"Buying time" is an ordinary phrase in English but, it doesn't make a lot of sense here because there'd be some activity SpaceX is doing to "buy time". If you're just waiting that doesn't "buy time".
The plan is simply for insiders to offload their bags (overvalued shares) to retail investors, like the folk who frequent the wallstreetbets subreddit and do all their “investing” on Robinhood. This speaks to the larger trend of the lower and middle class apparently giving up on any plans to retire- and it’s understandable as the federal minimum wage has never been so disconnected from the cost of living, plus inflation, plus the current job market being universally terrible (even for software engineers), et al.
It’s worth noting that this is nothing new. I’m reminded of Virgin Galactic, another “space company” that was heavily speculated on. Predictably, insiders like Richard Branson himself sold a large number of shares (well into the millions of dollars) ahead of the inevitable “dump” where the share price fell around 75% in a matter of weeks. Virgin Galactic (SPCE) entered the Nasdaq via SPAC - Special Purpose Acquisition Group - essentially a company whose sole purpose is to acquire a private company, thereby effectively making the company public. Why wouldn’t Virgin Galactic just go public? Why go through a SPAC? The short answer is “to bypass regulations.”
OpenInsider is an excellent website that makes it easy to see when insiders buy or sell a stock, and the most common pattern is insiders dumping their shares in overvalued companies. We saw it when Zoom and Crispr and a few others shot up several hundred percentage points during COVID. C-suite and board members made out like bandits. Those weren’t even SPACs, those were just companies that people were foolish enough to speculate on.
Finally I want to bring attention to Robinhood, the stock trading platform that eliminated commission on trades from all brokerages - Schwab, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, et al- by making it incredibly quick and easy (and free) to buy and sell stocks. They opened this Pandora’s Box, though I suppose it was bound to happen eventually- brokerages charged $7 per trade (sometimes more) and obviously for the college student who wants to throw $20 at Amazon stock… losing $7 in and then $7 again on the way out makes no sense. Now for anyone giving Robinhood the benefit of the doubt- their evil was (I think) absolutely confirmed when they unveiled a new feature- you can now trade OPTIONS with your retirement account. Options are essentially gambling, so to enable people to throw away their retirement on gambling is truly vile.
Options is gambling only for the vast majority who're inexperienced with them or don't have a sound theory for them. I can trade them in my setup with over a 95% success rate, perhaps even 99%. Of course I am not going to type out my theory here.
Such an overgeneralization ruined your otherwise reasonable comment. Always stop when you are winning.
Agreed. More importantly, this long documented history of massive recurring multi-billion dollar fraud and theft – mostly from domestic and international retirement funds – indicates that America is essentially, for all intents and purposes, a plutocratic dictatorship with the illusion of democracy. Ticking a box every few years, when all your options are pre-positioned to continue a criminal status-quo, is neither "democracy" or "by/for the people". This systemic corruption did not materialise out of thin air recently. It has arguably been present all of history (in every economy). It's just accelerated to psychopathic levels of obscene gratuity over the last 2 decades.
This is why I've voted with my wallet the only way I can, by moving all of my investments (including retirement) out of the American market. The rot is far too deep. The few bad apples have entirely spoiled the bunch. I'm not under any illusion other markets will be safe from the fallout, or that I'll make better returns long term, but I do not care. I'm voting the only way I can given the current system. If I'd moved my investments earlier, when I came to this conclusion, I would have actually made significantly larger gains over the last couple of years.
Don’t talk about fair valuations. Some people will say “who decides what anything is worth anyway”? Let people do what they want. If they lose their money they signed up for it.
I think the bigger issue is that oligarchs have gotten so powerful that they can just write down the valuation they want and the market will just agree with it blindly.
The issue isn’t that investors will lose their money, the issue is that in some cases like Tesla they never do. The oligarchs are propped up by their own power over the behavior or the market — a power which is disproportionally larger than the objective value their companies bring to the economy.
SpaceX is a company with the same revenue as Dick’s Sporting Goods.
I don't get the complaint about Tesla. It's profitable, has little debt and 40 billion in the bank. What sort of "Power over the behavior of the market" do they exert? Like they can force people to buy their cars.
Space X has the most sophisticated vehicle ever created by man. Dicks does not. If you are only looking at revenue then sure, but that would be silly, you have to look at what the potential in a company is not it's current revenue, if not then looking at Blockbuster in 2008 would seem like a great investment compared to Netflix which didn't have much revenue.
One theory is that Elon Musk ends up being able to build AI datacenters faster and more cost effectively than anyone else, which seems plausible given the success of Tesla Gigafactories.
It signals to me that they like money and people are willing to give it to them at unprecedented levels, and probably still have plenty of capacity for themselves afterwards. Why would you not accept billions of dollars per month?
This is pretty normal for tech stocks. Most have a big pop on the first few days of IPO and then they drop. After 180 days, insiders can start selling shares so there's another drop around that time due to a higher supply for shares on the sell side.
Tl;dr it’s still above the IPO price so the favoured investors still at a profit and Musk is still a trillionaire.
As with Tesla, Musk will keep coming up with ‘profits suck but we are doing x new shiny project so don’t worry’ announcements to keep retail investors believing…
SpaceX + Twitter + XAi + Cursor is the perfect combo to collect government contracts. You want exposure in social media? Use Twitter. Civil servants want AI? Use Grok. Developers want AI? Use Cursor. All space heading business? Contact SpaceX. All under the polished (!), totally unblemished (!) PR image of Musk.
Someone please wake me up if this is a fever dream.
On paper. The actual number is how much cash banks will lend him using his SpaceX holdings as collateral. Maybe that is a trillion dollars. Smarter money though? They know that if things go south and they need to collect that collateral, in that situation SpaceX will be worth a lot less than a trillion dollars.
I basically said a similar thing in another comment, but this is the real problem.
The ultimate power of the modern oligarch is gaining far more wealth than the value their assets bring to the market.
It would be healthier for our society if Tesla’s stock came back to earth to a valuation that made some level of sense for the business that they’re in. Musk would not be so astronomically rich in that case. The same story goes with SpaceX.
We don’t really need to be concerned that mom and pop are going to lose their life savings in their index funds to SpaceX. It’s actually the opposite: it’s more concerning that stocks like SpaceX and Tesla don’t crash down to better reflect reality, and their continued overvaluation serves as a massive transfer of wealth to major shareholders at the top.
I don’t bet on SpaceX stock crashing down anytime soon because the oligarchs who own it have so much soft and hard power to prop it up. Only the salaried employees are going to sell shares, while the biggest owners will just borrow against the collateral.
Even if it drops to 1/2 its IPO price ($855B valuation) that still massively overpaying for it.
What do they think is gonna come from this SpaceX + Twitter + XAi + Cursor amalgamation? Sexbot agents vibe coding on Mars?
> Sexbot agents vibe coding on Mars?
Now that I'd invest in :)
Morningstar has the most conservative valuation as far as I know, at $780B
https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/spacex-what-investors-nee...
Pentagon contracts.
So? It’ll never pay dividends..
Until MAGA is out of power
SpaceX is critical to national security and NASA. A new administration isn’t going to change that.
I know they broke up but I can't help but feel this is related: (Grimes - We Appreciate Power)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYG_4vJ4qNA
They are buying their time (6 months) before being included in the S&P500s, causing another inevitable surge in forced "demand".
Nit: the phrase is “biding their time” FYI
I agree with your statement overall.
Or “buying time”
"Buying time" is an ordinary phrase in English but, it doesn't make a lot of sense here because there'd be some activity SpaceX is doing to "buy time". If you're just waiting that doesn't "buy time".
I think they just blended together in the posters mind
It’ll be at least a year before they are eligible to join the S&P500. They also need to become profitable.
In the next 6 months another 45%-50% of Space X stock is unlocked, increasing the amount of shares on the market ~10 fold.
Although many will be long term believers who won’t sell. I can’t see how this couldn’t deflate the share price further
The plan is simply for insiders to offload their bags (overvalued shares) to retail investors, like the folk who frequent the wallstreetbets subreddit and do all their “investing” on Robinhood. This speaks to the larger trend of the lower and middle class apparently giving up on any plans to retire- and it’s understandable as the federal minimum wage has never been so disconnected from the cost of living, plus inflation, plus the current job market being universally terrible (even for software engineers), et al.
It’s worth noting that this is nothing new. I’m reminded of Virgin Galactic, another “space company” that was heavily speculated on. Predictably, insiders like Richard Branson himself sold a large number of shares (well into the millions of dollars) ahead of the inevitable “dump” where the share price fell around 75% in a matter of weeks. Virgin Galactic (SPCE) entered the Nasdaq via SPAC - Special Purpose Acquisition Group - essentially a company whose sole purpose is to acquire a private company, thereby effectively making the company public. Why wouldn’t Virgin Galactic just go public? Why go through a SPAC? The short answer is “to bypass regulations.”
OpenInsider is an excellent website that makes it easy to see when insiders buy or sell a stock, and the most common pattern is insiders dumping their shares in overvalued companies. We saw it when Zoom and Crispr and a few others shot up several hundred percentage points during COVID. C-suite and board members made out like bandits. Those weren’t even SPACs, those were just companies that people were foolish enough to speculate on.
Finally I want to bring attention to Robinhood, the stock trading platform that eliminated commission on trades from all brokerages - Schwab, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, et al- by making it incredibly quick and easy (and free) to buy and sell stocks. They opened this Pandora’s Box, though I suppose it was bound to happen eventually- brokerages charged $7 per trade (sometimes more) and obviously for the college student who wants to throw $20 at Amazon stock… losing $7 in and then $7 again on the way out makes no sense. Now for anyone giving Robinhood the benefit of the doubt- their evil was (I think) absolutely confirmed when they unveiled a new feature- you can now trade OPTIONS with your retirement account. Options are essentially gambling, so to enable people to throw away their retirement on gambling is truly vile.
Options is gambling only for the vast majority who're inexperienced with them or don't have a sound theory for them. I can trade them in my setup with over a 95% success rate, perhaps even 99%. Of course I am not going to type out my theory here.
Such an overgeneralization ruined your otherwise reasonable comment. Always stop when you are winning.
Agreed. More importantly, this long documented history of massive recurring multi-billion dollar fraud and theft – mostly from domestic and international retirement funds – indicates that America is essentially, for all intents and purposes, a plutocratic dictatorship with the illusion of democracy. Ticking a box every few years, when all your options are pre-positioned to continue a criminal status-quo, is neither "democracy" or "by/for the people". This systemic corruption did not materialise out of thin air recently. It has arguably been present all of history (in every economy). It's just accelerated to psychopathic levels of obscene gratuity over the last 2 decades.
This is why I've voted with my wallet the only way I can, by moving all of my investments (including retirement) out of the American market. The rot is far too deep. The few bad apples have entirely spoiled the bunch. I'm not under any illusion other markets will be safe from the fallout, or that I'll make better returns long term, but I do not care. I'm voting the only way I can given the current system. If I'd moved my investments earlier, when I came to this conclusion, I would have actually made significantly larger gains over the last couple of years.
Don’t talk about fair valuations. Some people will say “who decides what anything is worth anyway”? Let people do what they want. If they lose their money they signed up for it.
I think the bigger issue is that oligarchs have gotten so powerful that they can just write down the valuation they want and the market will just agree with it blindly.
The issue isn’t that investors will lose their money, the issue is that in some cases like Tesla they never do. The oligarchs are propped up by their own power over the behavior or the market — a power which is disproportionally larger than the objective value their companies bring to the economy.
SpaceX is a company with the same revenue as Dick’s Sporting Goods.
I don't get the complaint about Tesla. It's profitable, has little debt and 40 billion in the bank. What sort of "Power over the behavior of the market" do they exert? Like they can force people to buy their cars.
Space X has the most sophisticated vehicle ever created by man. Dicks does not. If you are only looking at revenue then sure, but that would be silly, you have to look at what the potential in a company is not it's current revenue, if not then looking at Blockbuster in 2008 would seem like a great investment compared to Netflix which didn't have much revenue.
I don't think most people signed up for it by just having some money in their pension funds.
SpaceX isn’t in indexes yet… That will be included later this month in NASDAQ & co.
The valuation is about to be just as unfair.
That’s at least something to look forward to!
Something like the plan in the anime Jormungand maybe? (https://jormungand.fandom.com/wiki/Jormungand)
One theory is that Elon Musk ends up being able to build AI datacenters faster and more cost effectively than anyone else, which seems plausible given the success of Tesla Gigafactories.
That doesn’t justify the valuation in any way
what's the point of being vertically integrated if they're just going to rent out their compute (https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/ai-startup-re...). This signals to me they don't have an internal use for it
You could say the same about AWS circa 2011 though.
AWS did not need to buy excess inventory from Amazon because the sales were down
They also didn't need to buy another company lead by Bezos because ot was going cost him very much if certain conditions are met
It signals to me that they like money and people are willing to give it to them at unprecedented levels, and probably still have plenty of capacity for themselves afterwards. Why would you not accept billions of dollars per month?
Why don’t they name it: SpaceX + X (twtr) + xAI = SpaceXXXAI
Don't give him ideas.
I would not put it past Elon.
Honestly a little surprised the ticker wasn’t $XXX
Sadly that exists already.
This is pretty normal for tech stocks. Most have a big pop on the first few days of IPO and then they drop. After 180 days, insiders can start selling shares so there's another drop around that time due to a higher supply for shares on the sell side.
It's Probably Overpriced
https://archive.is/lqPsS
Newton’s third law. To get anywhere, you have to leave something behind (bagholders).
Haha I like this!
https://archive.ph/lqPsS
Or direct share price chart https://www.hl.co.uk/shares/shares-search-results/s/spacex-u...
Tl;dr it’s still above the IPO price so the favoured investors still at a profit and Musk is still a trillionaire.
As with Tesla, Musk will keep coming up with ‘profits suck but we are doing x new shiny project so don’t worry’ announcements to keep retail investors believing…
SpaceX + Twitter + XAi + Cursor is the perfect combo to collect government contracts. You want exposure in social media? Use Twitter. Civil servants want AI? Use Grok. Developers want AI? Use Cursor. All space heading business? Contact SpaceX. All under the polished (!), totally unblemished (!) PR image of Musk.
Someone please wake me up if this is a fever dream.
Didn't even wait until the pension funds buy in?
volatile asset is volatile
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48634931
It's crazy that Musk is worth a trillion dollar and the 2nd richest person is just 200 Billion dollars.
What's more crazy is that the revenue in no way justifies the trillion dollars valuation of spaceX!
Chickens will roost when more of SpaceX is open to the market.
I doubt. Tesla is still so high!
Relatively speaking :). Put it this way: I wont buy puts.
On paper. The actual number is how much cash banks will lend him using his SpaceX holdings as collateral. Maybe that is a trillion dollars. Smarter money though? They know that if things go south and they need to collect that collateral, in that situation SpaceX will be worth a lot less than a trillion dollars.
Tesla being worth more than entire auto industry and PE ratio of 350+, i feel like spaceX will do fine in public market.
I basically said a similar thing in another comment, but this is the real problem.
The ultimate power of the modern oligarch is gaining far more wealth than the value their assets bring to the market.
It would be healthier for our society if Tesla’s stock came back to earth to a valuation that made some level of sense for the business that they’re in. Musk would not be so astronomically rich in that case. The same story goes with SpaceX.
We don’t really need to be concerned that mom and pop are going to lose their life savings in their index funds to SpaceX. It’s actually the opposite: it’s more concerning that stocks like SpaceX and Tesla don’t crash down to better reflect reality, and their continued overvaluation serves as a massive transfer of wealth to major shareholders at the top.
I don’t bet on SpaceX stock crashing down anytime soon because the oligarchs who own it have so much soft and hard power to prop it up. Only the salaried employees are going to sell shares, while the biggest owners will just borrow against the collateral.
> transfer of wealth to major shareholders at the top.
Excellent summary of the apst 25yrs
The U.S is nothing but an Oligarchy now.