You don't have to believe. If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch.
The IPO will go great, because the company will float a fairly small issuance. The big shareholders will not immediately sell. They will hold on and maybe even buy to support the price.
Then, after 15 days, it will enter the indexes and everyone's 401k will start auto-buying this stock.
You might say this is an obvious flaw in how the indexes work if they start immediately accept a brand new IPOed stock with limited float. You'd be right, which is why they won't list for a year.
I really wish more people were aware of this. It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about.
Nevermind SpaceX, which at least have some importance for US defense industry, but xAI ? We will be investing in Elon's private venture, at the price that he himself set and which is at least 2 orders of magnitude too high...
They are widely reported to be planning to raise $75Billion in new capital. It may seem look small a % for the valuation target, However that is about 3 times previous highest raise of $29B when Saudi Aramco went public few years back. The market simply may not be that deep[1]
There is a good chance this one becomes the Wework of this decade. The valuation, amount being raised, cooling interests in AI, and middle eastern capital changing priorities, interest rate outlook for the rest of the decade. These are all strong head winds to overcome even when not raising the largest ever amount in an IPO.
That is not say that it is destined to fail, Elon is excellent salesman of vision when fundamentals are weak, There is no better proof than Tesla P/E .
It is by no means clear this would be successful or not. The valuation, funds being raised, future growth potential are all not based on just SpaceX core businesses which would have been an easy sell.
---
[1] i.e. it could be still under-subscribed even if everyone buys into the vision, growth projections, is comfortable with valuation gets fully onboard including retail.
Even in this best case scenario SpaceX would have to sell at the lower end of the target range or go even lower and still end up being short matter what, because there could simply be not enough money in the market.
I am not an expert, but my understanding is most funds don't change allocations immediately, but it would be part of normal rebalancing, e.g. VOO and other indexes that track the S&P500 do it quarterly
Based on the list of businesses at the top, the stock market seems like it rewards profit margin and profits, by businesses that sell meaningful products and services.
Can you provide an example of any of the businesses on that are on that list due to "mass stupidity"? They all seem to operate factories, employ many highly qualified people, and make a material difference in many or even most people's lives around the world.
Meanwhile, SNAP has returned -14.98% per year to its shareholders since it IPO'd (Jun 3 2017), and at an $8.27B market cap, it makes up a negligible portion of any broad market index fund, so not sure how SNAP's shareholders have been rewarded by mass stupidity, especially given that the founders still own half of the business. They would have been far better off liquidating their shares and investing in SP500.
The flaw is the limited float. Indexes will be forced to buy a huge number of shares which don't exist, driving up the price.
For general investors if this is going to eventually happen, the earlier the indexes buy in the better. Otherwise more sophisticated investors will buy ahead of the indexes and grab the profit.
if they weighted (fully) by float (perhaps the average float from the trailing 90 days to the re-balance) it would not be as easy to game. The Nasdaq is accounting for float, but not completely.
Do the ETF managers have no discretion in determining when to buy? I was under the impression that they usually handle these changes to indices gradually even under normal circumstances.
Is there something about why spacex wants to go public ? if not then this is definitely about xai... to hide unprofitability and offload it on general public ASAP.
The thing i'm not looking forward to is SpaceX will now be beholden to Wall Street. With Startship testing being so public, there's a whole cottage industry of youtubers watching their every move, there's going to be lots of ups and downs on the stock price.
I get the feeling investors are going to watch Starship explode and explode while it's being developed without understanding the trial/error, hardware rich, approach SpaceX takes and not like it. That's going to hurt the stock price and therefore hurt the company. Before, when Starship exploded people just pointed and laughed at Musk but SpaceX kept going. For better or for worse it doesn't really bother him, don't forget he got literally laughed out of the room when he proposed a re-usable orbital booster. Now those people actually matter because they'll sell/short and kill the stock price and therefore materially hurt the company. I replied to a sibling about Tesla, remember the shorts nearly killed Tesla before it even had a chance. The technology was there and the concept proven but the shorters almost killed the whole thing. IMO Tesla went public way too early and it almost cost them everything. idk what SpaceX has to gain by going public, are they hurting for cash? Based on the pace of development in Boca Chica it doesn't appear so.
/not a finance or investment expert just my observations and feelings
I expect that the amount of "good influence" institutional shareholders can exert on SpaceX leadership and operations is about zero, and the amount of "bad influence" is more than that. Thus, the only way this can affect SpaceX's leadership is negative.
A big part of how SpaceX did what they did is that they weren't beholden to institutional pressures. They could afford to take major risks. This may change when a pool of investors who don't care about space and just want the line to go up end up being stakeholders.
None and that's the problem, the shorts almost killed Tesla for no other reason than being short. I think watching Starship after Starship blow up while being tested when investors don't really understand what they're looking at is going to be bad for the stock price. In a public traded company so goes the stock price so goes the business.
Elon will announce roborockets that pick you up and fly you to Mars in under 12 hours while your hypersleep in the ExaShip. Production starts definitely next year.
On one hand I do take some enjoyment of suckers being fleeced. But on other hand I know who this all will benefit so I really can't do that.
As whole I find that valuation just insane, but seemingly if you only offer tiny enough slice with enough hype it might bump prices to something that really make no sense at all...
The suckers being fleeced are every pension fund in the world. They're demanding the S&P includes them faster to force ETF owners to buy in before the price tanks.
For most people their talent and expertise does not involve investing. That's why pensions and 401ks exist and why S&P/nasdaq have rules to protect the public.
You may wish it were not so, you may find it inelegant and infuriating and unfair, but it is a fact that retail investors nearly all underperform the market over a long enough time horizon. Maybe you are built different but for most of us it is very rational to take the market return for “free”.
Why are they being fleeced? If people didn't want to buy SpaceX they could buy some other ETF that doesn't include it. If there's enough of a demand I'm sure ETFs will be offered which include all the big indexed stocks except SpaceX.
Yes Americans will definitely move their 401k over this /s
Its fleecing because it basically takes everybody's money and gives it to support musk's money loser xai. SpaceX net profit 8 billion per year (previous years much less) and Xai was net losing 1.5 billion per quarter.
Unless you literally have nothing, YOU are one of the millions being fleeced. Pensions & retirement funds, any index fund that comes remotely close to technology, any equity you own in a venture in tech, any industry that via very short linkages is connected. Good luck avoiding this.
You only get "fleeced" if the stock crashes. If it's that terrible of a stock then the price will be low. As far as SpaceX goes, I think there are far riskier companies with little prospect of doing well.
They are only selling a small % of the shares in the IPO and subsequent weeks.
With a tiny float the price will almost certainly go up as a limited number of enthusiastic investors buy in. The plan is to then line up the lockup expirations so they sell into the index re-balance, a ton of new non-discretionary demand to match the new supply.
1.) All the image generation models will do that, xAI is just the one that caught flak for it
2.) SpaceX made $16B in profit last year, despite its enormous R&D costs and is on track for $20B this year, despite the losses from AI. People still wise to invest in Google despite their AI business still being a huge loss
> 1.) All the image generation models will do that, xAI is just the one that caught flak for it
Perhaps. But that's a huge undersell. "just the one that caught flak"? No. The one with nearly zero guardrails. Where users could trivially create underage porn, bestiality, etc., using prompts that you could put into any other AI and just say "does this image generation prompt seem likely to create legally problematic content?"
Not that I approve of that, but when image generation was hot and new, the insane amount of refusals I got from the major ones for apparently no reason, exacerabated by the general slowness, quotas and inherent trial and error workflow has completely soured me on them.
Now or never. If the stock market goes bust because of the war then most IPO windows will close or will result in a much lower subscription rate. You can expect a flurry of these in the next few weeks.
> In the United States, SpaceX accounts for five of every six launches into space, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
because its not accurate. they're milking the market. not dumping on the market.
they're only (sic) going for 75 billion. with an evaluation in the trillion mark.
This is just more speculative investment. you'll see this again in another year or so with a bigger evaluation on it... it's how the modern economy now "works".
maybe it's the histrionics? Thse personalities are inevitably inflating their own balloons in order to cash out, but that doesn't mean the reality is these companies are worthless. The downvotes come from comments like "OpenAI is trying to dump their garbage". At best that's a silly thing to say. We can argue "fair market value" but it's not zero.
What is the fair market value of an AI company that loses >$10B/year? Of course they have assets that could be stripped and sold for profit but public creditors come last. It's also going to be no where near their private valuation.
1. Elon is a genius, a real world Tony Stark.
2. How dare you! You're just jealous!
3. Ok, regardless, he's done more to advance EVe and space travel than anyone else alive.
4. Oh God, he's going to cripple US development of EVs and rockets, isn't he?
5. Eh, Mars was never happening in my lifetime anyway.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember stage 1 being maybe 2011. There were plenty of Musk critics back then, as there are now, but they seemed to have been completely wrong on pretty much everything. I remember people saying he was a charlatan whose technology would never work and even if it did it would never get mainstream market penetration. I feel like you would have smugly chuckled if anyone told you the following things that are true:
1.) Tesla cars will be ubiquitous on American roads
2.) The best selling model of car globally would be a Tesla
3.) Most cars would be made in the US, yet still be price competitive with foreign competition
4.) SpaceX rockets would be re-used multiple times per week
5.) SpaceX's launch business is highly profitable despite lowering prices to less than 10% of what they used to be
6.) SpaceX launches more mass to orbit than the rest of the world combined
1. Tesla has sold ~2.5-3M cars since 2017 in the US. There’s more than 200M cars on the road in the country. Ford has sold more F series trucks in the last 4 years than Teslas have been sold ever.
2. The only reason Model Y is the best selling car in the world is because 3/4 of the sales come from the US and Tesla only sells one model of SUV. Other brands sell many different variants and multiple models in the same category across the world.
3. Teslas are not at all competitive in other markets. BYD is eating their lunch.
4-6. Yes, but the global market for space launches is projected to barely touch $30B by 2030. Global competition for this market is only getting fiercer with multiple US startups, India, China and more recently France.
Now let’s talk about the failures.
1. Nueralink
2. FSD
3. Roadster
4. Cybertruck
5. Hyperloop
6. $2T in Doge cuts
7. Robotaxi
8. Starship
9. Tesla Semi
10. 4680 battery
11. Boring company tunnels
12. Bots that were going to disappear on Twitter
The list is very long when you actually include all the data points.
If you're not getting downvoted at least some of the time on HN you're doing something wrong. I've caught plenty of downvotes myself for arguing that Mars was never going to happen and is just a recruiting tactic for SpaceX to hire idealistic young engineers and pay them sub-market wages because the dream of Mars is part of their compensation.
All the hardware they've actually invested in, including Starship, is in fact foremost for launching satellites into Earth orbit. Starship in particular is optimized for this.
Self-driving is a thing. Full self-driving, commonly known as "level 5 autonomy", has been claimed for over a decade. These claims have been made so many times it has a dedicated Wikipedia page!
But those levels are kind of bullshit. If a car is autonomously driving but needs an attentive driver in the seat for legal reasons you're stuck at what, level 2? Even if you never actually need to override/intervene?
Teslas running the latest hardware (manufactured 2023+) and software are actually nearly there, IMO. I used it for two months and never needed to intervene. It's not perfect yet but I believe it actually drives better than most people now.
However, the millions of Teslas on the road with older hardware are absolutely useless in comparison where you will need to intervene a lot. The latest FSD software only works on the latest hardware so these older cars are stuck on either old FSD versions (which are proven to be bad) or get slimmed down versions to fit lower specs (which we know wont be as good). It's unsafe and they really should disable it for all of the older vehicles and issue refunds for people who paid for FSD.
4 different levels to unpack: Literal IPO question, Epstein cover-up (gov. won't just do it), aliens (X-Files) cover-up, and finally the Elon-Epstein connection (email files thread to host him at SpaceX).
Parent commenter is making a joke about the fact that, in the title "SpaceX Files to Go Public", the word "Files" could be read as either a noun or a verb.
You don't have to believe. If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch.
The IPO will go great, because the company will float a fairly small issuance. The big shareholders will not immediately sell. They will hold on and maybe even buy to support the price.
Then, after 15 days, it will enter the indexes and everyone's 401k will start auto-buying this stock.
You might say this is an obvious flaw in how the indexes work if they start immediately accept a brand new IPOed stock with limited float. You'd be right, which is why they won't list for a year.
At least they wouldn't until Elon got them to change their rules: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-30/nasdaq-cl...
I really wish more people were aware of this. It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about.
Nevermind SpaceX, which at least have some importance for US defense industry, but xAI ? We will be investing in Elon's private venture, at the price that he himself set and which is at least 2 orders of magnitude too high...
>float a fairly small issuance
They are widely reported to be planning to raise $75Billion in new capital. It may seem look small a % for the valuation target, However that is about 3 times previous highest raise of $29B when Saudi Aramco went public few years back. The market simply may not be that deep[1]
There is a good chance this one becomes the Wework of this decade. The valuation, amount being raised, cooling interests in AI, and middle eastern capital changing priorities, interest rate outlook for the rest of the decade. These are all strong head winds to overcome even when not raising the largest ever amount in an IPO.
That is not say that it is destined to fail, Elon is excellent salesman of vision when fundamentals are weak, There is no better proof than Tesla P/E .
It is by no means clear this would be successful or not. The valuation, funds being raised, future growth potential are all not based on just SpaceX core businesses which would have been an easy sell.
---
[1] i.e. it could be still under-subscribed even if everyone buys into the vision, growth projections, is comfortable with valuation gets fully onboard including retail.
Even in this best case scenario SpaceX would have to sell at the lower end of the target range or go even lower and still end up being short matter what, because there could simply be not enough money in the market.
Only NASDAQ so far; S&P 500 is apparently "reviewing its rules" but hasn't changed them yet.
So you've got a full year to wait on that index fund, assuming they don't cave.
Also, would individual funds that track the S&P have left themselves some wiggle room to delay this if they wanted?
I am not an expert, but my understanding is most funds don't change allocations immediately, but it would be part of normal rebalancing, e.g. VOO and other indexes that track the S&P500 do it quarterly
And even with that, they give themselves some room for tracking error, I think.
Uter and complete corruption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389233
Serious question: Is there some ETF that is "Index of S&P500 minus anything that smells like Musk"?
Yes, kinda. Goldman Sachs launched that under the symbol SPXXAI last month. I'm not totally sure how to actually invest in it yet though.
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/ai-goldman-sachs-stocks-ind...
Ever since SNAP the whole IPO show has been a transparent scam to game the index funds.
The market simply doesn’t have enough people actively investing because it rewards mass stupidity over generating meaningful returns.
Based on the list of businesses at the top, the stock market seems like it rewards profit margin and profits, by businesses that sell meaningful products and services.
https://companiesmarketcap.com
Can you provide an example of any of the businesses on that are on that list due to "mass stupidity"? They all seem to operate factories, employ many highly qualified people, and make a material difference in many or even most people's lives around the world.
Meanwhile, SNAP has returned -14.98% per year to its shareholders since it IPO'd (Jun 3 2017), and at an $8.27B market cap, it makes up a negligible portion of any broad market index fund, so not sure how SNAP's shareholders have been rewarded by mass stupidity, especially given that the founders still own half of the business. They would have been far better off liquidating their shares and investing in SP500.
https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/?ticker=SNAP
The flaw is the limited float. Indexes will be forced to buy a huge number of shares which don't exist, driving up the price.
For general investors if this is going to eventually happen, the earlier the indexes buy in the better. Otherwise more sophisticated investors will buy ahead of the indexes and grab the profit.
if they weighted (fully) by float (perhaps the average float from the trailing 90 days to the re-balance) it would not be as easy to game. The Nasdaq is accounting for float, but not completely.
Aren't basically all the huge serious index funds float weighted?
Matt Levine wrote (uh, yesterday?) that the Nasdaq 100 was adding it (not a full linear weighting....) right now to accommodate this scam.
Do the ETF managers have no discretion in determining when to buy? I was under the impression that they usually handle these changes to indices gradually even under normal circumstances.
of course they do. read any prospectus for a FUND and funds track INDEXES using rules. inclusion in some index doesn't hamstring anyone.
blind purchases are not going to happen. people assume passive indexing is brainless, but it isnt.
> If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch
You will be an investor in spacex and xai which it bought.
Fun fact, Xai net loss 6 billion dollars per year and SpaceX net profit 8 billion on a good year (https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-xai-posts-net-quart... https://www.globalbankingandfinance.com/spacex-registers-tak...)
If you remember xai, it's that company currently being sued for the undressing kids feature (https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/895639/x... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_sexual_deepfake_scandal) in its flagship product. By the way the feature is still enabled apparently
Is there something about why spacex wants to go public ? if not then this is definitely about xai... to hide unprofitability and offload it on general public ASAP.
The SpaceX profit is EBITDA, not real. And presumably includes massive starlink depreciation and stock based comp.
This is absolutely vile. The xAi merger made no sense and this is forcing working class people into purchasing risky assets from a known scammer.
It does when you look at it with a few less zeros… it’s like a broke person floating checks for payday loans.
Patrick Boyle (fund manager, professor, youtuber) recently discussed this IPO on his channel. Informative and entertaining.
https://youtu.be/8rS3fTbC7TE?is=TGpEdM2Y7sknP-cW
And despite popular opinion, he is not an AI :)
The thing i'm not looking forward to is SpaceX will now be beholden to Wall Street. With Startship testing being so public, there's a whole cottage industry of youtubers watching their every move, there's going to be lots of ups and downs on the stock price.
> SpaceX will now be beholden to Wall Street
I get and appreciate that sentiment. Musk currently has a controlling interest in SpaceX. Do you expect that to change after the IPO? Thanks!
I get the feeling investors are going to watch Starship explode and explode while it's being developed without understanding the trial/error, hardware rich, approach SpaceX takes and not like it. That's going to hurt the stock price and therefore hurt the company. Before, when Starship exploded people just pointed and laughed at Musk but SpaceX kept going. For better or for worse it doesn't really bother him, don't forget he got literally laughed out of the room when he proposed a re-usable orbital booster. Now those people actually matter because they'll sell/short and kill the stock price and therefore materially hurt the company. I replied to a sibling about Tesla, remember the shorts nearly killed Tesla before it even had a chance. The technology was there and the concept proven but the shorters almost killed the whole thing. IMO Tesla went public way too early and it almost cost them everything. idk what SpaceX has to gain by going public, are they hurting for cash? Based on the pace of development in Boca Chica it doesn't appear so.
/not a finance or investment expert just my observations and feelings
I expect that the amount of "good influence" institutional shareholders can exert on SpaceX leadership and operations is about zero, and the amount of "bad influence" is more than that. Thus, the only way this can affect SpaceX's leadership is negative.
A big part of how SpaceX did what they did is that they weren't beholden to institutional pressures. They could afford to take major risks. This may change when a pool of investors who don't care about space and just want the line to go up end up being stakeholders.
What makes you think this will be different from Tesla?
Are you shorting Tesla since you’re so confident in its downfall?
blah blah irrational blah blah solvent
It's still obscenely overpriced.
None and that's the problem, the shorts almost killed Tesla for no other reason than being short. I think watching Starship after Starship blow up while being tested when investors don't really understand what they're looking at is going to be bad for the stock price. In a public traded company so goes the stock price so goes the business.
Does this mean that before june SpaceX will do something highly noteworthy, to justify the IPO price?
Elon will announce roborockets that pick you up and fly you to Mars in under 12 hours while your hypersleep in the ExaShip. Production starts definitely next year.
On one hand I do take some enjoyment of suckers being fleeced. But on other hand I know who this all will benefit so I really can't do that.
As whole I find that valuation just insane, but seemingly if you only offer tiny enough slice with enough hype it might bump prices to something that really make no sense at all...
The suckers being fleeced are every pension fund in the world. They're demanding the S&P includes them faster to force ETF owners to buy in before the price tanks.
God forbid we participants in the stock market evaluate a business before investing in it, or do any sort of work to get the return we're promised.
I, for one, much prefer to earn a 9% return without expending any effort or thought at all.
For most people their talent and expertise does not involve investing. That's why pensions and 401ks exist and why S&P/nasdaq have rules to protect the public.
You may wish it were not so, you may find it inelegant and infuriating and unfair, but it is a fact that retail investors nearly all underperform the market over a long enough time horizon. Maybe you are built different but for most of us it is very rational to take the market return for “free”.
Why are they being fleeced? If people didn't want to buy SpaceX they could buy some other ETF that doesn't include it. If there's enough of a demand I'm sure ETFs will be offered which include all the big indexed stocks except SpaceX.
Restructuring every ETF to be S&P but prior rules and no SpaceX would be enormously difficult.
Yes Americans will definitely move their 401k over this /s
Its fleecing because it basically takes everybody's money and gives it to support musk's money loser xai. SpaceX net profit 8 billion per year (previous years much less) and Xai was net losing 1.5 billion per quarter.
Unless you literally have nothing, YOU are one of the millions being fleeced. Pensions & retirement funds, any index fund that comes remotely close to technology, any equity you own in a venture in tech, any industry that via very short linkages is connected. Good luck avoiding this.
You only get "fleeced" if the stock crashes. If it's that terrible of a stock then the price will be low. As far as SpaceX goes, I think there are far riskier companies with little prospect of doing well.
They are only selling a small % of the shares in the IPO and subsequent weeks.
With a tiny float the price will almost certainly go up as a limited number of enthusiastic investors buy in. The plan is to then line up the lockup expirations so they sell into the index re-balance, a ton of new non-discretionary demand to match the new supply.
It's manipulation.
How about xAI? Losing $6B a year and with that whole "Grok, generate me an image of this child with no clothes on" horrorshow?
Sorry, "xAI, a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX".
1.) All the image generation models will do that, xAI is just the one that caught flak for it
2.) SpaceX made $16B in profit last year, despite its enormous R&D costs and is on track for $20B this year, despite the losses from AI. People still wise to invest in Google despite their AI business still being a huge loss
> 1.) All the image generation models will do that, xAI is just the one that caught flak for it
Perhaps. But that's a huge undersell. "just the one that caught flak"? No. The one with nearly zero guardrails. Where users could trivially create underage porn, bestiality, etc., using prompts that you could put into any other AI and just say "does this image generation prompt seem likely to create legally problematic content?"
No, Captain Free Speech said fuck it, let's roll.
Not that I approve of that, but when image generation was hot and new, the insane amount of refusals I got from the major ones for apparently no reason, exacerabated by the general slowness, quotas and inherent trial and error workflow has completely soured me on them.
This is structured so that Musk becomes the first trillionaire.
Now or never. If the stock market goes bust because of the war then most IPO windows will close or will result in a much lower subscription rate. You can expect a flurry of these in the next few weeks.
Rabble rabble... debt... rabble rabble... xAI burning revenue...
> In the United States, SpaceX accounts for five of every six launches into space, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
That's why.
And likely soon to be the world's biggest ISP, (they probably already are by some metrics)
They are nowhere near the world's biggest ISP by any metrics, what are you talking about?
Biggest by capital depreciation, no?
Well in terms of landmass covered it's not even a contest.
I hate that I will have to invest in this crap with my retirement index funds
They are going IPO close to Elon's birthday (26th or 29th June) aren't they? Like they did with Tesla.
But as soon as they IPO, that's a signal to head for the exit before it all collapses again.
TSLA is up 300x from what it IPO'd at
But it was also flat last year and the financials are atrociously bad. Reality is catching up.
Trying to dump on the market before the bubble pops.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. This is exactly what is happening and why OpenAI is trying to IPO to dump their garbage as well.
because its not accurate. they're milking the market. not dumping on the market.
they're only (sic) going for 75 billion. with an evaluation in the trillion mark.
This is just more speculative investment. you'll see this again in another year or so with a bigger evaluation on it... it's how the modern economy now "works".
maybe it's the histrionics? Thse personalities are inevitably inflating their own balloons in order to cash out, but that doesn't mean the reality is these companies are worthless. The downvotes come from comments like "OpenAI is trying to dump their garbage". At best that's a silly thing to say. We can argue "fair market value" but it's not zero.
What is the fair market value of an AI company that loses >$10B/year? Of course they have assets that could be stripped and sold for profit but public creditors come last. It's also going to be no where near their private valuation.
Mars bros... It's so over.
The five stages of Elon Musk:
I've got plenty of downvotes here on HN for critiquing him on Stage 1, herd mentality is relevant for HN community just as well.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember stage 1 being maybe 2011. There were plenty of Musk critics back then, as there are now, but they seemed to have been completely wrong on pretty much everything. I remember people saying he was a charlatan whose technology would never work and even if it did it would never get mainstream market penetration. I feel like you would have smugly chuckled if anyone told you the following things that are true:
1.) Tesla cars will be ubiquitous on American roads
2.) The best selling model of car globally would be a Tesla
3.) Most cars would be made in the US, yet still be price competitive with foreign competition
4.) SpaceX rockets would be re-used multiple times per week
5.) SpaceX's launch business is highly profitable despite lowering prices to less than 10% of what they used to be
6.) SpaceX launches more mass to orbit than the rest of the world combined
> ”3.) Most cars would be made in the US, yet still be price competitive with foreign competition”
Globally, 50-55% of all Teslas sold are manufactured in China, and a further ~10% in Europe. Only around 35-40% of Teslas are made in the US.
1. Tesla has sold ~2.5-3M cars since 2017 in the US. There’s more than 200M cars on the road in the country. Ford has sold more F series trucks in the last 4 years than Teslas have been sold ever.
2. The only reason Model Y is the best selling car in the world is because 3/4 of the sales come from the US and Tesla only sells one model of SUV. Other brands sell many different variants and multiple models in the same category across the world.
3. Teslas are not at all competitive in other markets. BYD is eating their lunch.
4-6. Yes, but the global market for space launches is projected to barely touch $30B by 2030. Global competition for this market is only getting fiercer with multiple US startups, India, China and more recently France.
Now let’s talk about the failures.
1. Nueralink 2. FSD 3. Roadster 4. Cybertruck 5. Hyperloop 6. $2T in Doge cuts 7. Robotaxi 8. Starship 9. Tesla Semi 10. 4680 battery 11. Boring company tunnels 12. Bots that were going to disappear on Twitter
The list is very long when you actually include all the data points.
If you're not getting downvoted at least some of the time on HN you're doing something wrong. I've caught plenty of downvotes myself for arguing that Mars was never going to happen and is just a recruiting tactic for SpaceX to hire idealistic young engineers and pay them sub-market wages because the dream of Mars is part of their compensation.
All the hardware they've actually invested in, including Starship, is in fact foremost for launching satellites into Earth orbit. Starship in particular is optimized for this.
"Full Self Driving" was also a giant scam. Got heavily downvoted for that as well.
You should expect to be downvoted for being wrong.
It is a scam. "Full Self Driving" isn't even close to Level 3 autonomy or even Level 5.
Tesla got away with this deceptive advertising and scammed [0] their customers believing their vehicles would soon reach full self driving autonomy.
The only ones defending this are likely the ones that still haven't realized that they got scammed by Elon. Sorry that happened to you.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/tesla-must-face-californias-fa...
How is this false opinion so common? I use self-driving regularly it has always worked more or less flawlessly
Self-driving is a thing. Full self-driving, commonly known as "level 5 autonomy", has been claimed for over a decade. These claims have been made so many times it has a dedicated Wikipedia page!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
But those levels are kind of bullshit. If a car is autonomously driving but needs an attentive driver in the seat for legal reasons you're stuck at what, level 2? Even if you never actually need to override/intervene?
Teslas running the latest hardware (manufactured 2023+) and software are actually nearly there, IMO. I used it for two months and never needed to intervene. It's not perfect yet but I believe it actually drives better than most people now.
However, the millions of Teslas on the road with older hardware are absolutely useless in comparison where you will need to intervene a lot. The latest FSD software only works on the latest hardware so these older cars are stuck on either old FSD versions (which are proven to be bad) or get slimmed down versions to fit lower specs (which we know wont be as good). It's unsafe and they really should disable it for all of the older vehicles and issue refunds for people who paid for FSD.
ugh he's going to be worth > 1T and go on to have even more influence than before. this is so bad for society.
idgaf about the company. sure they proved the space and moved the space forward just like Tesla did with electric cars but why did it have to be Elon?
What's in the SpaceX Files and why aren't they already public?
Details of alien encounters and abductions, paranormal and psychic phenomena, as well as crypto-zoology and curious human abilities.
reads headline again
Oh. Probably all the money burnt in AI training and data centers.
the truth social is out there
That is what I'm talking about, finally someone is asking the real questions.
Just more pedophiles and their supporters.
Clintons?
Clintons aren’t connected to Space X though so that’s a silly answer.
What? OP wasn’t trying to make an Epstein files joke?
Outstanding comment.
4 different levels to unpack: Literal IPO question, Epstein cover-up (gov. won't just do it), aliens (X-Files) cover-up, and finally the Elon-Epstein connection (email files thread to host him at SpaceX).
The big numbers are the cost to train a frontier LLM and the GPU cost per hour.
I don't know what's in the Spacex files, but I do know that Musk begged and pleaded with Epstein to come party on pedo island.
Maybe something to consider before investing in any of his companies.
Sensitive financial information. It is normal for companies to file confidentiality to avoid leaking information early.
Parent commenter is making a joke about the fact that, in the title "SpaceX Files to Go Public", the word "Files" could be read as either a noun or a verb.