What would be a fair price per share for SPCX?

[paulkienitz]

Given that they’ve used some of their windfall proceeds to buy some smaller AI companies which have a product or two that are actually competitive, unlike any of the worthless crap X AI came up with, I will estimate a reasonable share price at somewhere around five dollars. That may be overly generous.

They offered the shares initially at $135, but it was up to $150 already before the general public could buy in. It inflated to around $200 and then some of the insiders cashed out their unearned profits, so now it's dropped back to the $150 range. Once it plummets, well, Elon gets to keep the cash that was paid for the shares that sold at the early inflated price, so he and the company will be perfectly okay, even if the promises of orbital data centers never amount to anything. (Spoiler: they definitely won’t.)

For the sake of anyone who still has retirement money in a NASDAQ index fund, I sure hope it drops further as quickly as possible, so those people don’t get involuntarily bought into this ridiculously overblown price when NASDAQ’s “fast track” adds it to the official index, and then get strip-mined when the bubble pops.

[lapfog_1]

1. Not sure there is one

generally speaking stock price is based on forward looking earnings, which in turn are projected from past earnings.

Most IPOs wait until the company is profitable... and one can start projecting those earnings. AFAIK, SPCX has not turned any profits... and AI profits are highly speculative. the core business ( launch platforms and Starlink ) look better but still aren't generating the kind of money that justifies $130/share. I would not give a warm bucket of camel spit for Xai or Twitter.

Datacenters in space is simply ridiculous, thus removing any reason to combine the two businesses.

[paulkienitz]

4. SpaceX does have a profitable core in the launch business

...and if you temporarily set aside the expenditures on developing Starship (which would be revolutionary if it works), the Falcon and Dragon and other established products make good money with plenty of margin, as nobody has yet found a way to compete with them on price.

But the AI bullshit is the vast majority of the claimed valuation, and what X AI has managed to build in that space is probably the lamest AI in the industry, especially in proportion to what was spent on it.

[Bluetus]

5. "Datacenters in space is simply ridiculous"

Just as ridiculous as colonizing Mars. As Neil deGrasse Tyson says, we would have to "terraform" Mars to live there. It would be a whole lot easier to terraform Earth, or better yet, stop killing our only home.

As far as the stock goes. whatever SpaceX might have ben worth 6 months ago, it is much less now because of the merger with xAI, which loses a billion dollars a month and has no real busines case. At least with the the original SpaceX, there were two good business cases (rockets for the government and sattelite Internet.)

[paulkienitz]

6. Datacenters in orbit are a lot MORE ridiculous that colonizing Mars.

Colonizing Mars is actually doable if we want to, though there are a number of reasons why we might want to think twice, such as the apparent existence of Martian life, which if encountered would either fuck us up or be fucked up by us, or both. But if we really want to, it is a doable and feasible possibility. The surface of Mars has issues but it’s more habitable than the moon or asteroids or anywhere in the outer solar system. And it does offer a genuine alternative to living and dying on and with the Earth.

But data centers in orbit... there is no case to be made for them as an alternative to data centers on the ground, unless the goal is to build them at such a gargantuan scale that the ecosystem down here literally can’t support them. And nobody can build up there at that scale, no matter how big a trillionaire they are. And they’d have to be orbiting a lot further away than normal satellites, because cramming that much hardware into too tight a volume of empty space would lead to a Kessler Syndrome catastrophe — something we’re already taking too many chances with all the orbiting crap we’ve got already.

Elon’s vision of a million massive satellites taking advantage of the unlimited power available out there to provide AI companies with unlimited compute is never going to be built. Same with Eric Schmidt’s vision, or with any of the other grandiose assholes who’ve been floating the idea lately. With Mars you can say “unlikely, but eventually in the coming centuries it will probably come about under some circumstances or other.” But with this, there is no scenario where the plan ever makes sense as a way to solve a real problem.

There are two factors driving this promise: first, the need to keep feeding Ponzi bait to investors to keep the bubble inflating, and second, the same impulse that keeps leading so-called libertarians to want to found cities, create micro-nations, seastead, and so on: their personal desire to find a place not covered by anyone else’s laws, where they can do whatever they want. They want data centers in space because although it may be expensive, at least there are no complaining neighbors and no environmental laws, so they don’t have anybody poking their ego-bubbles by telling them that they are bad citizens.

[fujiyamasan]

2. Realistically less than half of what it is right now

The company is valued at just over 2 trillion dollars right now. I could see a case to be made for about a quarter of that and that’s generous. Starlink is the only part of it that brings in any profit right now. It’s a legit business with decent cash flow. starship is taking a ton of capex, but I get it — rocket science isn’t easy and takes a lot of money. It also actually has a moat. I can see paying a premium for the optionality for potential future growth.

As for xAI? Who the fuck knows. That’s the part Musk threw in there to simply cover up the leveraged twitter purchase. This is also drawing a lot of capex on data centers. It’s pretty insane.

So really you could say it’s three companies in one. This may have been an interesting company to own if that latter wasn’t included. Instead it basically comes with his shitty Nazi chatbot, which apparently even SpaceX engineers don’t use (I believe they decided against using Groc).

[flvegan]

3. About tree fiddy.

I would expect full investigations into Musk and any election tampering once the dems take back offices in the mids. I would expect that while those occur, all govt contracts with him and any of his companies would be suspended.