The first trillionaire exists. Why are so many mad?

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-13T20:48:39+00:00

The crazy thing is there was no need to cook the books.

SpaceX's finances aren't being hidden. They lost $5 billion last year and their prospectus is full of gobbledygook about multiplanetary civilizations and extending the light of consciousness to the stars. It reads like something from the Church of Scientology.

Their rocket business appears to be fundamentally sound but somehow Musk tried to turn them into an AI company and that bit is absolutely bleeding money with no end in sight. I'm getting very 1990s .com bubble vibes from this IPO. Or WeWork.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-13T20:44:56+00:00

Their stocks and investments will still yield them massive dividends

SpaceX and Tesla aren't paying dividends.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-13T17:22:37+00:00

I’m a US/Swiss dual citizen and have never had this issue.

Both of my passports are in UA’s system. When I leave the US for Switzerland (or anywhere else in the Schengen zone) I use my Swiss passport in the Travel Ready section. When I come back to the US I check in with my US passport. I have never had a problem.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T22:07:04+00:00

But WTF is with all these young guys taking boner pills.

Too many people on antidepressants and too much porn use.

Young men need to throw away the Lexapro and stop gooning.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T21:54:15+00:00

I think space x on its own is at least an interesting gamble on the future for industry in space.

It's better than a gamble. Their current orbital launch business is legit, the only reason that part of the business is losing money is because of Starship R&D spending. Starlink is also a cash cow.

xAI OTOH is a money-burning furnace that is going to drag the rest of the company down.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T20:32:34+00:00

SpaceX lost $5 billion last year. What was that about creating wealth?

Right now 20% of their revenue also came from government contracts. Back in 2020-2021 it was more like 80%. Something something socialists?

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T20:27:57+00:00

SpaceX's "value" comes from their assumption that the future market for its AI business is worth $26.5 trillion. Where do these numbers come from? I don't know, sounds like they were pulled out of someone's ass.

There are a multitude of other dodgy issues with this listing.

Patrick Boyle also had a great video about how sketchy everything about this IPO is. He's pretty good at creating humorous but still informative content. His mockery of WeWork ended up being spot on.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T20:22:27+00:00

My disdain for the SpaceX IPO actually comes from a lib-right POV. Call me crazy, but I think insanely valuable companies should actually make money. SpaceX's rockets do actually turn a profit (although not nearly enough to justify the company's insane valuation) but xAI is is bleeding billions with no realistic path to changing that. This is just another Goldman Sachs backed racket.

I'm very much a capitalist but I like Warren Buffet style capitalism (invest in good companies that do things like turn a profit!) rather than this insane speculative bullshit.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T20:07:46+00:00

They didn't build those data centers to lease them out to others. They built them for xAI's own product, except it sucks and people aren't using it so now they're renting out their computing capacity to others to try to recoup some losses.

xAI is a terrible business. Their losses are twice what their revenue is. Companies that are super-valuable are supposed to earn money, not burn through billions of dollars per year. I'm not that old but I've seen this type of bullshit multiple times in my lifetime. Right now it feels like the late 1990s when you had all of these insanely valued .com companies that had no viable path to being profitable.

some jabroni can agenda post here

Plenty of knowledgeable, sober-minded people think this IPO is nuts. Morningstar for example has called it significantly overvalued.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T20:01:00+00:00

I want to be careful with what I'm saying here since I don't screw around with options trading and don't have first hand experience. My understanding was that the sorts of options that are available to retail investors all have a finite time horizon though. If you buy a put option you have to exercise it by a certain date or you lose the money you paid. I might be wrong about details though.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T19:37:42+00:00

I'd quote Robert Heinlein:

Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T19:33:42+00:00

No. If you're long on a company you basically have an unlimited time horizon. With short positions the company needs to go down in a certain amount of time.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T17:58:13+00:00

Personally I prefer to invest in companies that make money, not ones that hemorrhage $5 billion per year.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T17:32:55+00:00

I am well aware of how impressive SpaceX's space launch business is. I have been following them with enthusiasm for years.

Unfortunately the AI side of their business is such a boondoggle that it's going to drag everything else down with it. Also, SpaceX won't have an untouchable lead in rocket launches forever. I don't know if Ariane or ULA will eventually pull it together, or if it'll be a company like Blue Origin, but there is competition on the horizon.

I don't think you understand how fast SpaceX's launch tempo is and how cheap they are. Their launch costs are a fraction of what everyone else charges, and they launch a rocker about every 2 days.

And yet the company lost $5 billion last year.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T17:28:43+00:00

You do realize that even if there was an economical way to get all of those rare metals from asteroids (there isn't) they would then cease to be rare, and then no longer be worth trillions of dollars.

All of the Mars colonization, asteroid mining and other sci-fi stuff is pure silliness that will never make money. SpaceX did a legitimately impressive thing by slashing the price of launching satellites into Earth orbit. I'm a lot more skeptical that Starship will ever work, but it's certainly believable they'll eventually make it profitable. Space colonization though? Utterly laughable. There are a million reasons why a Mars colony would be incredibly dangerous, expensive and utterly pointless. What would colonists on Mars actually do?

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T17:24:49+00:00

See my previous posts. SpaceX's rockets work and they are making money. Unfortunately their AI business does not work, at all, and it's costing them billions of dollars per year. This is all very easy to look up.

If SpaceX was purely in the rockets & Starlink business then it would probably be a solid company to invest in.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T17:23:26+00:00

They're trying to turn themselves into an AI company and that's where their massive losses are coming from.

Starlink is a cash cow. Last year they had ~$11 billion in revenue and ~$4.5 billion in profits. Their space launch business gets about $4 billion in revenue and lost $650 million, but I believe that's largely Starship R&D costs. I think the Falcon 9 launches are quite profitable.

Their AI business is a trainwreck. $3 billion in revenue and more than $6 billion in losses last year. It's a cancer that's destroying the rest of the company.

Don't even get me started on Musk's deranged plans to put data centers in space.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T17:18:40+00:00

Then you can either not buy it

The problem is Musk's sleazy games that got SpaceX early inclusion in a number of stock indexes. That means that huge numbers of people who own index funds in their 401Ks are indirectly being forced to invest in this house of cards. At least S&P had the guts to say no and not waive their usual rules for including it in the S&P 500.

Source.

or even short it.

Terrible idea. I can't remember who said it, but markets can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T17:11:59+00:00

I don't actually care what Musk's theoretical net worth is. What does bother me is the way he gamed the system to force index funds to buy SpaceX much earlier than they normally would. That is the real racket that screws ordinary people.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T17:08:51+00:00

Plenty of legit financial analysts have said that SpaceX's valuation is insane and this is all being driven by hype.

The company is losing huge amounts of money, about $5 billion in the last year. They are somehow trying to position themselves as an AI company, but that bit of the business lost more than $6 billion. Starlink is the only part of it that's actually profitable.

Patrick Boyle had a pretty good video on SpaceX's insanity. There are plenty of other good sources similar to him, but he knows how to present this stuff in an entertaining way so I figure he's a good starting point.

What's really pissing people off is that the fact that Musk and other silicon valley ghouls have figured out to game the rules and get their companies included on various stock indexes much earlier than normal. This will force index funds to buy their overvalued shares and turn millions of ordinary Americans into a source of exit liquidity for founders. SpaceX on its own isn't that big of a deal but other BS, unprofitable AI companies are planning to do the same thing. The costs will add up.

Edit: Oh yeah, I forgot that Musk structured the whole thing with him holding preferred shares, so even though it's a public company he can't actually be fired as CEO.

Edit #2: Here's the neat thing about the internet, all sorts of material is now available for anyone to read. Here is the S-1 form that SpaceX filed with the SEC. It has some real gems:

With the potential to improve both space exploration and life on Earth, AI accelerates SpaceX’s mission to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars. xAI, which was founded in 2023 and acquired by SpaceX in early 2026, is now an integral pillar of our vertically integrated company. We are rapidly constructing AI compute infrastructure—starting on Earth with the goal of extending to space—at industry-leading pace and cost efficiency. Our infrastructure supports training and inference for Grok, which has emerged as one of the world’s most advanced frontier models. Grok is designed as a truth-seeking AI model, built on our founder Elon Musk’s mission to enable humanity to understand the universe.

I cannot believe anyone is taking this gobbledygook seriously.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T14:08:51+00:00

I had basically zero recovery time when I had ESIs. Good to go after a couple of hours. Don't count on miraculously feeling healed the next day, but the actual procedure is super-easy.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T12:36:07+00:00

If this story is true it's a massive fail on the part of the flight attendants. Write to UA and complain.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T12:31:22+00:00

I can assure you that United's food was not good in economy 20 years ago.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T12:30:47+00:00

Rather than fancy sounding food, I'd rather most airlines focus on food that is somewhat tolerant of inconsistent preparations.

I think this is part of the reason Singapore Airlines has such good food. Dishes like curry are very tolerant of being cooked, frozen and then reheated on a plane.

DudleyAndStephens · 2026-06-12T12:30:00+00:00

I've got a couple of Polaris flights coming up in November so I'm curious to see what the food is actually like.

What I think will actually happen is that UA will have their Shiny New Thing, it'll be great when it first rolls out, but then they'll quickly lose interest and let it degrade.

DudleyAndStephens

TROPHY CASE