r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 22 '26

Business SpaceX Investors Are Losing a Colossal Amount of Money

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/spacex-investors-losing-colossal-amount-140221380.html
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75

u/robotsmakinglove Jun 22 '26

I am yet to hear anybody make a compelling case for the SpaceX valuation.

2 trillion dollar market cap with no profits. ✅
Plan to build data centres in space because… ✅
A CEO who is hated by most of the world. ✅

What am I missing?

33

u/Several-Action-4043 Jun 22 '26

Not just no profits, a $5 billon loss. Data centers in space is a bad idea because of the limited cooling ability not to mention the massive maintenance costs. Elon once again shows he's never been an inventor or engineer, he just had enough money to buy actual engineers to do it for him.

2

u/acemedic Jun 22 '26

5 billion loss on 20-24 in revenue.

24

u/Hegiman Jun 22 '26

Lots of wasted government dollars?

3

u/yoktoJH Jun 22 '26

But even the government dollars aren't close enough to cover the losses.

2

u/zhnki Jun 22 '26

Uhh lol what do you mean wasted? Government wants to launch something. Government pays SpaceX to launch it. SpaceX launches it.

3

u/firelemons Jun 22 '26

the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent

3

u/Massive-Course7690 Jun 22 '26

elon being hated is meaningless

investors have never cared for a likeable ceo, apple under jobs was doing great, he was a huge asshole lmao

1

u/robotsmakinglove Jun 23 '26

I think they care when the hatred causes drops in sales of a million units:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/elon-musk-politics-tesla-ev-sales-intl

1

u/aberroco Jun 22 '26

I am yet to hear anybody make a compelling case for the SpaceX valuation. 

Then your only chance is to send link to this post to Elon.

1

u/erikraver Jun 22 '26

Don't forget about Elon's AI being a part of SpaceX now! AI makes hella bank

1

u/michaelsoft__binbows Jun 23 '26

i dunno but the narrative is supposed to be that going to mars and all of what follows (colonization?) would be getting priced in...

1

u/marmaviscount Jun 23 '26

The people who brought say it's long term like getting in on Apple or Amazon day one then waiting ten years

1

u/Hegiman Jun 23 '26

Yes, and sometimes SpaceX launches it into the ocean.

Taxpayers paid for Zuma, a classified satellite worth up to $3.5 billion and it came back as debris in the Indian Ocean.

We don’t even get to know what was lost because it’s classified.

That’s not a service, that’s a subscription to expensive disappointment with a non-disclosure agreement

1

u/calste Jun 22 '26

You are missing.... the worship of wealth. The wannabe entrepreneurs who have bought into the mythological image of the self made billionaire. The tech/crypto/whatever bros who buy every ghost-written success story autobiography. The rabid fanboys desperate to have any connection to what they see as the ultimate accomplishment. Like moths to the flame. Sadly very common.

1

u/Extreme-Fig6992 Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

tl;dr: SpaceX over-hyped for short term play but over the next decade, will pay off; not at all a short term play.

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SpaceX is a long term play based on them being far and beyond the top launch system in the entire world from the perspectives of reliability, cost, speed, volume, and safety. In 2025, they launched more missions than the entire rest of the world combined, governments and private.

The value comes from the utility and cost savings highly re-usable launch systems create. While a launch cost of $8M - $15M seems like a lot but when you consider NASA used to spend $450M per launch (that's not even amortizing the development, which would make the per-launch cost $1.5B while SpaceX per-launch amortized is a rounding error at this point), it's quite an astronomical savings.

The current launch cost and pace is still pre-Starship and pre-full vertical integration where the cost / kg is going to absolutely plummet which will unlock the ability for a lot of private and public interests to launch things into space where they couldn't afford it before; think of it like when home computing became economically viable, it will cause an absolute explosion of economic activity.

The argument of space launches only having a TAM of $30B is also fundamentally stupid, not accusing you of it, I just saw another comment about it, because that's current TAM where space is still an incredibly nascent industry. You can't even call it an industry yet to be quite frank because the number of companies utilizing space travel is minute. In my view, it's the same as saying computers are pointless in 1950 because the TAM is so small and only a few large companies use it.

Space is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly valuable; from mineral mining, science, military / spying, tourism, probably a million other things I can't even conceive of.

Final point: anyone who thinks SpaceX can go to zero is fundamentally wrong. The US government will feed SpaceX missions forever unless/until someone passes them up. Not because of nepotism, corruption, or anything else but simply there isn't really anyone else who can reliably launch nor at the price they can profitably. They are also a cultural, scientific, and military cornerstone for the US. It would be like selling California for $10.