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I believe that SpaceX is extremely undervalued. At a minimum, SpaceX is going to form a core part of the next generation of American hegemony as military tech is put in space. In a medium case SpaceX is going to create a multi-trillion dollar space economy around telecommunications, computing, and satellite sensors at a scale previously unimaginable. In a maximum case...
The general tendency of SpaceX is that Elon wildly overpromises impossible deadlines that he fails to meet, and he still ends up years ahead of what everyone else in the industry thought was even remotely possible. For this reason I don't consider it dispositive that SpaceX misses all its deadlines and you've won all your bets.
The best argument against SpaceX, I believe, is that Elon likes to double down on his bets and he is going to continue to risk the entirety of SpaceX to reach the next run on his ladder. He could always fail and the whole thing comes crashing down. But at this point SpaceX has created a potential multi-trillion dollar space economy and I think the upside is so enormous that SpaceX is now too big to fail.
What I mean by "upside" is: Elon's new cheap orbital economics are going to fundamentally change the entire global economy. I think it's more than a question of the American military wanting to put spy satellites in space and therefore keeping SpaceX on a perma-subsidy that scuppers their downside. I think that SpaceX is unlocking huge, real productive economic value. Starlink provides internet access in remote and expensive locations that can't be serviced by traditional cables and landlines -- mining operations in the darkest jungles, oil rigs, planes. Continuous satellite imagery is going to unlock huge economic value in real world productive terms -- weather forecasts, crop yield measurements, infrastructure maintenance. How much is a better weather forecast worth? How much is continuous monitoring of an Atlantic hurricane worth over sporadic discontinuous images? How much was the shift from photos to video worth?
SpaceX is going to create a global nervous system of bandwidth and sensors and feed. This is more than simply putting better research telescopes in orbit and redirecting government monies based on taxing the productive earthbound economy. I think what SpaceX has already produced represents trillions of dollars in real wealth. Valued still at just one trillion -- a sale!
People were saying that about Tesla, and he was doing well for a while, and then he started promising goofy stuff like autonomous cars, robo taxis, electric trucks of various sizes, and humanoid robots, got absolutely nowhere with either of these things, and then got overtaken by the competition. xAI can't even keep up with it's competition from the start, and is a giant money pit that can plausibly sink SpaceX all on it's own. The only company that remotely fits your description is SpaceX itself because of how much more they launch than other providers, and I'll just repeat " $41.3 billion in accumulated losses" as a response.
I just remembered that I considered adding a "lessons learned" section where I also mention a few things that happened, which made me think that I was originally too harsh on Elon, but when I read stuff like this I figure I need to double down on negative coverage to compensate for the lalaland sci-fi predictions.
Which is the only company that I was describing.
Which is the same trajectory, Elon is willing to double down on black. SpaceX isn't down $41.3 Billion because they have failed to invent fundamentally productive technologies. SpaceX is down because Elon is leveraging previously-unimagined technological success into hither-further unimaginable giga-tech. It's possible that this blows up the company.
But Elon did invent the cheapest and most reliable rockets in the world, and this is a trillion-dollar industry at worst, and SpaceX has a huge moat it will take competitors years to cross. This is not la-la-land, even something as simple as continuous real-world weather monitoring and crop data is worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. How much is the internet worth? How much is it worth to have a near-monopoly on access to servicing ~3.5 Billion people? The entire world can be connected now, you don't have to build and maintain physical cables in inaccessible locations, you just need a few hundred dollars for a Starlink receiver. What's the bear case? That the schizos were right and global population is dramatically overestimated? That there's no economic value in putting the rest of Africa on the net? It seems to me like the market is so large that not even xAI could sink it.
The best argument remains that perhaps Elon is too unstable and his competitors will reap the boring rewards of actually making money while he chases a car he can't catch. But that case has to confront the fact that -- we somehow got here, didn't we?
That what he has doesn't scale, and what he has is currently maintained by investors / borrowed cash. That Starship isn't "unimaginable giga-tech", it's necessary for the whole thing to not collapse (this certainly seems to be the impression Elon himself has).
I don't know man, I don't know how to have a conversation with someone so high on hype. Make a specific prediction within a reasonable time frame, as in the past, I'll be happy to put my name on the other side of it. That's the only way I found I can have a productive conversation on the topic.
High on hype? Come on, make an argument. My argument is bounded by the theory that the US Government will bail out SpaceX in the worst case because it's important to a generation of American military power, and that SpaceX will be extremely economically productive in the medium case because -- blah blah blah I'm repeating myself. Did you even read what I wrote? It was actually pretty measured.
Do you disagree that continuous satellite imagery and communications servers (already proven technologies) represent huge industries? Why does an email from five years ago give you the impression that Elon thinks it's all going to collapse? (And despite the real problems they are having, they are producing more Starship Raptor engines now than they were at the time of Elon's email.)
I've given you a get-out-of-flail-plea card by noting that Elon could bet the company on yet-unrealized tech that becomes vaporware. You could have just agreed with that. The point you raised instead is a prediction from Elon that SpaceX would go out of business if something that wouldn't happen, didn't happen. SpaceX still hasn't gone out of business. In fact, quite the opposite recently.
My bet is that SpaceX is undervalued and its stock will rise. Tell me where you think it will be in ~2 years.
The democrats are going to get back in office at some point, and they are almost certainly going to try to permanently remove Musk's access to anything resembling wealth or power when they do so. This creates an obvious avenue for generating a fiscal crisis for SpaceX correlated with an obvious obstacle for the sort of bailout you're suggesting. At a minimum, I would expect a "bailout" under such conditions to require the removal of Musk and all Musk loyalists from the company's leadership, and the installation of people deemed politically reliable. I would expect such a "bailout" to effectively destroy the company.
The route to stopping Musk for a Democratic president and majority is getting harder. Unlike Tesla where it’s possible they could lean on institutional shareholders to pressure him out (although they’d be very loathe to do so given it would tank the price), Musk has a supermajority of SpaceX voting rights. They could try to use the SEC to force him out of management, defense production acts to take control of operations etc but they would be stayed by a conservative fifth circuit judge, then blocked by SCOTUS, especially this SCOTUS. So they’d have to pack the court first, which requires abolishing the filibuster, which would make some on the center squeamish, etc etc. There’s also no real competition in a lot of places eg Starlink, NASA contracts are so long term they’re hard to change quickly. I assume they’d try to fund competitors, maybe offer generous tax breaks or state funding or exploratory contracts, but they couldn’t actually replace them, not quickly. They can investigate him for DOGE actions, securities law violations etc but I expect Trump will give him a blanket pardon for everything that he ever did in his entire life up until January 20th 2029 when he leaves office.
"harder" is not "impossible" or even "sufficiently hard to successfully deter the motivated", and it seems to me that the Democrats and Blue Tribe generally are at this point highly motivated.
Packing the court is likely to happen soon in any case.
Loss of actual capabilities is not a significant obstacle; the federal government is very comfortable wallowing in infrastructure and technology mediocrity for indefinite periods of time.
I would not be comfortable betting my freedom and well-being on Presidential Pardons being the norm that shall forever stand, but I'll grant that a pardon is likely and should offer at least some protection short-term.
What would be the obstacle to a federal wealth tax aimed exclusively at trillionaires?
And of course, straightforward murder is always an option.
There's no need to be in power for that.
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