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These two comments seem to tell you, everything you need to know about this IPO. Sadly I cant get the same level of analysis, from CNBC or Bloomberg, so have to come here...
Ya but all the financial logic in the world doesn’t account for Elon god, number go up.
This other comment by the same user in one of the links from 2 weeks ago I found the easiest to understand, in brief:
Yes hard-nosed analysis, from a couple of retail investors but not finance journalists. The latter don't want to bite the hand that feeds, the former is on the menu.
If S&P change their rules, I am going to sell my index funds, taxes be damned.
Sadly, this is not the only trash that is going to be hoisted on us retirement investors. OpenAI is waiting in the wings as well.
I am sure I am not the only one. That doesn't seem like it will be good for the market.
I am considering the same. Of course this happens to be a bad time to sell with the Iran war. Maybe we finally found the real reason for the war (only 90% sarcastic).
There were extensive discussions previously about passive investors being taken for a ride:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47392550
And Michael Burry also wrote a long post about it:
https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/2032483200404992209
The question is what can we do about it? Nasdaq finalized these rule changes already. It seems like this got rammed through and now it is happening. And I don't expect Trump's corrupt SEC to do anything about it. Who else can we appeal to?
I still want to be long in the market so my initial thought is switching to equal weight funds.
I'm invested in VTI, VXUS, and VT in various places, so I'm definitely going to be buying it whether I want to or not
> Two-Stage Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model. It is the gold standard for valuing a high-growth company like SpaceX.
I don't know if it's true that DCF is the "gold standard" for valuing high growth companies. IME it's actually quite bad -- not that there's really good ways to value them; more that DCF is much better for companies that aren't high growth.
High growth companies - especially ones run by Musk -- are intrinsically very hard to value, for reasons like:
- They sometimes - unpredictably - spawn new categories (think Starlink)
- There are too many variables to be able to reliably predict future cash flows (compared to say, an oil company, where future cash flows are largely dependent on oil prices, which can also be forecast with some degree of certainty)
- Risk has a much higher impact on a high growth company, how does DCF try to quantify that? Sure, you can ramp up your risk free rate like TFA suggests, but that's about as coarse a measure as it gets. Consider the risks to e.g. Tesla, how do you quantify them and their impact on its future cash flows?
But even for something like starlink we have not been given enough details to understand if it would ever be a good business, and I doubt we will.
Actually all this can be captured in DCF, which incorporates continuous risks with the assumption of being a going concern.
What it does not incorporate is failure risk, which has to be brought in separately.
Pricing via relative valuation is implicitly DCF… so you can’t escape it actually. If you want to do some pie in the sky shit and pull a number out of thin air - go ahead.
The post fails to mention that spaceX is not just a rocket company. Bundled with it is xAI, which is presumably losing money hand over fist. Package enough risk together and sell for a higher price to retail consumers. We’ve seen this play…
> Bundled with it is xAI, which is presumably losing money hand over fist.
But that is surely offset by Twitter, which is doing great business.
What I don't get is what happened to 'I'm keeping spaceX private so we can actually get to mars', with the understanding that'd be almost impossible as a public company.
Welp, guess that idea got sold out...
Remember when AGI comes, money will be meaningless since we'll all just have abundance and no jobs.
But also Musk needs to get paid $1T, and he also needs indices to change their rules to pump more of your money into his giga-IPO.
Nothing to see here.
Going to be a circus when our only viable launch capacity is publicly traded and only looking a quarter ahead. Guess that is the end of rocket development as we know it. Hopefully academia bails us out and carries on fundamental research. Then again the orangutan is in the whitehouse disinclined to fund any science.
Tesla is not targeting quarterly goals. Most of its valuation is from long bets like robotaxi and the robot
Normally yes. But everyone will go with what Elon wants.
For this valuation to make sense, you’re betting on one or more of:
1. Orbital data centers become not only a real thing, but a dominant thing.
2. Grok goes from being a second-tier model mostly useful for not having guardrails to being a step above all other offerings.
3. Twitter realizes its “everything app” ambitions and becomes the WeChat of the West.
4. Starship not only flies operationally, but finds a niche with orders of magnitude more business than Falcon 9 gets. Something like Earth-to-Earth passenger transport at a level that substantially displaces airlines.
All of which seem extremely unlikely. I’m fairly bullish on SpaceX, but as something of a “normal” business. Starship shows promise. Falcon 9 is a cheap workhorse. Starlink seems to just print money. But not anything like a trillion dollars’ worth.
Most reasonable analysis here! But you forgot: “retail loves it and buys it, providing capital sufficient to stabilize.”
I also like SpaceX - one thing many of the kids around here seem to forget is that elon has managed extremely dire capital and earnings situations very ably in the past - the above list for Tesla ten years ago looked much much worse.
This isn’t dispositive to success on your list but it does mean you can treat the company more like a long call : it almost certainly won’t go away.
About #1, the first result in my search says:
> the global data center market size was estimated at USD 383.82 billion in 2025
Getting that entire market, with Apple-like profitability would leave SpaceX as an overvalued stock that only makes sense if there are possibilities for growth.
On #2, replacing every single white-collar job on the world and capturing 100% of their salary would leave SpaceX with a P/E close to 2.
On #3, Visa seems to have earnings of about 10% of all datacenters up there. So, no, that's not enough even for a high-growth business.
On #4, IATA says the air-travel market is about $800B large. So, if SpaceX gets all of it, it would still have a P/E larger than 2.
So yeah, either they create an all-capable AGI or they create some rocket that is cheaper to run than an airplane... And they better be the only ones on that market, and capture most of the value they create.
"Extremely unlikely" is a huge understatement.
> Starlink seems to just print money.
Does it? Those satellites are individually dirt cheap compared to historical communication satellites, but Starlink requires a whole lot of them and they depreciate outrageously quickly.
Compare to my personal favorite communication medium, single-mode-fiber. SMF from 20-30 years ago still works, is compatible with most current-generation wavelengths, and can carry extremely high bandwidth per strand if users are willing to put fancy optics and muxes at the ends or can carry lower speeds at transceiver prices that would have been almost unimaginably low 20 years ago.
Starlink satellites seem to have zero or even slightly negative value after five years.
It's an Elon company, the valuation is never going to make sense.
It would help if the author actually created a DCF model and shared it. I have seen others create their own which value SpaceX between $250 to $400 billion.
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I've structured a pre IPO bet:
Long RONB (holds a ton of spacex), short ARKK (similar composition sans SpaceX) - or if you have a lot of time, you can short non-spacex RONB holdings. Planning to sell just after the IPO
I have become so disillusioned by some of the Hacker News crowd on here. It used to be full of nuanced smart people with interesting takes. Nowadays it seems very one sided - makes me very sad. People seem to be completely forgetting that SpaceX is one of the most "inspiring" companies that currently exist. They produce things (Starship) that give adults long-lost goosebumps and excitement just looking at it. SpaceX tech and launch stats speak for themselves. I know its hard to extend an exponential, but just try. All the comments on here feel like they were made against Tesla in 2017, and look how that worked out.
> I have become so disillusioned by some of the Hacker News crowd on here.
I feel the exact same way, but it's due to comments like yours that seem to excuse anything in the name of innovation. The goosebumps people feel are them just projecting what they think the future may look like based on what the snake-oil salesmen are peddling. How long have we been "just 2 years away from fully-automated self-driving" again?
There's more to this story than goosebumps over starships. If you have a retirement account or any investments open up your eyes widely because you're about to be fleeced.
Isn't something like "the company that makes really cool reusable rockets may also be engaging in securities fraud" exactly the sort of nuance you're looking for?
"SpaceX is inspiring! Be nice to them!"
"SpaceX is neither all good nor all bad! They do good things and bad things."
One of those has nuance, the other does not.
You can be inspired by the company and skeptical of its finances.
Ford was the same at one point. 100 years later, revolutionary technology being attached to incredibly toxic and unethical leaders has consequences (Ideally).
I've dragged starship since the very first day as an example of bad product leadership and bad project management. It's going to turn out to be the cybertruck of space.
The inflection point for both Tesla and SpaceX is when Elon decided he's the genius and he must make his mark on the next big product. He stopped listening to his own experts.
The company may be inspiring but its investment prospects must be taken with more scrutiny.
You mean “disillusioned” by people paying attention to valuations, revenue, profit margins etc?
And if you have seen the latest sells from Tesla, how it’s continuing to sell less every quarter and its reliability is shit.
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/05/new-study-ranks-tesla-as-t...
Are you sure that’s the argument you want to be making?
The world finally woke up to the fact that “colonizing mars” was fake bullshit.
The same way “full self driving” was (and is) fake bullshit used to do what the rich always do:
Take from you (via taxes and inflation spending) and give to themselves via government contracts that are done via lobbyists and regulatory capture.
Musk literally raided the govt via DOGE to ensure these contracts got done. His entire grift is to get on the government tit via subsidies or direct contracts
Are you really making this point?
Curmudgeon News
for retail investors every failed engine test, pressure test, or anything else is going to be a sell event. Every succesful launch, engine delivery, installed pane of glass is going to be a buy event. The youtubers like Nasaspaceflight and the others who stalk Spacex's every move with livecams at every site are going to add the stock price to their streams i bet.
The potential for incredible forced demand has me considering participating for a period of time. I have no faith in things like datacenters in orbit, but I do have strong faith in the greed and recklessness of others.
"I know it's a scam, but I'll sell at the peak and get out before all the suckers" - every meme stock and crypto bubble investor in the last decade. Ultimately you will be the sucker that others (VCs, banks, insiders) will make money off of.
This is exactly what they are hoping for, and why wall street is playing along, they all see the chance to soak a bunch of suckers.
> Musk is a storyteller.
Musk is a bullshitter.
This is true by any objective measure. He goes beyond "marketing" and just tells lies to keep the balls in the air. That he's not held to account is an indictment of the SEC and the whole public equity system in the US.
Link is dead.
> The SpaceX IPO in 2026 is unlikely to mirror the 500x or 1,000x returns of early Amazon or Google
I don't think this is right; when Google first IPO'd the sentiment was that they had a single successful product, search, and the stock was expected to track search. Now they have a whole suite of successful products.
Similarily SoaceX is viewed as a rocket company, but they're likely to continue to expand their product range, and for all we know some of their future products could be bigger and more profitable.