SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought
56 points by kaycebasques 11 hours ago | 28 comments
  • ryandamm 11 hours ago |
    Did people really believe this was a financial behemoth? Or was this just a larger bet on the conglomerate that is Musk’s quasi-meme-stock empire?
    • marsten 10 hours ago |
      A lot of people believe in Musk and will invest in anything he wants to do. Is this rational? It depends on how it plays out.

      I think we may be seeing a new type of capitalism that maybe Steve Jobs and Warren Buffet hinted at: A business empire built around the outsized ambitions of a single charismatic individual. The valuations of Tesla and SpaceX only make sense if you attach an enormous premium to Musk the individual.

      • chneu 2 hours ago |
        We have seen that with people like howard hughes and some of the older families.
      • josefritzishere 2 hours ago |
        I hate semantic arguments but have a thought. I don't think "charismatic" is the right word. Musk is more vilified than celebrated. He's like a human traffic accident, an amoral black hole of social media attention. I am not sure the English language has a word for this.
  • marcosdumay 11 hours ago |
    Hum... I've been out of stocks for a long while...

    Is a price to sales ratio of 100 anything near normal nowadays?

    EDIT: Wow, that was easy to find out. Turns out that didn't explode with the everything bubble, and almost no industry in the S&P 500 has an average above 5, the highest being a bit over 8.

    • branko_d 11 hours ago |
      No.

      Palantir, possibly the most overvalued company on the stock marker, has P/S 63 and P/E 144.

      Nvidia has P/S 21 and P/E 33.

      • riffraff 10 hours ago |
        Tesla has a P/E of 383, I think?

        Of course, it shares the same reality distortion field.

        https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/

        • marcosdumay an hour ago |
          And a P/S of 15, according to that link.

          This 100 is really an outlier.

      • marsten 10 hours ago |
        Second-highest P/E is Tesla, currently at 97.

        Apart from Palantir and Tesla, the other big companies are trading at what would historically be considered reasonable P/Es given their growth rates and profitability.

        What's really changed in the last 20-30 years is the incredible profit generated by the tech industry, and the defensive moats the biggest companies have built.

  • bandrami 11 hours ago |
    Sometime about 20 years ago we all got used to the idea of companies not having to actually make money on their business operations and I worry the bill for this is coming due soon
    • weakened_malloc 10 hours ago |
      It's been that way for a loooooong time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
      • edelbitter 10 hours ago |
        Is that not the commonly cited example for commodity trading, whereas meaningful comparison of fundamentals to market capitalization only started much later?
        • weakened_malloc 9 hours ago |
          The idea is broadly similar, but I guess here's another example with a company this time.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_Bubble_of_1769

          The point is that I don't think irrational exuberance in stocks is a recent thing.

    • riffraff 10 hours ago |
      It would appear that the relative tax inefficiency of dividends over buy backs (and lack of wealth taxes) has fundamentally messed up the business world.

      Alas, I don't see that likely to change.

      • bandrami 10 hours ago |
        Along with the "borrow tax-free against unrealized equities gains" hack.
      • mike_hearn 7 hours ago |
        What's the proposed link here? Wealth taxes don't seem to incentivize the creation of profit. If anything it's the reverse: business owners are incentivized to keep ploughing profits back into the company because it reduces the apparent value of the firm if it's not profitable.
    • dmix 10 hours ago |
      The article says they had $5B in losses (half of which was -$2.5B for xAI) but also just signed a $15B/yr contract with Anthropic which would almost double their revenue

      Anthropic is also allegedly profitable https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-nears-first-quart...

      • bandrami 10 hours ago |
        Anthropic is profitable only if you carry forward the discounts they get for the first two months of this deal. That's why they're specifically talking about Q2. They start having to pay $1.6B/mo to SpaceX in July.
        • spwa4 7 hours ago |
          But they can cancel with 90 days notice ...
          • bandrami 7 hours ago |
            True but they're still committed to providing the compute they're getting from SpaceX to their clients.

            The cynic in me says this is a numbers game by Elon and Dario to screw up Sam's IPO, along with SpaceX's filing (using the individuals' names rather than the companies because I also think this has become damagingly personal to the players involved).

  • lokar 11 hours ago |
    Has anyone seen a detailed analysis of the starlink business that includes the cost to re-launch sats as they burn up?
  • nomilk 11 hours ago |
    tl;dr

    > It's expected to be the largest IPO ever...but the prospectus shows just how much the IPO depends on expectations for future growth

    Same goes for every IPO. One point of difference about SpaceX is those involved do have a track record for delivery.

  • senectus1 10 hours ago |
    Dont forget that buying in on spaceX IPO is really just buying in on XAI/ X/Twitter and starlink.

    The "rocket ship" company is a very small part of SapceX.

    and tbh.. most of the buyers of spaceX are really just going to be 401k investments....

    • ben_w 9 hours ago |
      X and xAI are also bad investments. Starlink is plausibly this valuable, but only if China doesn't clone all the parts and sell the same idea to much of the world, at a minimum forcing down margins and possibly undercutting entirely.
  • ChrisArchitect 10 hours ago |
    Discussion:

    SpaceX S-1

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213933

    Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214017

  • SilverElfin 9 hours ago |
    So this entire scam is just dumping on retail investors and forcing everyone to prop up a weak company through our 401ks. There should be jail time for people involved.
  • josefritzishere 2 hours ago |
    This is such an obvious pump and dump scam.