Comment by jesse_dot_id
15 hours ago
Every time Musk does anything these days, it further reveals the shell game he's playing with his companies. This is going to be an Enron type of story eventually. I truly wish I had a choice to pull my tax money out of this particular subsidy.
Enron was absolute peanuts compared to the financial fraud Musk has been executing (with the apparent blessing of the SEC). At its peak Enron had a roughly $70B market cap, TSLA is currently sitting at $1.74T. We can expect similar numbers from the SpaceX IPO.
It's hard to compare these numbers directly since valuations have increased quite a bit since a quarter century ago. As a proportion of the S&P 500, Tesla (2.3%) is about 4x of Enron at that $70b (0.6%).
Tesla is profitable, as a matter of public record. And SpaceX is, by all accounts, extremely profitable.
SpaceX is _not_ profitable by most reasonable measurements of accounting. If you discount rocket depreciation costs and R&D, then yeah its profitable from starlink revenue.
They haven't released a 10k yet so we don't know, but from what I understand SpaceX+X.ai is not GAAP profitable.
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SpaceX reuses its boosters 20+ times. Surely the depreciation is tiny when compared to the revenue of 60M+ per launch?
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Between launches alone, Starlink and Starshield, SpaceX will likely be a money printing machine for a long time.
They had like $16B in revenue last year, half from Starlink.
That’s just money in the door and the underwriters seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
If underwriters think it’s worth $1.7T with a $16B revenue (not profit), they’re doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating.
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They are decades ahead of their nearest competition, in multiple verticals, and their barrier to entry is a literal gravity well.
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About those underwriters - to quote the venerable Charlie Munger "they will sell 'shit' as long as 'shit' can be sold".
the ability to mine the moon or asteroid belt seems extremely lucrative, the logistics of transporting materials to earth costs less than shipping them across the ocean, an astounding level of value creation.
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It is less about profitability and more about dilution of ownership. He seems to have a pattern of diluting the ownership of his profitable companies by folding in his less profitable/failed companies. You still own a share of a profitable company, but a smaller share, to his benefit.
Im also profitable as an individual. I made a $100 this week, which makes me worth at least $30M.
SpaceX was profitable before the xAI thing happened. Now I imagine they're way in the red.
As was Enron
Pretty decent video released today by Wall Street Millennial that looks at the profitability of SpaceX (as part of looking at 'Terafab') :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJi1oQFQzs
SpaceX was surely more profitable before it was used to bail out Elon's xAI which was used to bailout his purchase of Twitter.
Have you looked at their latest report?
They are only profitable because of subsidies. Pretty much 1:1.
In part thanks to SpaceX purchase of CyberTrucks.
just because a bunch of rockets went up without blowing up, does not mean they are profitable. it cost money to shot rocket, and it is very expensive, reusable or not. most launches are internal launch without external paying customers.
How much of that profit was due to public subsidies of the sort that he killed for other companies but not for himself during his tenure as a special government employee?
Genuine question, how do you know that without a 10K? Have the filed any document that shows their finances?
Tesla’s profits and market share has been declining for the past few years and it’s basically an overpriced meme stock.
Their market share of EVs in the US went from 40.9% in Q3 2025 to 58.9% in Q4 2025.
You may not have noticed because positive Musk related news doesn't seem to make headlines anymore.
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Tesla has a P/E ratio of 364.981. It's blatant fraud.
Nobody is forced to buy shares of any company. Even automatic 401k investment plans let you specify what to buy if you so choose. Perhaps you could make the argument Elon makes false promises to boost the stock price, but at the end of the day, individual investors must decide what they believe in no matter the CEO's antics.
I'm not sure I follow, here. What about this makes you think this is a shell game?
Matt Levine writes a bit about this - the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And really if you're investing into e.g. SpaceX you're not investing into SpaceX you're investing into the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And most people seem to want that.
Tesla's the odd one out: it's public but it's still in there, although Musk would probably prefer it to be private too.
Tesla is the free cashflow play that is probably the most important for mars as there is no distilled fermented dinosaur juice on mars, but considerably more by ratio of lithium / oil than the Earth. Our flintstone fire mobiles won’t work so well there, and battery / solar will be important there for everything, including mobility and armies of slave robots.
Mars gets less sunlight on a good day for solar power; the inverse cube law really hits you harder than you'd think. And that's before accounting for the planet wide dust storms that can last for months.
We're probably looking at nuclear fission generators to get started, then converting to geothermal at any appreciable (and maybe fusion, inshallah).
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> Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate
That’s SpaceX’s version of Tesla’s self driving car pipe dream
Edit - I use self-driving car and Autopilot interchangeably
It's so pipe-dreamy that I used it for an hour today through SF rush hour traffic. Clearly never going to work though, right? right???
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Isn't Tesla FSD good enough and trending in the right direction to be called a "pipe dream"?
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Words do mean something, and you could have taken 5 minutes of research to make a reasonable counterclaim
Tesla has an insane PE ratio because it’s a casino stock (~350x). As a comparison, NVIDIA IS 40x. SpaceX Is projected to be 300-500x. These are fantasy, completely unrealizable valuations. Similar to Enron, and Enron was over 70x. Enron wasn’t some surprise either.
Typically when PE gets out of whack, market analyzers dig into what is happening because it’s usually chicanery. No longer. Everyone is along for the ride.
PE has literally nothing to do with what Enron did which was accounting fraud + cashflow problems because they actually didnt make any money, in fact they lost tons of money and used future earnings in current reporting
Having a high pe is not fraud. There are even companies that are losing money, and they're still worth something.
When people say something is like enron, they dont mean it has a high PE. Its like saying someone is like Hitler and meaning they are a failed art student
> How are any of these companies at all related to Enron?
There's a lot of parallels:
* Circular transactions between companies under the same control
* Using SPVs to keep debt off the books
* The supplier funding its own customer through investment to inflate revenue on both ends
* Valuations driven by a hyped up narrative and decoupled from actual fundamentals
SpaceX bought nearly 20% of Cyber Trucks sold in Q4. That makes me question the level of real profitability.
He shut down investigations into him for a reason.
Tesla isn't that profitable, but SpaceX is likely generating boatloads of cash. From what I can tell Starlink alone has a free positive cash flow of about $2 billion. I'm not sure what the launch business is worth, but it's likely a lot given the absence of domestic competition.
I have a suspicion the reason Musk wanted to combine SpaceX and X.ai is the latter gives him losses to write off against all that cash from the former plus a chance for a big AI payoff.
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