Comment by bko

15 hours ago

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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

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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    • In 2024 Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink had a $600 million positive free cash flow based on $8.2 billion in revenue. Last year revenue estimates from both SpaceX and from outside people adding up new military contracts came out to about $11.8 billion. Their fixed costs haven't gone up much, so the big unknown is development costs for military contracts. I think $2 billion is a reasonable, conservative estimate.

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    • There's a few ways

      They're prepping for an IPO and there have been some anonymous insider reports of the figures in the press

      There are industry estimates

      Much of their income comes from public contracts

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