The company has plenty of revenue, and if needed can just turn off the r&d tap and become a boring company. Terrible for the shareholders obviously, but the bond holders will be fine.
I mean the bond yield is 6.65% over US Treasury returns of 4.75% so it's not like everyone's running in fear of their imminent collapse either. But they're less confident than they were when Elon company valuations looked immune to gravity.
Could you imagine the abuse of power that could happen if one person held over 50% of the voting power at such a company?
So I wouldn't really give too many points to "the general public" for this one.
These things have a way of working themselves out. But look at almost all IPOs and the next 12 months the stock is down 50+% so I'd rather wait. And honestly when I buy, it's to hold 10+ years, not make a quick buck and it's because I believe in the value. You can believe in SpaceX but also still believe the market and the dynamics of IPOs is almost criminal for retail investors.
It's almost as bad as crypto token sales tbh.
The business fundamentals are rarely sound for modern IPOs, especially anything Elon adjacent. His companies are just as bad as crypto token sales in terms of their hype. Heck, some of the stock price appreciation of Tesla _was_ driven by their ownership of crypto for a year or two.
2.31% spread over treasuries is heading for junk bond status?
1. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/04/world/lancet-usaid-global-aid...
2. https://www.latintimes.com/researchers-estimate-usaid-cuts-h...
We'll see what ratings agencies think of the health of the company.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/nasdaq-che...
So, it's doing pretty well!
My best guess, it makes it harder to get loans in the future.
That can snowball: wider spreads → higher borrowing costs → more stress → wider spreads. The existing bonds' coupons are fixed, so the real bite is on future issuance and refinancing.
Lots of capital-intensive companies (SpaceX is definitely in this category) lean heavily on debt markets to fund ongoing investment and roll over maturing debt, so losing cheap access is a big deal.
He said he aimed to have 5000 Optimus robots out by end of 2025, 50000 by 2026 and 10 times that in 2027.
He promised in 2015 that full autonomous driving would arrive in 2 years and we aren't there yet 11 years later. He even said in 2016 that there would be coast-to-coast autonomous driving in 2017.
He promised manned missions to Mars by 2024-2025 in multiple interviews between 2011 and 2016.
He promised in 2016 that there would be solar roofs expansions by 2017 that didn't pan out, he promised AGI by 2025 in 2024.
Elon Musk has repeatedly lied about outcomes of his ventures, gotten crazy valuations based on those exaggerations and now people are starting to finally wake up that he isn't as good as his ego.
Name 3 accomplishments he made and I'll show you world class work done elsewhere by other companies. The only thing he did which was notable was Starlink and I'll gladly grant you that. China is about to eat Starlink's lunch with their own tech.
Again I think people overestimate Musk's contributions to the world.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/the-...
And now they report that investors, many of whom are their customers, are suffering...
...
SpaceX issued $25bn of bonds, and have to pay an annual $1.46 billion per year in interest until 2031
Google issued $85bn in bonds and have to pay annual interest on all that. Some are cetenary and so 100 years of interest at 6% due.
...
So how much enshittification will they indulge in.
https://ir.spacex.com/updates/releases-details/2026/SpaceX-A...
https://www.reuters.com/business/alphabet-sells-bonds-worth-...
The common justification for this is that for a media company (NYT) you want a person or family to take responsibility for the editorial content, not a pure profit seeker. Facebook has it both ways and typically denies it has editorial control.
IMO, the flaw of markets is that they are short sighted. Sometimes this allows states to outmaneuver them with a longer view. Current exhibit A: China. Historically state intervention has been worse in the long run. But who knows. If we went into a depression a lot of people may think state intervention is a better system, as many admired the USSR during the Great Depression.
Berkshire Hathaway is possibly the most famous from the 80s/90s. The class A shares are significantly more expensive and proportionately even more powerful than the class B shares. The lower price version was important back when physical exchanges didn’t support fractional shares as they do today.
Copied from google's response to "new york times governance"
Google's AI also says that the NYT has had that structure since 1957.
Ford has something similar from the 1930s. (Dodge did too until it was bought.) Raylon (synthetic textiles) did it in the 1920s and the company behind Jack Daniels did it right after Prohibition.
Google says that the NYSE banned dual-class between 1926 and 1986; I don't know how to reconcile that with Ford.
https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/ipo-data/
And his data shows that IPOs for the most part perform about as well as their respective market. That is large multi-billion dollar IPOs perform about as well as the broad market, and smaller IPOs (which constitute the vast majority of IPOs) perform about as well as other small-cap companies.
In other words, investing in IPOs doesn't give much of an advantage or disadvantage compared to investing in other similarly sized companies.
What's true is that most stocks, including IPOs, don't do well in the long run. The half-life of a publicly traded company is something like 10 years.
"Is the company market cap low? Do they have a decent product? Is it plausible they'll 10x? Yes -> Buy some amount I can afford loosing"
For example, Tesla IPO'd at $5B cap, it was perfectly plausible to believe they'd be worth $50B some day. Shopify IPO'd at $1.3B, Square at $3B, 10x was perfectly believable. Uber IPO'd at $75B, I did not believe they'd be worth $750B any time soon, or ever. Do I believe SpaceX will be worth 20T in like 10 years? Lol. Fmao even.
Today's IPOs at $1T+ means that private money figured this out and cut the retail public out, IPOs seems to be a really terrible deal these days.
Yeah, I know why people _want to_ (betting), but it doesn't serve a broader economic purpose.
(under the assumption your broker is managing their risk if your losses from a short position potentially exceeds capital available for liquidation if the trade moves against you)
Plus there's option traders who naturally need to go short sometimes.
Schwab won't let you, because even if you're 95% right, you'll still probably lose 95% of your money...
It's quite difficult to be 100% right...
Index and other funds are forced to buy as their contractual mandate is to follow the index or methodology set out by the fund.
It’s a variant of the people who pick “Jay-Z” in the meme question “would you rather have half a million dollars or lunch with Jay-Z?”
binaryturtle•1h ago
nijave•1h ago
https://archive.is/tnSeY
aftbit•38m ago