Musk is a bullshitter.
This is true by any objective measure. He goes beyond "marketing" and just tells lies to keep the balls in the air. That he's not held to account is an indictment of the SEC and the whole public equity system in the US.
Sadly, this is not the only trash that is going to be hoisted on us retirement investors. OpenAI is waiting in the wings as well.
I am sure I am not the only one. That doesn't seem like it will be good for the market.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47392550
And Michael Burry also wrote a long post about it:
https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/2032483200404992209
The question is what can we do about it? Nasdaq finalized these rule changes already. It seems like this got rammed through and now it is happening. And I don't expect Trump's corrupt SEC to do anything about it. Who else can we appeal to?
But that is surely offset by Twitter, which is doing great business.
Welp, guess that idea got sold out...
1. Orbital data centers become not only a real thing, but a dominant thing.
2. Grok goes from being a second-tier model mostly useful for not having guardrails to being a step above all other offerings.
3. Twitter realizes its “everything app” ambitions and becomes the WeChat of the West.
4. Starship not only flies operationally, but finds a niche with orders of magnitude more business than Falcon 9 gets. Something like Earth-to-Earth passenger transport at a level that substantially displaces airlines.
All of which seem extremely unlikely. I’m fairly bullish on SpaceX, but as something of a “normal” business. Starship shows promise. Falcon 9 is a cheap workhorse. Starlink seems to just print money. But not anything like a trillion dollars’ worth.
I also like SpaceX - one thing many of the kids around here seem to forget is that elon has managed extremely dire capital and earnings situations very ably in the past - the above list for Tesla ten years ago looked much much worse.
This isn’t dispositive to success on your list but it does mean you can treat the company more like a long call : it almost certainly won’t go away.
Does it? Those satellites are individually dirt cheap compared to historical communication satellites, but Starlink requires a whole lot of them and they depreciate outrageously quickly.
Compare to my personal favorite communication medium, single-mode-fiber. SMF from 20-30 years ago still works, is compatible with most current-generation wavelengths, and can carry extremely high bandwidth per strand if users are willing to put fancy optics and mixes at the ends or can carry lower speeds at transceiver prices that would have been almost unimaginably low 20 years ago.
Starlink satellites seem to have zero or even slightly negative value after five years.
I don't know if it's true that DCF is the "gold standard" for valuing high growth companies. IME it's actually quite bad -- not that there's really good ways to value them; more that DCF is much better for companies that aren't high growth.
High growth companies - especially ones run by Musk -- are intrinsically very hard to value, for reasons like:
- They sometimes - unpredictably - spawn new categories (think Starlink)
- There are too many variables to be able to reliably predict future cash flows (compared to say, an oil company, where future cash flows are largely dependent on oil prices, which can also be forecast with some degree of certainty)
- Risk has a much higher impact on a high growth company, how does DCF try to quantify that? Sure, you can ramp up your risk free rate like TFA suggests, but that's about as coarse a measure as it gets. Consider the risks to e.g. Tesla, how do you quantify them and their impact on its future cash flows?
What it does not incorporate is failure risk, which has to be brought in separately.
Pricing via relative valuation is implicitly DCF… so you can’t escape it actually. If you want to do some pie in the sky shit and pull a number out of thin air - go ahead.
But also Musk needs to get paid $1T, and he also needs indices to change their rules to pump more of your money into his giga-IPO.
Nothing to see here.
Long RONB (holds a ton of spacex), short ARKK (similar composition sans SpaceX) - or if you have a lot of time, you can short non-spacex RONB holdings. Planning to sell just after the IPO
guywithahat•1h ago
I don't think this is right; when Google first IPO'd the sentiment was that they had a single successful product, search, and the stock was expected to track search. Now they have a whole suite of successful products.
Similarily SoaceX is viewed as a rocket company, but they're likely to continue to expand their product range, and for all we know some of their future products could be bigger and more profitable.
foobarian•1h ago
nutjob2•1h ago
Google's price went up as they were more successful and created new products. They didn't try to extract money upfront from investors for vapor.
guywithahat•17m ago
u1hcw9nx•1h ago
In your opinion how much SpaceX should be valued to be overpriced?
If $1.75T is OK. Is $5T too much? I think the idea is that with over 1.5 valuation that is already taken into account (as is the narrative fallacy)
guywithahat•5m ago
I know this is a lame answer because it's an appeal to authority, but I don't have an opinion on the share price other than very knowledgeable people have agreed it's fair and put up a lot of their own money.
What I do have an opinion on is that I think there's plenty of room for them to expand the market and grow. I also know the EBITDA for SpaceX is outrageously high for a hardware company, would would suggest it's a lucrative industry that others have trouble entering with low recurring costs. It seems likely to me they could continue to grow on 15 billion of revenue, and this growth is likely to be profitable.
dan353hehe•1h ago
Like what? Do they have anything that actually brings in income other than advertising?
SpaceX also is Twitter(X), and Xai. So they already have several products that are loosing them money. Not sure what else they have in the pipeline other then ai data centers in space.
jayd16•1h ago
You're saying in 20 years SpaceX being valued at ~500x current Googles is likely?