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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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I'm not sure that the continental Colonies brought in much revenue, though. The individual colonists could do quite well, but viewed as an financial investment for the British Crown (which they were not, but that's the OP's analogy) I don't think they were very good. Plus, when they wanted to extract revenue via taxes, the Colonies revolted. Eight years of war probably cost a pretty penny, too.

(Sourcing my claim is difficult. I include this reference [1], which says that the Caribbean colonies were more profitable than all the continental colonies together. It doesn't comment on the cost of the war.)

[1] https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1ay/chapter/...

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

#142

I know it’s easy to sit at home being indignant at the internet, but how on earth does an ISP with 10M subscribers and the most expensive infrastructure in the solar system ever come out to be worth $300B? They even have to routinely replenish their “cell towers” as their orbits decay. Any mid-sized country would have multiple cellphone and Internet providers with larger customer bases and less upkeep.

They are pushing business-to-business service too, like ships, airlines, and retail/office backup. Plus smartphones can talk directly to their satellites. A lot of countries will use them for military use. Whether it adds up to a reasonable IPO I can't tell - market irrationality is hard to measure.

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make a mutual fund or ETF with any stocks you want, you just can't call it a NASDAQ 100 fund if you're not tracking the NASDAQ 100 index.

Is that really true? It doesn’t sound likely to me. Then again I’m often surprised by this stuff.

In order to call it a NASDAQ 100 Tracking Fund you need to pay the NASDAQ a licensing fee (same with S&P500, Wilshire 5000, etc.). The contract you have with NASDAQ will determine exactly how much freedom you have to change rules and still call it a NASDAQ 100 fund. I've never seen a licensing agreement, don't know anything about how they would typically read.

There is also the concept of "Index Tracking Error". No fund can perfectly mimic the index, and that is expected and understood, but the goal is generally to have the tracking error <0.1%- 1% would be a bad track. And so an index fund could take the risk that they will have a tracking error and delay picking up SpaceX even after it joins the official index, but then if it goes up they will look worse relative to their real competitors, the other NASDAQ 100 tracking index funds. If SpaceX goes down, of course, they will have positive tracking error, but I'm not sure how much potential investors would value that. SpaceX would be something like 4% of the NASDAQ 100 at it's announced expected market cap, so a 10% movement by SpaceX would be enough on its own to get you into the notable tracking error range if you didn't have any exposure to it.

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

#144
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Aren't we, though? Like it's hard not to argue that there's one or more groups of people that get together at lunches and dinners and galas and have ongoing projects to do things like institute rule changes at NASDAQ that effectively require index funds to take on outsize risk from a known-overvalued IPO just in time for that IPO to happen. To understand why this isn't a conspiracy of a sort by some "elite" group of…

>Like it's hard not to argue that there's one or more groups of people that get together at lunches and dinners and galas and have ongoing projects to do things like institute rule changes at NASDAQ that effectively require index funds to take on outsize risk from a known-overvalued IPO just in time for that IPO to happen.

It's also not hard to think of half a dozen other groups that could possibly benefit and plausibly have enough clout to steer things in their favor, hence why the need to make a specific claim rather than beating around the bush a vague "they" that can't be refuted.

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

#145
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is musk derangement syndrome a thing?

Yes, and it makes much less sense to me. It boils down to he's rich on paper, and doesn't put on a fake PR mask.

Once you see it, it's preety funny how these people pick weird little hills to die on.

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

#146
post #57

Not bad for about $12-$16B in total actual revenue. net income probably: $1.5B – $3B P/E:500-1000 Of course people will trip overthemselves to buy it up.

I just don't think space is as useful or profitable as people think. Time will tell.

You could argue that space is highly useful for creating profitable narratives. You could even argue that this is the whole game.

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why bend the rules[?] > for a trillionaire[!] This writes itself. It shouldn't, but "should" as a concept needs a lot of work. And even that isn't accurate. They are not bending the rules for a trillionaire, they are maintaining the consistency more systemic rules. This is how it has always been. We can all point to real or perceived ethical islands. They certainly exist, and are worth creating and preserving. But…

Did you get lost and start writing a poem? What’s all this about the “sea”? Fine. Let me turn down my anti-Elon-ness for a bit and caveat that the timing of these changes coinciding with this listing is suspicious, no? Grant me that at least. And then we can, with new found common ground, investigate the motives behind such a change.

Lol. Yeah, I am tired and need a nap. Half unconscious over focus. Pay no mind!

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

#148
post #27
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.

The "official" value of a stock is it is the current best guess of the market for all future earnings until infinity discounted back to the present at some discount rate (to account for the time value of money). That price to earnings rate is 1, because it's the definition. The "E" in PE ratio, however, is for a different time period: traditionally just the trailing 12 months (or previous completed FY- for high growth companies you will sometimes see "last month's revenue multiplied by 12" or other guesses).

This calculation is why "growth" companies dominated the stock market during the 2010's: with the Zero Interest Rate Policy that most of the developed world had, the discount rate that the markets used ended up being basically zero. In which case a market player is indifferent between a dollar in 2020 and a dollar in 2040. So if a company had a 10% chance of being worth a trillion dollars in 2040, that was worth (0.1 * 1 trillion=10 billion dollars). But with a more traditional 4% discount rate then a dollar in 2040 is worth less than half of a dollar in 2020, and that means your 10% chance of being worth a trillion dollars in 2040 has less than half of the value. Even if nothing else changed about your business, just the discount rate changing halved the value of your company.

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

America became a success much later.

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

#150
post #32
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.

Geez this comment is a melodramatic non sequitur.

There's no rule you have to own QQQ and indeed most people don't. There are thousands of low cost ETFs that provide passive exposure to the market. If this new rule bothers you, be like most people and buy one of those instead of QQQ. Problem solved.

Like sure, let's improve our tax systems (as an aside, I would say there are many more efficient and progressive options than a wealth tax, but whatever), but I don't see how there is even a tangential link between that topic and the NDX rule change.

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