Comment by WaitWaitWha

2 days ago

I am just delighted that SpaceX continues with the "good enough" pace of development here, at least at these phases. Rapid iteration of build, test, learn, and improve rather than wait for perfection.

They are willing to have "negative outcome learning experiences" to gather data quickly. and, of course, data, data, data.

I like it because I know what insane amount of red tape has built up to do anything similar in a Gov (any Gov).

17 comments

WaitWaitWha

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hgoel  2 days ago

Shame they're risking that ability with the IPO. We've seen how irrational and ignorant stock traders are from other publicly traded space companies. Even scrubbed launches cause the price to dip.

  • zugi  2 days ago

    > We've seen how irrational and ignorant stock traders are from other publicly traded space companies.

    Absolutely true, but ignorant stock traders making irrational trades only matters if company management pays attention to them. Musk will maintain complete control of SpaceX even after the IPO, so he can focus on long-term value rather than short-term ups and downs.

    Of course, over time, if more shares are issued, this may change.

    • hgoel  2 days ago

      The argument for the IPO was to fund their space datacenters project, if Musk could afford to ignore the stock price, that wouldn't be needed.

      6 replies →

  • xiphias2  1 day ago

    Elon negotiated with Nasdaq to automatically accept it in Nasdaq 100 index after 15 days, so the stock traders don't really matter.

    • throwaway2037  17 hours ago

      I asked about this in previous HN discussions. The old rule: You had to wait three months. Is there a meaningful economic difference between waiting 15 days or ~90 days? I don't see it. (For transparency: I own ETFs that track the S&P 500, which has lots of overlap with Nasdaq 100.) To be clear: OpenAI and Anthropic will sure IPO this year or next and have a similar effect -- they will be (or nearly) trillion dollar market caps upon listing.