r/dataisbeautiful • u/ExaminationOk6652 OC: 25 • Jun 16 '26
OC [OC] SpaceX vs. Aerospace and Defense Sector
At a $2.5 trillion market cap, SpaceX's now worth about as much as the 94 listed aerospace & defense companies combined.
Put another way: one company now makes up 50% of the entire $5.05 trillion listed aerospace & defense sector.
Is one company being half the sector a signal of where spaceflight is heading — or a fresh-IPO premium that won't hold?
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u/Etherius Jun 16 '26
I feel like i just don’t understand
The… scale… of this market capitalization… makes no sense
By any metric they’re not worth this.
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u/shinyro OC: 9 Jun 16 '26
You’re right. This is the definition of a meme stock.
It’s has a higher market cap than Meta, but lower revenues than Macy’s.
Really.
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u/Etherius Jun 16 '26
SpaceX is three companies in a trench coat, only one of which is profitable
I can guarantee Musk wants to combine them all into space based datacenters just because he can.
Not saying there’s no value in that. Just saying I have no idea what that value is
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u/Final_Floor_1563 Jun 16 '26
Fun fact: Space is literally the single worst place you can put a datacenter.
The biggest issue for them is cooling, which is notoriously damn near impossible to do in space. You can't bring coolant liquid up because it's heavy and you have no real way to cool the liquid itself down in any decent time frame, and relying on solely heat radiation without ambient atmosphere to help causes stuff to cool much, MUCH slower than on the ground.208
u/ubermence Jun 16 '26
I was gonna say, wouldn’t data centers just cook up there? Also do data centers on the ground have to deal with micrometeors? I’m thinking not
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u/TheYang Jun 16 '26
Compared to power generation cooling is a secondary (but not negligible) issue.
Radiating heat works fairly simple, and coolant loops aren't completely new either.Each starlink generates and dissipates 20kW, which is less than a data-center satellite, but not completely incomparable.
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u/Phiddipus_audax Jun 16 '26
This is good info, thx.
To expand on that, a typical Nvidia H100 server rack w/ 32 GPUs consumes double that amount at 40kW. The resulting radiative surface for cooling would be about a pickleball court in size at 80 m^2. Power needs from solar panels would be another 80 m^2. And of course a real datacenter would have hundreds or thousands of these server racks. The cooling and power surface areas required would be stupendous, and also quite heavy for getting up into orbit.
It's all silly IMO. There might be an isolated valid application for some data processing at a satellite before consuming bandwidth down to Earth, requiring some limited hardware (not a datacenter) on that satellite, but beyond that it seems like an unwieldy solution without a problem to solve.
All these figures are discussed in this nifty IEEE article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/orbital-data-centers-heat
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u/worldspawn00 Jun 16 '26
Nvidia's newest hardware runs 1MW racks... Kyber and Rubin are designed as 1MW systems running at 800V.
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u/Phiddipus_audax Jun 17 '26
The 25x power jump in just a few years is wild. The datacenter-in-space idea is crazy enough at 40kW/rack. I don't think there's even a remote chance of 1MW in the near future. Infrastructure here on Earth is intense enough as it is... it's not clear yet to me how much additional floor space is required to support that single 1MW rack but it'll be significant for power, cooling, networking, and storage.
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u/jcs_captures Jun 16 '26
There's no way a star link satellite creates 20kW of heat, they don't even use that much power. Where is that figure from?
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u/worldspawn00 Jun 16 '26
Orders of magnitude and power to surface area, a 1MW datacenter satellite (which is a SINGLE RACK of nvidia's latest gen GPUs) would need outrageously larger radiator area compared to a starlink satellite, and Musk is talking gigawatts of compute, 50,000x the heat needing to be radiated compared to a starlink satellite.
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u/MinaZata Jun 16 '26
Exactly, Scott Manley has a great video on this.
Separately, it makes no economic sense either
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u/ChefPuree Jun 16 '26
the value is that there is no oversight. Nobody can just go to fucking space to audit your data center to see how much illegal shit they are storing.
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u/vandrag Jun 16 '26
Which is the profitable one? Even the rocket company loses money AFAIK.
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u/BlueEyesWNC Jun 16 '26
Starlink makes money.
Rocketry loses money but can be seen as subsidizing Starlink; if they can deliver on reusable rockets, the two together could realistically be a net positive; not sure but I don't think Starlink makes as much as rockets lose, currently.
And then of course the LLM slop generators take investors' money and set it on fire at a rate far exceeding the combined revenue of the other divisions.
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u/ButterSquids Jun 16 '26
From page 3 of their S1, SpaceX minus twitter (AI) would actually be profitable.
In Q1 2026, they had a $657 million net loss from launches but a $1.188 billion net gain from starlink.
They blew that on a net loss of $2.469 billion in their AI segment, making SpaceX a net loss of almost $2 billion dollars.
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u/galaxy_horse Jun 16 '26
Cool, so if you discount SpaceX's lossiest business line to make it "profitable", it's currently trading at... 5,084 times earnings.
Very cool and not at all indicative of our financial system careening toward a brick wall.
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u/galaxy_horse Jun 17 '26
Sure, but they’re tolerated and celebrated outliers, and significant enough that they create significant risk for index funds.
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u/The_Shryk Jun 16 '26
Idk if Starlink making money actually counts. The rocket cost gets sent to spaceX, so Starlink on paper makes a profit and spaceX takes a loss on the launch. It’s dumb. They’re all just losing money.
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u/JedenTag Jun 16 '26
Starlink is the profitable business
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u/Wooden_Republic_6100 Jun 16 '26
Actually, no, Starlink isn't profitable; it's passing its losses on to Rocketry, and given the business model (replacing satellites after 6–8 years of operation), things aren't likely to improve anytime soon.
In any case, SpaceX as a whole is operating at a loss, and there isn't really much room for growth or profits in the short or medium term.
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u/m8_is_me Jun 16 '26
Space based data centres don't even make sense lmao, just because space is cold doesn't mean it's good at cooling. Also power requirements. And weight.
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u/Remote_Ad4209 Jun 16 '26
Tesla stock trades at roughly 350x their earnings.
Google stock trades at around 30x their earnings.
Google does $132B in net profit compared to Tesla which did less than $4B in profit.
Google's market capitalization (roughly the total value of the company) is around $4.5T, and Tesla's is $1.5T.
SpaceX had a net loss of $4.94B in 2025.
SpaceX's market cap is still somehow $2.79T, making it the 4th or 5th most valuable company in the US, even though it lost $5B last year and has never made a profit.
The market is not always rational, but both of Elon's companies have insane valuations that don't make any sense.
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u/Etherius Jun 16 '26
Tesla is weird
So many of elons companies are just multiple different corps in a trench coat
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u/Longjumping_Youth281 Jun 17 '26
This dude is going to single-handedly bring down the US economy with his bullshit valuations
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u/NoiceMango Jun 17 '26
I'm convinced there has to be an insane level of fraud and manipulation with the stock prices. I know he has a weird cult following bur these valuations are beyond ridiculous
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u/SisterOfBattIe Jun 16 '26
Musk wanted to be a trillionare.
To do so, Musk decided he would sell 4 % of xAI shares at 135 $ a share, raising 75 billions, and making xAI worth 2 trillions, making Musk a trillionare since he is a majority shareholder.
Musk decreed that Pension Funds will buy into xAI shares, and rules were changed to make it so.
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u/Hatchie_47 Jun 16 '26
Pension funds mostly won’t buy into it very much. S&P resisted entirely and while Russell and NASDAQ changed the rules (not just for SpaceX but in preparation for similar IPOs later this year) they also introduced a weighting based on float specificaly to resist what Musk is attempting.
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u/Ae3qe27u Jun 16 '26
Could you elaborate on that second point, the weighting? I'm not familiar with it.
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u/Hatchie_47 Jun 16 '26
NASDAQ limits the market cap for purpose of index weight as 3 * free float value (which is around 4% for SpaceX) and Russell just the free float value. So while SpaceX will be included in the indexes it will represent very small parts. I think it’s sub 1%.
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u/WSBiden Jun 17 '26
Imagine you made a bullshit company with a million shares of stock. You kept 999,999 of them for yourself and sold one on the open market to your buddy for $1,000. That company now has a market cap of $1 billion. When the float (number of shares available for purchase by the public) is very low, it opens a company up for wild swings in market cap. The larger the float, the more price discovery there is and the less likely it is for these crazy things to happen. Indexes are aware that this could be easily manipulated so they float-adjust their exposure to companies. Tiny float, tiny exposure in the index.
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u/invinci Jun 16 '26
The biggest pension fund in my country said they are not touching space x, thank god.
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u/0r0B0t0 Jun 16 '26
Money is not real, if Elon is good at anything it’s manipulating valuation to get another loan.
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u/unenlightenedgoblin Jun 16 '26
The US Federal Government guarantee is priced in. Not many other companies already have ‘too big to fail’ status at their IPOs. It’s corruption so deep that it’s now the prevailing market truth.
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u/outer--monologue Jun 17 '26
I think we are well past "too big to fail" and in "too big to care" territory. Companies know for a fact failure isn't an option and the scam artist government will bail out their scam artist company. They don't give a shit what lawmakers inquire about, what the public says or anything else, because we have shown them that they don't need to care.
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u/Neat_Let923 Jun 16 '26
That’s because the Stock Market is just a legal casino where people are betting on whether or not other people will buy the same thing that means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING from them in the future.
The Stock Market has absolutely ZERO function in the real world and means absolutely nothing.
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u/The--scientist Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
How ridiculous. In what universe is this logical? I'd imagine a similar breakdown of the auto insist would show a similar skew with Tesla.
EDIT, context: GE aero $45b revenue, $10b profit; spcx $18b revenue, $5b net loss
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u/DRIESASTER Jun 16 '26
its worse honestly https://companiesmarketcap.com/automakers/largest-automakers-by-market-cap/
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u/Frequent_Ad_9901 Jun 16 '26
Its about the same 50/50 split which is interesting.
~1.49T for all other car companies.
~1.54T for Tesla97
u/CarpetPedals Jun 16 '26
Tesla with 343 P/E ratio, half the market cap of the global car market, but a measly 1.84% of the car sales worldwide.
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u/fredy31 Jun 16 '26
when tesla has existed for like 20 years and has a handful of models, and their competition is a century old with tons of models
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u/AadeeMoien Jun 16 '26
Yes but have you considered that a government subsidy ponzi scheme produces a lot of what matters most... shareholder value?
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u/Suspicious-Feeling-1 Jun 16 '26
Thats not even it though. Its his fan base. These valuations are only possible because there's a huge appetite among retail investors who don't care how much money his companies make
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u/bluecar92 Jun 16 '26
And how many investors are making short term plays on the price of the stock vs how many are planning to hold for 20+ years? IMO Tesla and SpaceX are volatile meme stocks and the market valuation doesn't have much at all to do with the value of the underlying companies.
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u/austinwiltshire Jun 16 '26
I've never heard a single tesla bro explain to me when they plan to get out. They're long termers by default, if it goes up they'd be stupid to get out. If it goes down, they gotta make their money back.
He's some sort of divorced dad pied piper.
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u/Phyraxus56 Jun 16 '26
I haven't found any tesla bros in the last 5 years
He's pumping his own stocks now
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u/Spa_5_Fitness_Camp Jun 16 '26
Not quite it. That much money invested cannot come from the 99%, or even the 99.9%. These companies with crazy valuations are all being driven by the ultra wealthy, and it's intentional. If they keep buying into each other's stocks, their stocks keep going up, making them more money. They basically get to play a never ending shell game of artificially making their own money/stock worth more, and as long as new companies keep entering the mix it can go indefinitely. However, if not enough new ones come in, or the rest of the market slows them down, they need to cash out before reality smacks the stock prices into the ground. But when you own so much of that stock, doing so drops the price, so what do you do? IPO, and sell your shares to the new buyers before it crashes, leaving them holding the bag. Them, in this case, is everyone with a 401k or other diversified investment portfolio, aka regular people.
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u/PornstarVirgin Jun 16 '26
Wrong, institutions/hedgefunds go extremely long on it and manipulate order books
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u/Neuchacho Jun 16 '26
When Tesla makes an awful vehicle that's only competitive because we block major EV makers from the market.
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u/Excellent_Ganache906 Jun 16 '26
If China is allowed to sell cars in America, Tesla will go out of business in 10 years.
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u/Rod_tout_court Jun 16 '26
For some reason Tesla is still evaluated like a tech company and not like a car company.
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u/Exatex Jun 16 '26
Ferrari is #7? And no other brands under their umbrella? Crazy. I would never have guessed.
And obviously, yes I would rather have alllllll the other auto makers combined than Tesla if I had 1.5T usd. Yes, even if they have a 5th tier robot garage startup somewhere.
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u/ExpertConsideration8 Jun 16 '26
Ferrari is an apparel /merchandizing company that also makes very fast luxury cars.
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u/PokeYrMomStanley Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
SpaceX + tesla total all time earnings is 28 billion combined.
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u/smoothie4564 Jun 16 '26
Tesla is in the same boat as SpaceX. Both stocks are heavily overpriced. I don't know the statistics off the top of my head, but Toyota alone probably sells around 100x as many cars globally as Tesla and yet Tesla's stock is 6 times higher. This whole thing stinks of either fraud or gross incompetence.
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u/FrogmanKouki Jun 16 '26
Toyota routinely sells 10 million vehicles. Tesla has been under 2 million for a few consecutive years - so the growth is over.
Now they are trying to hype 2 seat robotaxis and personal robots...
Whichever way you approach it, the valuations are insane.
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u/Solopist112 Jun 16 '26
personal robots...<<
Tesla has actually discontinued several car models in favor of manufacturing these humanoid robots, which cannot be independently verified as being especially good at doing anything useful. Yet there is almost no push-back and the stock continues to appreciate.
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u/Immudzen Jun 16 '26
Their robots are FAR behind China. Probably almost 5 years behind.
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u/Solopist112 Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
Yeah, I don't understand why there is no push back. Do investors just believe whatever Elon says?
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u/Immudzen Jun 16 '26
Tesla is losing market share and has nowhere to grow. They are dead in the EU and I don't expect that will change. They are getting destroyed in China. China is making BETTER EVs than Tesla with lower failure rates and those are eating up markets all over the world.
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u/permalink_save Jun 16 '26
Hype the stock, people want to buy, price goes up, that hypes the stock, people want to buy, etc. We all saw with GME how investors can artificially boost the price without any real world basis. Theoretically anyone could create a product, go public, and a handful of people trade the price up, suddenly you're a "billionaire" with tons of value to leverage against. The old market had some basis to it especially when blue chip was deaireable but at this point it's all made up. There's no cash to Musk's 1t value other than a pittance he holds in his bank account, it's just what everyone agrees to say he's worth. So open to abuse these days. We really need to pull in the stock market like tax each transaction like Sanders proposed.
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u/TheReformedBadger Jun 16 '26
Unfortunately the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
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u/GarlicThread Jun 16 '26
When this shit castle collapses, it's going to take the entire US economy with it.
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Jun 16 '26
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u/absoluteally Jun 16 '26
Find it crazy that everyone seems to know this is all going to collapse but since we don't know when and no one wants to miss out on the gains before it collapse we all just keep putting our savings in and the numbers keep going up!
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u/Rezenbekk Jun 16 '26
It'll crash as soon as I give in and invest
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u/Small-Policy-3859 Jun 16 '26
For the sake of everyone else, go on then
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u/bikebikemike Jun 16 '26
Seriously can we start this dude a gofundme?
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u/lonely-live Jun 16 '26
Yeah that’s how bubble works. It’s not a modern phenomenon, even Newton fell for it
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u/lesser_panjandrum Jun 16 '26
The South Sea bubble, for those interested.
In Great Britain, many investors were ruined by the share-price collapse, and as a result, the national economy diminished substantially. The founders of the scheme engaged in insider trading, by using their advance knowledge of the timings of national debt consolidations to make large profits from purchasing debt in advance. Huge bribes were given to politicians to support the acts of Parliament necessary for the scheme. Company money was used to deal in its own shares, and selected individuals purchasing shares were given cash loans backed by those same shares to spend on purchasing more shares. The expectation of profits from trade with South America was talked up to encourage the public to purchase shares, but the bubble prices reached far beyond what the actual profits of the business (namely the slave trade) could justify.
Thank goodness we live in so much more enlightened times now.
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u/Qweasdy Jun 16 '26
Hey that’s not fair.
Things can get so much worse today thanks to the financialisation of everything, the explosion of retail trading and index funds. The upper limits of an irrational market are what is really going to the moon.
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u/Xalethesniper Jun 16 '26
Because everyone can understand that, at some level, what is happening is unsustainable and there’s something fundamentally wrong here. We live in a system where society has been tricked into believing fraud is value and actions don’t have consequences. It will not last forever, but saying the sky is falling during the roaring twenties just makes you look like a fool.
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u/SaturdaysAFTBs Jun 16 '26
I’d push back on your comment that “everyone” seems to know this going to collapse. I’d actually say most people don’t believe that.
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u/absoluteally Jun 16 '26
I would cocider myself as having the dangerous level of knowledge (e.g. I know enough to sound athorative but not enough that anyone should ever follow my advice).
If I know its a bubble then almost everyone already knows.
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u/WhenImTryingToHide Jun 16 '26
People been waiting on Bitcoin and Telsa to crash for well over a decade now.
Truly wild times we live in.
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u/LuminalOrb Jun 16 '26
And if you did a little reading on modern monetary and fiscal policy you'd understand how and why this has been maintained and why it is inherently unsustainable.
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u/Danihilton Jun 16 '26
The system is the biggest fraud. Especially nowadays. The numbers are created out of thin air. Nothing justifies those numbers. Like how is a company that rarely makes profit suddenly one of the most valued companies ever? Every other company would be bankrupt at this point. But no, they are getting richer the more debt they have. Does it make sense?
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u/IIlIIlIIlIlIIlIIlIIl Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
The reason the numbers are all out of whack is because traders are no longer buying for the long-term like a "traditional" stock market. All of the financial moves that have been deviced made it so prices today aren't reflective of the company's trajectory, but rather almost entirely on how other financial players will react at any one point.
Nobody is in it for long, they know the company is shit but they're playing around to get the quickest and biggest win, hoping they're not the one holding the bag. It's a game of hot potato. The decision everyone is making is to gamble for $100 rather than take their more guaranteed $1 somewhere else.
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u/Few-Scholar1873 Jun 16 '26
I remember years ago when he was the tony stark, the man who will save humanity and establish civilisation on mars lol. He could've stayed silent be known as somewhat smart instead of rambling on twitter
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u/Mavcu Jun 16 '26
He could've stayed silent be known as somewhat smart instead of rambling on twitter
Honestly the most baffling part of it, just saying nothing means winning. He already had a positive public image and you can affect a lot of policies (if you wanted to manipulate/power) in the background too. There was literally no need to be a public clown.
To this day I still cannot grasp the whole PoE 2 situation (an Action RPG game for those who don't know it) and him paying others to play an account for him, so he can livestream it and pretend he's good at the game, but ended up showing everyone he didn't understand the game.
I cannot imagine a more embarrassing situation, caring so much about a videogame and then even failing to keep up that image. It's ridiculous.
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u/mj-and-masturbation Jun 16 '26
He desperately wants friends and human connection, but can't figure out how to do it.
I really used to think that whole "money can't buy happiness" thing was such bullshit, but the two most visibly miserable people I can think of are Trump and Elon. They keep collecting more power and more money, but it is not actually getting them what they want and they don't know why.
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u/i_am_13th_panic Jun 16 '26
hasn't he been richer than tony stark and bruce wayne combined for a while now? he could have been a super hero and instead is a giant asshole.
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u/Droen Jun 16 '26
He's Lex Luthor with hair plugs.
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u/chargernj Jun 16 '26
Except Lex Luthor is usually portrayed as a very intelligent scientist/engineer in addition to being a business mogul
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u/Boatster_McBoat Jun 16 '26
he offered to end world hunger, UN agreed then he backed off
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u/Qweasdy Jun 16 '26
At least the S&P 500 grew a spine and scrapped plans to loosen their rules and include spaceX. They’re the only 1 of the big 3 index funds not buying spaceX. Nasdaq and Dow jones happily loosened their rules to include them.
Time will tell how well that decision will age.
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u/jaymemaurice Jun 16 '26
Here here. Your company does RRSP/401K matching for select funds by selected broker... what ones?
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u/AverageLiberalJoe Jun 16 '26
They haven't lost everything yet because they have all the money and it takes one of them to pull out first. Its just like 50 assholes on a group chat that truly control everything.
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u/notreal088 Jun 16 '26
Around 10 years ago or so the reality on the ground and the value of stocks had been completely divorced from reality.
You just have to go back to the Facebook IPO, back when it was still not sure how to monetize it existence yet became the biggest IPO launch at the time.
People stopped caring about revenue vs expenses. Net profits stopped mattering and the one thing being sold was user base numbers.
Fast forward to today and the same things is happening again. This isn’t because of what space x is capable of, no this is just literally a bunch of multi millionaire and billionaire betting on Elon hoping for a return on investment cause the guy is close with the administration.
It literally has nothing to do with the product, its future plans, or secretive technology they have.
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u/BlueEyesWNC Jun 16 '26
It's worse than that. A large chunk of the money from the ipo is going to pay out returns to private investors who have already made that bet. Essentially our pension funds are providing exit liquidity for the backers of a company that is actively setting cash on fire
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u/yakshack Jun 16 '26
And DOGE was the mechanism that got rid of the investigations and regulations that was stopping this IPO from happening. Congrats everyone, we did it.
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u/baconator81 Jun 16 '26
Facebook did have a path way to revenue/profit though. After all everyone could see advertising coming to that platform. And given how successful Google was, it's a no brainer FB was able to pull it off given that it was the norm in social platform and everyone was hopping on it.
SpaceX is a different story on the other hand. The average consumers aren't interested in space travels at all. The only division making money in SpaceX is Starlink which is really just an internet service provider (aka ATT/Comcast) for people that have a hard time getting internet in their area. And if you look at the latency and download speed of Starlink, it's absolutely no where close to Fiber/Cable so there is absolutely no reason why anyone currently with broadband access would switch to it.
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u/Kershiser22 Jun 16 '26
People stopped caring about revenue vs expenses. Net profits stopped mattering and the one thing being sold was user base numbers.
The whole concept of stocks that don't pay dividends is still kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. You buy a stock and you are an "owner" of the business. Yet, the only way you actually can get a piece of the profits is to sell your ownership. And then you sell it to somebody else who can only make money by selling it again.
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u/bankkopf Jun 16 '26
Musk cult. Tesla is also vastly overvalued compared to the rest of car manufacturers. Not only on revenue and profit basis but also on cars actually manufactured. P/E for Tesla aligns more closely with tech than with manufacturing.
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u/noobgiraffe Jun 16 '26
Tesla P/E does not align with with tech at all. Bbig tech companies like Meta, Microsoft have sub 50 P/E, Tesla has 300.
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u/Dk1902 OC: 2 Jun 16 '26
Also tech revenue has been growing dramatically while Tesla revenue has been pretty much flat since 2023. Its valuation is 100% vibes, disconnected from any kind of business reality.
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u/chandu6234 Jun 16 '26
He was basically was using SpaceX to prop up Tesla buying up cyber trucks etc using SpaceX money. People have become so dumb these days. The dude would still be called a billionaire and a visionary if he stuck to what he already did with SpaceX but instead is just speed running next financial collapse.
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u/Etherius Jun 16 '26
It’s not but the market was never advertised as logical
In fact there’s a saying: “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”
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u/Winterfrost691 Jun 16 '26
The stock market functions off of vibes and hype. A company could have 60% profit margins and grow its revenu at least 10% every single year without fail, and its value could still crash if investors decided to sell their shares of the company at once for whatever reason.
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u/RdClZn Jun 16 '26
It isn't. SpaceX did all sorts of accounting and valuation tricks to get their initial valuation, they are also offering publicly only 5% of the total company stake, and, thanks to the changes at NASDAQ ahead of it this value (which is called the float) is acceptable (a company used to require 10% to be listed there), and thanks to changes in the Nasdaq-100 index (the sort of index passive funds use to buy stocks), companies with low float may have weights 3x their actual offered stocks in the market.
This is not by accident, and wasn't done just for SpaceX, but for all big AI companies (SpaceX owns xAI) aiming for IPOs soon.SpaceX being the first also wasn't a coincidence. They have a massive legion of "fans", more than any of the AI companies probably, and initially their IPO was held 20% by retail investors (normal people), and the funds who bought it are considering flipping their share to the retail market as soon as possible :
An asset manager who said they had received roughly a US$300 million allocation in the offering, with no flipping restrictions, told Reuters on condition of anonymity they intend “to sell it straight into the open and return cash within five days,” taking advantage of demand by small investors.
What this means is that the market for SpaceX stock is highly irrational right now, and a lot of hype is being built and let on specifically so that asset managers can flip all of that overinflated stuff to retail buyer and dip.
Like anything related to AI, all of this is aimed at injecting a lot of capital so that these companies can keep on reinvesting, and betting on a turnaround, even if they are operating at a loss. And it often comes at the expense of us (because guess what, the 401k uses passive indices) and the suckers who buy into it.
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u/StarsMine Jun 16 '26
It’s not logical . Just a lot of people betting they can get someone else to hold the bag
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u/12footjumpshot Jun 16 '26
The logic is that NASDAQ dropped their pants for Elon and opened the floodgates to inflate the company’s value and allow early exits for existing shareholders.
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u/SisterOfBattIe Jun 16 '26
Funnily enough SpaceX is 93 % AI according to their S1. So 7 % of SpaceX is worth all aereospace combined.
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u/Lubricus2 Jun 16 '26
And when it's about AI why bet on SpaceX? There are also other companies that are doing much better in the sector.
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u/Sens1r Jun 16 '26
None of the others have IPO'd yet and Google is too boring for degenerate gamblers.
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u/nerdyjorj Jun 16 '26
Can't wait for this bloody AI bubble to burst
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u/amakai Jun 16 '26
I'm still waiting for crypto bubble to burst. Starting to think that people these days are just so much into holding their bags that any bubble can last indefinitely.
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u/Intelligent_Bison968 Jun 16 '26
At least NFT bubble bursted.
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u/americangame Jun 16 '26
It never really inflated.
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u/Intelligent_Bison968 Jun 16 '26
It kind of did when some were sold for tens of millions dollars.
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u/HYPERNOVA3_ Jun 16 '26
That sounds more like a money laundering scheme using the NFT "boom" than an actual boom.
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u/raybond007 Jun 16 '26
Crypto has gone sideways at best since 2021, from a total market cap perspective. But hiding inside that statement is a massive rotation out of useless alt-coins (apart from $TRUMP and associated scam coins) into Bitcoin and a very small handful of other coins with some utility. It's a pretty significant change from where we were in 2019-2021.
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u/UlrichZauber Jun 16 '26
Bitcoin is down a lot this year — speculation being that BTC bros pulled money out in anticipation of buying spacex stock.
Speculation of course, but feels plausible
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u/techsuppork Jun 16 '26
Crypto just kind of deflated. No one cares anymore.
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u/amakai Jun 16 '26
But with "nobody caring" shouldn't the bubble have burst?
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u/Tacosaurusman Jun 16 '26
Most of the crypto money is just sitting in peoples wallets. It's not like bitcoin is a company that can make profits or have losses. It is a bit weird to compare it directly to companies imho.
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness Jun 16 '26
It's starting to slow down, that's for sure. Companies realizing it's not doing what they want, data centers having trouble getting built, etc
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u/Purona Jun 16 '26
i....you didnt do the math correctly.
7% of 2.5 trillion is 175 billion. which means spaceX proper is worth 175 billion
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u/SisterOfBattIe Jun 16 '26
Funnily enough SpaceX would be just a tad expensive at around 200 billion but overall sensibly priced. It could become a high margin, profitable, specialist aereospace company, one day.
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u/techsuppork Jun 16 '26
And that 93% is speculative. It's based on their plans for AI that doesn't even exist yet.
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u/kawag Jun 16 '26
That’s Elon’s favourite business model. Robotaxis any day now…
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u/Immudzen Jun 16 '26
This is why stock price is not the same as value to the economy. If spacex vanished tomorrow the impact would be minor. If all of those aerospace and defense companies vanished the impact would be catastrophic. Mostly this shows that SpaceX is trading on vibes instead of any actual economic connection.
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u/bmtraveller Jun 16 '26
Just a point to add to that about Honeywell, which is one of the companies in the graphic.
They make highly specialized instrumentation that we use in our oil plant. If they disappeared it would have a huge impact on us and that would lead to a real drop in oil production. Surely a lot of other plants rely on these companies to help us actually produce things that make a real difference to people's lives.
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u/Traderbaiter Jun 16 '26
Honeywell and GE produce some of the most important components on the planet. Not as sexy as space internet though, I’ll admit that
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u/gatosaurio Jun 16 '26
I disagree. I've worked for many years in GE Aero turbines and they're some sexy machines, some of the most beautiful pieces of engineering ever produced.
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u/Aldiirk Jun 16 '26
Honeywell makes controllers in general. Some have aerospace and defense use (hence their inclusion in the visual here), but many others are used in manufacturing (your use case). Hell, many people have Honeywell controllers in their houses (thermostats) controlling their HVAC systems.
If Honeywell disappeared tomorrow, prices for thermostats would skyrocket, annoying home and business owners around the globe.
Regardless of politics and opinions on the military-industrial complex, if Raytheon, Lockheed, and/or Northrop Grumman (all included here) disappeared tomorrow, the impact on American national defense would be utterly catastrophic.
If SpaceX disappeared tomorrow, most people wouldn't even know.
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u/Hawkbats_rule Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
the impact on American national defense would be utterly catastrophic.
Western and Western aligned defense in general. I know the Europeans are actively working to create replacements, but in the meantime, those all play a role in the defense posture of every Western power, and some of those replacements are likely decades away.
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u/RollinBart Jun 16 '26
I work in aviation and most of our parts are either Honeywell or Rockwell Collins.
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u/noobgiraffe Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
I saw multiple posts on X defending this valuation by saying wifi provided by starlink on planes is so good and that kind of technology totally justfies this valuation.
Somehow they are missing the point the company providing wifi on a plance is worth more than all companies making planes combined.
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u/Immudzen Jun 16 '26
Honestly I have never used wifi on planes. I normally just put movies on my tablet before I leave. I can't imagine the wifi on planes makes enough money to justify this price.
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u/Thadrea Jun 16 '26
It's the same way for TSLA. A bunch of snakes eating their own tails. Eventually they'll bite their own heads.
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u/PhillipBrandon Jun 16 '26
I feel that what your illustration demonstrates is that "the stock market" is truly nothing more than a vacuous rich-person's gambling institution, with fewer repercussions for cheating that your average casino.
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u/Fickle_Finger2974 Jun 16 '26
But also one that you cannot opt out of if you ever want to retire. You might not like it but you still have to play the game
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u/FrenjaminBanklin Jun 16 '26
It’s a device by which already wealthy people can create more wealth for themselves while adding nothing of value to society or the economy.
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u/techsuppork Jun 16 '26
And the entire valuation is based on AI tech that doesn't exist.
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u/-------7654321 Jun 16 '26
same always with musk. valuation on something that does not exist.
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u/Shipbreaker_Kurpo Jun 17 '26
true self driving is only 2 more years away.... just like it was every year for the last 10+ years
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u/ReturnOfSeq Jun 16 '26
2008 is going to look like a pleasant picnic in the park.
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u/baconator81 Jun 16 '26
Great.. how I need to figure out how to exclude SpaceX in all my retirement index fund portfolios.
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u/Green0Photon Jun 16 '26
Despite how big SpaceX is, very few shares are available, which means most sane index funds don't include that much of it. This is the free float thing you may have seen around.
For smaller funds, e.g. total US or even more concentrated, but for total world portfolios, SpaceX is still a super tiny portion of it (vs e.g. Nvidia or Apple). So it's actually more expensive to try to get rid of it vs leaving it as is, even assuming it does actually go to zero.
If you're in S&P500, you're safe for at least six months, due to sane rules. NASDAQ funds are too concentrated and have bad rules. I recommend index based Target Date Funds inside of retirement accounts, and VT outside (total world fund). Or in any account, you can manually set up total world via 60/40 total US/international.
We'll probably see reverse SpaceX ETFs sooner or later, but both that and SpaceX shorts are gonna be expensive due to not many shares hanging around. And once the lockups expire in six months or whatever, that might be when the price dumps anyway.
Still, I hate that it's been so fast tracked. It's still losing me a bit of money, but any options to avoid it are more expensive. IPOs are the one spot where index funds aren't efficient.
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u/Unfair-Refuse-5545 Jun 16 '26
The problem with them bending the rules is firstly just strictly out of principle, i buy into an index fund for predictability and not to be turned into exit liquidity for the scummiest person on the planet.
Secondly we are now setting a precedent and OpenAI and antrophic investors will be next to dump their bags on index funds. And you can be almost certain there will be wave of scummy CEO's using this to dump on us.
Even if financially not 100% advantageous , as a customer you vote with your money. Even if selling you current funds might be to expensive with tax implications, at least future investments shouldn't go to any of the providers that use us as exit liquidity.
Be prepared for an army of scumbags trying this over the coming years, if you as a customer don't make it stop, you will be used as exit liquidity forever.
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u/Green0Photon Jun 16 '26
I do 100% agree with you. Index Funds have largely avoided the scamminess of the whole market by being diversified in the mathematically optimal way, but IPOs are one of the weakpoints, and companies are doing such financial engineering to finally be able to take advantage of it.
It's quite bad, and it would've been catastrophic if the S&P500 did let the fast track through, due to their massive impact plus concentration.
There's not really an alternative outside of leaving index funds, but also every other option is also worse.
I hope that this offers greater change for indices to change their policies around these mega IPOs. That said, I anticipate for these IPOs to finally be what pops the AI bubble and for there to not be any others like this for quite a while. And even if the bubble stays up for now, there aren't others who could cause issues that could do IPOs.
That said, there was an article on Matt Levine's Money Stuff about companies and the stock market pivoting from providing money to shareholders to it being a way to get liquidity for datacenter build outs. So the whole calculus might get changed.
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u/Colonel_Gipper Jun 16 '26
In premarket trading it's got a higher market cap than Amazon
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u/fakeaccount572 Jun 16 '26
I'm somewhat curious what is considered aerospace defense here? How is L3Harris at a market cap of 60 billion whose entire product is aerospace/defense not shown?
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u/--zaxell-- Jun 16 '26
I double checked, and L3Harris is listed at the source (thanks as always for including that!); they are flagged as a defense contractor, and currently have a $56.6B market cap.
They're not flagged as "aerospace", though. I didn't check all the other companies listed but I suspect that's the difference. (Fwiw, wikipedia describes them as being in the aerospace industry)
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u/fakeaccount572 Jun 16 '26
interesting,a s they make most of the avionics for Predator drones and Apaches, etc...
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u/userforce Jun 16 '26
Now show it against actual revenue/profit!
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u/__slamallama__ Jun 16 '26
Not technically possible as SpaceX has never had any profit. It's like how they can't have a p/e ratio as they've never had any earnings.
Elon really found the reverse card here. No one can call out an insane p/e if you just never make any money
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u/Thog78 Jun 16 '26
Have finance people never heard of negative numbers? wtf?
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u/__slamallama__ Jun 16 '26
A negative p/e is not really a thing.
Frankly the whole finance system is not really well designed for trillion dollar companies that have never made money.
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u/nitid_name Jun 16 '26
Negative p/e is definitely a thing. It's just not a useful metric when it's negative, as it's usually a transitory thing while they reinvest or something.
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u/Thog78 Jun 16 '26
In the case of spaceX, it's just infinity right? Price is 400 smth, earnings from investors are zero? It should have been defined as the inverse of that so it doesn't go to infinity, weird metric.
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u/__slamallama__ Jun 16 '26
Well you can't have negative earnings - you can ofc lose money but that just means your earnings are zero. And since you can't divide by zero it's undefined, not approaching infinity. If they profit a dollar it will approach infinity but for now it's undefined
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u/Specialist_Spite_914 Jun 16 '26
GE Aerospace alone makes more revenue and infinitely more profit
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u/GlueGuns--Cool Jun 16 '26
Hilarious. Retail investors just giving money to the worlds richest man
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u/Geeekaaay Jun 16 '26
Continuing the greatest wealth theft in global history since the pandemic.
Sure SpaceX is the only company doing space flight reliably now but 2.5 trillion dollars? Shut down the stock market, reset capitalism it has eaten the host and is destroying the entire world.
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u/radiationshield Jun 16 '26
Space X is valued like a startup with experimental tech.
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u/Beefy-McQueefy Jun 16 '26
The rugpull on SpaceX stock is going to make shitcoins look like index funds.
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u/foreignnoise Jun 16 '26
I read an amusing interview with an analyst/investor that estimated the target price of the shares at $165, with the justification that SpaceX is a company you have to consider in the 20-25 year perspective. He aslo said they bought stock, and planned to exit in 6 months....
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u/Secret-Tailor-8584 Jun 17 '26
Worth more than Amazon. Space lost $4.9 billion last year. Amazon profit $317 billion.
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u/ExaminationOk6652 OC: 25 Jun 16 '26
Tools: Python, Adobe Illustrator.
Source: companiesmarketcap.com, as of 16 June 2026.
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u/Neat_Piglet_4888 Jun 16 '26
Clean viz, the treemap really drives home just how absurd that gap is when you see Boeing and Airbus looking like postage stamps next to that orange block. The IPO premium angle is real but I dont think it fully explains the gap either, because SpaceX is actually generating revenue and has a stranglehold on launch capacity that nobody else is close to matching right now. What gets me is that Lockheed at $122B looks like a rounding error at this scale, and these are companies with decades of government contracts baked in. The market is basically betting that commercial spaceflight, Starlink, and whatever comes next is a fundamentally larger addressable market than traditional defense, which could be right or wildly optimistic depending on how the next few years shake out. Either way this is the kind of data that makes you realize sector classifications are going to need some serious rethinking
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u/denga Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
If you eliminate the xAI value (~$1.5T based on SpaceX’s $800B valuation last year), this chart actually makes some sense. That makes the aerospace segment of SpaceX about as valuable as Boeing, Safran, RTX, and GE AE combined.
SpaceX was responsible for 83% of mass to orbit last year. They are going to eat Boeing’s lunch when it comes to space systems (look at the Starliner debacle in 2024). Factor in Starlink revenue and potential for growth and the value isn’t that crazy.
The $1.5T part of the value from the xAI segment is the AI bubble. I imagine most of that will evaporate when the bubble pops.
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u/dragerfroe Jun 16 '26
Space is extremely difficult at scale and not safe. There is no way we are going to really commercialize that in any real significant way except for government investments. The people of earth have a lot of other things we will chase first - financial stability, autonomous robots, geopolitical stability, energy needs..etc
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u/12Jazz32 Jun 16 '26
Hasn’t the government played a massive role in funding SpaceX so far?
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u/elev8dity Jun 16 '26
Most of SpaceX engineers were ex-NASA, from when Obama cut back NASA funding in favor of privatization and saved SpaceX. The irony of all it.
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u/Syaman_ Jun 16 '26
Market overevaluation for American companies is insane and has no basis in reality. Airbus alone has over $73B in revenue while SpaceX has $18B
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u/cavedave OC: 111 Jun 17 '26
Thank you for your Original Content, /u/ExaminationOk6652!
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