SpaceX Stock May Actually Be a Horrendous Investment "Bro, have you seen inflation lately? Ketamine is expensive!"
Elon Musk has just pulled back the curtain on the biggest public stock offering in history, and the numbers are ghastly.
SpaceX, which is expected to go public on Nasdaq in June, just released the first round of financial summaries all companies are required to share when they’re about to sell stock to the public for the first time. The documents reveal Musk is targeting a raise of at least $80 billion — for a proposed valuation of $1.75 trillion — which would immediately make the rocket company one of the top 10 most valuable conglomerates in the US, Axios calculated.
With that kind of valuation in mind, one might expect SpaceX to be massively profitable going into its debut — but that’d be dead wrong.
According to the financial statement, the company lost $4.9 billion in 2025, even though it brought in around $18.7 billion in revenue. It’s not like that situation is about to turn around in time for the IPO, either: over the first three months of 2026, SpaceX posted further net losses of $4.3 billion.
As analyst Scott Melker pointed out, SpaceX wants investors to believe the company will someday make 93 times what it currently makes in a year. To understand why that’s absolutely nuts, just peep the numbers from the previous IPO record holder, Saudi Aramco, the state oil company of Saudi Arabia.
Commonly understood to be the most profitable corporation on Earth, Aramco went public in 2019. When it did, investors accepted a valuation about 6 times more than what Aramco made in yearly sales, raising $26 billion for a valuation of $1.7 trillion, as one analyst noted. SpaceX is asking for about 15 times more than that.
“Bro, have you seen inflation lately? Ketamine is expensive!” one stock analyst razzed on X-formerly-Twitter (that platform, by the way, has all but imploded under Musk’s leadership, with revenue down around 59 percent compared to 2021, the year before he took over).
To justify its wild revenue ambitions, SpaceX estimates its total addressable market — the maximum money it could make if everything goes perfectly — at $28.5 trillion. Of that, nearly 80 percent is attributed to the imaginary landscape of “enterprise applications,” which the document describes as a buffet of various Earth-shattering AI tools that have yet to be built, including one agentic AI platform called “Macrohard.”
Put it all together, and the numbers only work if you put your faith in unprecedented earnings from technology that doesn’t even exist, in a market as infinite and uncharted as outer space itself.
An IPO at 93x times revenue for a company run by a guy famous for making huge promises that he never keeps (see https://elonmusk.today/).
Seems legit.
"This statement, in its utterly clueless hubristic stupidity, cannot be improved upon. I merely quote it in admiration of its perfection." - Garibaldi
"Problem is, while the Germans have had many mea culpas and quite painfully dealt with their history, the South is still hellbent on painting themselves as the real victims. It gives them a special place in the history of assholes" - Covenant
"Over three million died fighting for the emperor, but when the war was over he pretended it was not his responsibility. What kind of man does that?'' - Saburo Sakai
Back in my day, companies were supposedly to make sustainable profits.
"This statement, in its utterly clueless hubristic stupidity, cannot be improved upon. I merely quote it in admiration of its perfection." - Garibaldi
"Problem is, while the Germans have had many mea culpas and quite painfully dealt with their history, the South is still hellbent on painting themselves as the real victims. It gives them a special place in the history of assholes" - Covenant
"Over three million died fighting for the emperor, but when the war was over he pretended it was not his responsibility. What kind of man does that?'' - Saburo Sakai
Sure, there are expectations of what publicly traded companies do. But Tesla is the only Musk company that is publicly traded. The rest are private companies, beholden to nobody except Musk.
At least until this IPO makes SpaceX public.
As for investment advice, years ago I saw someone saying that if you can buy a company during it's IPO, that means institutional investors don't want to touch it. So you should avoid it.
bilateralrope wrote: 2026-05-31 03:43am
Sure, there are expectations of what publicly traded companies do. But Tesla is the only Musk company that is publicly traded. The rest are private companies, beholden to nobody except Musk.
At least until this IPO makes SpaceX public.
Isn't some of the controversy around this that the shares are sold such that Musk still has total control and the shareholders don't get any rights at all? It sounds like it is only one step up from buying some SpaceX themed crypto scam.
Apparently nobody can see you without a signature.
If it's just a limit of 'no one entity can purchase more then X amount of stock', then no. I just means you need ALOT of shareholders working together to force any change. (If the max anyone can purchase is 1% of the company, you'd need 51 people to agree to have a majority vote anywhere, which would be next to impossible to do, but still legal).
If it's 'you own shares, but agree you have no voting power', now it's a Crypto-Scam.
I've been asked why I still follow a few of the people I know on Facebook with 'interesting political habits and view points'.
It's so when they comment on or approve of something, I know what pages to block/what not to vote for.
bilateralrope wrote: 2026-05-31 03:43am
Sure, there are expectations of what publicly traded companies do. But Tesla is the only Musk company that is publicly traded. The rest are private companies, beholden to nobody except Musk.
At least until this IPO makes SpaceX public.
Isn't some of the controversy around this that the shares are sold such that Musk still has total control and the shareholders don't get any rights at all? It sounds like it is only one step up from buying some SpaceX themed crypto scam.
I haven't heard that one, and it's unusual enough that I'd have expected it to show up on at least one of the news sites I follow if it was true.
bilateralrope wrote: 2026-05-31 03:43am
Sure, there are expectations of what publicly traded companies do. But Tesla is the only Musk company that is publicly traded. The rest are private companies, beholden to nobody except Musk.
At least until this IPO makes SpaceX public.
Isn't some of the controversy around this that the shares are sold such that Musk still has total control and the shareholders don't get any rights at all? It sounds like it is only one step up from buying some SpaceX themed crypto scam.
I haven't heard that one, and it's unusual enough that I'd have expected it to show up on at least one of the news sites I follow if it was true.
Do you have a source ?
I must admit I originally heard it from reddit comments, but there seems to be reputable recent reporting as well:
Ok. That looks like another reason to stay well away from this IPO.
Though I am curious if the arbitration clause will work on people who buy shares on the market. That's probably going to be a messy lawsuit when Musk does something stupid.
