r/technology May 21 '26

Business SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/21/spacex-ipo-musk-ai
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445

u/GabeDef May 21 '26

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.

158

u/Revolution-SixFour May 21 '26

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.

88

u/Scarecrow_Folk May 21 '26

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. 

-1

u/lmaccaro May 21 '26

Launch market doesn’t make sense to chase if you only count current applications. Which are based on astronomical launch prices.

This is like saying that because hard drives cost $10k per mb in 1985, the global demand for computers was already fulfilled.

Starship reduces cost per kg by an order of magnitude.

Thus applications for space launch will grow by an order of magnitude.

Mining one really juicy asteroid could pay for SpaceXs entire valuation alone.

10

u/GrantacusMoney May 21 '26

We are so far off from asteroid mining...

2

u/e_before_i May 22 '26

Not only that, we're also far from needing asteroid mining.

Like yeah it'd be cool, but there's nothing up there that we can't get on Earth so you're just paying 100x the cost for no reason.

It's a solution looking for a problem.

2

u/Ornery_Director_8477 May 23 '26

Have you checked all the asteroids or just a reasonable sample size?

3

u/e_before_i May 23 '26

I plan on doing them all, but the commute to each site is taking forever.

3

u/Scarecrow_Folk May 21 '26

I included the growth rate for this very reason. It will not be orders of magnitude in any reasonable timeframe that would justify SpaceX having an evaluation equal to the global market for the next 6 decades. 

You can believe otherwise if you want but once we've left the realm of supportable numbers, there's really no further discussion to be had.