SpaceX has reduced the cost of getting a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10 and with their new system (Starship) it's poised further reduce that to 100x. They launch, land and re-use their rockets so often now that what was considered impossible 15 years ago is now routine. They currently put more things into space than the rest of the world combined and by a huge margin. They also have the most advanced internet infrastructure in the world and are poised to replace legacy ISPs and even mobile carriers in the coming decade. Oh, and they're doing all this while making a profit ($16B last year) despite their massive R&D spending and even with the money sink that is xAI their profits will be higher this year. It's hard to say that this isn't one of the most innovative and fast moving companies in the world. $1.75T maybe seems excessive, but less so than a lot of other companies out there.
That article claiming $8b profit is indeed mislabeling EBITDA as profit. EBITDA removes any recurring replenishment costs, the cost of building the satellite, launching the satellite, the user equipment manufacturing and returns, all ground infrastructure build and replacement, all employee stock compensation (not counted!), no advertising costs (and they've actually had to do a lot of that lately to scrounge customers that are remote enough that their network isn't too congested to serve), no taxes are counted (though they get out of that because they have no profit!). Not to mention payments servicing all their debt and Starship development.
*they actually use "Adjusted EBITDA" which is even more nonstandard and means they define the accounting however they want!
Good for you! It’s fun when you realize it’s a constructed language that also tends towards precision. While accounting is not my favorite, financial models as a whole are incredibly powerful reasoning tools. On par, for me, with engineering or physics based first-principles reasoning.
Nicely done! When I started moving up from being an individual contributor to corporate management years ago, the brass would casually say things like "P&L" or "EDITDA" and I had no idea what they meant. I read textbooks, took online classes, and it was a big deal when I finally could lead a conversation related to our finances.
It's such common language in business that I didn't even realize I was writing so much jargon. I hope you inspired some people to look up the terms. It's really not that hard to understand.... Even CEOs can do it.
Hey are absolutely not replacing “legacy” isps and certainly not mobile. Even if they had perfect coverage, sat signals are way too sensitive to obstructions.
Their technical accomplishments are doubtlessly notable, but does the expected business growth justify this valuation? Honest question, how many things do we really need to send up there that reducing the cost to orbit by 100x will trigger Jevon's paradox and lead to 100x more launches?
I suppose "data centers in space" is the current answer but again, I'm suspicious about its feasibility.
Barring that, until we have another "killer app" besides Starlink, like a giant orbital space station or a moonbase, I'm curious whether there is enough demand.
Sure, but factor of 10 cheaper in a market that is tiny still isn't that much. Even if you assume a 10x market size increase, its still tiny.
> They also have the most advanced internet infrastructure in the world and are poised to replace legacy ISPs and even mobile carriers in the coming decade.
That's quite the claim. I believe Starlink is a great business, the largest sat business for a long while to come (unlike space datacenter) but even if you are, very, very bullish on it, its not enough to justify the price.
You basically need to believe that:
- Launch market to 10x and grow faster then it ever has for decades
- Starlink goes from already being amazing systematically crushing terrestrial competition.
- xAi wins the AI race (this is almost absurdly optimistic)
- AI data-center becoming a insanely thing (also absurdly optimistic)
And even then this is hard to justify. And I certaintly don't believe 3. or 4. And 1 is a stretch. And while I believe in Starlink continued growth, terrestrial infrastructure still has lots of advantages for cities, where most people actually live.
It has technical merit and it is impressive. But I doubt it's worth that much. I guess Musk has the talent of pushing and getting what he wants, so I guess we'll see how it plays out. I'm just afraid for the future is SpaceX in these crazy crazy times.
At some point we'll reach saturation of what we're comfortable putting into LEO, or at least greater pushback from governments leading to regulations in hopes of avoiding that. There's a lot of space junk out there already and they're still pumping out those isp satellites en mass.
Luckily these specific spacex LEO sats decay pretty rapidly (unless they've made them more advanced recently, I haven't followed closely as of late.) So I guess they'll keep themselves busy at least refreshing the fleet.
The jury is still out on Starship. And also a bold claim to say that SpaceX by itself has reduced the cost of a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10. Did it play an important role in that reduction? Sure...
This comment reads like an S-1 pitch deck and almost every claim is false or misleading.
The $16B is not profit its revenue, and I strongly suggest to learn the difference before investing. The $8B figure is EBITDA, also known as, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, AND amortization.
For a company running around 9500 LEO satellites with a less than 5 year lifespan, depreciation is the business.
Their FCC filings show that about 500 satellites deorbited just in the first of half of 2025 alone, and they were all under 5 years old. The estimates for constellation sustenance are currently at $5-8B per year in satellite manufacturing (about $500K each) and launch costs are about $3M each. That is the real capex that EBITDA hides. Net income has never been disclosed and probably for good reason...
And lets not even mention the $19 billion EchoStar acquisition who is almost certainly! not included in the $8 billion EBITDA figures reported...
The most critical is that xAI is excluded from the number. XAI had a $1.46B net loss in Q3 2025 on just $107M in revenue, accelerating from $1B the prior quarter. They were burning $1B a month at the time of filing. This pig was then merged into SpaceX in Feb 2026 along with X/Twitter. So start with $8B EBITDA, subtract $5-8B satellite replacement, subtract $4-6B per year in xAI losses, subtract interest and taxes specially amortization and you are very very deep in the red. Once audited financials go public, every analyst with a calculator and a working brain will see this.
Also the revenue is largely circular... Over 70% of Falcon 9 launches in 2025 were internal Starlink missions so SpaceX is its own biggest customer. Starlink is 70% of total revenue. The so called "launch business" and "internet business" are the same capital cycle booked as two revenue lines ;-)
Replace legacy ISPs? Really? Starlink has 0.2% residential market share after 5 years, with declining ARPU ($85 avg vs $120 US) and congestion already emerging at 10M subs. It is a niche rural/maritime ISP, not an AT&T killer.
And on the valuation? NVIDIA for example, who has an almost actual monopoly on AI chips, with $216B revenue, and $120B net income, at 56% margins, trades at 20x revenue. Tesla…. already considered absurdly overvalued at P/E 355, trades at 15x. Amazon at 3x. Meta at 10x. SpaceX wants 110x !! times revenue, with no audited financials, unknown net income, and a freshly absorbed money losing AI company. Even on bullish 2026 projected revenue of $24B, it's 73x so nearly 4x NVIDIA multiple, and NVIDIA actually prints profit...
Starship on another side is very very far from routine... 11 flights, 5 failures. But notice on thing...In 2025 alone on Flight 7 the upper stage exploded from harmonic vibrations. Then Flight 8 exploded from propellant mixing. Flight 9 was destroyed on reentry...Ship 36 exploded on test stand
...the first V3 booster exploded during pressure testing and was scrapped.
See a pattern here? Each failure from a different root cause. So multiple unsolved failure modes, not iteration. It has never reached orbit, never caught a ship, never demonstrated orbital refueling.
This offering is the most scandalous ever and the structure tells you everything. The filing is confidential, REAL financials only need to go public 15 days before the roadshow. Nasdaq is literally changing its index rules effective May 1 to allow a fast track Nasdaq-100 entry in 15 trading days. This is a rule that never existed before, and is made for this IPO, forcing billions in passive index buying on day one.
Public float is just 3% to 4%. This is one of the tightest floats for any major US IPO in modern history, and I have been following the markets for 20 years. They do 30% retail allocation what is three times the norm and tells you exactly who the target buyer is.
Given this level of rule bending, dont be shocked if the S-1 with real audited numbers quietly drops at the last legally permissible moment, maybe minutes before the IPO? ensuring hype and retail commitments are fully baked, before anyone really looks at what the financials actually say.
It will be a wildly successful IPO. Same playbook as Tesla 2010, just with more zeros and fewer functioning prototypes.
You don't have to believe. If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch.
The IPO will go great, because the company will float a fairly small issuance. The big shareholders will not immediately sell. They will hold on and maybe even buy to support the price.
Then, after 15 days, it will enter the indexes and everyone's 401k will start auto-buying this stock.
You might say this is an obvious flaw in how the indexes work if they start immediately accept a brand new IPOed stock with limited float. You'd be right, which is why they won't list for a year.
I'm genuinely waiting to see at what the valuation lands at. The gap between what SpaceX charges per launch and what everyone else charges is so wide that the moat basically is the rocket. Hard to compare against anything even now.
The thing i'm not looking forward to is SpaceX will now be beholden to Wall Street. With Startship testing being so public, there's a whole cottage industry of youtubers watching their every move, there's going to be lots of ups and downs on the stock price.
How will they make money? From governments? With Elon's beliefs, few will be able to afford the vacation trips to space, except a few and they can already do this if they wanted, but haven't in droves.
If anything this just proves that the Overview Effect (traveling to space changes you) is just BS, Bezos and the others never changed.
I'm a SpaceX investor, and from reading the comments here, I think most people here are missing why SpaceX has an outrageously high valuation.
SpaceX's valuation only makes sense if you buy into their mission of creating a civilization on Mars, and that the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation is the vehicle that creates this future. If SpaceX achieves this, it would be the most valuable company ever created. It would be worth $10s of trillions.
I personally believe SpaceX has a 70% chance of achieving its Mars ambitions. So I find the current $1.75 trillion valuation very logical, if not a little underpriced.
If you believe there's a SpaceX won't achieve these ambitions, which I'd assume most people in this thread belong to, then you'd assign a <1% chance of this happening. Then you'd value the company based on it's financials, at a more realistic $200B. You'd explain the 8x valuation gap though a mixture of financial engineering and Elon grifting, both of which I agree are happening.
The current $1.75 trillion valuation comes from the ratio of people in camp A to camp B.
I wonder if this ends up like Tesla - China copies it and makes it cheaper -
GG if not protected by huge tariffs/bans. It seems like US these days is just a testing ground for new tech that later scaled further and optimized in China. Are there any hard moats protecting SpaceX from that?
Starship is the biggest scam in the history of spaceflight, it was never about getting to the moon or mars or even towards other points on Earth (or space tourism) but lowering the cost of sending military and other dual use technologies to Low Earth Orbit.
It's hard to imagine how SpaceX can be making the reported $8 billion a year in profit[1]. We now see roughly two Starlink reentries per day... The replenishment costs are at least $5M/day just to maintain the current constellation, while the entire customer revenue is ~$20M/day. Guess the real money is in Golden Dome.
SpaceX does internal sales of stock twice a year, so there will not be pressure from existing stockholders to sell. But there will be buyers. SpaceX is/was a great brand (before it became SpaceTwitter).
Can't wait til the precious minerals market crash from asteroid mining goes kaboom, and just like that old tale about the king who left a wake of gold in his hajj, which ended up destroying the economy. In Cairo specifically.
> In the United States, SpaceX accounts for five of every six launches into space, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
It's going to have a big impact on short-term volatility, but it's going to take a big drop in prices in a month. But I think it's a company that needs to be invested in the long run.
In space development, I don’t think there are any competitors at SpaceX’s level at the moment. On top of that, they are trying to do something most people would never even imagine: building data centers in space using SpaceX’s technology. If that becomes a reality, they will almost certainly dominate when it comes to energy.
The Artemis II launch, despite the heat shield risk, is clearly a way to hype up the general retail investor before the SpaceX IPO. I really hope that nothing bad happens to the astronauts up there... but if it does, shame on NASA, and shame on everyone else involved. Big money, unfortunately, always wins.
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You don't count R&D as an expense per GAAP, so...
They have claimed $8B in EBITDA, also leaving out the amortization of R&D costs.
Those aren't audited numbers, as far as I know.
*they actually use "Adjusted EBITDA" which is even more nonstandard and means they define the accounting however they want!
>> *they actually use "Adjusted EBITDA" which is even more nonstandard and means they define the accounting however they want!
Enron would be proud...Theranos-level Transparency...
90% of the valuation is about Golden Dome
What did you read that worked?
I suppose "data centers in space" is the current answer but again, I'm suspicious about its feasibility.
Barring that, until we have another "killer app" besides Starlink, like a giant orbital space station or a moonbase, I'm curious whether there is enough demand.
> They also have the most advanced internet infrastructure in the world and are poised to replace legacy ISPs and even mobile carriers in the coming decade.
That's quite the claim. I believe Starlink is a great business, the largest sat business for a long while to come (unlike space datacenter) but even if you are, very, very bullish on it, its not enough to justify the price.
You basically need to believe that:
- Launch market to 10x and grow faster then it ever has for decades
- Starlink goes from already being amazing systematically crushing terrestrial competition.
- xAi wins the AI race (this is almost absurdly optimistic)
- AI data-center becoming a insanely thing (also absurdly optimistic)
And even then this is hard to justify. And I certaintly don't believe 3. or 4. And 1 is a stretch. And while I believe in Starlink continued growth, terrestrial infrastructure still has lots of advantages for cities, where most people actually live.
Luckily these specific spacex LEO sats decay pretty rapidly (unless they've made them more advanced recently, I haven't followed closely as of late.) So I guess they'll keep themselves busy at least refreshing the fleet.
The $16B is not profit its revenue, and I strongly suggest to learn the difference before investing. The $8B figure is EBITDA, also known as, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, AND amortization.
For a company running around 9500 LEO satellites with a less than 5 year lifespan, depreciation is the business.
Their FCC filings show that about 500 satellites deorbited just in the first of half of 2025 alone, and they were all under 5 years old. The estimates for constellation sustenance are currently at $5-8B per year in satellite manufacturing (about $500K each) and launch costs are about $3M each. That is the real capex that EBITDA hides. Net income has never been disclosed and probably for good reason...
And lets not even mention the $19 billion EchoStar acquisition who is almost certainly! not included in the $8 billion EBITDA figures reported...
The most critical is that xAI is excluded from the number. XAI had a $1.46B net loss in Q3 2025 on just $107M in revenue, accelerating from $1B the prior quarter. They were burning $1B a month at the time of filing. This pig was then merged into SpaceX in Feb 2026 along with X/Twitter. So start with $8B EBITDA, subtract $5-8B satellite replacement, subtract $4-6B per year in xAI losses, subtract interest and taxes specially amortization and you are very very deep in the red. Once audited financials go public, every analyst with a calculator and a working brain will see this.
Also the revenue is largely circular... Over 70% of Falcon 9 launches in 2025 were internal Starlink missions so SpaceX is its own biggest customer. Starlink is 70% of total revenue. The so called "launch business" and "internet business" are the same capital cycle booked as two revenue lines ;-)
Replace legacy ISPs? Really? Starlink has 0.2% residential market share after 5 years, with declining ARPU ($85 avg vs $120 US) and congestion already emerging at 10M subs. It is a niche rural/maritime ISP, not an AT&T killer.
And on the valuation? NVIDIA for example, who has an almost actual monopoly on AI chips, with $216B revenue, and $120B net income, at 56% margins, trades at 20x revenue. Tesla…. already considered absurdly overvalued at P/E 355, trades at 15x. Amazon at 3x. Meta at 10x. SpaceX wants 110x !! times revenue, with no audited financials, unknown net income, and a freshly absorbed money losing AI company. Even on bullish 2026 projected revenue of $24B, it's 73x so nearly 4x NVIDIA multiple, and NVIDIA actually prints profit...
Starship on another side is very very far from routine... 11 flights, 5 failures. But notice on thing...In 2025 alone on Flight 7 the upper stage exploded from harmonic vibrations. Then Flight 8 exploded from propellant mixing. Flight 9 was destroyed on reentry...Ship 36 exploded on test stand ...the first V3 booster exploded during pressure testing and was scrapped.
See a pattern here? Each failure from a different root cause. So multiple unsolved failure modes, not iteration. It has never reached orbit, never caught a ship, never demonstrated orbital refueling.
This offering is the most scandalous ever and the structure tells you everything. The filing is confidential, REAL financials only need to go public 15 days before the roadshow. Nasdaq is literally changing its index rules effective May 1 to allow a fast track Nasdaq-100 entry in 15 trading days. This is a rule that never existed before, and is made for this IPO, forcing billions in passive index buying on day one.
Public float is just 3% to 4%. This is one of the tightest floats for any major US IPO in modern history, and I have been following the markets for 20 years. They do 30% retail allocation what is three times the norm and tells you exactly who the target buyer is.
Given this level of rule bending, dont be shocked if the S-1 with real audited numbers quietly drops at the last legally permissible moment, maybe minutes before the IPO? ensuring hype and retail commitments are fully baked, before anyone really looks at what the financials actually say.
It will be a wildly successful IPO. Same playbook as Tesla 2010, just with more zeros and fewer functioning prototypes.
https://youtu.be/8rS3fTbC7TE?is=TGpEdM2Y7sknP-cW
The IPO will go great, because the company will float a fairly small issuance. The big shareholders will not immediately sell. They will hold on and maybe even buy to support the price.
Then, after 15 days, it will enter the indexes and everyone's 401k will start auto-buying this stock.
You might say this is an obvious flaw in how the indexes work if they start immediately accept a brand new IPOed stock with limited float. You'd be right, which is why they won't list for a year.
At least they wouldn't until Elon got them to change their rules: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-30/nasdaq-cl...
Smells like great fiduciary responsibility!
If anything this just proves that the Overview Effect (traveling to space changes you) is just BS, Bezos and the others never changed.
SpaceX's valuation only makes sense if you buy into their mission of creating a civilization on Mars, and that the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation is the vehicle that creates this future. If SpaceX achieves this, it would be the most valuable company ever created. It would be worth $10s of trillions.
I personally believe SpaceX has a 70% chance of achieving its Mars ambitions. So I find the current $1.75 trillion valuation very logical, if not a little underpriced.
If you believe there's a SpaceX won't achieve these ambitions, which I'd assume most people in this thread belong to, then you'd assign a <1% chance of this happening. Then you'd value the company based on it's financials, at a more realistic $200B. You'd explain the 8x valuation gap though a mixture of financial engineering and Elon grifting, both of which I agree are happening.
The current $1.75 trillion valuation comes from the ratio of people in camp A to camp B.
Starlink is close to causing the kessler syndrome. https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...
When I was young and naive I believed Elon, at least I've figured out his shtick now, plus his connections with that man.
Regulate them.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/spacex-generated-ab...
Will mankinds's mouth be larger than its stomach?
Found the Emperor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa
> In the United States, SpaceX accounts for five of every six launches into space, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
That's why.
I'm a little disappointed now.