A sections, assess the competency of senior leadership, look at how they view themselves, etc.

Then you'd look at comparable firms, i.e. companies doing the same or materially-similar things. Some of those are "pure plays", i.e. companies selling exactly the same product/service (e.g. TSMC, UMC, GFS) and some are not pure (e.g. red bull sells energy drinks but it also has a bunch of other stuff like a formula 1 team).

You compare your target company's fundamentals to those of its comparables, see what prices those comps are trading at, look at discounted cash flows, and then you pull a semi-informed number more or less out of your ass for the target as a forecast, based on your analysis.

These days, though, valuations are more or less completely disconnected from fundamentals. This is why Warren Buffett-style value investing is commonly said to be dead in today's market.

[casey2]

They pull them out of their (*((