That article claiming $8b profit is indeed mislabeling EBITDA as profit. EBITDA removes any recurring replenishment costs, the cost of building the satellite, launching the satellite, the user equipment manufacturing and returns, all ground infrastructure build and replacement, all employee stock compensation (not counted!), no advertising costs (and they've actually had to do a lot of that lately to scrounge customers that are remote enough that their network isn't too congested to serve), no taxes are counted (though they get out of that because they have no profit!). Not to mention payments servicing all their debt and Starship development.

*they actually use "Adjusted EBITDA" which is even more nonstandard and means they define the accounting however they want!

Audited financials would be released with the S-1. But it's very unlikely that they are not audited given the amount of money they have raised.

> Those aren't audited numbers, as far as I know

SpaceX has been audited for over a decade.

No related to this conversation, but I just started reading some books on finance and I actually know what most of those terms mean now! Lol

If anything they'll go for the lucrative customers that _need_ a signal to go faster through vacuum than through glass.

Maybe some decent revenue offering sat to cell for the traditional carriers.

It's not meant to replace terrestrial networks, it's a space-based alternative that serves areas carriers have no financial incentive to cover. Terrestrial cellular towers cost between $150k to $500k per tower, and are not economically feasible in less populated areas. There are also many dead-zones in mountainous regions, since cell signals are blocked by mountains.

Starlink Mobile supplements this, it's simply cheaper for mobile providers to partner with them than do their own buildout. Currently only 5% of the earth's surface is covered by cellular signals. Starlink will push that up to 85+%, and is backward compatible with existing cellphones.

5G Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) is already part of the 5G standard. It's not a replacement for terrestrial carriers, it's an expansion that enables devices to be always connected and select the appropriate terrestrial vs satellite connection transparently. ~75% of the land mass on Earth has no cell coverage, ~90% if you include the oceans. It's the same transition in theory that we had from landlines to cell towers.

It doesn't not seem like anything approaching a lucrative business.

TAM: How big is the market for high speed internet that can pay $1200+/year and isn't already well-served by comcast/at&t/etc? And of course, this is all with finite spectrum too. So you can't serve the major cities.

No doubt there exist buyers. But rural Montana doesn't have that many households. Add that 5 year replacement cycle and Musk's Trump alignment that has Europe building their own for security reasons.

Personally, I think that valuing businesses by their expected growth is doing really bad things to our society.

We used to value businesses by their current returns, usually dividends paid to shareholders. And we treated any statements about their future plans as interesting but not something anyone should trust.

Now we value stocks on what their price will do in the near future, because the primary return to shareholders is an increase in share price, effectively speculation rather than dividends as the method of returning value to shareholders. So we're incentivising companies to be constantly pushing their share price up (rather than paying decent dividends), which does bad things to both the company and the economy as a whole.

It's not how the system was intended to work and we find ourselves on a treadmill of constant growth that is killing everything good.

thats the game though. Elon is selling a "slice of the future" and everyone starts having FOMO... the result is a P/E ratio of 300 or whatever crazy number. We will all agree that the company isn't worth that, but theres a bunch of people happy to buy meme stocks that will make a ton of money without the slightest idea of how to value stocks. Botton line an asset is worth what people are willing to pay for it.

Gell man amnesia

> It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about

It’s being extensively talked about and debated. It hasn’t entered the mainstream discourse because it’s too technical.

There are enough Elon haters that you can rest assured there will be an inverse ETF so that you can easily hedge away your index exposure if you really want to.

Just call it what it is: SpaceTwitter

Well, we elected a bunch of criminals, and Elon fired everyone who regulates this. The SEC was gutted like a fish, and contract terminations resulted in a large percentage of FINRA staff being laid off.

> It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about.

You mean pension savings accounts? You're right these are major scandals not being talked enough about.

And it's only just a tiny less bad than how the system works in socialist europe: in socialist europe the various states' public debt is the pension "savings". Those mandatory contribution have been long spent already by the states with the IOU promise that, once you'll retire, the state shall keep paying you a monthly pension. It's totally unsustainable.

It's nearly as if thieves voted, worldwide, a system allowing them to part their taxpayers from their hard-earned money.

Pension funds, private or public, are the scandal.

In order to be incredulous at xAI, you'd have to be incredulous of the AI business in general, which is fair.

But then you'd also be basically betting against the entire tech sector, and really the entire US economy and against the value add of AI. That kind of bet is much more difficult to swallow.

I think you have to temper the skepticism a bit though.

SpaceX has dramatically lowered the cost of launching things into space. They are still the leader here. They can put a kg into orbit cheaper than anyone, even heavily subsidized state operations (EU and China).

Their order book continues to be full. Every single launch vehicle they roll off the line was pre-sold years ago, including its re-use flights.

I agree that Elon is their biggest potential problem and a big risk but their launch business is sound and wildly successful. If you believe access to space will be a growing segment of the economy in the future it isn't exactly a bad investment.

I remember all the people putting Tesla down when they IPO'd. I bought $4k of stock (all I could afford at that time). Sold $100k of it a few years ago, still have the other half worth near $220k. Their numbers at IPO time were garbage and it wasn't clear they would even survive. Then they started shipping hundreds of thousands then a million cars.

YMMV, consider all sides and make your own judgement. Just be careful about trusting the anti-SpaceX case. Even if everyone is technically correct about them it can still be a huge miss not to invest! The future is not static and if they can put the raised capital to productive use the IPO could end up being a fantastic deal. And FWIW I also agree the largest immediate risk is they are over-valued. Only time will tell on that front.

>There is a good chance this one becomes the Wework of this decade.

It's very different from WeWork which was basically just subletting office space with beer taps. At least SpaceX had done significant stuff with the rockets and Starlink.

> excellent salesman of vision when fundamentals are weak

Wow that was a polite way to say that

Didn’t Sp500 drag their feet for a long time before adding Tesla?

Also, would individual funds that track the S&P have left themselves some wiggle room to delay this if they wanted?

Cave? That’s the boring company, this is the space company.

"The secret of greath wealths with unknown causes is a forgotten crime, because it was properly done" for those who don't speak french.

If you have $100k, you can do it with direct indexing at Schwab. The management fee is 0.40%.

I looked into it, but there are gotchas with wash sale rules and taxes. You really need $500k-$1M to avoid tracking errors. End of the day, the overhead seemed more problematic than the problem, so I ended up increasing my global allocation instead.

Yes, kinda. Goldman Sachs launched that under the symbol SPXXAI last month. I'm not totally sure how to actually invest in it yet though.

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/ai-goldman-sachs-stocks-ind...

The cheapest option might be to buy the index and sell short the appropriate amount of Musk companies.

If you have a big enough portfolio, direct indexing (using something like Frec or Wealthfront) could be an interesting option, and weighting the companies that you don't want at 0.

There is XMAG, but beware the expense ratio is much higher than the mainstream indices.

Direct indexing is pretty easy these days.

Based on the list of businesses at the top, the stock market seems like it rewards profit margin and profits, by businesses that sell meaningful products and services.

https://companiesmarketcap.com

Can you provide an example of any of the businesses on that are on that list due to "mass stupidity"? They all seem to operate factories, employ many highly qualified people, and make a material difference in many or even most people's lives around the world.

Meanwhile, SNAP has returned -14.98% per year to its shareholders since it IPO'd (Jun 3 2017), and at an $8.27B market cap, it makes up a negligible portion of any broad market index fund, so not sure how SNAP's shareholders have been rewarded by mass stupidity, especially given that the founders still own half of the business. They would have been far better off liquidating their shares and investing in SP500.

https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/?ticker=SNAP

if they weighted (fully) by float (perhaps the average float from the trailing 90 days to the re-balance) it would not be as easy to game. The Nasdaq is accounting for float, but not completely.

The operators of the fund are allowed to do whatever they outlined in the prospectus to track the index, some funds allow futures, options, and swaps along with equity shares to maintain parity with the index.

There are ways to gain exposure to a single stock without directly purchasing shares, options and swaps being the most common. Owning the actual shares makes things easy for the fund operators, but there are other ways.

of course they do. read any prospectus for a FUND and funds track INDEXES using rules. inclusion in some index doesn't hamstring anyone.

blind purchases are not going to happen. people assume passive indexing is brainless, but it isnt.

But a low stock float. I once had a meeting with a guy who said his company was worth $100m. How did he get that valuation? He sold 0.4 % of stock to friends and family at $400k.

The SpaceX profit is EBITDA, not real. And presumably includes massive starlink depreciation and stock based comp.

Most serious index do float, nasdaq has somewhat different rules (but it's a weird index...)

It does when you look at it with a few less zeros… it’s like a broke person floating checks for payday loans.

The cadence point is understated. SpaceX launched 130+ times in 2025. The next closest was around 15. That's not a gap that closes in 2-3 years even with heavy subsidies, because it's not just the rocket, you need to account for the operational framework of doing it every 3 days.

The valuation only makes sense if you price in Starlink becoming a top 3 telecom and Starship opening up entirely new markets. Possible, sure, but the launch business alone doesn't get you anywhere near 1.75T. They're betting the multiple on revenue lines that don't fully exist yet.

In the same world where Tesla is worth more than every other automaker in the world combined.

I mean... in what world is it worth less?

Meta has increasingly ephemeral digital mindshare and no AI play. SpaceX has a near monopoly on access to the rest of the galaxy.

On what grounds would the SEC actually block the merger? It's not anticompetitive, it's not even vertical integration. They can't stop things just for being dumb.

My belief is that Mars will be colonized for ideological reasons, not for profit. A Mars colony won't be profitable. But it will be colonized, mostly for prestige, and also because of overcrowding & pollution, which will become bigger issues in the coming decades.

The ocean floor is more habitable than Mars.

The asteroid belt likely contains more easily-obtained rare metals that also don’t have to escape Mars’ terminal velocity.

Reading a comment like the grandparent’s while we’re surrounded by many tangible crises on earth is sickening. Especially many of them manufactured by the same man who the grandparent comment seems to deify (DOGE AIDS funding).

Anyway, I find myself feeling contempt for the people in this industry pretty often.

In the 2040s. The upcoming wave of robotics will push the cost of goods down enormously low, robotics + need for compute + cheap goods will cause a huge increase in demand for raw resources; mining on earth will not be able to keep pace & environmentalists will get generally upset about environmental destruction caused by resource extraction.

People's attention will shift to obtaining resources from outer space, which leads to more demand for space exploration, and then space manufacturing to avoid polluting earth. Then the general sentiment towards a lunar/Mars colony will trend towards positive, and people will desire to run away from political problems on Earth. So significant investment towards building a Mars colony will happen then.

The technical problems with a Mars colony are not insurmountable, it's completely possible to build a colony with 2026 technology, just the cost is too high. Better technology (robots) and innovations (i.e. upgraded Starship) will push the cost down.

I don't know one off the top of my head, I learned most of my information about space and SpaceX from youtube, mainly from Scott Manley and Noise In Space.

This video gives an overview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3hPH_bc0Ww but it strongly underrepresents the role of robotics.

Elaborate?

250 years ago, you could make this exact argument about the British colonization of Australia, and it would be entirely correct. The early colony was a pure fiscal drain on Britain with almost no return.

Yet today it's the 13th largest economy on earth.

Think on a longer time scale.

Was the British colonization and funding of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia profitable? All three colonies were not profitable for decades after their formation.

Yet looking back, colonialism was probably the most profitable venture ever undertaken. All three of them ended up becoming key allies and instrumental trading partners.

Think on a longer time scale.

Not a good metric imo. The majority of people have no interest in, and have no idea what's happening at SpaceX or in the space industry in general. Any predictions they have are based on vibes, not evidence.

I wouldn't follow the majority for advice. They're not aware of what's happening. Take Starlink V3 direct-to-cell as an example, I believe less than 5% of the general public even knows what this is (even after a massive marketing campaign), and even fewer understand how it works.

that's a fake quote and not at all related to anything I wrote.

> The speaker seems to be generated by AI

This is Patrick Boyle, he's not AI generated? Why did you feel like the speaker is AI generated?

I get the feeling investors are going to watch Starship explode and explode while it's being developed without understanding the trial/error, hardware rich, approach SpaceX takes and not like it. That's going to hurt the stock price and therefore hurt the company. Before, when Starship exploded people just pointed and laughed at Musk but SpaceX kept going. For better or for worse it doesn't really bother him, don't forget he got literally laughed out of the room when he proposed a re-usable orbital booster. Now those people actually matter because they'll sell/short and kill the stock price and therefore materially hurt the company. I replied to a sibling about Tesla, remember the shorts nearly killed Tesla before it even had a chance. The technology was there and the concept proven but the shorters almost killed the whole thing. IMO Tesla went public way too early and it almost cost them everything. idk what SpaceX has to gain by going public, are they hurting for cash? Based on the pace of development in Boca Chica it doesn't appear so.

/not a finance or investment expert just my observations and feelings

I expect that the amount of "good influence" institutional shareholders can exert on SpaceX leadership and operations is about zero, and the amount of "bad influence" is more than that. Thus, the only way this can affect SpaceX's leadership is negative.

A big part of how SpaceX did what they did is that they weren't beholden to institutional pressures. They could afford to take major risks. This may change when a pool of investors who don't care about space and just want the line to go up end up being stakeholders.

None and that's the problem, the shorts almost killed Tesla for no other reason than being short. I think watching Starship after Starship blow up while being tested when investors don't really understand what they're looking at is going to be bad for the stock price. In a public traded company so goes the stock price so goes the business.

> It’s almost always cheaper to individually target satellites than to try and blanket orbits.

The problem is that even one satellite could start the Kessler syndrome due to how many are currently in orbit, and the numbers are expected to keep increasing rapidly - everyone wants their "sovereign" Starlink now that it has been shown to be feasible and performant.

They are nowhere near the world's biggest ISP by any metrics, what are you talking about?

Genuinely: regulation. Every other benefit is conceptual at best. If SpaceX controls the entire heavy launch market _and_ they control data-centers in space, then absolutely no one on earth is in a position to control or regulate such a data-center except SpaceX themselves.

I'm not arguing that it's a good idea, but that is the idea.

It's a convenient way to merge AI and spacetech, two hot topics to the retared investor class that rules our world. The reality and feasibility of it doesn't matter.

The suckers being fleeced are every pension fund in the world. They're demanding the S&P includes them faster to force ETF owners to buy in before the price tanks.

Unless you literally have nothing, YOU are one of the millions being fleeced. Pensions & retirement funds, any index fund that comes remotely close to technology, any equity you own in a venture in tech, any industry that via very short linkages is connected. Good luck avoiding this.