Maybe hacker news is wrong and SpaceX is actually valuable.

throwaway27448 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think anyone is arguing SpaceX is actually valuable, just overvalued and the repeated recipient of obvious corruption.

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dmix 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Which corruption exactly? NASDAQ giving them fast entry so the biggest IPO in history is done on NASDAQ and not on NYSE who was also competing for it? Both are fighting for OpenAI and Anthropic listings as well which likely influenced their choice to get in early with SpaceX

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throwaway27448 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was primarily referring to the acquisition of musk's ai company. But the more general (and unfortunately widely accepted practice of) government contracting culture certainly applies to OpenAI and Anthropic as well.

EDIT: cleaned up my comment; removed a more inflammatory claim about corruption in the private sector.

	▲	consensus1 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Who has delivered better value for money on government contracts than SpaceX?

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yieldcrv 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

fortunately the passive investor bagholding didn’t work, the price sliced straight through their forced buying pressure and only created more shortable shares, as people without share lending sold to passive funds that do

Corruption that stands out to me would be regarding starlink, Elon got the FCC to change power emission rules to hamper competitors with better satellites, but the competitors were able to comply and offer a better service still, while starlink’s existing fleet cannot. meaning elon still would actually have to compete and make a new starlink fleet, which he is doing now. (Basically competitors dont need a base station, and future starlink wont meed a base station either, direct to device ubiquity high speed service is coming) but before that path, he then tried to get an exception from the fcc regulation he promulgated, which was extremely grimy. The fcc didn’t go along.

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yieldcrv 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

$500bn marketcap is still valuable

Its how it declines to that point at another 70% loss from $1.5 trillion that people are worried about

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piloto_ciego 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, I have put my money where my mouth is, but I think it is. Extraordinarily so, and I think the Musk hate has clouded people’s judgement.

For what it’s worth, I get it. I have found Musk insufferable for the last decade since he attached himself to the right and got into drugs, however I think SpaceX is undervalued right now.

1. They are literally the only company on earth with a reliable partially reusable launch system. There are a few people trying, but everyone else is way behind.

2. When they eventually (hopefully) get Starship right, we will see a price drop in the cost of transportation to orbit we have never seen. When I did the numbers a few years ago, the price for space mining to be comparable to terrestrial mining was around $20-60/kg to orbit. They’d effectively be the ONLY way to access that. That’s one of a gazillion things that becomes possible with cheap access to space. UPS becomes a competitor at those prices… it’s game changing.

3. They are basically dominating the satellite internet world. Nothing compares. Starlink is amazing, especially here in Alaska, I suspect they will eventually have a phone, which will be revolutionary.

4. A gazillion government contracts, Star shield, and arguably point to point QRF shuttle (after starship). The defense implications alone mean that they are going to be around indefinitely.

I don’t know, but I think people are sleeping on this.

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stevefan1999 3 hours ago | parent [-]

5. A gazillion amount of telemetry data and social media data to sell on the data broker market. That alone is enough to attract another billion dollar of potential investment consistently, especially for training data and intelligence...you know, selling to the Mossad or CIA.

In a world of money, every bit you can earn, you have to earn, while I know it is immoral to sell the data for spying purposes, morality alone don't mean shit now, that I never see any capitalists and corpo dogs have any kind of morality anyway, except when massive backslash, congress hearings and boycotts, which is, ahem, Meta/Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. But given the unique position Musk used to have in Trump's government and his right leaning position he is safe to do so. At least for now, he is immune to holding congress hearing for a scandal I suppose.

And not to mention that Grok is literally trained over X/Twitter, and keep in mind Bluesky is federated and strangely, no one seems to be scraping it over ActivityPub. I believe Thread is also built on the same foundation but it's sure that Meta made good measures for antiscraping, I expected as a data oriented company.

Alas, keep in mind SpaceX merged with xAI and nonetheless don't forget their data side

	▲	piloto_ciego 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You’re right! And then they’re an inference provider too. All these come together with orbital data centers…