Comment by themgt
4 hours ago
It's funny it concludes "A line is not a law" while the entire page is just lines and charts. If you didn't know anything going in, SpaceX might as well be a company selling toilet paper for all you learned.
I've got no idea what a share of SpaceX is worth today or 14 years from now, but fully reusable rockets are going to be one of the most important engineering achievements in human history, and SpaceX appears far in the lead to getting there first. Ignoring everything else they're at the cutting edge of.
It's really just sad to me how upset how many people are about an IPO. "Imagine what a waste, if the stock market were to overvalue the company dedicated to solving the challenges required to make humanity a multi-planetary species, when this graph clearly shows we could've wisely allocated more of civilization's resources to Saudi Aramco."
I am upset that I am forced to either rebalance out of NASDAQ and incur significant tax consequences, or bet that SpaceX is about to become nearly 10 percent of GDP and keep exceptional margins while doing it.
I would not voluntarily take that bet, but we have regulatory and financial engineering nearly forcing me to do so.
I am upset that I am forced to either rebalance out of NASDAQ and incur significant tax consequences
Just to quantify, "The projected SpaceX weighting is around 0.6% of QQQ."
So if you have $100,000 invested in QQQ and SpaceX winds up say 4x overvalued, it may eventually wind up costing you as much as $450 (i.e. 1/5th as large a loss you experienced today in QQQ).
You could maintain a short SpaceX portion in the approximately same percentage as your NASDAQ ETF. You'd have more slight tax events as you increased or closed out that short position to maintain the percentage, but significantly less than your NASDAQ position's taxes. Then when you sell your ETF you could close out the short to effectively remove SpaceX from the equation.
I'm upset that we allow people like you to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, possibly indefinitely, so anything that makes that harder even "accidentally" is ok by me.
I would rather capital gains be taxed at income rates but indexed to inflation. I am fine with that being a fair bit more.
But ripping off pension funds so you can tax me more, as a side effect of enriching people that engage in these shennanigans, doesn’t seem like a great move.
So you’re upset at the broader system that has allowed that change.
I am upset that it is not a great bet and that retail investors and pensions are being forced to take it. Let’s not pretend that this is not regulatory capture and financial engineering by techbros.
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They aren't being valued on the rockets, though, they're claiming a large TAM based on the ai portion.
if I could invest in just the rockets that would be cool. much less downside risk
Falcon 9 was in a quasi-monopoly position in 2025, and had $4 billion in revenue. That's revenue, not profit. Starship will expand the market, but it would have to expand it by ~1000x to justify the valuation.
All things equal I would agree with you. However, all things are not equal.
SpaceX's target 2040 revenue of $4.3T. Let us assume that the US GDP grows at 3% p/a; in 2040 we may project a GDP of around $50T. Naturally, SpaceX would pushing 10% of the total US GDP.
Such a change is possible. It is not out of the question. Companies can and do reach that size, though obviously for mathematical reasons only a small number do. However, the claim that one will reach that size 14 years in advance beggars scrutiny. Simple credulity is not justified and it naturally follows that there will be a large number of people, even people with very bullish outlooks, who do not believe SpaceX will meet target. 30% growth p/a for 14 years would, historically, represent a fantastic rate of return and yet still it falls considerably short of target.
All the same, part of the promise to investors (whether one believes it or not) is that, even if SpaceX were to fall short of target, the long term revenue prospects are so explosive that one can't help but feel it's a good deal. (Is it? Time will tell.)
Why are you comparing SpaceX revenues to US GDP? (when it's main customers will all have a global footprint)
GDP rates should be nominal (5-6%) not 3%
Also, go back in time and do the same analysis for Anthropic in 2023 or Nvidia in 2021, would you have predicted their current Annual revenue for them?
Outgrowing GDP for awhile— especially from a smaller base— is certainly possible. It is much less likely to do it from a long time from already large revenue.
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Also we crashed 2000-2002 2008-2009 2020. Although specific causes vary we haven't had 14 good years in a row so even the size of economy may be optimistic.
SpaceX will never be 10% based on rockets.
Rockets will get shit canned in the next crash because it's less important and spacex not having saved sufficiently will get wrecked.
Their 10% basically depends on them getting to super intelligent ai first despite others obviously being more successful.
An actually wildly successful projection would be asking us to imagine they weathered the next crash ok and were very successful at rockets after exiting AI.
> fully reusable rockets are going to be one of the most important engineering achievements in human history
The number of implicit biases, assumptions, and unsubstantiatable assertions packed into that extremely confident sentence is frankly kind of impressive.
We have no idea how important reusable rockets will end up being, because we have no idea of what the future potential (economical or otherwise) space travel will have. Even Musk’s oft repeated (supposed) personal motivation for space travel (“protection of the species”) will ultimately hinge far more on other, far more important (and as of yet unrealized) technologies than reusable rockets.
Not to mention your implicit comparison of reusable rockets to literally every other extant technology. I mean really - transistors? The written word? RF comms? Indoor plumbing??