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I don't think it's politically motivated at all. My impression of this IPO is that it's designed to inflate SpaceX's perceived value by offering very limited float and aggressively seeking to capture passive money by bargaining for inclusion in indices it would not otherwise be eligible for. Speaking as a passive investor myself, I want my money nowhere near this company until it meets the old eligibility criteria.
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Elon achived this valuation by merging xAI into SpaceX. The future of xAI is questionable, and without it SpaceX is very overvalued.
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SpaceX has the potential to be the most valuable company ever if the space economy expands. Starlink will be a tiny puzzle piece by then.

How is this even debatable.

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Why do people believe SpaceX is trying to democratize space flight? Thats demonstrably false if you actually listen to the things Elon says. He wants to go to Mars so he can setup the equivalent of the racist gated community he grew up in. That way he and his rich friends can escape there once being on earth is no longer tenable.
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If the space economy expands + if spacex continue to hold market share + if it can do so while increasing profitably against increasing competition in the future. And considering the argument is for "the most valuable company", if spacex can do all of the above while other non-space related companies that are hugely profitable slow down their paces of innovation, spacex could be the most valuable company ever.
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The SpaceX S-1 contradicts your claim by including an optimistic "TAA" (total addressable market) figure for "the space industry". Which falls heavily short of your claim. While the SpaceX claimed total TTA is mostly (like 80%) AI-powered "enterprise applications" which don't exist and are not related to space data centers or whatever.

How is this even debatable.

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What space economy? Aside from satellites- which have been a known quantity for a long time- I'm not seeing it.
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Also, starlink is stupid as a long-term play. Do you really think tossing satellites up into to space and replacing them every few years is cheaper or more sustainable than just building out wired infrastructure on the ground that can be used for decades? Plus, the is a finite limit to how much they can scale based in physics.
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The "space economy" is not yet a certainty, other than in the mind of science fiction fans. (Unsurprisingly, hard to reach irradiated rocks of undifferentiated boring minerals in a cold vacuum are of negligible value to humans here on Earth.)

Even if the Star Trek utopian future materialises, it is very likely to be a long time from now.

1. SpaceX has competitors. Most are making reusable rockets.

2. SpaceX has no moat.

3. The concept of money itself might change dramatical by the time SpaceX becomes a multi-planetary mega corporation. Investing now may not return returns in any meaningful sense.

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>The "space economy" is not yet a certainty

True, and that's exactly the reason why people want to buy this stock now.

If future returns were already (almost) certain, they would have been priced in and you couldn't make any money with this stock.

This is a classic high risk / high reward stock. IF the space economy takes off you might 10X your investment. If it doesn't, you might lose most of it.

Rich people (who own most of the stock market) can afford to make such high risk bets, because they can afford to lose the money and thus many will make that bet.

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This is the only sane reply so far, and being on HN (notably a VCs platform) this is rather sad.
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While the Starship project may be struggling, Falcon 9 is still a massive success, with a successful launch every couple of weeks, making up most of humanity's access to space/LEO right now.

And Starlink is a pretty big deal, particularly in a time of conflict where undersea cables are very vulnerable.

If Elon hadn't shifted so far to the right, these threads would be near-universally praising SpaceX despite Starship's struggles.

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Falcon 9 is a serendipitous technical success for a rocket that wasn't designed to land and be reused. It is an operational success. Whether that makes it a financial success is very questionable.

Starship is meant to answer all those questions about design intent and financial viability and then some. It could readily turn out to be an example of second system syndrome.

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> If Elon hadn't shifted so far to the right

A symptom of his fickle nature and erratic behavior, as well as general poor impulse control, all of which rightfully make people skittish with their money and question his judgment.

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I dont think he was fickle with this one. He was remarkably consistent.

He had period where he though he can become hero for the democrats due to green cars. It did not worked, neither democrats nor left accepted him as unconditional hero.

The racism, the villingness to cause harm to get more power for himself were there whole time. He was far right the whole time, just became more extreme and open when it stopped being disadvantage.

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He also loudly proclaimed support for trans rights and called out people on Twitter who didn’t, as well as other progressive issues. It wasn’t just “green cars.” So either he was just being a cynic/lying, which is bad. Or he suddenly became a bigot, which is also bad.
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But it’s at the whim of someone who I think nobody can describe as stable or trustworthy. Starlink the technology is great, Starlink the company has a massive weight attached to it.
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Interesting definition of "struggling", as in "managed to catch the largest booster rocket ever built with by snatching it mid air, and land the largest space ship in the ocean using a belly flop maneuver that everyone said was crazy and would never work".
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The 'struggle' is that they seem to have regressed from that point, and that the scale of Starship is perhaps too big for a 'fail fast, iterate rapidly' approach.

Especially now that every failure results in a massive wave of negative publicity

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Not even remotely politically motivated.

It doesn't matter if it's successful or not. Their space business is worth virtually nothing on paper and the funding structures and profit/loss accounts are scary.

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Most of the 1.8T hype is not at all related to the rocketry business. Well, I suppose if you buy the "AI DCs in space" pitch they could be somewhat related.
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If you buy the "AI DCs in space" pitch, you deserve to be parted from your money.
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I am baffled by how many people are buying in
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What's political is a policy change to "fast track" companies into the Nasdaq 100. Spacex is the first to benefit from this loophole that allows them to be added to indexes almost immediately after listing, which likely is a license to steal a bunch of regular folks retirement money. Elon Musk doesn't need more ways to steal people's money.

The unfortunate thing is, a lot of people have no idea this rule change has gone into effect, and that they're about to get fleeced by a bunch of professional investors.

https://www.kiplinger.com/investing/what-the-nasdaqs-new-fas...

It's legalized theft, and the victims are people least able to defend themselves from it. Most people have no idea what's in their retirement accounts, or track very closely what's being tracked by the index funds they've been told for decades was the safest way to invest in the stock market for non-pros.

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>Akademikerpension also said the governance structure of SpaceX was "extremely deficient", adding that Elon Musk is expected to control more than 80% of the voting rights while simultaneously serving as chief executive officer, chief technology officer and chair of the board.

Their skepticism seems pretty valid to me

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The company is wildly overvalued. It'd be funny if Musk wasn't about to walk away with a bunch of money stolen from retirement accounts.
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I think you'll find the whole valuation of the S&P500 is built upon retirement accounts. Yours. Mine.

In other words, look one level deeper and you'll see it's not the S&P500 that's overvalued. It's you and me and 100 million other people desperately attempting to make sure young people pay for them for 20-30 years when they're old.

And then you calculate it out ... and see it's not happening. No matter what the number on the account says.

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There's the normal level of... optimism. And, then there's SpaceX, a scam on a scale the world has never seen.
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Zuck was in roughly the same position and they didn’t put out a statement skipping that IPO. The valuation criticism is more valid but this line belies political motivation.
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More than 10times higher (possible valuation), 10+ years of Musk showing what kind of liability he is and at that time Zuck didn't have all the main CxO positions.

I don't think it is similar therefore.

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Google too, and this was in the long term best interests of shareholders.

Imagine in 2010 if investors had real transparency into how much money YouTube or Maps was losing, along with the governance structures to enforce their concerns.

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Musk appears far less predictibile, more volatile than Zuck. Musk also got directly involved in US politics aligned with of a man who singlehandedly butchered US relations with almost everyone in the world. A man who threatened Denmark with taking their territory by force.

You’re calling it “political motivation” as some sort of blind hate or vendetta out of principle, cutting off the nose to spite the face. But you can no longer separate Musk from politics and aggression towards Denmark.

The pension fund’s assessment looks entirely valid, objective and justifiable to me. But for anyone who personally favors Musk and his political views any dismissal will look politically motivated. It’s easy to cry foul. In this light your shallow dismissal might be just as politically motivated.

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The political motivation is on Musks part. There's no unpolitical view of a man who ransacked the US government and is propping up far-right movements all over Europe.
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Has anybody noticed a marked increase in simping here on HN?
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They've been simmping for Musk for at least a decade. Doing it for AI is only few years old.
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There's a lot of it. But I also see a lot more skepticism of Musk and the rest of the intellectual dork web. Flirting with fascism was edgy. Now it's just icky.
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Think so? I feel like HN has always had a high level of simping.
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