Every time Musk does anything these days, it further reveals the shell game he's playing with his companies. This is going to be an Enron type of story eventually. I truly wish I had a choice to pull my tax money out of this particular subsidy.
Every time Musk does anything these days, it further reveals the shell game he's playing with his companies. This is going to be an Enron type of story eventually. I truly wish I had a choice to pull my tax money out of this particular subsidy.
Enron was absolute peanuts compared to the financial fraud Musk has been executing (with the apparent blessing of the SEC). At its peak Enron had a roughly $70B market cap, TSLA is currently sitting at $1.74T. We can expect similar numbers from the SpaceX IPO.
It's hard to compare these numbers directly since valuations have increased quite a bit since a quarter century ago. As a proportion of the S&P 500, Tesla (2.3%) is about 4x of Enron at that $70b (0.6%).
Tesla is profitable, as a matter of public record. And SpaceX is, by all accounts, extremely profitable.
SpaceX is _not_ profitable by most reasonable measurements of accounting. If you discount rocket depreciation costs and R&D, then yeah its profitable from starlink revenue.
They haven't released a 10k yet so we don't know, but from what I understand SpaceX+X.ai is not GAAP profitable.
SpaceX was, but SpaceTwitter is not. xAI is hoovering all the money out of SpaceX.
SpaceX reuses its boosters 20+ times. Surely the depreciation is tiny when compared to the revenue of 60M+ per launch?
The entire space launch market is about $20B with multiple competitors in 2025. And by the most generous estimates it is going to be $80B by 2035. They can reuse the rockets as much as they like, the company isn’t worth $1.7T.
3x growth in ten years is the “most generous” estimate?
Yes because outside Starlink and govt contracts, there isn’t that massive of a demand growth in the sector. There a limit to how many satellites can be in orbit at a time and land based telecom infrastructure makes it so that satellite based infra isn’t necessary unless you’re in remote areas.
Starlink is already most of the revenue.
What's the point of the except?
The main problem is the AI stuff.
How can you say “The company isn’t worth X”? Isn’t the company worth exactly as much as people are willing to pay for its shares?
I don’t personally think Google is worth $4T but the share price says otherwise.
You’re comparing a publicly traded company where the supply demand economics have established a price to a company whose financials are not public, and is valuing itself at $1.7T and forcing everyone’s 401Ks and pension funds to fund it. Not the same thing.
>forcing everyone’s 401Ks and pension funds to fund it.
Source?
https://theconversation.com/musks-spacex-is-shaping-up-as-th...
The source links in that website (which looks like clickbait) do not support your claim.
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/spacex-ipo-how-index-funds...
> S&P is reportedly considering a fast entry rule change to its flagship index, though it has not yet been approved, and details are scant.
> FTSE Russell is also considering a fast entry rule for its suite of US market indexes and is in a consultation period as of early April 2026.
Only Nasdaq 100 has changed its rules, but Nasdaq 100 is not (and should not be) in most retirement funds.
If 1/3 having changed rules and 2/3 considering changing the rules isn’t evidence enough then not really much to discuss here.
When someone says that it usually means they believe the price is bound to drop.
> Isn’t the company worth exactly as much as people are willing to pay for its shares?
Really? We're still making claims like this in the year of our Lord 2026? People in the markets today are not predicting the real value of a company, they're gambling that the various political and financial machinations from people like Elon Musk will increase the share price enough that they can sell at a profit. The value of shares like Tesla are utterly disconnected from the value of the underlying business.
They also have to replace 20%+ of their satellite network every year.
why is that ?
They are low earth orbit satellites. Generally, the lower the orbit, the faster they decay. You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.
> You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.
No, having the option to replace technology at your leisure would be a benefit. Being forced to replace your technology because it's destined to become aerosolized aluminum in less than five years is a detriment.
Planned obsolescence really only works well if someone else is paying.
The operational lifetime of their satellites is about 5 years.
Because they fall back to the ground…
No, the burn up in the atmosphere. Burning metals being added to the oxygen you breathe.
low earth orbit
because of gravity
More because of drag
What about the R&D costs of blowing up vehicle after vehicle?
They have over 300 falcon 9 launches in a row now, just in case you’re not caught up on the latest
C'mon, you know they're talking about Starship.
It's less than the yearly cost of ground stations (just under 1 million/year per installation)
5 million over 5 years capex+opex. Mostly opex
It's also a troll post
Depreciation isn't the only thing that matters. R&D, manufacturing, maintenance, fuel, launch, support staff, and I'm sure there are countless others.
I'm not saying they aren't profitable. I don't know, but it's definitely not a given.
They did report FCF before xai and also invested at least $1B before they merged xai
Given that it's one Musk company giving a mountain of money to another, and the only numbers floating around regarding SpaceX seem like marketing fluff, I don't think any meaningful conclusions can be reached until we get some real numbers giving a full look at the finances.
Between launches alone, Starlink and Starshield, SpaceX will likely be a money printing machine for a long time.
They had like $16B in revenue last year, half from Starlink.
That’s just money in the door and the underwriters seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
If underwriters think it’s worth $1.7T with a $16B revenue (not profit), they’re doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating.
Do you have any evidence or analysis to back that up? How are those similar?
It's not the same at all. Do you know how an IPO roadshow works at all or are you just spouting bullshit?
If roadshows guaranteed accurate valuations, pets.com wouldn’t liquidate within a year of IPO.
Again, not debating that SpaceX isn’t a legit company or that it’s profitable. But underwriters agreeing with high valuations to stocks that collapse once they go public isn’t unheard of.
Edit: and I will concede that I should’ve phrased my initial thoughts better. Credit rating agencies and underwriters do very separate things, just like IPOs and MBS are two very separate things.
You said: "underwriters ... doing the same thing as the credit agencies did in 2008 by giving underwater mortgage backed securities a AAA rating"
That isn't what is happening at all.
In an IPO the underwriters and the company collaborate to set the price based on approximate demand and what they want the quality of the holders to look like.
In the roadshow, the company is very constrained as to what they can say or disclose outside of the scope of the S-1. They can't include MNPI, forward looking financial projections, etc. Underwriters are also prohibited from sharing MNPI, or publishing marketing disguised as research.
So I guess if you're saying the SpaceX S-1 is completely full of shit and there's hidden risk in it, than it could be similar to 2008, but in this case nobody is manufacturing a rating, and those material misrepresentations would constitute securities fraud. Investment banks and ratings agencies aren't the same thing at all, and the buyers of marginally profitable IPO stocks are (hopefully) different than those of AAA MBS.
Yes. I updated my earlier comment and I concede I should’ve worded my earlier comment better.
I agree underwriters and credit agencies are very different just like IPOs and MBS are very different. I don’t think SpaceX is committing fraud.
> That’s just money in the door and the underwriters that seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
I was responding to this particular comment.
In 2008, the credit rating agencies weren’t necessarily found to be guilty of wrongdoing, but a variety of reasons let them roll with AAA ratings on junk MBS anyway. Similarly the underwriters are not going to be committing crimes to facilitate IPOs. They are after all taking the risk of guaranteeing the sale for the company. However, if a company wants to roll with a high valuation, even if the fundamentals aren’t matching the valuation, if there are buyers, the underwriters will set the price supporting that high valuation. They are not incentivized to accurately measure a company’s worth like the comment I was responding to suggests.
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They are decades ahead of their nearest competition, in multiple verticals, and their barrier to entry is a literal gravity well.
All the money they are burning is for grok. And it is not decades ahead.
BO has entered the chat New Glenn and are arguably equal to Super Heavy given they've also recovered and reused their heavy booster.
I think you're going to be surprised at the level of competition BO provides SpaceX in the Artemis program.
About those underwriters - to quote the venerable Charlie Munger "they will sell 'shit' as long as 'shit' can be sold".
the ability to mine the moon or asteroid belt seems extremely lucrative, the logistics of transporting materials to earth costs less than shipping them across the ocean, an astounding level of value creation.
This can’t a serious comment.
Did you notice the size of the Artemis rocket and the size of the payload it sends to the moon and back?
Do you expect there to be diamonds just laying these on the moon surface, no mining required.
you don't have to ship things the moon, you just build a mass driver on the moon that sends things to earth. it doesn't need to yield diamonds, this would be lucrative with just fresh water
You actually believe that transporting _water_ from the moon to earth could ever be profitable, no, lucrative? Can you lay out the economics? Just so I understand.
There is no other mode of transportation cheaper than shipping across the ocean.
launching things via a mass driver from the moon to the earth requires a lot less fuel, is faster, and cheaper than shipping across the ocean
That one is subsidized by externalizing costs to our lungs.
Shipping on water has been, by far, the cheapest mode of long-distance shipping since the moment boats were invented. That is to say, since thousands of years before boats were ever powered by the shit that destroys our lungs.
So is pace travel. Then rockets are not green!
It is valuable if they can find the right rocks and bring them back. A platinum group metal asteroid would be of immense value, at least the first one anyways. After that who knows, they might super saturate the global market for decades.
our use of platinum has been limited by its scarcity, having tons of it would completely change the things we could build. saturation isn't a real downstream effect of economics, it would instead be transformative
It is less about profitability and more about dilution of ownership. He seems to have a pattern of diluting the ownership of his profitable companies by folding in his less profitable/failed companies. You still own a share of a profitable company, but a smaller share, to his benefit.
Im also profitable as an individual. I made a $100 this week, which makes me worth at least $30M.
SpaceX was profitable before the xAI thing happened. Now I imagine they're way in the red.
As was Enron
Pretty decent video released today by Wall Street Millennial that looks at the profitability of SpaceX (as part of looking at 'Terafab') :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJi1oQFQzs
SpaceX was surely more profitable before it was used to bail out Elon's xAI which was used to bailout his purchase of Twitter.
In part thanks to SpaceX purchase of CyberTrucks.
Have you looked at their latest report?
They are only profitable because of subsidies. Pretty much 1:1.
just because a bunch of rockets went up without blowing up, does not mean they are profitable. it cost money to shot rocket, and it is very expensive, reusable or not. most launches are internal launch without external paying customers.
How much of that profit was due to public subsidies of the sort that he killed for other companies but not for himself during his tenure as a special government employee?
Genuine question, how do you know that without a 10K? Have the filed any document that shows their finances?
Tesla’s profits and market share has been declining for the past few years and it’s basically an overpriced meme stock.
Their market share of EVs in the US went from 40.9% in Q3 2025 to 58.9% in Q4 2025.
You may not have noticed because positive Musk related news doesn't seem to make headlines anymore.
> Their market share of EVs in the US went from 40.9% in Q3 2025 to 58.9% in Q4 2025.
You’re not wrong factually, but it doesn’t mean what you’re suggesting it means. Their share went up because EVs aren’t selling as much anymore. All companies including Tesla are selling fewer EVs. They just have a bigger share of the smaller pie, which isn’t exactly a success when you only sell EVs, but your competitors also sell non EVs.
I'm aware of the reason. Their market share is, nonetheless, up. That's still good for Tesla, their sales remained constant while people stopped buying other EVs.
Edit: Constant is the wrong word. Resilient or consistent is what I was trying to say.
Competitors leaving the market means less competition which is a good thing for Tesla. If the market for EVs returns in the future (if, say, the next administration reimplements the incentives), Tesla will be there to reap the benefits.
> their sales remained constant while people stopped buying other EVs.
Their sales did not remain constant.
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Tesla has a P/E ratio of 364.981. It's blatant fraud.
Nobody is forced to buy shares of any company. Even automatic 401k investment plans let you specify what to buy if you so choose. Perhaps you could make the argument Elon makes false promises to boost the stock price, but at the end of the day, individual investors must decide what they believe in no matter the CEO's antics.
I'm not sure I follow, here. What about this makes you think this is a shell game?
Matt Levine writes a bit about this - the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And really if you're investing into e.g. SpaceX you're not investing into SpaceX you're investing into the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And most people seem to want that.
Tesla's the odd one out: it's public but it's still in there, although Musk would probably prefer it to be private too.
Tesla is the free cashflow play that is probably the most important for mars as there is no distilled fermented dinosaur juice on mars, but considerably more by ratio of lithium / oil than the Earth. Our flintstone fire mobiles won’t work so well there, and battery / solar will be important there for everything, including mobility and armies of slave robots.
Mars gets less sunlight on a good day for solar power; the inverse cube law really hits you harder than you'd think. And that's before accounting for the planet wide dust storms that can last for months.
We're probably looking at nuclear fission generators to get started, then converting to geothermal at any appreciable (and maybe fusion, inshallah).
Regardless, fission, geo, fusion don’t fit well on a rover. The boring company makes the tunnels, Tesla makes the vehicles and robots, and batteries. Likely we will still use solar despite poor relative performance for bootstrap.
Right, right, all those facts... that's nothing compare to Musk's genius and will! /s
> Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate
That’s SpaceX’s version of Tesla’s self driving car pipe dream
Edit - I use self-driving car and Autopilot interchangeably
It's so pipe-dreamy that I used it for an hour today through SF rush hour traffic. Clearly never going to work though, right? right???
Did you follow Tesla's published instructions on how to use it (https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB6080...)? You're explicitly forbidden, for example, from assuming that it's going to make the right decision at intersections; you must manually inspect each intersection and evaluate whether it's "safe and/or appropriate" to continue. You're also not allowed to look away from the road or use your phone. YMMV, but to me that level of required attention doesn't match the term "self-driving".
What I see a lot of people do, unfortunately, is reconcile this contradiction by not following the published limitations of the "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" product. They assume that Elon Musk wouldn't call it that if it couldn't be trusted to do what they expect. Then they get into fatal crashes, and someone sues, and Tesla argues that they can't be held accountable for bad drivers who don't follow the rules.
Your claim was that the product doesn't work, and I'm telling you it works without intervention consistently and in complicated traffic situations.
Any argument about how people don't pay enough attention since it isn't yet certified as a L4 system is irrelevant and tangential to the point.
Your definition of Tesla's self-driving product is very different than what Tesla itself promised, and that's what the person you are replying to...is telling you as well.
Anyone who thinks it is pipe dream given how it works today + rate of change is clueless, and that is putting it kindly.
I don't think L4 autonomy is a pipe dream. Indeed, it exists today and is widely available in the same city you drove your Tesla in. I think it's a pipe dream for Tesla specifically to achieve it, because for bizarre and idiosyncratic reasons Elon Musk won't let them use LiDAR or mount a roof sensor. They've been stuck at L2 for a decade now, and I don't see much reason to think that making that system incrementally more reliable will ever "unlock" L4.
In practice, Tesla on HW4 drives indistinguishably different from Waymo.
It does! A system which drives indistinguishably different from Waymo 99.999% of the time is L2. You might very well never experience that unlucky 1 mile in 100,000, but if there's 1M Teslas on the road driving a daily average of 33 miles, it's going to happen hundreds of times each day. An L4 system must guarantee that it can come safely to a stop before human intervention is required, and I don't think you can achieve that guarantee by pushing the nines on an L2 system.
I've been in Waymos that have needed teleop rescue multiple times in the last year so by that metric it's not a L4 system either.
Isn't Tesla FSD good enough and trending in the right direction to be called a "pipe dream"?
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Words do mean something, and you could have taken 5 minutes of research to make a reasonable counterclaim
Tesla has an insane PE ratio because it’s a casino stock (~350x). As a comparison, NVIDIA IS 40x. SpaceX Is projected to be 300-500x. These are fantasy, completely unrealizable valuations. Similar to Enron, and Enron was over 70x. Enron wasn’t some surprise either.
Typically when PE gets out of whack, market analyzers dig into what is happening because it’s usually chicanery. No longer. Everyone is along for the ride.
PE has literally nothing to do with what Enron did which was accounting fraud + cashflow problems because they actually didnt make any money, in fact they lost tons of money and used future earnings in current reporting
Having a high pe is not fraud. There are even companies that are losing money, and they're still worth something.
When people say something is like enron, they dont mean it has a high PE. Its like saying someone is like Hitler and meaning they are a failed art student
> How are any of these companies at all related to Enron?
There's a lot of parallels:
* Circular transactions between companies under the same control
* Using SPVs to keep debt off the books
* The supplier funding its own customer through investment to inflate revenue on both ends
* Valuations driven by a hyped up narrative and decoupled from actual fundamentals
SpaceX bought nearly 20% of Cyber Trucks sold in Q4. That makes me question the level of real profitability.
He shut down investigations into him for a reason.
Tesla isn't that profitable, but SpaceX is likely generating boatloads of cash. From what I can tell Starlink alone has a free positive cash flow of about $2 billion. I'm not sure what the launch business is worth, but it's likely a lot given the absence of domestic competition.
I have a suspicion the reason Musk wanted to combine SpaceX and X.ai is the latter gives him losses to write off against all that cash from the former plus a chance for a big AI payoff.
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In 2024 Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink had a $600 million positive free cash flow based on $8.2 billion in revenue. Last year revenue estimates from both SpaceX and from outside people adding up new military contracts came out to about $11.8 billion. Their fixed costs haven't gone up much, so the big unknown is development costs for military contracts. I think $2 billion is a reasonable, conservative estimate.
How much of that are they sinking into Starship?
Probably some, but $2 billion a year? That seems like too much.
Hopefully all of it. If Starship succeeds, and that seems incredibly likely given the tests thus far, it will create an entire industry.
People underestimate how much ships changed the world. It will happen again, the only question is when.
There's a few ways
They're prepping for an IPO and there have been some anonymous insider reports of the figures in the press
There are industry estimates
Much of their income comes from public contracts
pointers?
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