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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.
Elon Musk is on a one-man crusade to prove the EMH wrong. The valuations of his firms are so clearly delusional, and yet it persists. At this point, it seems a great deal like if you're betting on Musk you're betting that he's going to achieve financial escape velocity and katamari the economy before his political and legal liabilities catch up with him. (I'm being hyperbolic, but the valuations seem extraordinarily hard to justify).
Not that his companies should be worthless, but SpaceX currently outvalues the rest of the aerospace sector. TSLA has vastly higher market cap than auto manufacturers with an order of magnitude more revenue, income, and assets despite repeatedly failing to generate the breakthrough innovations that would justify high future expected performance. All this at a point where Musk has significantly stepped back from hands-on management of his company in favor of drugs, politics, and posting, so even if you still think Musk is a wizard (he's not), it seems questionable to base your investment decisions on that.
Both Tesla and SpaceX bulls are entirely upfront about the fact that you cannot make a bull case for the core businesses of Tesla and SpaceX justify the market cap. The bull case is explicitly that Musk will pivot to a business that doesn't exist yet and make the pivot work because he's Musk.
Stories that have run for Tesla in the past include:
The current story for SpaceX is orbital datacentres, which at least has something to do with the existing assets, but is a lot further from actually existing than Autopilot or Tesla Robotics.
Even with the best case price per KG to orbit for Starship, orbital datacenters still really don't make any sense financially. Even when compared to more exotic options like underwater datacenters in the ocean. The only thing orbital datacenters would make sense for is escaping regulation, but even that would require significant changes to all of our current treaties for how satellites and other stuff in space are regulated.
Reusable rockets and an LEO communications satellite constellation also didn't make any sense when they were originally proposed, and look at them now. At this point I'm willing to trust that whatever harebrained scheme SpaceX is pushing this time, their engineers have done the math and figured out that it's doable.
As far as I can tell, the actual obstacle that's pushing SpaceX and others to put their compute up into orbit is really just good old fashioned zoning laws. If you want to move as fast as Elon does, putting your compute on a rocket and blasting off probably sounds a lot better than navigating the increasing political opposition to data centers here on Earth.
Which, as I mentioned, would be cheaper to accomplish (and far easier to maintenance on) somewhere in the ocean as opposed to in orbit.
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Space datacenters are probably inevitable if we keep increasing the compute power available in space as satellites get cheaper. The question probably is whether it will make anything efficient outside of orbit.
Can you radiate that much heat?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80
You can, but it's another one of the big increases in cost compared to a terrestrial datacenter.
Warning: The "?si=", "?pp=", and similar portions that YouTube has started adding to any URL created with the "share" button allegedly can be used to reveal the YouTube username of the user who created that URL. For that reason, those portions of the URL should be deleted before copying and pasting.
Thanks, forgot they added that bullshit
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