Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

https://www.matteast.io/spacex-escape-velocity.html

103•meast•1h ago

Comments

SXX•1h ago

You never know what inflation gonna be in futute. In some countries that turned into autocracies with strong and long standing leaders who love traditional values and religion inflation can easily be 30-70% a year.

Then not only 4.3T reachable, but even 43T.

epolanski•59m ago

Solid argument to get into the IPO asap. /s

malfist•59m ago

Sorry, but I'm not pricing a stock today based on the assumption that this country will turn into a theocratic autocracy with a 70% YoY inflation rate for 15 years.

Besides, if I was pricing that in, I'd be buying indexes and not a specific stock. The 70% YoY inflation would rise all tides. Not just SpaceX.

voidfunc•54m ago

Will? It already has turned into one.

sidewndr46•45m ago

Isn't SpaceX uniquely in the position to benefit from that kind of government?

marcosdumay•40m ago

Nothing the GP said makes SpaceX a better stock. It would just make the promise technically true in a way that doesn't benefit any investor.

Or, in other words, it's a joke.

scottyah•38m ago

But these insane valuations are leading the tide-rising. This is one instrument in inflation because it's "creating" this money from nothing. All the employees that got a $5k bonus 5yrs ago will see it rise to $50k (or more) out of thin air (crazy financial mechanisms).

bluGill•35m ago

If inflation is really that high I'm buying hard assets that won't depreciate. Sure I will need some cash, but gold bars in my personal safe suddenly are a great investment (gold is generally a terrible investment, but when inflation is the main concern is is really good)

threetonesun•17m ago

Until SpaceX finds that golden asteroid.

downrightmike•54m ago

China launched a direct competitor on June 2nd

"China launches debut mission of Falcon 9-like rocket with no advance notice" https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...

Spacex is going to get rekt, China has all the materials and workforce

re-thc•52m ago

> Spacex is going to get rekt, China has all the materials and workforce

According to their brief, most of the revenue is going to come from AI!

The rockets are apparently just "minor" now.

ActionHank•48m ago

That must be a mistake, revenue isn't the word for the money you're going to throw in the furnace.

bilbo0s•49m ago

Well, SpaceX is supposed to be more about AI than low cost orbital launches. At least that’s what their roadshow is claiming.

But either way, yeah, I’m not willing to bet much money on USD4.3T unless we can get some serious financial engineering, (read “circular deals”), going.

scottyah•27m ago

We've seen through Tesla that software, government regulation, and to a smaller degree build quality are the only moats against China that still currently hold.

zuzululu•52m ago

at that inflation rate the US dollar would lose its reserve currency status so I doubt it

at some point interest rates should reach double digits like in the 70s following oil crisis

the only crazy scenario for spaceX is it does space exploration/mining and finds something extremely exotic or valuable and sought after.

scottyah•31m ago

I get the feeling that in 5yrs or so if China makes the yuan free-floating it will be more of a reserve currency.

All spaceX has to do is keep being as innovative and industrious as it is now, in the physical world as all other companies are getting very lazy or just working on software. Eventually it'll probably go the way of GE because humans are humans, but I think we have a few decades until more compelling places to work come up.

soperj•19m ago

> All spaceX has to do is keep being as innovative and industrious as it is now

SpaceX seemed to lose a big step when Musk got involved in DOGE. I don't know if key people left or what, but the pace seem to slow considerably, and the successes also seemed to come to a crashing halt.

mullingitover•10m ago

Some principled people left when he made his big heel turn into openly promoting ethnonationalist authoritarianism.

Pretty sure some other principled people stayed behind and are using the field manual[1].

[1] https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184

mohamedkoubaa•

Avshalom•46m ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/10/trump-inflation-cpi-iran-oil... gonna hit 4.3 easy.

thatmf•46m ago

> Donald Trump said “I love the inflation” after new data showed that inflation jumped to an annual rate of 4.2% in May, the third consecutive monthly increase since the start of the Iran war and a three-year high.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jun/10/inflation-r...

You may be on to something...

SecretDreams•4m ago

This is true. We just need to bank on a total economic collapse and all of our SpaceX valuation fantasies can come true.

sometimelurker•58m ago

thx

adding a mode on this that prevents animations would be nice addition tho

Jblx2•58m ago

A grammar corrected title might be better as:

"Why SpaceX's 2040 Revenue Forecast of $4.3T is highly unlikely"

mentalfist•56m ago

It's amazing we're in a timeline were people let stuff like this happen, against any sane logic.

DenverR•56m ago

The actual takeaway question is "is Elon Musk on a frontier of his own — or is the market extrapolating one proven outlier onto an unproven one?"

The HN title editorializes its own answer to the author's question.

devindotcom•50m ago

it's a rhetorical question, not a real one. the author's inclination is clear as day.

DenverR•39m ago

it's written to provoke thought and reflection.

the title does the reflection on behalf of the reader which is a disservice.

bigyabai•54m ago

> AN ESSAY IN SCROLLS

I'd have preferred the essay. This kind of Claude Code landing page turns people off when the content is otherwise meaningful.

The target audience will be looking for any reason to excuse this logic, and by vibe coding them a website you've given them their reason.

m3kw9•53m ago

I know this sounds "bad" but early in Tesla's forcasts, I've seen many "highly unlikely" articles, but Tesla ended up blowing past expectations. This one is tough too, but I hate just dismiss it as unlikely especially with Elon at the helm

JumpinJack_Cash•47m ago

Those things were highly unlikely because they accounted for rationality from the consumer's end as well as the political's end and of course Fed and regulators

All 3 went out of the window sometimes around 2015 or so.

itsgonnabebad•43m ago

Blown past?

It was only a few years ago people were saying Tesla was going to own the entire car market, and everyone else would go out of business. The Cybertruck was going to be the best selling car of all time, the insurance business was going to be a massive money maker etc.

None of these things happened.

throwawayqqq11•9m ago

Elon is a true grand master to blow past shifted goal posts. If people continue to fall for it, he might have success, however you define it.

Eji1700•41m ago

I think the only opinion I care about on this will be Aswath Damodaran https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQKIJU7TmTc

I plan to stay the fuck away from it either way, but he's at least someone who's not only good at this stuff, showing their work and approaching it professionally.

I haven't had time to watch the video, but I read through part of the blog post, and seems he believes 1.2T is possible,but I won't know how much I agree with that until I finish reading/watching it all.

It's at, the very least, a professional presentation so it's a hell of a lot easier to see why and what he does/doesn't agree with.

danielovichdk•47m ago

I think the US is in such a fucked up place economically, that the stock market is so overheated and will cause grave inflation, but it's the only lever left to pull for the government, that it will cause havoc within the next 10 years.

SpaceX or any of AI companies for that matter is absolutely not worth their money, but they will be carried through by government legislation, because otherwise the economy will be fucked for the US.

SpaceX ... 4.3 trillion...what the fuck are you on about

scottyah•11m ago

I mean, the entire predicted value that the company will be worth is like 6mo of the US budget (>$7 Trillion per year). I don't think that's all that much, even if they accomplish half of what they're all trying to do.

The economy is already F'd because so few people are actually working productively- it's been a laptop-class driven economy since the 80s.

ck2•47m ago

I'm still struggling with the idea that 4,400 millionaires are going to be created overnight

(out of 22,000 employees)

Because many of them are going to sell sell sell at least half of their shares

Which then means the value will PLUMMET

supertroop•43m ago

College roommate worked for nvidia and cashed out last year and retired in his early 50s. Tens of millions in cash. After tax too. Am I jealous? Hell yes.

itsgonnabebad•41m ago

You realize there will be people on the other end wanting and/or being forced to buy buy buy right? They aren't selling into a vacuum.

People seem to have a weak grasp on how supply and demand dynamics actually work in a market. Price doesn't magically plummet; people need to agree to buy and sell at a given price.

criddell•37m ago

I take it you are going to be shorting the stock?

scottyah•8m ago

I think most still believe in the mission, especially the ones with that many shares. I get selling enough to buy a house and add some diversity to your portfolio, but you really have to have a dismal outlook to sell all your shares, or even half.

eggplantemoji69•47m ago

Isn’t like 90% of their predicted revenue due to their AI products?

square_usual•45m ago

I'm assuming this is vibe coded, because it's got a bunch of the usual tells, so to the people who do this: can you please stop making stupid scrolling presentations where I can see less than a slide of information at a time? Please tell your clanker to just write a blog post instead, or better yet, write it yourself.

shimman•27m ago

eh, am very biased as I design similar sites but I honestly prefer these to what would be likely string of random social media posts.

I like having relevant graphics stickied while text is displayed alongside it (assuming by blog post you mean the typical page-like top to bottom approach).

edit: damn, if these designs are hated what modern approaches do people like? I feel like scroll based text is a relatively unexplored idea compared to the typical blog post.

When it comes to web content, I vastly prefer web like interfaces that you can't reproduce in print.

giancarlostoro•26m ago

My corporate firewall blocked this due to it being a newly registered domain.

So I can't even see it, I care less about "vibe coding" but it sounds like someone registered a domain just to get attention on their amazing take about why they think they're qualified to tell the world the future.

quantified•16m ago

Having read plenty of 1970's and 1980's sci-fi, I feel that clanker is the perfect term.

kylehotchkiss•14m ago

> Please tell your clanker to just write a blog post

lol

d_silin•42m ago

SpaceX already blown through a number of "... but this cannot be!" forecasts. Would not discount them easily.

MPSimmons•33m ago

SpaceX's entire history is full of, "there's no way they'll ever do X", followed by them doing it.

They definitely haven't hit all of their goals, but I don't think anything they want to do is impossible, just really difficult.

testing22321•17m ago

“Here at SpaceX we specialize in making the impossible merely late.”

-Elon

a_shovel•21m ago

Skeptics said SpaceX would fail, but it succeeded. Therefore, skepticism in general is wrong and SpaceX will have an annual revenue of $11 quadrillion by 2030.

kilroy123•21m ago

I was thinking about this lately as well. If you break down their plan of launching a LOT of solar panels into space and strapping a GPU cluster to it. It's not _that_ crazy now.

Prices for solar panels have dropped 90% in the last 10 years.

Price per kilo to Low Earth Orbit has dropped ~50% in the last 10 years.

SpaceX's entire plan is to keep dropping both of these prices down even more with massive solar panel / starship factories.

sleepyguy•27m ago

The US consumer cellular subscription service is around 185 billion a year and if you add business/enterprise it is around 225 billion a year. If they were able (highly unlikely) to capture that market in the US alone through Satellite Cellular service, it would be huge revenue stream. Setting up data centers in orbit (easier said than done) would be another huge revenue stream. Setting up facilities to beam down energy to earths surface could also be an opportunity.

If I learned a good lesson, it's never say never....

wnmurphy•21m ago

Another factor I don't see mentioned: every Trump policy is inflationary. Deporting the labor base, deterring legal immigration, applying tariffs that were basically derived by taking the trade deficit with a country and dividing by 2, and now locking up 20% of the global oil market by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz.

The Fed's response will have to be to raise rates, which is going to crush the multiple of any stock whose valuation is based on the expectation of massive growth.

killjoywashere•17m ago

Elon making outrageous projections? Noooo.....

notorandit•9m ago

Please, correct the typo in the title!

If you build apps with AI tools, this is .uh concerning

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