What do they think is gonna come from this SpaceX + Twitter + XAi + Cursor amalgamation? Sexbot agents vibe coding on Mars?
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.
Although many will be long term believers who won’t sell. I can’t see how this couldn’t deflate the share price further
I agree with your statement overall.
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.
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.
Such an overgeneralization ruined your otherwise reasonable comment. Always stop when you are winning.
https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/spacex-what-investors-nee...
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…
Someone please wake me up if this is a fever dream.
What's more crazy is that the revenue in no way justifies the trillion dollars valuation of spaceX!
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.