For this valuation to make sense, you’re betting on one or more of:

1. Orbital data centers become not only a real thing, but a dominant thing.

2. Grok goes from being a second-tier model mostly useful for not having guardrails to being a step above all other offerings.

3. Twitter realizes its “everything app” ambitions and becomes the WeChat of the West.

4. Starship not only flies operationally, but finds a niche with orders of magnitude more business than Falcon 9 gets. Something like Earth-to-Earth passenger transport at a level that substantially displaces airlines.

All of which seem extremely unlikely. I’m fairly bullish on SpaceX, but as something of a “normal” business. Starship shows promise. Falcon 9 is a cheap workhorse. Starlink seems to just print money. But not anything like a trillion dollars’ worth.

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vessenes 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Most reasonable analysis here! But you forgot: “retail loves it and buys it, providing capital sufficient to stabilize.”

I also like SpaceX - one thing many of the kids around here seem to forget is that elon has managed extremely dire capital and earnings situations very ably in the past - the above list for Tesla ten years ago looked much much worse.

This isn’t dispositive to success on your list but it does mean you can treat the company more like a long call : it almost certainly won’t go away.

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danny_codes 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Will he get bailed out by the Feds again though? SpaceX launch 3 failure was bailed out by the DOD. Tesla was bailed out by Obama.

Possibly. I don’t know if being bailed out is a sign of business acumen. Maybe political acumen? In any case bailing out present day Tesla or SpaceX will be very expensive, unclear of taxpayers will go for it.

Which is presumably why Elon is aiming for retail as the bail-outers

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vessenes 13 hours ago | parent [-]

SpaceX is emphatically not in need of a bailout. I don't know the history of launch 3, so I can't opine, but saying Tesla was bailed out by Obama is reductive in the extreme. Elon is the single largest taxpayer in US history.

It's not a bail-out Elon wants, nor is it 'safety' for SX. He wants capital to go build out space as fast as possible; he needs retail capital to do it.

	▲	wat10000 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		People mix up (deliberately, I'm pretty sure) bailouts with payments for services. The other commenter might be referring to the NASA CRS contract for Falcon 9 and Dragon which was awarded after that third failed launch and pretty much saved the company. But that was payment for providing resupply to the ISS, just like they've done with other companies, not a bailout. Tesla did get a DoE loan in 2010 at a critical point its early history. It's worth noting that the amount of this loan was approximately 5% what the government spent bailing out legacy automakers in 2008, and about 0.5% of Musk's current net worth.

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marcosdumay 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

About #1, the first result in my search says:

> the global data center market size was estimated at USD 383.82 billion in 2025

Getting that entire market, with Apple-like profitability would leave SpaceX as an overvalued stock that only makes sense if there are possibilities for growth.

On #2, replacing every single white-collar job on the world and capturing 100% of their salary would leave SpaceX with a P/E close to 2.

On #3, Visa seems to have earnings of about 10% of all datacenters up there. So, no, that's not enough even for a high-growth business.

On #4, IATA says the air-travel market is about $800B large. So, if SpaceX gets all of it, it would still have a P/E larger than 2.

So yeah, either they create an all-capable AGI or they create some rocket that is cheaper to run than an airplane... And they better be the only ones on that market, and capture most of the value they create.

"Extremely unlikely" is a huge understatement.

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15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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amluto 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Starlink seems to just print money.

Does it? Those satellites are individually dirt cheap compared to historical communication satellites, but Starlink requires a whole lot of them and they depreciate outrageously quickly.

Compare to my personal favorite communication medium, single-mode-fiber. SMF from 20-30 years ago still works, is compatible with most current-generation wavelengths, and can carry extremely high bandwidth per strand if users are willing to put fancy optics and muxes at the ends or can carry lower speeds at transceiver prices that would have been almost unimaginably low 20 years ago.

Starlink satellites seem to have zero or even slightly negative value after five years.

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wat10000 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Getting fiber to a house is relatively expensive, especially houses in more rural areas which is Starlink's main market. A Starlink satellite costs a lot more but can serve many customers.

Let's say a Starlink satellite costs $2 million all-in. (They launch about 25 at a time, the launch costs something like $25 million, add in another million for the satellite itself and operations.) They have about 10,000 satellites in orbit currently, and about 10 million customers. That's about 1,000 customers per satellite, so a five-year cost of $2,000 per customer. That's a fair bit less than it costs to run fiber to a rural house. And Starlink is pretty much a monopoly in their main markets (terrestrial telecoms is usually at least a duopoly) so they can charge more. I pay $85/month for symmetric gigabit fiber. Starlink charges $80/month for 200Mbps, or $120/month for "max." On top of that, they can charge enormous amounts for commercial users like airliners and cruise ships.

According to https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/spacex-generated-ab..., Starlink revenue last year was north of $8 billion. They'd need to launch 2,000 satellites per year to maintain the current fleet. If $2 million is an accurate price tag for them, then that's $4 billion/year. Pretty nice profit, and there's a lot of room for growth.

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amluto 12 hours ago | parent [-]

This seems generally correct, but there are some things to note.

Once fiber is installed, it’s not particularly expensive to maintain, indefinitely. That $2k/customer needs to be paid again every five years, whereas for fiber it’s much closer to being a one time cost. (To be fair, fiber still depreciates and gets damaged.) And fiber is not that expensive to install: Starlink clearly wins for truly rural areas, but for merely low-density suburban areas it’s not nearly so clear.

Starlink’s performance is not awesome compared to high quality DOCSIS fiber deployments, so they will struggle in areas that are well served by the latter, which covers quite a lot of the population by ability to pay, at least in developed markets. So there’s a limited total addressable market issue.

Of course, Starlink may have other valuable applications, especially military.

	▲	wat10000 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think they're competitive anywhere a halfway decent terrestrial option is available. But there are enough places where those aren't available to get them 10 million customers and growing, which is enough. If I were them, my big concern would be getting overtaken by the buildout of cellular connectivity. A good 5G connection could be competitive. But if their direct-to-cell stuff works out, we might see the opposite: rural cellular infrastructure stops being built out or even diminishes because it's cheaper to provide coverage by satellite.

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benj111 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's an Elon company, the valuation is never going to make sense.