These two comments seem to tell you, everything you need to know about this IPO. Sadly I cant get the same level of analysis, from CNBC or Bloomberg, so have to come here...
I talked with my wife about this (MBA, Masters in Economics...). She said treating this kind of company like an established company (PE ratio as indicator... etc.) doesn't work because the company hasn't reached its steady state yet. Not Tesla, and, when it IPOs, not SpaceX either. They're in heavy R&D, where their revenues keep getting plowed into pushing through their emerging phase.
Most of the derision I see for both of these companies takes the form of standard investment analysis for established firms, or simple hatred on ideological grounds. Tesla and SpaceX are like Apple when it was Jobs & Woz in their garage.
Orbital data centers, moon and asteroid mining, more launches, by two orders of magnitude, than any other commercial entity on the planet... SpaceX is going bigger. Yes they might go bust, but evaluating them as though they were Microsoft, GE, or Samsung just doesn't make a lot of sense yet.
Tesla????! The company that has been in business for more than a decade? Tesla is like Apple when it was in a garage?? That is f’ing wild, Elon is God to get an Army of retail investors buying into this kind of nonsense… We had 12 years of robotaxis dreams where he has shown incapable of moving a car safely from point A to point B and now that he failed at that he’s gonna mine the Moon from Woz’s garage? Geez! Too funny it it wasn’t tragic to read stuff like this
Definitely meme stonk territory. IMO Elon is good for making the big bets on things with no competition that don't currently exist. The day to day grind of growing a company and maneuvering all the twist and turns of competition not so much.
I wonder if going public will mean that SpaceX engineers are no longer going to be able to concentrate on rockets, but instead need to work on a variety of distractions meant to excite investors like dancing robots.
Yes hard-nosed analysis, from a couple of retail investors but not finance journalists. The latter don't want to bite the hand that feeds, the former is on the menu.
> Two-Stage Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model. It is the gold standard for valuing a high-growth company like SpaceX.
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?
The post fails to mention that spaceX is not just a rocket company. Bundled with it is xAI, which is presumably losing money hand over fist. Package enough risk together and sell for a higher price to retail consumers. We’ve seen this play…
Going to be a circus when our only viable launch capacity is publicly traded and only looking a quarter ahead. Guess that is the end of rocket development as we know it. Hopefully academia bails us out and carries on fundamental research. Then again the orangutan is in the whitehouse disinclined to fund any science.
For this valuation to make sense, you’re betting on one or more of:
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.
It would help if the author actually created a DCF model and shared it. I have seen others create their own which value SpaceX between $250 to $400 billion.
If you have been a victim of any scam, go file an email complaint to victim led organization via (support @ 4victimsbyvictims . org ) to get help from people who have been there themselves.
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
I have become so disillusioned by some of the Hacker News crowd on here. It used to be full of nuanced smart people with interesting takes. Nowadays it seems very one sided - makes me very sad. People seem to be completely forgetting that SpaceX is one of the most "inspiring" companies that currently exist. They produce things (Starship) that give adults long-lost goosebumps and excitement just looking at it. SpaceX tech and launch stats speak for themselves. I know its hard to extend an exponential, but just try. All the comments on here feel like they were made against Tesla in 2017, and look how that worked out.
for retail investors every failed engine test, pressure test, or anything else is going to be a sell event. Every succesful launch, engine delivery, installed pane of glass is going to be a buy event. The youtubers like Nasaspaceflight and the others who stalk Spacex's every move with livecams at every site are going to add the stock price to their streams i bet.
The potential for incredible forced demand has me considering participating for a period of time. I have no faith in things like datacenters in orbit, but I do have strong faith in the greed and recklessness of others.
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.
> The SpaceX IPO in 2026 is unlikely to mirror the 500x or 1,000x returns of early Amazon or Google
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.
96 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47606845
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613231
Most of the derision I see for both of these companies takes the form of standard investment analysis for established firms, or simple hatred on ideological grounds. Tesla and SpaceX are like Apple when it was Jobs & Woz in their garage.
Orbital data centers, moon and asteroid mining, more launches, by two orders of magnitude, than any other commercial entity on the planet... SpaceX is going bigger. Yes they might go bust, but evaluating them as though they were Microsoft, GE, or Samsung just doesn't make a lot of sense yet.
Remember when Jobs of Apple died?
Now think about what is going to happen when Musk dies. Compare and contrast.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389233
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.
> Two-Stage Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model. It is the gold standard for valuing a high-growth company like SpaceX.
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?
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.
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.
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
> Musk is a storyteller.
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.
> The SpaceX IPO in 2026 is unlikely to mirror the 500x or 1,000x returns of early Amazon or Google
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.