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A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses

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Re: A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses

#111

Post by gruez »

scythe wrote: post #108
gruez wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's "they"? Billionaires? Wall st? SpaceX insiders and investors?

The unknown subject is a valid construction in language. It is not necessary to be able to answer "who's they?". It is semantically equivalent to saying "I knew the rules would be changed." There are also perfectly ordinary situations in which this pattern is used to imply the influence of an unknown party. "They built a bridge over the river." Clearly the speaker does not believe that bridges over rivers construct t…

>There are also perfectly ordinary situations in which this construction is used to infer the influence of an unknown party. "They built a bridge over the river." Clearly the speaker does not believe that bridges over rivers construct themselves. She doesn't need to know who built the bridge.

This excuse only works if who built the bridge isn't central to the discussion. Otherwise this is just generic conspiratorial thinking that we're being oppressed by The Elites™.

Re: A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses

#112

Post by ben_w »

Noaidi wrote: post #27
ddp26 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's wild. But it's not like the P/E should be 30, what do you think would be fair? That's the thing about SpaceX, some businesses are real businesses that can be modeled in normal ways, like the government launch contracts, and to some degree starlink. Others, like ~all of xAI, and the starship stuff, are being valued completely independent of revenue. I predict the IPO investors will generally follow the anal…

I mean, shouldn’t the price to earnings ratio be 1? Anything higher or lower is just speculating or other words, gambling.

P(rice)/E(arnings) ratio of 1 would mean it pays for itself in the earnings period.

The earnings period is 1 year.

It would mean making 100% return on investment each year. Being that low is only possible if there's reason to think the business is extremely precarious and unlikely to survive.

P/E 30 means returns of 3.33%, P/E of 20 means 5%. These are sensible numbers given people have other investment opportunities.

P/E of Tesla being 400 or so means it would take 400 years of its own profits to be able to afford to privatise itself, i.e. returns of 0.25%; being that high is a gamble that future revenue/unit time will go up by a factor of about 20 to bring it into the sensible range.

The upper bound from the grandparent comment for P/E 500-1000, says the annual return is 0.1%, which is what I saw on various current accounts, not savings accounts, not special deals, current accounts.

Re: A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses

#113

Post by gruez »

motbus3 wrote: post #88
gruez wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's "they"? Billionaires? Wall st? SpaceX insiders and investors?

[flagged]

Someone who can't articulate who the villains are out of a pre-selected list and has to fall back to personal attacks is pretty "weak" as well.

Re: A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses

#114

Post by venusenvy47 »

genidoi wrote: post #16

> Starship at $170B is pure option value on technology still in advanced testing. The argument that Starship is somehow an experimental/unproven technology that might fail to materialise was absurd but plausible sounding before flight 1, there were many new technologies simultaneously being deployed to a single launch system in one go. But after 3 tower catches of the booster demonstrating centimetres of guided preci…

The booster is definitely looking good, just like the Falcon 9 booster is very reliable. The big question for me is the upper stage, and whether they will be able to reuse anywhere near as often as they claim. It is so much more complex than the Falcon upper stages, which aren't reusable very quickly. It seems they have a lot to learn about upper stage reusability.

Re: A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses

#115

Post by ddp26 »

mikkupikku wrote: post #73
ddp26 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I wrote in the piece, I'm extremely skeptical that xAI should be valued as if it is a frontier lab. But as you say, going back to the xAI + SpaceX merger, analysts consistently seem to value it as if it is, so I predict the public will too, at IPO time.

I assume "extremely skeptical" is you being generous, is there anybody other than Elon who says xAI/Grok are SOTA? The only thing anybody says about it is that it's only good for porn, but local models do porn too so xAI has no moat or edge at all as far as I can see.

There is actually a real bull case for xAI (that I don't endorse), e.g. from people who think that chips & computer is the main determiner of model quality. xAI may plausibly soon have the biggest training apparatus of anyone.

I think talent is more important than compute, as I wrote in my Jan 2026 predictions that Anthropic would end up on top this year: https://futuresearch.ai/blog/forecasting-top-ai-lab-2026/

Re: A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses

#116

Post by ddp26 »

taurath wrote: post #32
malfist wrote: post #3

An passive investors are going to get hosed by this thanks to NASDAQ cooking the rules to favor Elon and his band of misfits. No longer will there be a year of price discovery for index funds, 15 days. Meaning index funds have to buy it at the peak of the hype cycle. Will be a huge wealth transfer from mom and pop retirement accounts to the ultra wealthy.

When index funds became such a default I knew they’d change the rules. They’re taking everything thats not nailed down. A wealth tax is the only way, it cannot continue like this.

Got a source on this? I didn't take into account in this forecast that public markets could be very inefficient in this way.

Re: A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses

#117

Post by malfist »

WalterBright wrote: post #110
malfist wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These premises may or may not make sense, but the thing that matters is capturable revenue. European settlers being on the north american continent would be an amazing technical tour de force. But relatively speaking, there isn't much revenue there.

Jamestown was a failure. The Pilgrims starved their first year.

Okay? The US is the largest country market in the world.

Re: A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses

#118

Post by conorcleary »

ddp26 wrote: post #116
taurath wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When index funds became such a default I knew they’d change the rules. They’re taking everything thats not nailed down. A wealth tax is the only way, it cannot continue like this.

Got a source on this? I didn't take into account in this forecast that public markets could be very inefficient in this way.

oh baby, that's the just 'new' way they screw ya

Re: A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses

#119

Post by croes »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #44
croes wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and they still do

Tesla's highest market cap in 2010 was $3.3B. Tesla has more net income, sometimes multiples more, per year, from 2021 to 2025. For comparison, it is routine to see sale prices of 3x to 5x revenue for many, many kinds of everyday businesses that have much less potential than Tesla. There are very, very few businesses whose shares one could have purchased in 2010 that performed better over the subsequent 15 years. Tha…

because not only the shareholders overpaid but the car buyers too.

Re: A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses

#120

Post by KK7NIL »

stouset wrote: post #95
malfist wrote: post #3

An passive investors are going to get hosed by this thanks to NASDAQ cooking the rules to favor Elon and his band of misfits. No longer will there be a year of price discovery for index funds, 15 days. Meaning index funds have to buy it at the peak of the hype cycle. Will be a huge wealth transfer from mom and pop retirement accounts to the ultra wealthy.

They’re also reducing the float requirements, which is absolutely insane. As a passive investor with significant assets outside of tax-protected retirement accounts, I am beyond livid. If I have to switch investments to move away from the rules being changed out from under me, it will result in enormous tax consequences. I don’t tend to let my emotions out this much here, but utterly fuck everything about this admini…

Nothing like a forced tax event to get the people rioting in the streets!
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