- Apollo had a significantly higher accepted risk. Apollo 1 or 13 would be untenable today.
- The percent of 13-year olds that made it into and through eight grade was significantly smaller in 1912. Your average poor farming kid did not go to eighth grade.
It seems Nowadays for new businesses, lawsuits, maybe even a stint in prison with a 1 million presidential pardon at the end, is all incorporated into a business cost line, in a VC investment funds planning...
This comment reads like an S-1 pitch deck and almost every claim is false or misleading.
The $16B is not profit its revenue, and I strongly suggest to learn the difference before investing. The $8B figure is EBITDA, also known as, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, AND amortization.
For a company running around 9500 LEO satellites with a less than 5 year lifespan, depreciation is the business.
Their FCC filings show that about 500 satellites deorbited just in the first of half of 2025 alone, and they were all under 5 years old. The estimates for constellation sustenance are currently at $5-8B per year in satellite manufacturing (about $500K each) and launch costs are about $3M each. That is the real capex that EBITDA hides. Net income has never been disclosed and probably for good reason...
And lets not even mention the $19 billion EchoStar acquisition who is almost certainly! not included in the $8 billion EBITDA figures reported...
The most critical is that xAI is excluded from the number. XAI had a $1.46B net loss in Q3 2025 on just $107M in revenue, accelerating from $1B the prior quarter. They were burning $1B a month at the time of filing. This pig was then merged into SpaceX in Feb 2026 along with X/Twitter. So start with $8B EBITDA, subtract $5-8B satellite replacement, subtract $4-6B per year in xAI losses, subtract interest and taxes specially amortization and you are very very deep in the red. Once audited financials go public, every analyst with a calculator and a working brain will see this.
Also the revenue is largely circular... Over 70% of Falcon 9 launches in 2025 were internal Starlink missions so SpaceX is its own biggest customer. Starlink is 70% of total revenue. The so called "launch business" and "internet business" are the same capital cycle booked as two revenue lines ;-)
Replace legacy ISPs? Really? Starlink has 0.2% residential market share after 5 years, with declining ARPU ($85 avg vs $120 US) and congestion already emerging at 10M subs. It is a niche rural/maritime ISP, not an AT&T killer.
And on the valuation? NVIDIA for example, who has an almost actual monopoly on AI chips, with $216B revenue, and $120B net income, at 56% margins, trades at 20x revenue. Tesla…. already considered absurdly overvalued at P/E 355, trades at 15x. Amazon at 3x. Meta at 10x. SpaceX wants 110x !! times revenue, with no audited financials, unknown net income, and a freshly absorbed money losing AI company. Even on bullish 2026 projected revenue of $24B, it's 73x so nearly 4x NVIDIA multiple, and NVIDIA actually prints profit...
Starship on another side is very very far from routine... 11 flights, 5 failures. But notice on thing...In 2025 alone on Flight 7 the upper stage exploded from harmonic vibrations. Then Flight 8 exploded from propellant mixing. Flight 9 was destroyed on reentry...Ship 36 exploded on test stand
...the first V3 booster exploded during pressure testing and was scrapped.
See a pattern here? Each failure from a different root cause. So multiple unsolved failure modes, not iteration. It has never reached orbit, never caught a ship, never demonstrated orbital refueling.
This offering is the most scandalous ever and the structure tells you everything. The filing is confidential, REAL financials only need to go public 15 days before the roadshow. Nasdaq is literally changing its index rules effective May 1 to allow a fast track Nasdaq-100 entry in 15 trading days. This is a rule that never existed before, and is made for this IPO, forcing billions in passive index buying on day one.
Public float is just 3% to 4%. This is one of the tightest floats for any major US IPO in modern history, and I have been following the markets for 20 years. They do 30% retail allocation what is three times the norm and tells you exactly who the target buyer is.
Given this level of rule bending, dont be shocked if the S-1 with real audited numbers quietly drops at the last legally permissible moment, maybe minutes before the IPO? ensuring hype and retail commitments are fully baked, before anyone really looks at what the financials actually say.
It will be a wildly successful IPO. Same playbook as Tesla 2010, just with more zeros and fewer functioning prototypes.
The only thing I can argue with is the thoughts on Starship. Each ship failing in a new way is exactly what you'd expect to see from a research project fixing one issue at a time and progressing a bit further until the next issue crops up. I would be much more concerned to see _the same_ failure happen over and over with no clear plan to resolve the issue.
How to do you factor in the military demand for Starlink?
If you follow the war in Ukraine, there is absolutely no denying that Starlink is a total gamechanger. Mostly because it's inherently hard to jam, but also got acceptable latency allowing for unrestricted FPV strikes. Because of this, Ukraine seems to have achieved Russian air-defense degradation to the point of limited "free hunting" in the deep.
In that use case, even "AI in space" kinda make sense to me, for future drone developments. One-way drones don't have to waste expensive compute for autonomy, when the compute can be in space above. This would save one RTT for drone control, too. For cheap, jamming resistant swarm (semi-)autonomy, to overwhelm AD, it seems like the perfect solution.
The cat is out of the bag, there is no way the military will ever let go of this capability. Cheap drones are the future, LEO sats provide the comms. There will be long running service contracts.
I see the civilian use rather as a "peace time" subsidiary, now, but the main customer will be the military. And due to SpaceX's launch platform and commercial offering, it's giving the US a hard technological edge in warfare, since it's difficult to afford a LEO sat network without cheap launches and civilian co-pay.
I am too stupid to make a proper economic argument, but it seems like a clever and sustainable business model :D Would love to hear your thoughts!
Famous last words. https://t.me/kcpn2014/3890
The [Russian] Analytical Center of KCPN has conducted a large-scale study of the [Ukrainian] hidden military infrastructure, which provides Ukrainian forces with stable communications along the entire line of contact. The focus is on the “BakhmutTelecom” project — a military mobile network operator (3G and 4G) that was deployed practically under our noses back in 2023. We often attribute many of the enemy’s successes to Starlink, although in reality these are the result of organizational, not technological, advantages.
The civilian cover for “BakhmutTelecom” is J&Y LLC, which in fact serves as infrastructure for purely military tasks. The network comprises around 2,500 towers, 36 or 50 meters tall, arranged in three tiers. They are interconnected via underground fiber-optic cables and microwave relay links.
It's true, it was a bit hyperbole. No civilian really knows what's up. Should have stated it accordingly. It's the apparent observer's consensus.
Yet, the Russian cut-off from Starlink was incredibly notable, organizationally and the recovered FP-1/FP-2 drones featured Starlink terminals, so no use denying that.
Ukraine certainly didn't build 3G/4G in occupied territory. Consider the radio horizon for a 50m tower. In proximity to targets, it absolutely can be jammed, and Russia is very capable of doing so. We see none of that in those deep strikes. Those drones seem to be completely resistant to EW, which implies a connection from above (can only be effectively jammed from above AFAIK). The latency seems notable, but stable.
Now, of course, Starlink alone wouldn't have defeated AD by itself, magically. That's mostly good strategy and intel. However, Starlink made those FP-1/FP-2 deep strikes way more effective and simple (compared to using relays and mesh networking, hoping EW hasn't caught up). Starlink allows to have stable video feeds until impact. No need for autonomy, radio tracking, terrain mapping... just a reusable pilot and a cheap drone. That's huge and a significant tech advantage. If Russia had this (and the intel) for their overwhelming numbers of Geran drones, Ukraine would be in a very bad situation, I think.
Apart from that, Starlink was also instrumental in exfiltrating information about the Iranian protests. It's just a jamming/censorship resistant technology evidently effective against most competent adversaries.
That said, due to the importance of Starlink, I think escalation to/focus on orbit denial attacks seems likely, for any nation which can't afford their own LEO sat network, or existentially utilizes censorship/information control. Especially since (low) LEO debris will deorbit rather timely, it's not exactly a permanent damage to human space flight. Therefore Starlink's military success may be self-limiting and temporal, since the satellites themself are not at all immune to asymmetric attacks.
Those are a lot of great points but I'll nitpick a couple things. While it's true that Starship has never reached orbit, they have reached orbital velocity several times. They could have gone into orbit if they'd aimed in that direction, but they didn't because it's a test rocket and they didn't want it to stay up there if anything went wrong.
And I don't think the multiple failure causes mean they aren't iterating. They're making changes with every launch. It might mean that everything's a tradeoff, and a lot of times when you fix one thing, you create a problem somewhere else. Building a fully, rapidly reusable rocket is a really difficult task.
Something you didn't mention is that even on the "successful" flights they suffered some damage on reentry. They'll have to fix that if they want rapid reuse, which is essential for the super low costs Elon estimates.
I'm not sure what you mean by "never caught a ship" but they did catch a landing first stage with their launch tower, which was a pretty fancy trick nobody had tried before.
> See a pattern here? Each failure from a different root cause. So multiple unsolved failure modes, not iteration. It has never reached orbit, never caught a ship, never demonstrated orbital refueling.
Wouldn't it be worse if it was all from the same root cause. That would suggest they can't figure out how to fix the problem. Multiple failures with different root causes provide almost optimal experimental data. I'm not saying the failures are necessarily good for SpaceX, but we are seeing progress and a willingness to push the envelope.
This IPO makes me more worried about the future of SpaceX then experimental rockets blowing up. That said, I can see why some people will invest in SpaceX, SpaceX has a significant lead in the space race and may end up gaining a near monopoly on access to space.
Borking up the indices has been inevitable since index investing rose. Think of index investors like a bunch of entirely undefended prey surrounded by predators. If we had a working SEC somebody might do something, but we don't.
Using your metaphor, this rule change represents something more along the lines of an invasive predator, new disease or parasite.
I'll stop there, because Musk is much-loved by the internet, but to pull on this string of systemic risk, let me see if I can walk through my thoughts here:
Nasdaq Inc. (the exchange operator) and Nasdaq-100 (the index) are not independent entities with separate interests. Nasdaq owns and operates the index. A SpaceX listing would be a major win for Nasdaq, reinforcing its dominance in IPOs and billions in licensing fees - Invesco QQQ Trust alone has over $300 billion. Every basis point of licensing fee on that is enormous static income. When SpaceX says "change the rules for me or I list on NYSE," that's a threat to both the exchange listing fees and the downstream index licensing revenue.
So the competition here is between index operators (SP500 is actively managed by an actual steering group, so rules changes aren't as big a whoop) for who can net the biggest pool of new shares so that their passive income on index license fees can get maximally farmed. The actual thing the money comes from - retail index investors - don't figure in this equation at all. It's a systemic risk of replacing actively managed funds with consumer 401k products, risk that requires active legislation and law enforcement for there to even be a fair marketplace; markets require regulations, after all[1].
If you're thinking this sounds a little like the competition between the ratings agencies circa 2008 to see who can award the most AAA ratings, you're in the right ballpark. It wouldn't even be possible if SpaceX wasn't onboarding basically every big player in this travesty: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup. In fact, I suspect that this cabal of villains are the ones testing the x{N} float idea that has everyone up in arms - they see a golden plan here to smash the window and hit the road before the sirens go off.
And that's the problem with invasives. They don't participate in the system at hand; they monkey with the fundamentals. Compete with other plants? Nah, I poison all the soil where I grow. Not enough substrate? Kill all the vertebrates with symbiont viruses so the world turns into Fungusland. And even if the retail investor wins, that means a massive flight from NASDAQ, which even I have been double checking in my tiny little pool of casino winnings. But triggering a flight from every index everywhere? That would not be bright. But, well, that's the other thing about invasives, right? They're not long term thinkers.
[1] I suppose this has become a political point too, hasn't it? Well, ride with me for a bit.
Smartphones can now connect directly to some LEO satellite services. Apple’s iPhone satellite features work on iPhone 14 and later. It makes me wonder if the evolution of this capability will eventually make Starlink a telecom without the traditional towers.
It won't because of congestion. Terrestrial wireless infrastructure can be engineered for any level of user density. The TAM for space based wireless is limited to people who are out of range of terrestrial wireless, and have a high enough value need to connect.
>See a pattern here? Each failure from a different root cause. So multiple unsolved failure modes, not iteration. It has never reached orbit, never caught a ship, never demonstrated orbital refueling.
Solid comment on the ISP business but this is straight up bullshit. They absolutely better have different root causes. That’s exactly what iteration looks like. Blowing up subsequent ships for the same problem would be incompetence.
Also the ship has very explicitly been held from an orbital trajectory to ensure predictable reentry in the event of no re-engine light. It’s very apparent from external analysis it was capable of the extra few seconds of engine runtime for an elliptical orbit.
"...Attacks on those companies would begin from 8 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1, Tehran time (12:30 p.m. EDT), the IRGC said in a post on Telegram translated by Google, warning employees at those companies to leave workplaces immediately to protect their lives...
The list of companies also featured Cisco, HP, Intel, Oracle, IBM, Dell, Palantir, JP Morgan, Tesla, GE, Spire Solutions, Boeing
and UAE-based AI company G42. ..."
Kill they Supreme leader and 40 other leaders, destroy their Navy and Airforce and give them 30 days of B1 and B2 night and day bombings, and they decide it still worth it to joke on Aprils Fools ? :-) I have to give to them...
Towards the bottom they list some satellite imagery and a statement indicating they are possibly using the taxiways as parking.
Still leaves open the question of who might have been injured and where, but at least answers how the Iranians could have possibly hit a taxiing plane — they didn’t.
Well after 50 years we cant reproduce what Apollo did, and I would doubt current students of the same age would handle a 1912 Eight Grade Examination: https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam191...
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