As those lock-ups expire I only see the stock sliding further. Still, the very early investors will probably make bank, with the retail investors holding the bag.

Many of those early investors would have invested in a rocket company, I doubt many of them were overjoyed to be saddled with all the debts from an AI company and Twitter.

But why would you want to buy a company where the valuation reflects an extremely optimistic outcome already? Basically you are assuming obscene growth from SpaceX in AI, datacenters, rocket launches etc just to for the stock to go nowhere. The market cap was over 2T!

When you buy equities, if the company turns out shockingly successful beyond most peoples probable expectations you dont simply want your investment to just stay flat, you want to make multiples of your money. In order to do this, you simply cant start from a 2T marketcap. No company worth 2T can make you 100x your money or even 10x or 5x your money in a reasonable amount of time given the overall size of the economy.

It's all a bit of a mess with the consolidation of multiple businesses.

> SpaceX is a pretty important company not just for "the market" but also for many other things (see Russia/Ukraine war)

Starlink, which was rolled in to SpaceX, is/was profitable and it is a factor in Ukraine.

The rocket division is not profitable, but I sense that there might be a path to a profitably operating business.

As for the X/xAI piece, who knows? Long-term it seems like a moon-shot. I appreciate the irony that it's in the wrong division.

Buying at a high price just gives money to the early investors, the company itself doesn't get richer unless they're doing a raising capital round, but after an IPO you're just giving liquidity (+ profit) to early investors.

If you wait till the price comes down to its natural level, you'll be able to buy more of the company for less money.

What is your idea of strategic ownership? Musk has voting control, everyone else is along for the ride.

There are no "pretty important" companies with the relatively meager revenues SpaceX has got.

> SpaceX is a pretty important company not just for "the market" but also for many other things (see Russia/Ukraine war).

True, if Twitter and xAI stopped existing, there would be an uproar from all the suddenly unemployed disinformation botters.

SpaceX / Musk is the company which will build the Dyson Swarm. This is an opportunity to get in at the ground level.

> If no one cared about cash flow and profitability wouldn't SpaceX stock go up instead of down?

In addition to looking at the "fundamentals" of a company like cash flow and profitability, there is also a 'meta-game' that traders (as opposed to investors) have to look at:

> A Keynesian beauty contest is a metaphorical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular choices among all judges, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive. This idea is often applied in financial markets, whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value, because when other people buy a stock, they bid up the price, allowing an earlier investor to cash out with a profit, regardless of whether the price increases are supported by its fundamentals and theoretical arguments.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

"whereby investors could profit more by buying whichever stocks they think other investors will buy, rather than the stocks that have fundamentally the best value"

I think one thing to point out is "everyone" in this context is probably the broader market, but the stock holdings aren't distributed uniformly. A few large investors could actually be sophisticated and unload a fortune and the rest of the shareholders could still largely still ignore fundamentals and suffer large losses. The broad market can be ignorant and the stock can (and is) be down, both things can be true.

People cared after the IPO but initially in far less informed circles I constantly heard from lower sophisticated investors bragging about how they'd been allocated X shares like they were Pokemon trading cards they managed to snag. They weren't very sensitive to the price, only to brag to their friends they had snagged them. After the shiny wore off and no one cared about how cool they were, they sold them.

The company is still overvalued by a pretty massive multiplier

You've been through this before and have the scars or have seen them on others. It is hard to explain to those who have not. Though they only need look at a historical chart.

The Fed transitioned from QE to tightening almost 5 years ago.