Deal Currency My Ass

Updated: 2026-06-05 17:30:01

Sources suggest SpaceX is planning to IPO next week with a jaw-dropping $1.75 Trillion valuation. They claim $18.7 billion in revenue and $5 billion in losses for 2025. That's 94 times revenue.

In August 2019, WeWork filed an S-1, boldly asking the market for a $47 billion IPO valuation. They boasted about $2 billion in annual revenue, while generating $2 billion in annual losses. The ask represented 25 times revenue and the market went ape-shit over the audacity, leading to a canceled IPO, a fired CEO, and eventually, bankruptcy.

One would expect SpaceX to be laughed out of the marketplace, but no. What actually happened is the NASDAQ, FTSE, and Russell committees literally changed their rules to allow fast-track inclusion of SpaceX in their indexes just 5 to 15 days post-IPO. It normally requires 3 to 6 months. They also waived profitability, free float and other requirements designed to protect investors from market manipulation.

So, why the sudden leniency?

Excuses include:

SpaceX does AI stuff!

Sure, and so does every other big tech company. Grok is a mid LLM in terms of benchmarks, with a tiny market share and no clear path to dominance. Also consider what it means that they recently sold $15 billion of their annual data-center compute to Anthropic.

SpaceX does physical robots!

Maybe, if they merge with Tesla, but to date they have sold zero(?) units and offer no timeline for bringing them to market. Amazon, on the other hand, operates over 1 million (non-Tesla/SpaceX) robots in production.

SpaceX has a grand vision of developing Mars colonies, lunar settlements, and AI data-centers in space!

Umm, they are talking about doing these things, but have none of the technology required to actually make it happen, and offer no firm timeline for when they will.

SpaceX dominates the space launch market with near 100% share!

Right, and after 24 years of operation they still only generated $18.7 billion in revenue last year (including twitter and AI).

None of these excuses justify the changes.

Public companies are typically valued based on profits, but this company has none. Total assets minus liabilities are $41.3 billion according to the S-1. Add in a very generous 10x revenue multiple and you get a real world valuation of about $230 billion.

Ten times revenue is generous because everyone who isn't getting a cut of the fees is, wisely, asking where the growth comes from. None of the fee collectors have a good answer.

The people behind this circus think they're geniuses. The fees and kickbacks are no doubt very large and very tasty, but history is going to remember who force-fed passive investors this steaming pile of shit.