“Time to musk up.” – Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
You know who gives kids a bad name? Elon Musk.
Elon Musk has just launched his SpaceX® IPO at a price of $135. If you were in on the initial purchase, you’ve already printed money, as the current price is now at $216 as I write this. This is bitcoin level price increase. And, it shows Elon Musk’s meme effect. I expect soon enough that he’ll announce he’s moved his headquarters to an orbital space bombardment platform.
For tax reasons, you know.
As much as the GloboLeftists like to make fun of Elon for buying Twitter© and turning it into X© and destroying 30% of its market value, Musk has certainly had the better of that conversation since he’s now a trillionaire and his having an amplified voice on X© certainly hasn’t hurt.
Regardless: quatro commas.
That’s a lot of money.
Step 2: Profit. Step 1: Time Machine.
As I write this, SpaceX© has a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion dollars. That’s more than Amazon©. It’s more than Saudi Aramco®. There are only four stocks bigger than SpaceX©: Apple®, Nvidia™, Google©, and Microsoft© and I think it passed Microsoft® this afternoon. And, in the scheme of things, it’s pretty close to being the biggest company.
Ever.
To put this into perspective, SpaceX© by itself is now worth as much money as all the aerospace companies and defense companies in the world. Combined.
Part of this is due to the relatively small number of SpaceX™ shares available. SpaceX© sold 5% of itself, getting $85 billion to pay off debt and buy Elon something nice. If Elon had dumped all of the stock, I’m betting it wouldn’t have near that valuation because someone would have had to buy the other $2.7 trillion worth of shares, and it’s not like Jeff Bezos has that in his couch cushions.
To be fair, no one has that in their couch cushions except the federal government, and they’re too busy giving it to Democrat agitators to bring in foreigners and agitate for communism. You know, things that benefit society.
The North Korean gymnast didn’t win in the Olympics©, but her execution was flawless.
That small float has led to the stock, in my opinion, being a meme. It’s the Dogecoin© of equities. It has enormous value because Elon is associated with it. It also, unlike the usual IPOs accessible only to folks with a half million bucks or so, is accessible to anyone that can fog a mirror. Beyond that, it’s also going to be required to be picked up by several stock indices soon. This will require things like pension funds and mutual funds to buy it.
What is “it”, though? What makes up SpaceX™?
The smallest piece is actually what people think of: the rockets. Even though Musk has the single largest, most active, and most efficient space program on the planet, that’s not a huge market. I mean, it’s more money than I have, but Elon’s biggest customer is . . . Elon.
Starlink© is the only profitable piece of this project. My eldest, The Boy, has Starlink©. He likes it. It’s good, if you’re not close to an actual wire. The problem for other people wanting to make a space-based Internet is that Elon has the big lead here, and there’s probably only room for one company.
Jeff Bezos was going to try to make an orbital communications network, but his rockets don’t work, so he has no way to send stuff to space cheaply. Cheaply? Speaking of Jeff’s wife . . .
I digress.
I knew Bezos’ rocket program schedule was in trouble when he hired Elton John. I think it’s gonna be a long, long time.
So, what else is SpaceX©? It’s the X™ formerly known as Twitter©. Which seems an odd pairing with the other two, but not as strange as the last piece: xAI®.
In summary, SpaceX© is:
Rockets: Total market? $370 billion. Not sure if that includes the Iranian market. As it is, he’s showing a $662 million loss in the rocket segment in 1Q26, but that includes blowing up all of those Starship™ tests. If NASA were doing the same thing, it would have already cost a trillion dollars and they wouldn’t have launched the first one yet.
If some of SpaceX® junk destroys a city in north Texas, would the headline be “Debris does Dallas”? (as-found)
Space connections: Total market? $1.6 trillion. Elon can probably earn most of this and it’s already earning him over a billion dollars a year. As the Internet is primarily made of porn and cat videos, made $1.1 billion last quarter selling virtual pussy . . . cats.
The old Twitter™: No known profit. By transferring the old Twitter® to SpaceX™ that does make Elon the X® owner.
AI: $26.5 trillion. Right now, he’s losing only $2.5 billion a quarter at this, which makes him a rank amateur when compared with OpenAI®. OpenAI© lost $38.5 billion last year, so Musk needs to lose a lot more money this year to catch up.
One of these is not like the other. And I’d argue that one of these isn’t remotely reasonable.
You can do your own math. But the big thing to me is this is quite like Elon Musk’s junk drawer that has a flashlight and an old 9-volt battery and some slightly-dull colored pencils and an old AC adaptor that I’ve forgotten exactly what it adapted. Starlink™ and the rockets make sense together. But xAI®? Was that just thrown in there to puff up the price?
It was. And maybe sometime in the future he’ll toss Tesla© and Grimes and some old socks in there, too.
See! I didn’t make this up. It takes accountants to make things up. (as-found)
The big connection there would be that, I guess, that Elon can make orbital data centers that don’t require power generation on Earth or cooling water. And Elon’s only going to build (checks notes) a million of them. That’s pretty ambitious since he’s only tossed up 10,000 Starlink© satellites at about $2 million each. If he got the same price (doubtful) it would still cost $2 trillion. Probably closer to $20 trillion.
Which is . . . not going to happen. In fact, I think the SpaceX™ IPO will be looked back as the point where the A.I. bubble began to deflate. But I’ve been wrong before: I missed some bits and wouldn’t have bet that it would have gone up as fast as it has.
Remember like they said in Apollo 13, failure is always an option. (as-found)
What is the end game, then?
Well, Elon’s end game is to make Elon insanely rich, for one. To be fair, he’s already gotten insanely rich through selling electric cars and built a space program that exceeds the capacity of every other nation on Earth, and has fathered something like 70 little Musks which might be part of his own diversification strategy: a genetic junk-drawer, as it were.
What’s the long game? Maybe an orbital space bombardment platform. Or a government on Mars peopled entirely by those offspring.
Well, at least now he has space for rent.
This is not advice or a solicitation to buy or sell or rent or trade or loan or barter or whatever other adjective. It’s a humor post. I actually hope Elon does send up a million rockets, but I’m thinking it’s more likely he’ll have a million kids, which, with enough investor money is much more possible but I wouldn’t want go on a long car trip with a million kids because I’d be tempted to sell or rent or trade or loan or barter the lowest performing 10% of the children into the PEZ® mines. Also, I think having a million kids would make me sore. Which also might be Elon’s plan. Regardless, this isn’t investment, dating, or reproductive advice.
This is what happens when there is too much money in circulation. All those printers going “brrrrrrrrr” led to a lot of cash that had to end up somewhere. So we get these insane valuations.
It is sad that our stock market has devolved into a few AI/social media companies driving everything, while all of the other stocks are now viewed as irrelevant.
Bingo. And people are looking for the next Nvidia.
It’s gambling at this point.
The misdirection and deception of EVERYTHING going on is Matthew 24 on steroids. The price of an ounce of real money should be 13-15k. The program to turn people away from having anything is pure evil genius.
Yup. Evil.
The reason SPCX price has exploded from an IPO price of $135 to the current $200+ is basically a classic gamma squeeze on its option chain. A company’s stock price is just what it’s worth at this particular instant in time. Its stock options are a casino of bets on what the stock price is gonna be at multiple points in the future. The Wall Street Vampires make their money by playing the house and running a company’s options casino, not by buying and holding its actual stock – that’s a job for venture capitalists to do. And if you’re a bookie giving action on a hot, hot bet, you gotta lay off action to other bookies to protect yourself from the mugs, er, retail investors actually winning their bet. That protection insurance costs (Monopoly) money and raises the price of everything. As the casino operator, it’s just a cost of doing business – remember, Wall Street makes its money on the house edge (brokerage fees), not by being right on the price direction bet.
https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/understanding-gamma-squeeze
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/spcx/option-chain
Pretty much the same thing happened to GME in early 2021. I actually made X5 on my money on GME and bought my beloved 20 year old used convertible I otherwise would not have today. But those numbers (especially the insanely high Melvin Capital short stake) on GME were painfully obvious to everybody on what was gonna happen…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStop_short_squeeze
In contrast, SpaceX is an opaque mystery box that IMHO anybody with common sense is not gonna touch with a ten foot pole – the Tesla mystique on steroids and a stock price crash is a-comin’. If you run the numbers, Starlink cannot possibly expand to its full global potential based on the (admittedly impressive!) throw weight of the Falcon 9. To grow Starlink (and the SPCX stock price), Musk has GOT to have Starship work as a Falcon 9 replacement. A lunar lander for NASA, a city of a million on Mars, AI data centers in space – these are all fantasy side shows. Starship is the make-or-break element for Starlink and SpaceX… and we are a LONG way from proving Starship is a viable REUSABLE, QUICK TURNAROUND launch platform.
Just getting the thing to orbit and back would be a major accomplishment at this point – and unveiling the actual weigh capability to orbit would also be nice. Rumors are the Starship stack is (unsurprisingly) overweight, which may ultimately prove to be its downfall. You can’t fool the unforgiving Tsiolkovsky rocket equation.
Allow me a tech geek-out here for a minute….
“The Starship V3 payload bay is optimized to deploy up to 60 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites at once. These third-generation satellites are massive—measuring roughly 7 meters (23 feet) wide and weighing around 2 metric tons each—making them far too large to fit inside a traditional Falcon 9 fairing. SpaceX utilizes a specialized “PEZ dispenser” payload mechanism built into Starship’s nose cone to slide the flat-packed satellites out into orbit one by one.
Payload Bay Capacity & Physical Constraints: Because a single Starlink V3 satellite spans nearly the full width of Starship’s 9-meter cargo bay, they must be flat-stacked tightly together.
Mass Target: A full batch of 60 satellites totals roughly 120 metric tons. This perfectly aligns with the target operational capacity of the stretched Starship V3 frame.
Exponential Capacity Boost: Launching 60 V3 satellites simultaneously delivers an unprecedented 60 Terabits per second (Tbps) of network capacity in a single flight. This means just one Starship V3 launch adds more data throughput to the constellation than 23 separate Falcon 9 launches combined.”
FYI, so far musk has flown 390 Falcon 9 Starlink missions.
Only problem…the NOMINAL (and unproven) payload target for the CURRENT Starship V3 is 100 metric tons, not 120 – and they are currently selectively reducing the hull skin from 4mm thick to 3 mm thick wherever they can just to try and get to this 100 tons of payload. They’re gonna have to move on to an official “stretched V3 = V4” Starship to hit their ultimate targets.
Longer, thinner things break easier, so this is all a big, big gamble. If SpaceX succeeds, they will replace every cell phone tower on Earth with direct-to-space cellphone service and wipe out ATT, Verizon and TMobile. But that’s one big if.
From what I’ve read, AST Spacemobile’s satellites work much better than Starlink for cell to satellite communication. They’re made specifically for this as opposed to Starlink.
What you say is true for the current generation of Starlink satellites, which Musk considers obsolete and is gonna replace with the massively (see what I did there?) improved newer version to be launched by Starship.
Both AST Spacemobile and SpaceX have around 60 MHZ of licensed 5G bandwidth for their services, but the former is a patchwork of frequencies stitched together from partnerships with Verizon and ATT while the latter is a previously unused contiguous block of frequencies purchased outright for $20 billion from defunct Echostar . The FCC has authorized AST Spacemobile to launch 248 satellites for US coverage. The FCC has authorized SpaceX to launch 15,000 next-generation Starlink satellites for worldwide coverage.
Handicap those two horses and place your bets.
Always remember that Musk thinks big and is out to conquer the world.
Something I forgot to mention. The estimates are that 2,000 of those 15,000 currently-approved next generation Starlink satellites in the finished constellation will have to be replaced every year. At 60 satellites per Starship launch, Musk is counting on 2000/60 = around 35 Starship launches per year JUST TO KEEP HIS PROPOSED FCC APPROVED UPDATED STARLINK CONSTELLATION RUNNING. If his ultimate plans of a 30,000 sat constellation is realized, he’s gonna need a Starship launch every 5.5 days to keep it running.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-elon-musk-next-gen-starlink-satellite-details/
Thanks for the follow up to my comment. My real interest in the commercial space industry is the “up” part. The more viable launch capacity we have, the better.
Ricky – – Kudos for elucidating the mysterious space launch logistics for we mere human beings.
Seriously, excellent info ! Now I tender a serious question: What effect will a nuke burst at 60-100 miles high have on those Starlink satellites that are within line of sight of the blast…. ? ? Would they survive an EMP blast to thereafter be operational ? (Any other readers… please put forth you answers…)
We kinda know the effects of EMP Nuke Burst near the surface of the Earth, but those reports were conjured-up back before Starlink was even a dream in Elon’s mind.
I have seen nothing on the EMP effects of satellites in orbit. I am certain that it is NOT NOTHING….
I have read that our GPS satellites and some others have been built to withstand EMP blasts. Perhaps Elon has prepared his Starlinks to perform likewise. Perhaps, but I’m not putting money on it !
Technically, nuclear blasts don’t produce EMP, they produce uncharged radiation, specifically X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons. When this radiation hits air molecules, it ionizes those molecules to produce free electrons. At this point the situation is basically like a solar storm event which sprays the earth with free electrons from the Sun. The electrons have their initial motion “downward” towards the ground, and the Earth’s magnetic field lines also induces the spiraling motion around the field lines guiding the electrons towards the poles where they produce auroras. It is this secondary high-velocity electron motion (moving charge) that creates a high-intensity electromagnetic wave and so EMP damage to electronics and an overload in the ionosphere that disrupts radio communications.
So the electromagnetic effects from an orbital nuke are primarily felt on the ground and in the atmosphere. Satellites have to deal with a pulse of high-energy radiation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3028-3.html
The rules were all set up for this to soar. It was . . . engineered.
Gay.
The only thing worse than an evil system of shekel rubbing ghetto space lizards looting heritage America is not getting my 5x return at the evil system casino. This is why we will keep losing.
Musk has been a con job from Day 1. CIA seed $$$, right? And, who cares about Mars? There was a post on
stevequayle.com last week that claimed there were 250,000 people living on the Moon.
John – – Once again, you are w-a-a-a-y outta there with your Spaced-Hex news…..
Loved the: “Debris does Dallas”?
Few today would know that “connection”……
Hehehe, glad you caught it. Now you need an antibiotic.
Wonder how many RAH fans who identify Elon Musk with Harriman threw in some coin just to support the dream.
I’ve planted so many trees I will never live to see tower, I’ve lost track.
If we had the 💸 I’d’ve bought one share…
Back from 2017 🙂
https://wilderwealthywise.com/elon-musk-the-man-who-sold-mars/
Real patriots wish that they could stay awake 24 hours a day spreading freedom.