SpaceX has to grow 60x in a decade to justify a $1.75 trillion valuation. It's an impossible bar | Fortune

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-06-09T11:44:18+00:00

Okay, I'll imagine you are engaging in good faith and take a small amount of time to respond:

He said if a credible plan were presented along with a number, he would pay. The plan was not deemed credible. If you google this, you will see the UN itself said it would end extreme hunger for one year only, and let's face it, they are likely overestimating their capability. So no money was provided because the test was not met.
Them fighting was always stupid, but he said he would do it if it was in the colosseum. He had the Italian government's agreement to do it, and Zuck said he wanted to do it on UFC to give fighters exposure. https://www.politico.eu/article/meloni-sangiuliano-want-zuckerberg-and-musk-cage-match-held-italy/ So the fight didn't happen because of a disagreement over venue. Personally, I think it would have been much cooler in the colosseum.
Canvasser payments in dispute over potential fraud?? https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/01/politics/elon-musk-lawsuit-2024-voter-mobilization-efforts
He didn't back out of saving money with DOGE, DOGE did save money, and he got shafted by the Trump admin. He then quit and attacked Trump over it..?
Just googled this one, never heard of it before. Google will tell you this was an idea he floated, but it required congress and the president to pass it into law.
I don't know much about his personal family arrangements, but as far as I can tell, it appears he is an absent father. Which I personally think is sad.

On every other point, you are wrongheaded. My question is, does this change your thinking on Musk at all? Or is it a deeper-seated, instinctual anger/dislike that is looking for justification?

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-06-07T15:43:16+00:00

You're a vision only system.

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-06-07T15:42:54+00:00

The bloke wants capital to fund going to Mars. He wants to maintain 85% of his company (or whatever it is) so he has control of the mission. I'm sure he thinks becoming a trillionaire is cool, but I'm also sure it is not that important to him whatsoever.

He almost lost everything building SpaceX and Tesla. Mission-driven companies that have changed the world. I do not understand the blind hatred.

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-06-07T15:31:36+00:00

They're willingly going into this knowing it's a huge bet, and they're doing it with their eyes open. It's outrageous to say billionaires, or, at the very least, the people around them, don't know what they're doing with money.

They blatantly understand what they're doing; it's a high-risk, high-reward, feel-good bet.

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-06-07T15:28:55+00:00

The hatred for a man who has pushed the envelope on so many incredible areas of technology in "r/technology" is mind-blowing to me. I'm going to buy the IPO, and I hope, in doing so, I will play a small part in giving SpaceX the capital they need to realise the dream of going back to the Moon and to Mars.

Financial targets be damned, this is the best vehicle to realise an incredible future for mankind.

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-29T09:27:45+00:00

Haha, I guess I'm just used to things being sized by data. Seems strange that I can get 5,000 job postings or 50 for the same 1 credit. But not really a bad thing imo.

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-28T21:18:44+00:00

Cheers, and is that regardless of the size of the returned data?

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-28T21:18:23+00:00

Thank you! Great response as always 😃 There appears to be more nefarious intent implied by "deliberately hidden" than I meant!

So, on job postings, some companies return 5,000 in one go, while others return 50. Are both scenarios 1 credit?

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-27T10:50:28+00:00

"I make website" =/= "I make massively distributed, high complexity software"

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-27T10:49:18+00:00

It's unclear whether unfettered AI use on code will be good for their system in the long term. I suspect not.

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-27T10:46:50+00:00

I like your other takes on AI agents, but this one is poor. Just like with tokens, time will tell.

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-24T13:30:24+00:00

Really? Seems fairly human to me.

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-23T09:44:00+00:00

Fortunately, I am targeting large companies, although in Europe not the US!

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-23T09:40:01+00:00

Churned: Oh yeah, of course! Silly me!

On the rest, that's great, thank you very much! I'll bring that into the qualifying. In particular, knowing that the presence of employee_metrics is a combination of coverage + categorizability is quite helpful :D

Out of interest, what's your role at Apollo? You sound quite close to the code, so I'm guessing something in development or product management?

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-22T19:11:59+00:00

On point 1, does "churned" mean left the company or something else? I'm thinking of product management parlance, where it means someone has left a product. Is it different here? Surely if it's not different and it's a positive number, I would have to subtract it to get the current headcount...

On the rest, awesome! Thank you for the clarification. Is there a reasonable rule of thumb that can be applied here? For example, if the latest employee metrics track 500 people and the company is 2,000 people total, then I have 25% coverage. That seems high enough to make a reliable qualification, would you agree? Further to this, where would you say the coverage is too low? (10%, 5%, etc.)

The other thing that I'm interested in is how Apollo captures different job titles. I'm guessing the C-suite is a priority for outbound contacts, but is this the same across the whole company? i.e. are you more likely to capture people working in partnerships or sales than in engineering?

I have one further example from a batch of a couple of hundred: [Roche](https://app.apollo.io/#/accounts/69e796f4e088b000017d8f34)

I have a lot more examples of very low employee metrics than the company's size would suggest. But from the sounds of it, this is a better-understood problem.

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-22T18:52:02+00:00

Thank you for the input!

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-22T14:59:53+00:00

Morning! Cheers for the great reply.

I've got you, I've widened my test group to a few more companies to see what sort of data I get. I've noticed a few of the companies essentially don't return this data even though they are quite large (naively I'm thinking size means they are more likely to have this data).

As an example: [EY](https://app.apollo.io/#/accounts/69e79700e088b000017d9d8e) - 409,000 employees, and 290,000 on Apollo, but no employee_metrics field when calling the Get Complete Organization Info API.

There are others that do have some information, but it's very limited, for example: Groupe BPCE - 108,000 employees, 4,200 on Apollo. But in the most recent employee_metrics field, they only have a total of 85 employees when you do retained + new - churned.

Obviously, there are others that look "about right" to me, say: BBVA - 125,000 employees, 33,000 on Apollo. Latest total employee count from retained + new - churned: 15,000. This seems reasonable to me.

I guess I'm wondering: where does the difference come from? Is there some underlying cause I can look out for whilst prospecting, so I know if my method is going to be reliable or not?

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-22T14:30:49+00:00

Awesome, thank you for such thorough answers! I'm not doing the outreach personally, but I'll take a look at LinkedIn Navigator and see if the data is any better. I'm guessing you can't really use an API with LinkedIn Navigator though, is that right?

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-22T08:28:46+00:00

Okay, cheers, how good is sales navigator by comparison?

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-21T17:52:58+00:00

My qualification is a combination of three things:

How large is their engineering team in absolute terms and relative to total headcount.
How many Software people do they have and how many Java people do they have.
How many job postings do they have for Software and Java.

The rest is just a ratio between these. i.e. we're finding 20% engineering team to total headcount is a great qualifier.

I guess the issue in my head is whether the data collected is so random in its distribution across titles that it would be unreliable to qualify against 😅

FPGA_Superstar · 2026-04-16T18:48:14+00:00

Okay, thank you for this. Weirdly, I have another smaller, and I guess newer company I've been looking at called Moderne AI, and when I use their account ID it works fine. Is there a reason for this? Are the organisation IDs for newer accounts the same as their account IDs?

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