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The spacex IPO has happened and made Elon Musk a Trillionaire.
There are probably hundreds of potential topics from this story, feel free to go off on your own tangents.
What I am interested in is that this is a company that is building real world things, and not fake internet shit. It feels like a lot of new wealth and investment in America comes from and is directed to the internet. I think one of the main reasons has been that large investors are generally play-it-safe followers. They see which companies are newly striking it rich: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple, etc. And they are happy to invest in copy-cats.
I'm hoping the spacex IPO has a similar effect. That investors start chasing new copy cats. But this time copy-cats of spacex rather than copy cats of facebook or google.
I'm not sure what your definition of fake internet shit is, but obviously a large (majority?) share of the SpaceX valuation is xAI; it's not all about rockets and space. And xAI is essentially a copy-cat of OpenAI/Anthropic/the other tech companies chasing AI.
As for the space operations of SpaceX, it's not really clear to me what kind of innovation you expect here. In 2025, SpaceX already launched more rockets than the rest of the world combined. They've established a reputation as being cost effective and very reliable, which is great but also means it's hard to drive costs down further or become even more reliable. From that perspective, it seems like it's practically impossible to significantly grow their core operations.
They've achieved the cost reductions through partial reuse of rockets, the next step is full reuse via the Starship program, which (although estimates differ) is expected to driver cost down another order of magnitude. Starship has seen lots of R&D investment and appears to be close to deployment.
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Eh... SpaceX has launched more rockets than the rest of the world in no small part by making the justification to do it, in addition to the ability -- SpaceX without StarLink gets into a really weird place that's at minimum a much smaller company. And now that they can do it, there's a lot of other potential: space-related buildouts have historically been a place clever ideas go to die because availability and reliability didn't exist, and now they're present.
A lot of the ideas won't be economically viable (ICB-concorde) or won't work for decades (asteroid mining). But it's a little strange that there's no more potential. I admit I don't know the expectation rules and timelines that the filing here would need to use, though, which may explain that.
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Even their satellites are mostly just used for fake internet shit!
Leaving aside the fairness of "fake internet shit" as a concept, communications infrastructure is extremely real.
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Well Ukraine is worth at least a couple of trillion dollars and spacex is one of the main reason it exists as a country today.
Is it? Ukraine is as poor as India, with far worse demographics, and it's also a bombed out wreck at the moment.
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