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SpaceX Is Junk. That’s What the Bond Market Says
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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2026
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Once again, the IPO ($135/share or $2.1 Trillion) was based on the success of some long term goals like space-based data centers and a Mars colony of one million permanent residents.
This is from the same guy who promised a fleet of Tesla robotaxis by 2025.
Space experts have since pointed out that the vacuum of space does not sink heat.
Some of the assets thrown into the SpaceX valuation include xAI (which is falling behind OpenAI and Anthropic) and Starlink (which is suffering from congestion problems already and cannot be scaled up).
So this is not unexpected.
I still want to know how having anyone on mars was supposed to be profitable.
Unless a government is paying you to run a private prison there.
The point of manned missions and colonies now is proof of concept for the expansion of human civilization to other worlds, but yes, that's not a private for profit endeavor but a public interest one.
That said, the research and development done for the Apollo moon shots returned to the economy $14 for every one dollar spent, so it was absolutely a sound investment. Also, those patents were sold to the US government for a dollar each (at most), and so the technology gained like microcircuitry and memory foam, are public domain.
( RANT: The public domain, the creation of a robust one is -- according to the Constitution of the United States -- the very purpose of the whole temporary monopoly system that is the foundation of intellectual property law.)
The market demands EVERYTHING be for profit.
I completely agree, and don’t think sending trillions of investment dollars to a private company is going to get us anything like the Apollo program did. Maybe we’ll be wrong and some great inventions will arise from the challenge.
Mining asteroids or the moon seem like the next thing, but the cynic in me thinks it will likely just increase wealth inequality.
Taking a page from the Fourth International–Posadists, I suspect we're going to have to develop a working socialist / communist society before we will be able to develop a space program robust enough for asteroid mining and offworld colonization.
With the climate-crisis fast approaching critical, we may not make it at all, or may have to wait tens of thousands of years (homo-erectus went through a long stint where there was less than ten-thousand of them), but I don't think there is a capitalist path.
To clarify, the problem with starlink is that the investment is mostly done (they have the projected number of sats in orbit, give or take a couple thousands) so there is no rational reason for them to raise billions in cash.
In a rational world it would now have to prove itself on its own dime.
I'm merely a casual Elite: Dangerous player and I could have told him that.
He's a genius btw
To me it is unexpected in the sense that the market has been responding positive to all previous recent fantasies ..
Bit sadly it is still extremly overvalued