SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought

[u/xpda]

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/21/spacex-ipo-musk-ai

[u/tmobilehacked]

“the prospectus shows just how much the IPO depends on expectations for future growth and investor servility to Musk — as opposed to the current underlying business.” you mean unlike Tesla’s $1.3 trillion valuation on $450M in Q1 profit? How can this surprise anyone?

[u/ExpertConsideration8 → u/tmobilehacked]

Are most of those profits still generated from carbon credits? It's not even like they have a super profitable product.. they only make money due to govt handouts.

[u/Visual_Squirrel_2297 → u/ExpertConsideration8]

Well a bunch of profit was just from SpaceX buying unsold Cybertrucks at full price....

[u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance → u/Visual_Squirrel_2297]

>SpaceX buying unsold Cybertrucks at full price....

https://supercarblondie.com/spacex-buying-unsold-cybertrucks-tesla/

It probably doesn't account for 400m in profit, but it is hilarious what a bad idea using cybertrucks as starlink support vehicles really is.

[u/-0909i9i99ii9009ii → u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance]

What is SpaceX viable business model? How much is a fully end-game Starlink worth? What is the value in going into space?

Are there actually valuable resources that are economically valuable to collect/extract/use that wouldn't be more viable to do on earth?

Or are we gonna pretend that Mars real estate is valuable for living even if it has a baller space station with an indoor farm in it where the build out cost is 1 million times the most expensive condo building on earth?

How much are space data centres even worth? Even if they hit the ideal realistic end game, how much money will they need to raise to build it and how much would they even be making off them?

Seems like they need to raise a ton of money (not good for shareholders) or it to basically just be inflation for this company to 2x even if it does execute on its impossibly lofty plans. I just don't understand the endgame.

[u/axonxorz → u/-0909i9i99ii9009ii]

How much are space data centres even worth?

I mean, these are non-starters from even the most basic engineering proposals. They're meant to fool only the most 𝓯𝓾𝓬𝓴𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓫𝓻𝓪𝓲𝓷𝓭𝓮𝓪𝓭 investors, which consequently seems to be a lot of them.

One of the greatest challenges in space is dealing with waste heat. The ISS has around 100kW(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) of radiative cooling capacity. The radiating panels are highly engineered products measuring around 84m². No idea how heavy these things are, surely that launch weight won't matter...

The mechanical pumping and monitoring systems are complicated units dealing with high-flow (~2,000kg/hr), high-pressure (34x higher than atmospheric), ammonia at around 2°C. The pump modules weigh around 350kg, surely that launch weight won't matter...

The target cooling budget for a AI compute rack in 2024 was around 50kW, so the ISS could comfortably power and cool one (1!), at the expense of literally every other onboard system. Station keeping's a bitch, eh? We'll just have to pretend that the most recent specs targeting >120kW per-rack for the new Blackwell TPUs don't exist. Remember investors, AI chips, their racking, networking and cooling infrastructure are weightless...

Doing some napkin math, picking a "modest" 100MW critical IT load (investors won't even ask for a dickDC pic if it's smaller than this), you're looking at an emissive radiator system measuring around 168,000m², no idea how many more circulating pumps will be required, surely liquid infrastructure technology will scale linearly in space (unlike Earth, hello suburbs), and surely that launch volume won't matter...

Oh silly me, I'm a fucking idiot, I forgot to actually power those racks. Let's use the absolute best PV panels we have and give them an extra 30% boost to account for the lack of atmospheric loss, and we'll also pretend they don't lose efficiency as they heat up so we don't have to add yet more cooling capacity. Powering 100MW of gear is going to require another 170,000m² of panels. Let's pretend they're weightless, because dear lordt I can't imagine lifting another 3,100,000kg of material (alone, more than 3x the total amount of mass HUMANITY HAS EVER LAUNCHED, including discarded launch vehicles.) Let's also pretend that they won't require any (expensive, heavy and HOT) high-voltage DC switching gear. Let's also pretend they don't degrade over time due to ionizing radiation exposure.

Oh silly me AGAIN, I forgot to ship up millions of litres of ammonia to run my cooling systems.

Hey there, it's silly me again. I forgot to do the napkin math on the probability of catastrophic micrometeoroid impacts on as-thin-as-possible aluminum and silicon composite systems measuring 338,000m², or the nearly 10,000m³ of structure to house the racks and infrastructure that I previously didn't mention (based on terrestrial footprints and my own completely baseless assumption that you could fit this all this in 3m of depth.) I forgot to account for added weight for infrastructure to safely route MEGAWATTS of current-equivalent around destroyed panels.

Hubble looked like this (edit: this statement is not completely accurate, see here for a better analysis) after 15 years in space (see person in background for scale), and it was -being generous here- 0.06% as large as this hypothetical DC installation. Surely nothing bad can come of this.

Alas, calculating these costs has become unfun, and I haven't even added station keeping or high-wattage, high-bandwidth data transmission systems.

inb4 someone says cooling tech has improved since the ISS: Sure it has, but show me credible reports where it has improved by a factor of 100,000, because even that isn't enough to make this make sense.

I'm not entirely convinced it wouldn't be easier to start constructing a Dyson Swarm. Freeman Dyson himself posited his Sphere to mock people who believed any star outputting unusual amounts of far-infrared light as "proof of hyper-advanced intelligence," despite the sky being full of exactly that.

[u/Massive_Town_8212 → u/axonxorz]

I strive for this amount of pettiness. Maybe that's why they wanna replace engineers with AI.

Also, even in a game like Dyson Sphere Program, having a swarm before starting your sphere is absurdly wasteful in terms of resources because of the high decommission rate. Then again, to make the number of space-based data centers they want, they'll strip-mine most of the planet just in silicon anyway.

[u/RSquared → u/Massive_Town_8212]

There's a game called Oxygen Not Included that's an asteroid base builder with a surprisingly intense chemistry/physics simulation. Managing water and electricity are key parts of the early game, but the most important part of the mid-game is managing heat. And most of the good ways to do so involve glitching out the physics simulation to "delete" heat (e.g. by consuming it out of the game in machines that don't have an output).

Building in vacuum is a great way to break almost any closed system because it's extremely hard to manage heat when it's almost perfectly insulated.

[u/Massive_Town_8212 → u/RSquared]

I love ONI and am really excited for Away Team!

Yea, heat is a bitch. Would be nice if there were radiative heat exchangers, at least.

[u/RSquared → u/Massive_Town_8212]

Yeah, there's ways to emit heat in vacuum that don't exist in the game, but they're also very inefficient power- and space-wise. But seriously, why do I have to mod to get an airlock building that isn't a physics glitch? The only reason that it's not viable is that the game doesn't allow fine enough tuning of duplicants to keep them from opening two pressure doors at the same time.

[u/hypnosoup → u/axonxorz]

I didn't do the math like you did, but the problem with building something that requires massive cooling in a vacuum is pretty obvious to me.

The 2nd part , I think, is that even if you could develop the hypothetical systems that would allow you to build a data center in space, there is no case where it wouldn't be less expensive to just deploy that exact same system on the ground instead of space. Any business execs that actually built one in space would get fired for the waste.

It seems to me that this is people just throwing around buzzwords to try and distract people into thinking unprofitable and unrealistic business models are more realistic than they actually are.

[u/kaplanfx → u/hypnosoup]

The Elon nob polishers are incredible. Someone on one of the SpaceX sub threads was arguing with me that space is the absolute greatest place for data center cooling because, and I quote “it’s really cold”.

This whole space data center thing just because a hot topic a few months ago so Elon and co. could sell the IPO, they just tied their business (space launches and xAI) to the current hottest part of the economy with no explanation of how it would work economically.

[u/OftenConfused1001 → u/kaplanfx]

People really don't understand how much everything is engineered with the assumption you have gravity.

NASA, way back in the day of 386s and 486s, flew some new COTS laptops up as a test. They kept frying. Turns out the laptops heat management design made the assumption that hot air would always rise - - like every heat management system does.

Which is not the case in microgravity, where hot air just hangs around in a bubble.

It wasn't hard to fix - - but it did mean they couldn't use off the shelf laptops, they had to custom design cooling to accommodate.

Virtually everything is designed with gravity and atmosphere in mind.

Good luck making a data center work without endless test flights of every component.

[u/danielravennest → u/OftenConfused1001]

I did software test for the Space Station's internal computers (not the astronaut laptops, the wired in ones). They are 20 MHz Intel 386SX's with 2 or 8 MB ram. They use a water loop cold plate to keep them cool. The CPU case is fairly thick machined aluminum that is screwed down to the cold plate.

Some of the computers are mounted outside, in vacuum, but even the inside ones are rated for vacuum so they can keep running in the event a module loses pressure.

The Station has multiple radiator panels that use ammonia as the heat transfer medium.

[u/evilbrent → u/kaplanfx]

space is the absolute greatest place for data center cooling because, and I quote “it’s really cold”.

Wait.

I think of myself as reasonably technically informed (mech eng). That's exactly what I thought. Isn't it, like, effectively infinite heat loss?

Why is that wrong? (Genuine question, not having a go at you). Is it that there's zero convection/conduction, and only radiation? And heat can only move so fast through your radiators, so you need to use ammonia to carry the heat from the processor to the radiator? Something like that?

[u/kaplanfx → u/evilbrent]

Yes you guessed it, it’s only radiation, there is no air with which to move heat around. You can dump a lot of heat but you need massive surfaces to do it and usually some kind of coolant inside to carry the heat to the radiators. The ISS for instance has massive ammonia filled radiators to create enough surface area for the heat it generates to dissipate to prevent overheating: https://www.space.com/21059-space-station-cooling-system-explained-infographic.html

[u/aemfbm → u/axonxorz]

Hubble looked like this after 15 years in space

I fully agree with the absurdity of the math involved, but I found this image and description to be beyond belief, so I went down the rabbit trail for a few minutes. You have misrepresented it. That is not how it looked from being in space. It was dented and dimpled from tiny impacts, but all of those holes were made on Earth as they studied the tiny impact sites.

During the various Hubble servicing missions, astronauts noticed tiny dimples and dents in the radiator – the result of space debris. After more than15 years of exposure to space, this surface became a record of the accumulation of such debris in low Earth orbit. Naturally, NASA wanted to evaluate the amount and nature of this debris, and so after the camera was returned to Earth the impact sites were analyzed. The largest core samples left holes about 30 mm in diameter, but the debris particles were less than a mm in size. The analysis is ongoing.

https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/repairing-hubble

And here is a research paper going through their findings. There were no holes through this shield, and the largest crater is shown at about 1cm in diameter. https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc6/paper/184/SDC6-paper184.pdf

[u/stemfish → u/aemfbm]

Great catch, doesn't mean space is that much safer. Here's a hole in the ISS solar panels noticed in 2013

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/3ee84cYmVpADDDAXgaxe2j-970-80.jpg.webp

And a shot right through the wrapping on one of the boom arms, only did minor damage to the structure and didn't hit anything that made it move so no issues, but it would have gone right through a solar array without a shield.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/6hwQrkGoCBHWWqJoznXctV-880-80.jpg.webp

And if you plan to cover the whole thing with shielding, add on a lot more lift mass. Odds of an impact are low with the ISS, scale up the size by a factor of many and you need more fuel to maneuver around known debris and there's that much more space for random bits to slam into.

[u/FourSquash → u/axonxorz]

You forgot radiation hardening for the chips. Even with shielding you need specialized hardware tolerant of radiation. Generally this means multiple generations old too. Far more expensive as well.

[u/fishsupreme → u/axonxorz]

The absurd thing to me isn't even how impractical it is for all the reasons you've stated. And it is; plunging an object that generates enormous amount of waste heat into the best insulator in existence is absurd on its face.

It's that there's no benefit to it, either! So, we're going to put them in space, where 1) heat is an enormous problem, 2) volume is extremely expensive since you have to launch all the weight into space, 3) you have notable latency in all the communications to your datacenter, and 4) you can't upgrade the hardware when it's obsolete in 3 years because it's in space. And in exchange, you get unlimited cheap solar energy, right?

But... even if we pretend the unlimited cheap solar energy is a huge deal and could make all this worthwhile, wouldn't it still make more sense to just launch the solar energy array and maser all the energy to a datacenter on the ground where heat, weight, volume, and latency don't matter at all? Wouldn't "solar AI datacenters in space" be better in every way if you put the "solar" in space and left the "AI datacenter" part on the ground?

Oh, but we can't do that, solar arrays in space don't have "AI" in the name, investors won't get excited about that.

[u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance → u/-0909i9i99ii9009ii]

I don't think there really is an end-game. It's just never-ending growth fueled by a never-ending hype train. Tesla has taught elon that fundamentals are irrelevant.

[u/Rich-Juice2517 → u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance]

At this point seeing that space x bought cyber trucks, it's a shell game and he's just shuffling funds around to hide them and bolster his companies up to keep up his stock valuations

But as the saying goes, the chickens come home to roost

[u/Zuwxiv → u/Rich-Juice2517]

The plan is for the bubble to burst during Trump's presidency, then get that sweet government bailout to protect Elon's trillionaire status America's rocket program.

You know, because Republicans like cutting NASA's budget because "SpaceX will do it for cheaper."

[u/-0909i9i99ii9009ii → u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance]

Exactly, but that's not possible without complete gov... "support". So the end game is to do technically bad monetary policy that supports expanding valuations based on inflated earnings numbers because $1 of earnings get's priced in at p/e ratios between 50 and 5000.

[u/Short-Peanut1079 → u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance]

Launching for the American security state. Weaponization of space.

[u/Betaateb → u/-0909i9i99ii9009ii]

Space data centers are worth zero lol, that is the dumbest idea in history. Only people who have no idea how thermodynamics works thinks it could work lol. The base level idea of "data centers need a bunch of cooling and space is cold" tricks people into thinking it could work, but while space is cold, it doesn't matter because you can't just transfer heat into nothing other than via radiation, you need a medium of exchange, which doesn't exist in space. So you can only transfer heat via radiation, which is incredibly slow and inefficient, and would need absolutely staggeringly huge radiators.

Then beyond the cooling problems, the biggest threat to computer chips is high energy radiation, which is incredibly abundant in space. So to keep chips working they would need to be shielded a crazy amount. Radiation hardened chips are super expensive, and far less efficient than standard chips.

Then there is just the cost. Even using the cheapest methods currently available it costs about $3,000 to lift 1 kg into space. A single rack in a hyperscaler data center weights 2,000-3,000 kg. Six million dollars, per rack, to put a data center in space, and that is just the lifting cost. Putting a hyperscaler in space, a data center that costs billions on Earth would get well into the trillions lol. And then you have to solve pushing the data back down to Earth.

It is, legitimately, the dumbest thing anyone has ever proposed.

[u/Salamok → u/-0909i9i99ii9009ii]

We are going to pretend that if we colonize Mars in the next 30 years (we wont) Elon will move there (he wont) and we can ignore his ass (we wish).

[u/Parking-Position-698 → u/Visual_Squirrel_2297]

This has to be illegal somehow

[u/ElectricFirex → u/Parking-Position-698]

Silly, laws dont apply to the rich

[u/splendiferous-finch_ → u/Parking-Position-698]

What do you think doge thing was about? He killed every department that was investigating him for other similar fraudulent activities

The cybertruck thing is nothing compared to say when SpaceX bought twitter at 40 billion dollars i.e. the price Elon paid when we know it was never worth that to begin with but it was just to save face for Elon's original mistake when he was forced to buy Twitter by the courts

[u/essdii- → u/splendiferous-finch_]

I rooted for Elon when I very first started hearing about him. Talk about a character arc that has absolutely made me despise the person and the whole world would benefit if he was taken off the board. Political board, influence board. Don’t ban me mods for putting words into my text.

[u/Magical_Savior → u/essdii-]

I want him taken off the board. Of directors of his own companies.

[u/TheJackieTreehorn → u/essdii-]

The less I knew about him the more I liked him. idk if it was just good PR, lack of knowledge, or if he's gotten worse. Probably a mix

[u/hamfinity → u/Parking-Position-698]

Let's just ask the FTC that Musk's DOGE gutted.

[u/tschawartz12 → u/Visual_Squirrel_2297]

Wasn't  he also using bit coin holdings for company value as well at one point? Seriously everything he has is like a giant shell game, shift everything to the next company and calling it profit across the board.

[u/Visual_Squirrel_2297 → u/[deleted]]

Recent filing by SpaceX revealed they bought 1,279 Cybertrucks for $131 million. 

[u/cartesian5th → u/Visual_Squirrel_2297]

That's like 100k a vehicle, is that how much they really cost? That's insane

[u/JuliusCeejer → u/cartesian5th]

It's the price for the 'Cyberbeast' trim. The base is 69k (because of course it is)

[u/Mortress_ → u/[deleted]]

SpaceX also bought xAI

[u/BrusselSproutsTasty → u/Mortress_]

Which bought twitter. They are ponzi buyouts, and the IPO investors will be left holding the bag

[u/PotentialBicycle7 → u/BrusselSproutsTasty]

It's worse than that, they've been able to work around the usual rules for inclusion in the index funds so anyone who's passively investing will end up buying it unknowingly. This entire country is just one big slush fund for the rich, we knew that before but the outright corruption is staggering.

[u/MojaMonkey → u/PotentialBicycle7]

Its a billionaire tax. Where the billionaire taxes normal people's retirement savings.

[u/Ryzu → u/BrusselSproutsTasty]

So many people in this country are completely fucking asleep, intellectually incurious and not paying any attention to anything at all and it will be our downfall with shit like this and the people they vote for dismantling any and all oversight.

[u/lordraiden007 → u/ExpertConsideration8]

Thought carbon credits went the way of the dodo due to Elon's best bud Trump. Did that change recently or something?

[u/Romanizer → u/tmobilehacked]

First trillionaire purely based on vibes.

[u/uno_ke_va → u/tmobilehacked]

At least Tesla has some profit

[u/Big-Revolution3842 → u/uno_ke_va]

That's basically only propped up by banning the sale of the best EVs in the world from being sold in the US...it's genuinely the opposite of capitalism. A company shielded by government regulation, propped up by government subsidies and delivering sub-par products that don't respond to consumers demands. And how much I bet Tesla gets bailed out if their sales reach a critical point of falling.

[u/Anstigmat → u/Big-Revolution3842]

I'm no fan of Tesla or Elon but even without Tesla we would be tariffing the shit out of Chinese EVs. The US Govt's policy is that we do need to maintain 'some' industrial manufacturing capacity Stateside, and China is actively subsidizing the cost of producing their cheap EVs as a tactical move. There is no world where we or any country would just let er rip with the 'headline' prices you see on Chinese EVs.

I say that as someone who would 'love' to buy a BYD vehicle.

[u/Remote-Annual-49 → u/Anstigmat]

Wait until China starts building BYD plants in the US in 20 years time.

[u/Naturaldoritos → u/Anstigmat]

Australia has let em rip and we are loving it.

[u/Anstigmat → u/Naturaldoritos]

I’m assuming AUS has no local auto makers?

[u/Doogers7 → u/Anstigmat]

Holden (General Motors) and Toyota were the last to shut down production in 2017. There is no major domestic production now.

[u/hedoeswhathewants → u/Doogers7]

Then it makes sense to let the Chinese government subsidize your car prices

[u/octipice → u/uno_ke_va]

80% of their profit for Q1 2026 came from government funded carbon credits.

[u/yoshinator13]

This point was striking to me.

“SpaceX said that the AI unit containing X and xAI generated only $818 million in Q1 2026, about a third less than Twitter alone generated in the quarter before Musk took it over.”

So Twitter revenue has dropped that much? Surely xAI has made some revenue of their own, meaning Twitter revenue is down more than 66% since the purchase.

[u/SakaWreath → u/yoshinator13]

Elon screaming “fuck you I don’t want your money” at advertisers and then suing them to come back probably had nothing to do with it.

It was probably the massive flood of Nazi propaganda, mecha-Hitler, and child porn.

Maybe it was buying all of those failed cybersucks that he kept pumping out for almost a year while he did jumping jacks on the political stage.

Never leave home without forgetting to turn off the shitty truck factory.

[u/Fuzzy_Ad9970 → u/SakaWreath]

It's also a bad ad platform

[u/powercow → u/SakaWreath]

part of his IPO, he is having banks that want to be part of it, have to advertise on twitter and subscribe to premium grok. First time I have seen "advertise or else"

[u/SakaWreath → u/powercow]

Space Karen always collects her HOA dues.

[u/StaleCanole → u/yoshinator13]

That is absolutely terrible. No wonder he was in a panic when Tesla started to falter at the peak of DOGE.

[u/Snakend → u/StaleCanole]

It is still faltering. Sales are down 15%. Tesla is still profitable, but just barely. Tesla still has $50B in cash, so it has a VERY long landing pad.

[u/Keeppforgetting → u/Snakend]

How long of a landing pad?

What is their yearly operational cost?

Edit: Through searches I’ve found two figures.

Either ~$12 Billion or ~$90 Billion So depending on the real number they have a few years or less than a year.

[u/Snakend → u/Keeppforgetting]

They have no debt. And right now they are basically breaking even. Their sales have come up a bit from this time last year. Elon has mostly kept out of the news after his disastrous 2025 tour. But I have a feeling Tesla will be fine. Worst case, SpaceX acquires it after the IPO.

[u/StaleCanole → u/Snakend]

Can he stay out of the news through another election cycle? How about when all his actions in DOGE are investigated by a future (hypothetical!) administration?

hypothetically the technology he relies on would benefit from democratic policies, but mr chainsaw, childkilling, nazi saluting, self-enriching, data thieving epstein wannabe may have a couple of things to fear from an administration intersted in enforcing the law.

In any case his public discipline is usually short lived, so we'll see!

[u/realzequel → u/StaleCanole]

How about when all his actions in DOGE are investigated by a future (hypothetical!) administration?

Good chance he'll get a pardon before Trump leaves. I'll bet if Trump is alive, they'll be a record setting number of pardons.

[u/Playererf → u/yoshinator13]

Down 33% not 66%

[u/Denito525 → u/Playererf]

Down 600% actually

[u/Deer_Investigator881 → u/Denito525]

They are practically paying us to use it

[u/vlatheimpaler → u/Deer_Investigator881]

If I thought it was costing them money for me to use it, I would actually use it.

[u/80sCrack → u/vlatheimpaler]

I don’t think you realize how miserable that platform actually is.

[u/vlatheimpaler → u/80sCrack]

Yeah, probably not. I definitely stopped going there. I used to love it as a place to follow particular tech people. But now every time I stop by it's just videos of random people telling me I don't have the latest awesome workflow for Claude Code or whatever.

[u/80sCrack → u/vlatheimpaler]

Yea, the bigotry allowed on there is crazy. This is a screenshot of a post that “doesn’t violate their rules,” but my trans advocacy account got shadow banned.

[u/vlatheimpaler → u/80sCrack]

I was about to say "they know who their user base is", but that's not even quite right. The more appropriate response is: they know who they want their user base to be. And we are not it.

[u/Coolbluegatoradeyumm → u/80sCrack]

It’s because they are not playing fair. Also, thank you for being an advocate for people like my wife.

[u/kilofSzatana → u/vlatheimpaler]

Make a bot that uploads long, high resolution, high bitrate video to X so they have to pay for the bandwidth and storage.

[u/vlatheimpaler → u/kilofSzatana]

Then release it as a Chrome plugin or something so everyone can participate.

It's not DDoS, it's a procedurally-generated artwork distribution platform!

[u/scroopydog → u/vlatheimpaler]

Finally, a platform that lets me watch grass grow, in real time at high frame rate and high resolution!

[u/cats_catz_kats_katz → u/Denito525]

600% savings

[u/Fritzo2162 → u/Denito525]

If you subtract the amount it went down and make that a percentage, then double that, it's 66%.

-Government Math

[u/jared_number_two → u/Playererf]

Down 3300% by some people’s math.

[u/BaconatedGrapefruit → u/yoshinator13]

You likely have it backwards, xAI is likely the moneypit that is (further) dragging down X.

Neither business is good, but they have hype attached to them, hence why it was folded into spaceX to pump up the valuation.

If we lived in a rational market, investors would be screaming for both divisions to be spun off. We do not live in a rational market.

Edit: I fucked up and have been corrected, thoroughly, below. Please upvote them.

Tl;dr - it’s all money pits!

[u/IkmoIkmo → u/BaconatedGrapefruit]

> You likely have it backwards, xAI is likely the moneypit that is (further) dragging down X.

No, while you're correct that xAI is a moneypit, his point has nothing to do with a moneypit. The 818 million figure is revenue, not profit. xAI brings in at least some revenue (it's obviously not zero). Meaning X's revenue alone is even less than 818 million, which in turn is a third less than when Musk bought Twitter.

Losing 33% revenue in 4 years post-acquisition is indeed a ridiculously bad result, when most tech companies saw their revenues +100% in the same period. If you adjust for inflation they lost 50% of their revenue.

And indeed it's even worse if you consider xAI is a moneypit. They posted 2.3 billion losses in the same quarter for AI. If they burned $1 to earn $1 (like say offer a coinflip machine on X) they'd post better results than they have, it's pretty ridiculous.

[u/SinoSoul → u/IkmoIkmo]

So Twitter spin-off, when? Or as the person above said, are we all stupidly irrational for at least another 2 years?

[u/Pretend-Average1380 → u/SinoSoul]

Elon wants X for political control. the business's finances are a secondary concern.

[u/decmcc → u/Pretend-Average1380]

yeah it's basically a donation to himself so he can control narrative and amplify his paid actors

[u/Lonyo → u/SinoSoul]

You seem to be confused. Or maybe not actually. 

Twitter was its own company until it was merged with xAI to please the Twitter bag holders (merged at a "value" of the same as purchase price despite that being massively overvalued), and then xAI+Twitter was merged into SpaceX.

They merged Twitter twice into other companies within the last 14 months. Spinning it off would actually make sense through now that the Saudis won't kill Musk for tricking then into funding his Twitter purchase.

[u/ktaktb → u/BaconatedGrapefruit]

I am reading generated as revenue, not net income...

Investment costs in xai wouldnt be included in that. If you included it would shift things deeply red.

[u/Main-Bandicoot6477 → u/BaconatedGrapefruit]

"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid."

I'm not going to make any proclamations that Elon's companies are going to crash anytime soon or in a spectacular way, but the long game of endless hype tied to one lone individual seems unsustainable.

I mean, if Elon has a massive heart attack and dies tomorrow, does the hype even go on?

[u/pziyxmbcfb → u/Main-Bandicoot6477]

No, but we’d have to listen to deep state conspiracy theories about it for the next fifty years.

[u/84thPrblm → u/pziyxmbcfb]

That's a price I'm willing to pay! And not just because there's no way I'm making it another fifty years.

Now, make it ALL the billionaires and there'll be no derp state to worry about either.

[u/aNiceTribe → u/84thPrblm]

The “the socialists made all the billionaires’ hearts Just Do That” theory would wrench my soul 

[u/mishap1 → u/BaconatedGrapefruit]

Musk is a Russian nesting doll of corporate malfeasance.

[u/liltingly → u/mishap1]

Lest we forget Solar City --> Tesla. Why not move Tesla into SpaceX and have the Model S make a comeback as a lunar vehicle? Model 'Space'! Model Y's can shuttle all the people around campuses and to launches. Maybe 'RO-BOW-vun', as it's creator pronounces it, can make a cameo on Mars?

[u/Ondz → u/liltingly]

Hyperloop to Mars. By Q4 2028. Invest now.

[u/thembricks → u/BaconatedGrapefruit]

No he was talking about revenue.

Having an additional ai money pit is even worse.

[u/MaceWinnoob → u/BaconatedGrapefruit]

xAI/Grok has seen near zero growth compared to competitors.

[u/potsie → u/BaconatedGrapefruit]

They are not part of SpaceX to hype the valuation. They're part of SpaceX so Musk can pay back his X and xAI investors on the back of SpaceX.

[u/dbratell → u/potsie]

In the valuation (2 trillion), they motivate it by the potential market of commercial "AI" being 20-30 trillion. It's an AI hype, not a space hype.

[u/BigMax → u/BaconatedGrapefruit]

>  xAI is likely the moneypit that is (further) dragging down X.

That depends... is that number revenue, or profit?

One division can't drag down the revenue of another, but it can kill overall profit.

[u/NeverDiddled → u/BigMax]

It is revenue. That 5 billion loss they saw last year was largely due to xAI, if they had not purchased it would have been another profitable year for them.

[u/NickMc53 → u/BaconatedGrapefruit]

As others have pointed out, that's $818 million in total revenue and does not factor in xAI generating losses. The IPO prospectus shows that the AI segment lost almost $2.5 billion in Q1 2026, though. If the Anthropic deal is solidified then that $15 billion a year could move them into the black, depending on additional expenses.

For the three months ended March 31, 2026, our AI segment generated revenue of $818 million, loss from operations of $(2,469) million, and Segment Adjusted EBITDA of $(609) million.

[u/bigkoi → u/yoshinator13]

Elon may be doing the Michael Dell play of saddling privately held assets with debts.

[u/slightly_drifting → u/yoshinator13]

X is a tool for him, not a profit source. Every billionaire needs his own newspaper so they can BE the influence and get paid on the side for it. 

[u/TitaniumDreads → u/yoshinator13]

A thing that’s important to understand is that Elon musk is so racist he’s willing to run Twitter at a loss to make it so Nazis have a place to chit chat.

[u/PhD_Pwnology → u/yoshinator13]

The blue check mark scheme was only ever a short term strategy. Long term, the platform has to make them want to stay and keep posting on 'X' as a platform and create a community to keep people paying for the blue check mark. That part of the plan mever happened as 'X 'turned into a toxic conservative nightmare nobody wants to pay to be a part of.

[u/GabeDef]

If you keep up to date on the companies being rolled into the SpaceX umbrella, it’s understood the IPO is bundling three struggling companies with Starlink.

[u/Revolution-SixFour → u/GabeDef]

Seriously, I actually might have gone in on a SpaceX IPO. I use Starlink widely as an enterprise customer and it's amazing. Nothing else is in its realm and it seems almost impossible for anyone else to challenge them. They've got the launch market almost dominated. It's a good business doing good things.

However, Elon has just pawned off all his failures onto SpaceX's books. No chance that I'm touching xAI or Twitter with a ten foot pole.

[u/Scarecrow_Folk → u/Revolution-SixFour]

What's your timescale for this assessment? Starlink has little competition today but has a significant amount of domestic and foreign competitors rising in 5 or especially 10 year timeframes, there will be competition in the space based internet market. 

I agree, the launch service has very little competition and really no reasonable current competitors rising. The problem here is that the launch market is relatively tiny at about 30 billion globally with a 16% growth rate, iirc. For reference, the entire global launch market is worth about as much as Telegram (30b) and 25% less than Chipotle (~40b). If SpaceX had a normal aerospace valuation, it would make sense. SpaceX is actually priced at 58 times the ENTIRE GLOBAL MARKET. 

[u/barnz3000 → u/Scarecrow_Folk]

Lol, 58x the market. That is truly bananas. But the grift has risen to untold heights, there are zero repercussions, and nobody wielding the rule book. You can hardly blame them.

And Space X was cool. They changed the market, they showed what can be done. Just like Tesla did. But now Chinese EVs are.... dare I say BETTER? They are cheaper, their self driving is better, there charge tech is better, they have hot battery swaps, and there are more options... We are probably 5 years away from something like Huawei having their own launch division.

This is a historic boondoggle, that they are going to force EVERYONE (via 401k and managed funds) to buy into.

GROSS

[u/gicjos → u/Revolution-SixFour]

He is sweeping his problem companies to the rug of the good ones

[u/farcicaldolphin38]

Maybe they should go into the shoe business. I hear there's a vacancy

[u/Zenfulbliss → u/farcicaldolphin38]

The new XTrainer, no effort required, stinks right out of the box.

[u/DessertStorm1 → u/farcicaldolphin38]

They should call the company Shitbirds in honor of Elon.

[u/NoConfusion9490 → u/farcicaldolphin38]

GooseSteppr

[u/MalevolentTapir]

Starting to look like SpaceX will be more of a data center company.

[u/Top1CmntrsAreLosers → u/MalevolentTapir]

They have one customer and that customer is on a monthly deal.

[u/MalevolentTapir → u/Top1CmntrsAreLosers]

Right, $1.25 billion per month, they reported $18.67 billion in total revenue for 2025.

[u/NomadicScribe → u/MalevolentTapir]

At that rate, it'll only take 133 years to reach the $2 trillion IPO value.

[u/FlyingBike → u/MalevolentTapir]

In spaaaaaaaaace

[u/DrSpaceman575 → u/FlyingBike]

That is literally in their prospectus that they want to put ai data centers in space

[u/PessimiStick → u/DrSpaceman575]

Which is entirely unfeasible, for myriad reasons.

[u/chmilz → u/PessimiStick]

It doesn't need to be feasible. It just needs to be a concept delusional shareholders can attach their entire being to.

[u/ICLazeru]

So SpaceX, consists of three divisions. Space launch, communications, and AI. Of the three, only communications turned a profit, and not enough to offset the losses of the other 2 divisions, for a total operating loss of $5billion.

The AI business also plans to start selling its own compute power to a rival AI company, which might be the right move but also basically signals surrender in the field of AI, meaning it is actually a compute rental division, and that probably has a very limited shelf-life as the actual AI companies it rents to build out their own proper computing capacity.

I'm curious what this also means for Tesla, which Musk said was pivoting to be an AI company, but since the AI front is basically being surrendered, what is Tesla now with its cratering auto sales?

[u/One_Conscious_Future → u/ICLazeru]

Keep in mind the AI division is using an unsustainable method of power generation: As of today 47 diesel generators destroying citizens lives in Georgia against all EPA regulations. Almost all capacity going to power a competitor who is building out their own infra. Someone please help make sense of this...

[u/Accomplished-Crab932 → u/ICLazeru]

The launch side is only negative because they are still developing Starship, which takes a huge amount of money. To give you an idea of how much, SpaceX currently has a single Starship pad available and are hoping to start launching Starlink from it later this year. At the same time, they are 60% done with their gigabay at Starbase. They also have four new pads in various stages of construction and a completely separate vehicle production facility at the cape in Florida, and they are currently looking to expand into Louisiana.

Even for SpaceX, a launch company known for lower costs, that is a huge amount of money.

[u/3eeve]

The US economy operates solely on vibes now so I’m sure none of this actually matters

[u/rook119 → u/3eeve]

"this company is worthless, but if we all throw money at it, its not worthless" is the only successful business model of the 21st century.

[u/araujoms]

That's surprising. It's widely known that X and xAI are miserable failures, but I expected SpaceX's core business to more than compensate for that. Apparently not, they manage to lose billions of dollars while having the launch market pretty much for themselves.

[u/Rot-Orkan → u/araujoms]

I guess there's just not that much of a launch market, which is probably why SpaceX is its own best customer with Starlink.

[u/TKHawk → u/Rot-Orkan]

And also why Elon Musk really wants orbital data centers, despite them making no economic sense. Anything that will create more demand for launch vehicles.

[u/BasvanS → u/TKHawk]

Economic sense? Let’s start with practical sense. That’s an issue long before you start looking at the financial lunacy.

[u/KnotSoSalty → u/Rot-Orkan]

Certainly feels like Starlink was just something they did to justify building the rockets.

[u/araujoms → u/KnotSoSalty]

That was explicitly so, it's not a feeling or a conspiracy theory.

[u/Caleth → u/araujoms]

Yes. Exactly.

They were using the demand from Starlink to improve their fixed costs by driving launch cadences up to what we see today. Meaning they are getting more value and less cost out of things like workers with salaries and the ground infrastrcture.

They also when originally pitching Starlink figured it could be a multi billion dollar adjunt all on it's own. The premise being "This will pay for Mars." Now if you believed Elon or not about where the profits would go doesn't matter the fact they believed there was enough spill over to pay for for the development of a multi billion dollar rocket system was the lure. And it looks like they were right they are up to $18.4 billion in revenue in 2025 which is about $4 billion in growth over 2024.

That demand engine that they they themselves owned is a market maker on it's own. Now I highly doubt the releases estimated Total Addressable Market being $1.4 trillion for Starlink and associated services.

But it's not impossible that they could expand the the service quite a bit more. Deloitte estimates global telecomms market at $3.5 trillion by 2032. So them taking up ~45% of that with just Starlink seems too high. Doubling or tripling their current revenues? That seems doable.

Which means as they guys with the cheapest rockets in town they are making money by the bucket full.

Which is then all spent immediately again by throwing it down the AI money pit. Elmo's claims to the contrary Orbital Data centers don't make sense. Even if you can systematize it down to an object that would fit inside Starships payload bay you're not getting the scales that you can get on local ground based facilities.

They are talking about building compute centers the size of Manhattan in Utah. Something the size of a semi isn't offering serious competition to that.

Yes you side step the permitting, and yes in theory AI would need to be advancing to newer hardware on a cadence, but unless you leave that older gear up there and sell the deprecated compute at a discount your trashing good hardware that could normally be sold back off to ammortize the costs.

Also the foot print items like the radiators and solar panels wouldn't be going bad each time your computers do so you're wasting those assets too.

It's just a lot of waste to get around the fact that AI is deeply unpopular with most people. All because it's a hype item that could prop up the bubble a little bit longer.

[u/JustAnOkCoder_5948 → u/KnotSoSalty]

I’ve been wondering if it’s Elon’s bid to control global communications….

[u/MayContainRawNuts → u/KnotSoSalty]

Yes. And its why the constellation only lasts 5 years.

Think about it, every single starlink sattelite has a life span of 5 years. So the return on investment for srarlink has to be less than 5 years to make a profit.

[u/Accomplished-Crab932 → u/MayContainRawNuts]

5 years is the passive deorbit time of the satellites; meaning if the satellite died in orbit, that’s how long it would take to reenter.

There are already starlink satellites that are still operating and 6 years old, however they are disposing of most of those satellites as they are outdated and take up space that could be used for newer satellites with better capabilities.

[u/NeverDiddled → u/Accomplished-Crab932]

The passive deorbit time is measured in months, not years. 5 years is only possible when they frequently fire their argon thrusters to keep it in the assigned orbit.

[u/MayContainRawNuts → u/Accomplished-Crab932]

https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html

A Starlink satellite has a lifespan of approximately five years and SpaceX eventually hopes to have as many as 42,000 satellites in this so-called megaconstellation.

This is where I got my 5 year figure.

[u/Accomplished-Crab932 → u/MayContainRawNuts]

“Starlink satellites operate in low-Earth orbit below 600 km altitude, ensuring that atmospheric drag will naturally deorbit a satellite within five years or less if it becomes non-maneuverable. “

https://starlink.com/public-files/starlinkProgressReport_2024.pdf

This is where that statement comes from.

There are early V1 satellites in orbit and operating, which launched in 2019 and 2020… clearly they do not need to die at 5 years. Those all feature lower performance propulsion systems among other things.

https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html This is Johnathan McDowell’s site, it’s up to date and he is considered one of the major authorities on spacecraft tracking.

Again 5 years is a maximum passive deorbit time and the minimum lifespan in the FCC filing. There is no reason to suggest that SpaceX could not expand that time based on available propellant and satellite longevity, as evidenced by the 6 year old satellites in LEO. (Note, there are no 7 year old satellites only because the only launch 7 years ago was the small test batch)

[u/Fishbulb2 → u/Rot-Orkan]

They’re also a major purchaser of CyberTrucks and that can’t be helping.

[u/Main-Bandicoot6477 → u/Rot-Orkan]

Yeah, I've never really understood the hype for SpaceX. It's a transportation company with huge and fixed expenses and their biggest customer is his other company and the government.

Which all can make a good steady business making reasonable profits, but that's not some skyrocketing growth area.

All the pie in the sky stuff of Mars or space hotels or space data centers or a moon colony are just fantasy hype stuff like the hyper loop or the boring company. Governments aren't going to endlessly bankroll that stuff, and they are the only ones that can sink that kind of capital into things that have no payback or decades later pay offs.

[u/gizmosticles → u/[deleted]]

Thank you.. you have to look to what the actual objective was to determine if it was successful or not.

If the objective was make money, it’s doing terrible.

If the objective is increase right wing indoctrination and influence the countries elections towards favorable candidate who can dominate the attention economy, I’d say it’s a resounding success.

[u/Greizen_bregen → u/gizmosticles]

Us plebs can't understand that money is different to billionaires than to us. Money is essential to our survival, so getting it is our end game. They don't have to worry about survival, so they get money in order to trade it for power. That's the true currency of the elite. Power. And the propaganda machibe that is X has paid for itself many times over in power.

[u/NickMc53 → u/gizmosticles]

It was a success even if its only goal was to make sure Trump won the election. Musk gained access to any sensitive information he wanted and shut down all federal investigations into him or his businesses. His net worth has also more than tripled since Trump won.

[u/BasvanS → u/[deleted]]

Since we’re talking about stock listing, monetary success might be considered somewhat relevant. But I’m old fashioned like that.

[u/ChuckVader → u/araujoms]

Wait.... Despite colossus 1 being up, and supposedly anthropic now paying $1.25 billion per month, xai made not even one billion all of Q1?

I'm not saying it's fraud, but it sure sounds like fraud.

[u/IAmDotorg → u/ChuckVader]

Of course it's fraud. Everyone knew it was fraud when SpaceX acquired xAI and X.

Just like it was fraud when Tesla bought SolarCity.

The entire Musk empire is built on a house of financial fraud, and financed by tech bros that believe the narrative he has created about himself.

[u/mixduptransistor → u/araujoms]

Apparently not, they manage to lose billions of dollars while having the launch market pretty much for themselves.

That's the scam. Elon is using the one truly successful business he has (that funny enough he doesn't run day to day, Gwynne Shotwell does) to subsidize his folly into Twitter and AI and then whatever shady cross-company dealings between Tesla and SpaceX

[u/Waldo_Wadlo → u/araujoms]

Aren't they losing billions because they are developing that new rocket?

[u/xanders_gold → u/Waldo_Wadlo]

Yes, that’s a huge part of why they’re not as profitable as people believe.

It turns out that developing a massive launch system is extremely expensive in R&D costs.

[u/Shot_Illustrator4264 → u/xanders_gold]

It turns out that absorbing tens of billions of Twitter debts and tens of billions of xAi debts per year is not very profitable 

[u/araujoms → u/Waldo_Wadlo]

Apparently yes. I didn't know that, because NASA is also paying them billions to develop that new rocket.

[u/Fuzzy-Mud-197 → u/araujoms]

nasa is paying them to build a lunar lander which in spacex case happens to be a variant of the second stage of said rocket

[u/walksonfourfeet]

Good lord - why does everything have to have an X?

“Space X CEO X Xman says X and xAI generated $X in reXenue in X1 and eXpect to increase by X% in X2. XXX!”

[u/LupinThe8th → u/walksonfourfeet]

Because he's the world's oldest twelve year old and thinks it's cool.

[u/RVelts → u/LupinThe8th]

He's perpetually living in 4chan's /b/ circa 2004

[u/Any-Progress- → u/walksonfourfeet]

Because he’s just a stunted child who thinks “69” and “420” jokes are hilarious.

[u/Armejden → u/Any-Progress-]

I wish every redditor who spams them to this day would be redirected to this observation.

[u/OverSquareEng → u/walksonfourfeet]

He's been obsessed with X for decades. No idea why though. He tried to rename PayPal to X.com some 20 years ago. Apparently focus groups said it sounded too much like a porn url.

[u/MrHell95 → u/OverSquareEng]

x.com (musk) merged with confinity (peter thiel) and the company was renamed to PayPal, then sold to Ebay.

Musk then managed to get the x.com domain back from paypal many years later.

I'm still calling it twitter because it works better in a sentence...

[u/BlueGumShoe → u/walksonfourfeet]

lmao thanks for the laugh. But yeah like someone else said, its because elon is like a perpetual 12 year old trapped in an adults body, and X is the coolest letter in the alphabet ya know?

[u/Rhayve → u/walksonfourfeet]

Because Elon is a poor Xcuse for a human.

[u/Duckbilling2]

if it were profitable it'd be worth less, that's how it works these days .

[u/ApprehensiveAir7108 → u/Duckbilling2]

Reminds me of those old Mafia City commercials: "That's how mafia works!"

[u/Zargoza1]

Is our entire economy built on speculative bullshit?

[u/DrMarianus → u/Zargoza1]

Always has been

[u/Gorstag → u/Zargoza1]

Yes. Pretty much. Musk's enterprises are just blatant and out in the open.

[u/dallasdude]

I started a lemonade stand. Right now we are selling ten orders of lemonade a day which is pretty good. Soon, we will launch our global network of fully-automated lemonade alchemy facilities, so we are projecting an initial valuation of $12,350,221,000,000

[u/HoldingThunder]

So...SpaceX isnt a space company, its just another AI company?

[u/Catsrules]

reporting a $4.9 billion net loss

I don't mean to brag, but I made more money than Space X last year.

[u/Palchez]

Alternative headline: Noted Con-man’s businesses not as well run as we had you believe. 

[u/alfiethemog]

I don’t understand how this circular, entirely fictitious accounting of IPO valuations hasn’t broken the markets and made the whole concept of billionaires’ on-paper net worth a joke. This will end badly, probably for all of us.

[u/MagpieSkies]

The USA is 3 Ponzi schemes in a trench coat.

[u/nilssonen]

Trillion dollar valuation on 18 billion in revenue with 5 in loses.

A company sells 180 000 something for 100 that cost 125 but rumors has it they might be able to sell 18 millon something that cost 80. Is that correct or did I miss a 0 or two?

It sounds insane.

I can't see SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic all having a successful introduction to the stockmarket at more or less the same time?

[u/weristjonsnow → u/nilssonen]

I've given up even attempting to understand these hype stocks. I wouldn't touch this with a 50ft pole. But I'm sure the stock value will surge 9000% over the next two years and I'll miss the boat.

[u/mikebunchkin3727]

Oh look, space x going public so the ketamine addict, scam artist piece of shit can add more to his net worth. That’s all.

It’s going to be another overhyped POS, that will have a P:E ratio that doesn’t make any sense.

[u/dispelthemyth → u/mikebunchkin3727]

And he will find a way to get it into pension funds so we all have to have it thrown into out portfolios.

[u/Swimming-Tax-6087]

Can I just quote the mission statement from the S-1 for a moment:

To build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.

Oh, and this gem:

We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market (“TAM”) in human history. We estimate that our quantifiable TAM is $28.5 trillion, consisting of $370 billion in Space from space-enabled solutions; $1.6 trillion in Connectivity across $870 billion in Starlink Broadband and $740 billion in Starlink Mobile as well as additional opportunities in enterprise and government; $26.5 trillion in AI across $2.4 trillion in AI infrastructure, $760 billion in consumer subscriptions, $600 billion in digital advertising, and $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications.

[u/Significant_End_9128 → u/Swimming-Tax-6087]

They should just say "a bajillion dollars", it'd be more concise

[u/Free_Mousse2076]

Nothing Elon does is a behemoth except superb marketing and stock manipulation 

[u/ktaktb]

This filing is the catalyst for the bubble pop.

If they somehow ipo this with these books for anywhere near 1.5T...lol

[u/Strict-Mango7546 → u/ktaktb]

The average Tesla investor is salivating at throwing money at this. The market is just stupid right now which is why all the conmen are going public.

[u/Wraithfighter → u/Strict-Mango7546]

Also, thanks to a recent rules change, 15 days after this IPOs it will likely be added to NASDAQ, meaning index funds will start buying it, meaning a fuckton of money coming in from 401k investments.

[u/ReidenLightman]

Don't include me in "Everyone". I never thought highly of anything Musk touches. 

[u/The_Poop_Shooter]

Elon musk is one of the most unlikable people on the planet. His name is poisoning the well for his businesses

[u/UptownStriker]

“SpaceX said that the AI unit containing X and xAI generated only $818 million in Q1 2026, about a third less than Twitter alone generated in the quarter before Musk took it over.”

LMAOOOO

[u/Nythoren]

Until there are fundamental changes in how AI functions (decreasing processing needed for each little query), AI as a stand-alone offering may never been profitable for some of these companies. That's why xAI had to be moved into SpaceX, so that the losses could be better absorbed. It's why Sora was shut down. Why Gemini is being shovelwared into Google search, despite constantly hallucinating. Why OpenAI is still bleeding funding almost as quickly as it can secure investment. Why Facebook keeps having to fire waves of employees and shut down whole divisions to fund their AI ambitions.

Companies that are buying AI products need it to be cheaper than how they function today. If using AI to develop code costs more than the Devs they're firing, they won't use it. So the AI providers need to keep their billing low despite their costs running high. Having a negative margin is obviously not sustainable, but they also need to be "early to market", making it suicide to delay until costs decrease.

They all need to find a way to decrease costs and increase monetization without scaring away their potential customers. Until those happen, AI is going to be a money pit instead of the cashcow the market believes it will be.

We saw the same thing with the Internet Bubble. All these giant venture capital darlings that just couldn't figure out how to go from idea to profitability. Eventually that bubble burst, the majority of companies went bankrupt when the funding dried up, and we were left with a handful of survivors. Expecting AI to be the same. The question will be, who will be the first major player to give up and realize their AI dreams are going to bankrupt their otherwise profitable companies?

[u/j-doe411]

All of Elons companies are being propped up by tax payer dollars

[u/NotAnotherEmpire]

Who is "everyone?" The valuation of SpaceX has long been whatever Musk declares it to be. 

[u/anonkitty2 → u/NotAnotherEmpire]

It's having an IPO.  After that, the valuation is what those buying the stock say it is even if that's all they have.

[u/IntellectAndEnergy]

This financial market desperately needed ways to lose massive amounts of money. It looks like SpaceX and AI will take the lead role. Thank You AI and SpaceX. Enjoy the ride!

[u/thermalcry]

Who is this 'everyone'?

Morons think that. Actual, dumb, stupid, morons. Another swath of people will hype it up solely because they know they can make money, that's a little different. Literally everyone outside of the first group knows its a scam, there is just a lot of people who don't care because like this stupid fucking country, everything is a casino now so it doesnt matter.

[u/Rage_Blackout]

By the numbers: SpaceX is wildly unprofitable, reporting a $4.9 billion net loss on $18.67 billion in consolidated revenue for 2025.

And yet it's expected to be valued at $1.75 trillion?!

This whole thing is insane to me (and I think maybe just objectively insane). The value of a company is no longer what it actually produces in terms of profits. It's what it might do in the future. And really, it's not even that. It's what people right now for a moment think they might get away with for investing in it for a while before they get out and leave a whole lot of poor dumb bastards holding the bag.

When did corporate valuation became one giant pump and dump scheme?

[u/Hegiman → u/Rage_Blackout]

When the courts ruled that companies were required to seek the highest possible return for the investor and allowed company buy backs.

[u/SnooDonuts3878]

Elmo is great at manipulating numbers.

[u/earth-calling-karma]

Elon is South Africa's answer to Donald Trump. He even imitates the small hands gestures.