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...
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.
I am considering the same. Of course this happens to be a bad time to sell with the Iran war. Maybe we finally found the real reason for the war (only 90% sarcastic).
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?
You can praise the technological achievements while still thinking the underlying business is trash. Plenty of horrible companies have generated great advances, but your money in them before mine thank you very much.
> 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?
Actually all this can be captured in DCF, which incorporates continuous risks with the assumption of being a going concern.
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.
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…
What I don't get is what happened to 'I'm keeping spaceX private so we can actually get to mars', with the understanding that'd be almost impossible as a public company.
Unfortunately, shorting it means betting that space data centers won’t happen (I’d happily take that bet) and that some fuckery won’t extend the inflated valuation beyond my ability to hold the position.
> Unfortunately, shorting it means betting that space data centers won’t happen (I’d happily take that bet)
This seems like an easy bet to win, though I don't know what you were responding to now that it's flagged. It's hard to imagine 'space data centers' being a meaningful product or infra in the collective lifetimes of anyone posting on this site.
It was a silly comment saying that if you’re dumb enough to think data centers in space won’t be worth a trillion bucks, you can turn that into cash by shorting SpaceX.
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.
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.
> I have become so disillusioned by some of the Hacker News crowd on here.
I feel the exact same way, but it's due to comments like yours that seem to excuse anything in the name of innovation. The goosebumps people feel are them just projecting what they think the future may look like based on what the snake-oil salesmen are peddling. How long have we been "just 2 years away from fully-automated self-driving" again?
There's more to this story than goosebumps over starships. If you have a retirement account or any investments open up your eyes widely because you're about to be fleeced.
Isn't something like "the company that makes really cool reusable rockets may also be engaging in securities fraud" exactly the sort of nuance you're looking for?
"SpaceX is inspiring! Be nice to them!"
"SpaceX is neither all good nor all bad! They do good things and bad things."
Ford was the same at one point. 100 years later, revolutionary technology being attached to incredibly toxic and unethical leaders has consequences (Ideally).
The world finally woke up to the fact that “colonizing mars” was fake bullshit.
The same way “full self driving” was (and is) fake bullshit used to do what the rich always do:
Take from you (via taxes and inflation spending) and give to themselves via government contracts that are done via lobbyists and regulatory capture.
Musk literally raided the govt via DOGE to ensure these contracts got done. His entire grift is to get on the government tit via subsidies or direct contracts
Someone somewhere probably once thought agriculture was "fake bullshit" and insisted on the hunt instead. I definitely take GP's point (so long as one can afford the longest of plays).
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
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.
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.
"I know it's a scam, but I'll sell at the peak and get out before all the suckers" - every meme stock and crypto bubble investor in the last decade. Ultimately you will be the sucker that others (VCs, banks, insiders) will make money off of.
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.
> the global data center market size was estimated at USD 383.82 billion in 2025
Getting that entire market, with Apple-like profitability would leave SpaceX as an overvalued stock that only makes sense if there are possibilities for growth.
On #2, replacing every single white-collar job on the world and capturing 100% of their salary would leave SpaceX with a P/E close to 2.
On #3, Visa seems to have earnings of about 10% of all datacenters up there. So, no, that's not enough even for a high-growth business.
On #4, IATA says the air-travel market is about $800B large. So, if SpaceX gets all of it, it would still have a P/E larger than 2.
So yeah, either they create an all-capable AGI or they create some rocket that is cheaper to run than an airplane... And they better be the only ones on that market, and capture most of the value they create.
Most reasonable analysis here! But you forgot: “retail loves it and buys it, providing capital sufficient to stabilize.”
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.
Will he get bailed out by the Feds again though? SpaceX launch 3 failure was bailed out by the DOD. Tesla was bailed out by Obama.
Possibly. I don’t know if being bailed out is a sign of business acumen. Maybe political acumen? In any case bailing out present day Tesla or SpaceX will be very expensive, unclear of taxpayers will go for it.
Which is presumably why Elon is aiming for retail as the bail-outers
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 muxes 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.
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.
"SpaceX lacks the hardware or a plan with scientific viability for a genuine Mars program. The scientific community has long recognized the facade. A feasibility study published in the journal Nature definitively concluded that a crewed Mars mission using Starship is unworkable. The vehicle’s massive dry weight creates a severe Delta-v deficit, making a return flight physically impossible. Furthermore, the architecture lacks closed-loop life support and relies on massive, non-existent nuclear power and water-mining infrastructure. Instead of building for Mars, Starship is a heavy-lift vehicle with low characteristic energy (C3). This is only a reasonable design for driving mass to low-Earth-orbit constellations—a trajectory that perfectly mirrors decades-old Pentagon objectives, that recently has manifested as Golden Dome.
In the 1980s, Michael D. Griffin architected "Brilliant Pebbles," a global missile-interceptor network made up of thousands of weaponized satellites in Low Earth Orbit. It died alongside Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative in 1990s after the DC-X reusable rocket program failed to lower launch costs. The architectural dream survived through "New Space" advocacy. Griffin co-founded the Mars Society and recruited Elon Musk after he was brought to his attention by Peter Thiel. In 2001 Griffin and the young Musk traveled together to Russia to examine ICBMs. SpaceX was conceived on the flight home to solve the exact launch bottleneck that killed Brilliant Pebbles. Musk later admitted the company was simply "continuing the great work of the DC-X project," and it was ultimately Griffin—later acting as NASA Administrator—who awarded billions of dollars in contracts that saved a zero-experience SpaceX from bankruptcy.
SpaceX masking began to slip when Gwynne Shotwell publicly confirmed the company's willingness to launch offensive weapons in 2018. That same year, Griffin returned to the Pentagon to establish the Space Development Agency, mandated to build a proliferated LEO constellation for hypersonic missile tracking. In 2019, U.S. General Terrence O'Shaughnessy pitched the Senate on "SHIELD"-a layered orbital missile defense system. Shortly after, O'Shaughnessy retired from the military and joined SpaceX to lead their discreet new division: Starshield.
Three decades later, Brilliant Pebbles is finally materializing as Golden Dome. As Reuters reported, Musk's Starshield is the frontrunner to build this classified SDI successor, pitching the Pentagon on a Golden Dome architecture involving thousands of weapon satellites. Starshield is already deploying these military satellites alongside standard Starlink satellites.
Mars was the necessary myth to recruit talent, capture public imagination, and secure capital. But as the Nature study proves, Starship was never physically capable of planetary colonization. The capabilities SpaceX actually delivered...cheap mass-to-orbit and rapid satellite replenishment...are the exact prerequisites of Golden Dome.
"
> 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.
I don't know what the correct value is, however my understanding of IPO's is that a bank buys (underwrites) the shares first and then lists them. This would suggest a large bank has taken a massive financial bet on the company, and I trust they understand the market and SpaceX's current value.
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.
The underwriters take almost no risk, and have a much higher upside compared to the risk they do take. You should never view the participation of a bank in underwriting an IPO as any kind of endorsement of the long (or even mid) term prospects for the business.
> Now they have a whole suite of successful products.
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.
I would argue all stock prices are speculative, they could quarter their share price in a month or they could 4x it. I've found myself constantly surprised when I look at a company, think "what else could they do?", and then watch the company explode in value again. I disagree that their share price assumes some unspecified massive success
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47606845
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613231
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389233
https://ioc.exchange/@muskfiles/116333241408716236
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.
I mean… it is still up 63% over the last 5 years. It’s not a bad time at all.
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?
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.
Welp, guess that idea got sold out...
True or not, it rings with reality IMO
But that is surely offset by Twitter, which is doing great business.
This seems like an easy bet to win, though I don't know what you were responding to now that it's flagged. It's hard to imagine 'space data centers' being a meaningful product or infra in the collective lifetimes of anyone posting on this site.
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.
I feel the exact same way, but it's due to comments like yours that seem to excuse anything in the name of innovation. The goosebumps people feel are them just projecting what they think the future may look like based on what the snake-oil salesmen are peddling. How long have we been "just 2 years away from fully-automated self-driving" again?
one livecam view, there are many https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhJRzQsLZGg
this guy releases videos about once a week or so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_YDnrjf3G8&t=241s
this aerial photography channel documents bocachica every week or so too. Spacex is absolutely watched from every angle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnPcEFla3Dw
"SpaceX is inspiring! Be nice to them!"
"SpaceX is neither all good nor all bad! They do good things and bad things."
One of those has nuance, the other does not.
The same way “full self driving” was (and is) fake bullshit used to do what the rich always do:
Take from you (via taxes and inflation spending) and give to themselves via government contracts that are done via lobbyists and regulatory capture.
Musk literally raided the govt via DOGE to ensure these contracts got done. His entire grift is to get on the government tit via subsidies or direct contracts
Are you really making this point?
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
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.
> the global data center market size was estimated at USD 383.82 billion in 2025
Getting that entire market, with Apple-like profitability would leave SpaceX as an overvalued stock that only makes sense if there are possibilities for growth.
On #2, replacing every single white-collar job on the world and capturing 100% of their salary would leave SpaceX with a P/E close to 2.
On #3, Visa seems to have earnings of about 10% of all datacenters up there. So, no, that's not enough even for a high-growth business.
On #4, IATA says the air-travel market is about $800B large. So, if SpaceX gets all of it, it would still have a P/E larger than 2.
So yeah, either they create an all-capable AGI or they create some rocket that is cheaper to run than an airplane... And they better be the only ones on that market, and capture most of the value they create.
"Extremely unlikely" is a huge understatement.
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.
Possibly. I don’t know if being bailed out is a sign of business acumen. Maybe political acumen? In any case bailing out present day Tesla or SpaceX will be very expensive, unclear of taxpayers will go for it.
Which is presumably why Elon is aiming for retail as the bail-outers
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 muxes 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.
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.
In the 1980s, Michael D. Griffin architected "Brilliant Pebbles," a global missile-interceptor network made up of thousands of weaponized satellites in Low Earth Orbit. It died alongside Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative in 1990s after the DC-X reusable rocket program failed to lower launch costs. The architectural dream survived through "New Space" advocacy. Griffin co-founded the Mars Society and recruited Elon Musk after he was brought to his attention by Peter Thiel. In 2001 Griffin and the young Musk traveled together to Russia to examine ICBMs. SpaceX was conceived on the flight home to solve the exact launch bottleneck that killed Brilliant Pebbles. Musk later admitted the company was simply "continuing the great work of the DC-X project," and it was ultimately Griffin—later acting as NASA Administrator—who awarded billions of dollars in contracts that saved a zero-experience SpaceX from bankruptcy.
SpaceX masking began to slip when Gwynne Shotwell publicly confirmed the company's willingness to launch offensive weapons in 2018. That same year, Griffin returned to the Pentagon to establish the Space Development Agency, mandated to build a proliferated LEO constellation for hypersonic missile tracking. In 2019, U.S. General Terrence O'Shaughnessy pitched the Senate on "SHIELD"-a layered orbital missile defense system. Shortly after, O'Shaughnessy retired from the military and joined SpaceX to lead their discreet new division: Starshield.
Three decades later, Brilliant Pebbles is finally materializing as Golden Dome. As Reuters reported, Musk's Starshield is the frontrunner to build this classified SDI successor, pitching the Pentagon on a Golden Dome architecture involving thousands of weapon satellites. Starshield is already deploying these military satellites alongside standard Starlink satellites.
Mars was the necessary myth to recruit talent, capture public imagination, and secure capital. But as the Nature study proves, Starship was never physically capable of planetary colonization. The capabilities SpaceX actually delivered...cheap mass-to-orbit and rapid satellite replenishment...are the exact prerequisites of Golden Dome. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
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.
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)
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.
It is more likely that the parties involved know that they can create/manipulate conditions to make it a success.
You're saying in 20 years SpaceX being valued at ~500x current Googles is likely?
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.
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.