The thing i'm not looking forward to is SpaceX will now be beholden to Wall Street. With Startship testing being so public, there's a whole cottage industry of youtubers watching their every move, there's going to be lots of ups and downs on the stock price.

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Diederich 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> SpaceX will now be beholden to Wall Street

I get and appreciate that sentiment. Musk currently has a controlling interest in SpaceX. Do you expect that to change after the IPO? Thanks!

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chasd00 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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

Investors have been doing this since SpaceX first raised outside funding. American capital markets are not that risk averse.

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notahacker 8 hours ago | parent [-]

tbf those investments weren't traded on a liquid market, and I suspect Founders Fund are less worried about short term setbacks than your average mutual fund or mug punter.

But of course we also know that Musk-run public companies are immune to normal dynamics of worrying about next quarter's returns (or even worrying about the CEO publicly torching his brand equity) so the very last thing I'd imagine happening is SpaceX becoming risk averse and profitability focused

	▲	JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Founders Fund are less worried about short term setbacks than your average mutual fund Fidelity has been an investor since 2014. The only new money flows will be index and retail; everyone else has had access for years.

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karmakurtisaani 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> idk what SpaceX has to gain by going public

They will save Elons shitty AI investment by making the public bag holders.

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ACCount37 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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moogly 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What makes you think this will be different from Tesla?

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nxm 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[flagged]

	▲	pstuart 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		blah blah irrational blah blah solvent It's still obscenely overpriced. edit: to nxm -- the blah blah was about it being a default response, not to trivialize your comment.

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chasd00 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.