Comment by barredo
17 days ago
>> SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP.
I very much can imagine a future documentary in a few years. With the host asking the audience: "Where were the signs?"
Imagine the East India Trading company advertising the TAM of the new emerging markets in the early 1600's. I bet the numbers compared to the old world would be enormous, and equally unbelievable.
IF, and yeah it's a gigantic really big IF... the future plays out the way people are envisioning it. It's future shock. Astroid mining, gigafabs, star ships launching hourly making space exploration cheap, satellite intelligence, physical AI. The world is going to be a completely different place IF SpaceX and the AI labs are successful. That TAM might be real. It's a literal moonshot, the stuff they're talking about sounds SciFi, but that's why the valuations sound SciFi.
That said, I would not invest anything into SpaceX that I wouldn't be willing to lose, and i personally would not invest until the lockups are free. Moonshots aren't in my risk profile.
This is such terrible history. Please Google things before making analogies.
The East India Companies (Dutch and English) didn't invent or discover the spice trade. They were created to leverage private capital to wrest control of the trade from the Iberian Union, an entity both Company's sovereigns were at war with.
The "TAM of the emerging markets" had already emerged both because of the Silk Route from Pax Mongolica and in the 1500s from the Portuguese Empire's Cartaz trade license monopolies enforced by their naval posts (feitorias) throughout Asia.
The TAM was incredibly apparent, Anglo-Dutch privateering during the war had seized multiple cargo laden ships along with trade route information.
I feel like you are intentially misrepresenting his comment to flex your history knowledge. English privateers captured the Madre de Deus. When they brought it to port, the cargo was worth roughly half the entire national treasury of England at the time. I think that is pretty equivelent to space mining, no?
We've been mining platnium and aluminum for all of humanity, so we know they exist, "The TAM was incredibly apparent". We know there are astroids worth 1 quadrillion dollars. So, if SpaceX has a 1% chance to capture that, thus the valuation.
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The TAM that spacex quotes has nothing to do with Space. It is all AI. As in grok. This is a joke, and people that believe it are just providing exit liquidity.
Its not grok at all, their business is renting compute ie. infrastructure. If they have any hope of success its renting out space base compute.
AI hype is full of bad total addressable market hypotheses. There just isn't $26T of money to buy this stuff.
Patrick Mackenzie, at the time at Stripe, about 10 years ago, talked about how Stripe's growth depended on growing the actual internet. Not just growing their market share within it.
Google, Meta, etc, have projects dedicated to getting more people online, because when you have 2bn users, you kinda have to make more users.
If that were to become reality, and I won’t guess at the odds of that, is because it grew the world economic pie. Thinking about it in terms of the size of the pie today is treating it like a zero sum game. It’s a different game.
> There just isn't $26T of money to buy this stuff.
But there is. Like, it is less then GDP of US only
What do you mean, of course everyone in the first world, including babies and the elderly, is eager to pay Elon some $20k/year.
The valuation bubble on AI is threatening the entire global economy at this point.
The GDP of the entire world is $126T. Each and every year. And, thanks to USD inflation, that figure is increasing rapidly.
Based on the disclosed financials by SpaceX, they have made $48B in revenue since 2023 with a cumulative loss of -$41.3B.
And yet, based on stock price and market cap, they are worth about as much as Microsoft. Microsoft generated $80B of revenue and $31B in profits...per quarter last year. SpaceX will never, ever, generate $124B+ in annual profits.
What all the SpaceX naysayers don’t understand is that they effectively have a monopoly on selling drugs to aliens. Think about it, man.
Until the alians realize this and throw the drugs in the harbor, leading the a US vs alians war to open them up for free markets access. Not sure this can actually realize their ambition.
What about the compute deals? $3.1B a month for half their compute? Elon built $6B of rev in 122 days. What can he do now that he's got a $85B war chest of cash?
Buying NVidia gear early and renting it out isn't exactly business model. Like what is their moat? While literally everybody is bidding up hardware?
The only way you can see this continue as a model if space based data-centers actually can beat everything land based. And that is very questionable.
> What can he do now that he's got a $85B war chest of cash?
Increase the profit of Micron and NVidia?
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They have quite short cancellation notices and there is a question why do you need to rent it if you are an ai company? How is it grok not running the world using that compute.. And possible cancellation will erase a large income stream, think when gpus get old or sooner when Google does not need it anymore.
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The compute deals are going to go the same way as all those data centers that openai said they would need to build.
The compute deal is for their depreciating hardware.
Matter of time before its no longer considered good enough by the main players.
Anthropic are building their own Datacenters so it's a stop gap
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Maybe they can monetize and trade AI tokens like Enron was going to trade bandwidth?
Enron was never audacious enough betting every US man, woman, and child will spend $28k/year on their generally nonprofitable business with one exception -- Starlink.
Patrick Boyle covered the SPCX trajectory fairly well... =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKXgeNwNRJ4
This feels very 1999.
Market maker for AI tokens. Now that’s an original idea!
Well the TAM can match GDP if GDP evaporates!
That's the number AI boosters are spreading too "The TAM for AI is all of humanity - this includes every person and every company. So, imagine this huge pile of future revenue." I agree that TAM is likely huge but is SpaceX most suitable to capture that TAM? Unlikely. But for now everyone wants in on the AI hype train and FOMO of losing out one any company in the AI space.
In the long term most markets are duopoly with small competitors. And personally I see OpenAI and Anthropic duking it out rather than SpaceX.
I know this is just nonsense wish thinking, but apparently the investors disagree and I have zero clue when they will also stop giving Musk their money.
I think the bump since IPO can be explained at least partially by low float not meeting demand. I've seen a lot of accounts from retail investors who entered the lotteries saying they only got a small fraction of what they wanted, hence demand is kept artificially high. Probably intentionally, since it essentially allows the optimists to dictate the price.
(edit: This is not at all unique to spacex, of course, but given the nature of Musk's companies and their "fans" it's logical that they would employ this strategy. They are also doing a staggered unlock to avoid upsetting the market when insiders start dumping their shares.)
yeah, the float is very low, even if tech IPOs sometimes feature fairly low floats. But the cash sum raised is still ludicrous for a money furnace.
"investors" really over-sells who these people are. They're people with gambling apps on their phones who think SpaceX is great because of Musk's politics.
Signal and noise. Lots of noise. SO much noise.
To be clear, I don't know which part is signal and which part is noise any better than anyone else.