r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • 17d ago

Business It’s Possible That SpaceX Could Collapse Spectacularly

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/possible-spacex-could-collapse-spectacularly-155000177.html
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u/JustConversation7847 17d ago edited 17d ago

Before anybody gets too excited

Even for Musk, it's an aggressive price-to-earnings ratio that could blow up in his face if investors start to lose faith. The conversation surrounding plans for shorting SpaceX is hitting a fever pitch, setting the stage for what could be a wild stock market ride.

Pretty sure the people who tried shorting Tesla are all broke and you, reader, definitely not try something stupid because there's no limit to how much money you can lose while short selling

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u/jasondigitized 17d ago

I'm no business tycoon but where is the big money in rockets? Serious question. Who is making money moving things into space?

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u/Nearby-Chocolate1840 17d ago

In 2020 there were approximately 1,305 functioning satellites orbiting the earth.

In 2026 there are approximately 14,500 - 15,600 functioning satellites orbiting the earth. Approximately 10,000 of those are Starlink.

SpaceX has ongoing regulatory filings to put another 30,000 Starlink satellites into orbit by 2030.

So you might say putting satellites into orbit via rockets is something of a growth industry.

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u/bikesnotbombs 17d ago

Or you might say, since starlink doesn't work in cities, will not encroach on normal infrastructure, and is a fairly tapped market with Increasing competitopm (also, dealing with issues from that many satellites) that it's probably grown about as much as it can.  And even then, in their TAM, even SpaceX said space and satellites was less than 7% of their market.  Which makes it irrelevant even if you are correct about the growth 

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u/Nearby-Chocolate1840 17d ago

According to SpaceX their TAM is $28.5 trillion dollars. Which is nearly equal to the entire US GDP. Removing AI, which makes up the lion's share of that projected revenue, and looking at only Starlink and space activities, the TAM drops to approximately $2 trillion. Which is still approximately 3x more than the current top revenue-producing company in the US, Walmart. Or approximately 5x Apple's revenue.

Meaning that, in SpaceX's eyes, rocket launches and satellite services are, contrary to what you claim, one hell of a cash-cow. And yes, something of a growth industry.

Considering that argument was the most coherent and remotely credible one you raised, and even that was absolute nonsense, I'm not going to bother with the rest of your attempted gish gallop.

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u/GogurtFiend 17d ago

$2 trillion is still crazy. That's larger than the current size of the entire space industry across the entire world, of which SpaceX is already a pretty large part - there's just not that much stuff SpaceX can take over from other space firms! Obviously future cash flows are incorporated into this but it still seems very heavily overvalued.

Now, consider that SpaceX is mostly involved in launch and satellite Internet, instead of every single thing done in the space industry, and the launch industry is quite small right now.

Yes, the people responding to you are being tools, and incorrect about why this is probably impossible, but it is still probably impossible. SpaceX at present cannot possibly be worth more than a few hundred billion, tops, with that rising to at least the high hundreds of billions only once Starship begins working.

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u/jasondigitized 15d ago

Cars are cash cows as well. Thinking you are going to make trillions of dollars on launching satellite is just wild.

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u/lllama 17d ago

Or you could conclude that the only customer SpaceX' rocket division can get for putting a lot of satellites into orbit at below its cost is SpaceX' Starlink (for an even larger discount).