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Notes -
Starship bet update
A few years ago I made a series of bets about Starship making it to orbit with other posters, last rounded up here:
The last one is a real nail-biter. When I heard about the SpaceX IPO I first thought it's time to call it a day. My model for my predictions about Elon was that he has a hype-compulsion, making wilder and wilder promises to get money out of investors, and as it becomes clear he won't be able to reach the hyped up goal, at some point they will get fed up with him. So when the news of the $85.7 billion came out, I figured that even if I do win, it will be on a technicality - maybe they won't pull it off by end of this year, but this sort of money will surely be enough to get them over whatever humps they run into on the road.... Then again maybe not! It also turned out that they have $41.3 billion in accumulated losses since their founding, and have burned $4.3 billion on AI in Q1 2026 alone, so maybe I will lose on a technicality instead, where they will indeed get to orbit by end of year, but will be dragged down by the unprofitable parts of the company.
I now believe that such a "loss on a technicality" is a pretty likely outcome, precisely because of the IPO. Like I said last year, if my bet was with Elon, he probably could have ordered the damn rocket to be put in orbit, just to prove a point, and while I'm lucky enough to have made my bet with internet randos instead, the IPO changes the dynamics such that he will be very tempted to do such things just to prove a point. Currently 95% of SpaceX stock held by insiders is locked up and it will be gradually released over the course of the year. Stonks are largely guided by hype, hype is generated with media articles (such as "SpaceX makes history with Starship orbital launch!!!11"), so while a frivolous orbital launch would make little sense before, it could make a lot of sense now. There's already talk of Starship 14 being orbital, and I fully expect them to schedule it just before one of these unlock dates.
That said, it's not over until it's over! Just because they might want to do it, doesn't mean they'll pull it off. This whole bet is starting to feel like an episode of Wacky Races.
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.
Autonomous Tesla robo taxis started operating unsupervised in Austin last December, and in like 3 more cities this year, though I think they're at least delayed in 4 others, and in indefinite "you must ring a bell in front of your auto-carriage so as not to spook the horses" supervised status in California. I also wouldn't categorize prototypes as "absolutely nowhere", but at the very least the phrase "lalaland sci-fi prediction" should not be used to describe literal, physical things that I look out my car window and see driving past, don't you think?
Yeah, all 39 of them. Is that what's supposed to carry the company?
Absolutely nowhere in terms of generating profits for the company, and being able to justify it's valuation in a rational way, seems accurate to me.
The things Elon predicted / promised can't actually be seen. The Cybertruck is not an indestructible post-apocaliptic tank, and he didn't produce millions of them as he was telling his investors. His autonomous cars aren't safer than human drivers. The Semi can't economically beat diesel, let alone rail.
In technology, the gap between "0" and "39" is a hell of a lot larger than the gap between "39" and "tens of thousands"...
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