r/investing
SpaceX IPO is in 2 days. I read the entire S-1 so you don't have to. Heres the good, the bad and the absolutely insane
SpaceX S-1 review: highlights Starlink growth but warns of massive cash burn, extreme 95x valuation, and Musk's absolute voting control.
- Dominates 82% of US space launches and 45% of global commercial space contracts.
- Starlink user base doubled to 10M, generating $3.26B in Q1 connectivity revenue.
- Diversified post-merger assets include Grok AI, X platform, and Bitcoin holdings.
- Extreme valuation at 95x 2025 revenue, historically leading to 50% drops within three years.
- Massive cash burn of $30B over four quarters, meaning the $75B IPO raise could be gone in 2.5 years.
- Severe corporate governance risks due to Elon Musk's 85% super-voting control.
On june 12, the largest ipo in the history of financial markets goes live. $75 billion raise thats like more than triple what saudi aramco pulled in 2019 which was the previous record. Bitpanda is also listing spcx from day one with fractional shares. I spent the last few days actually going through the S1 filing ,
The spacex handles 82% of all US space launches and 45% of every commercial space contract on the planet while starlink hit 10m subs across 164 countries by end of q1 2026, roughly double what it was a year ago and connectivity revenue came in at $3.26 billion in just q1 alone,
Now heres the catch, spacex posted a $2.6B loss in 2025 and 2026 operating loss then ballooned to $1.9 billion so over the past four quarters the company burned through roughly 30B in cash which means at current burn rate the entire $75 billion ipo raise is gone in about 2.5 years. The ai unit alone spent $12.7 billion in capex in 2025 and another $7.7 billion in just Q1 2026. (sorry for too much no.s)and at $1.77 trillion this is priced at nearly 95 times its 2025 revenue so even the most expensive mega cap tech companies rarely trade above 30x sales and history isnt kind here either, companies that ipo at sky high valuations like this have typically lost around half their value within three years.
Then theres the elon factor and this is the one that should genuinely give you pause, mr.musk owns class b supervoting stock giving him about 85% of the voting power and the only person who can remove musk as CEO is musk himself lol. Look I like the guy but you have to be honest you are not buying a company in the traditional sense here. You are buying a ticket to ride along with whatever elon decides to do next across spacex, xai, X, neuralink
So what is SPCX actually after all the noise? After the xAI merger in feb you are getting starlink which is the fastest growing internet service on the planet, grok AI, the X platform and a balance sheet sitting on $770 million in bitcoin controlled by one man with 85% of the votes
I'm genuinely not telling you to buy it or avoid it, both cases are strong and reasonable people seriously disagree on this one. What I will say is that this sub is going to have some of the most interesting takes on this over the next 48 hours and I m genuinely curious where people land on the valuation question specifically.
Not financial advice. Do your own research before investing.
After the debacle with Ukraine, any country not seeing it as a security risk is run by morons. The literal future of your country should not be at the whims of some business dude's politics with no skin in the game.
Holy shit, dude. The cognitive dissonance lmao
Lmao what? I would love to see some sources
Which daddy youre referring to? The drunk biological father that beat him up?
He is a genius. Alot of many other things aswell, good and bad.
I was a huge fanboy back when the two boosters simultaneously landed right on the dot, my view of him as a person has changed alot since then but you cant deny the huge jumps for space exploration he has done.
A lot of people will lose their pensions. Funds will get commissions. Elon will make money.
I don't like the guy. He's a neonazi white supremacist. I will continue to avoid his products and stock.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand the importance of "the space thing".
Show the exact tweets or speeches where Elon advocates white racial supremacy or names the “far right white power groups” he addressed and what supremacist content he delivered.
You can’t, because none exist. He rejects racism and white supremacy, runs merit-based global companies, and opposes all racial identity politics—including anti-white DEI. Disagreements on immigration, birth rates or censorship aren’t supremacy.
Prescribed ketamine treats depression; it’s medicine, not a character flaw. Isaacson’s biography covers it factually. Mocking treatment while demanding others disprove your evidence-free smear is incoherent.
they're dumping it in the S&P 500
No they're not. About the level of knowledge you'd come to expect these days in investing threads though. Sigh
Twitter was losing a ton of money before Elon came along.
It's classic reddit.
You probably don’t because you’re a cocksucker to all the liberal narratives jumping on the hate Elon bandwagon across Reddit.
Starlink is a short term play. People will realize why pay top dollar for 150mbps when you already got 400mbps celluar or 1Gbps fiber.
Helped develop DirectTV and it was a huge cash cow until fiber/cable caught up and with Cable modems blew us away. But we sure made a lot of cash beforehand. Starlink is rinse and repeat with newer tech. Next up, Starlink will offer their own streaming channel, maybe thru xAI to compete with YouTube. But the bill will come due, sat mgmt is expensive compared to a cell tower.
They need the NASA missions to be revenue positive for decades, those are cash cows and BO was eating their lunch. The BO mishap puts way more pressure on SpaceX.
Real valuation is probably half the share price at the moment. Nothing more. Their AI side is burning shit tonnes of cash and the AI bubble is going to burst. There's only going to be one or two major players and survivors in the market, and grok ain't one of them.
It seems profitable but what we're saying it that it won't scale. What's the TAM on 200$/month satellite internet with 400$ antenna you have to renew every 10 years?
Hey some of that equipment was used on Pet Sounds.
That seems to wildly misunderstand what it means to like someone.
I hate Reddit discussion when Elon Musk is involved.
It's like redditors can't have an interesting discussion without involving their personal feelings.
It's okay for kids, it's problematic for grown-ups.
worth noting that while everything else may be crap, the xai datacenters are printing money. that company turned into a great payoff for the wrong reasons.
Dude you nailed it perfectly!
First principles? Thermodynamics? GTFOHLOL /S
Bought an election?
So how did the Democrats lose spending over $1.5 billion dollars then? They and their supporters just stupid?
Aim for mars and only make it to the moon.
Not bad.
Aim for the moon and only make it into LEO (low earth orbit, not cops) like starlink and it’s still a win.
Where? BTC?
Schiller price or even the Buffet indicator says we are due for a correction. Market is up nearly 1000 pts right now and we are above 50K
If we listened and tried to time the market, we’d still be sitting on cash when the market was below 40000 (two years back) and even if we discount a 20% correction, we’d be ahead.
It’s all good to say “do not buy, there are better alternatives” so let’s hear it. Name a few large caps that have a better upside to grow magnitudes in the next 2 weeks.
Body slamming his own reputation?
How liked is Jamie Dimon by comparison? Does it matter if the guy is popular or is it more important that he is good at finance?
Jesus Christ y’all dumb.
I don’t need the same rate of growth as TSLA, I just need to beat the rest of you and out run the bear (which is inflation)
So let’s say it’s not $3M with a $10K investment. Let’s say it’s 50% or $1.5M. I still win
Let’s say it’s not $3M equal to TSLA rate of growth but only 10% of that so now $300K. I still win
Get it? Space X doesn’t have to moon like Tesla, if it gets just 10% it’s still a 6x multiplier vs the SPY
Jesus Christ y’all dumb.
I don’t need the same rate of growth as TSLA, I just need to beat the rest of you and out run the bear (which is inflation)
So let’s say it’s not $3M with a $10K investment. Let’s say it’s 50% or $1.5M. I still win
Let’s say it’s not $3M equal to TSLA rate of growth but only 10% of that so now $300K. I still win
Get it? Space X doesn’t have to moon like Tesla, if it gets just 10% it’s still a 6x multiplier vs the SPY
Might be like 20+ launches to put all of resources needed for a maned Mars mission but only a couple will be the big ticket launches that have crew or a major component of the vehicle. The rest will just be things like unmanned fuel and supplie runs which even if it was 20 falcon heavies launches, that's still only $2 billion.
Except try and replace normal physical internet with starlink and cities will have tons of problems with bandwidth issues and interference. Also once you run fiber it's good for 25 years or more and just by changing the endpoints you can keep bumping up the speed. Meanwhile the starlink satellites need to be replaced every 5 years so they can never just build the infrastructure and reap the benefits.
it will almost certainly pop for a month or two. most major IPOs do. after that it is very hard to tell. my assumption is legacy private investors who are getting public shares will sell out for exit liquidity. if enough of them do then the price may drop hard. whether that spurs a panic sell off is hard to tell.
price to sales is more like 90x right now, not 30x.
RKLB is trading at an even higher price to revenue multiple than SpaceX.
I read one of your links, and actually the numbers seem more workable to me than I initially thought.
The numbers are brutal. Starcloud’s own white paper estimates that a two-sided radiator held around 20°C would emit only about 633 watts per square meter, over 1,000 times slower than water cooling of AI chips on Earth. So, a puny 1-megawatt orbital data centre, 1,000 times smaller than the gigawatt scale of hyperscale data centres on Earth, would need about 1,600 square meters of radiator, an area roughly the size of a hockey rink.
That's not utterly insane. Sure, putting gigawatt in space is a different story but that may not be the killer use case - if they do then it's a distributed compute situation.
It all boils down to how cheap launch can get. If its cheap enough then moving a hockey rink up is maybe OK.
IMO after reading your link this is more of an engineering challenge than a physics impossibility
according to the S-1 the company is actually cash flow positive:
Operating cash flow:
2025 --> + $6.8 billion
2024 --> + $5.8 billion
2023 --> + $4.5 billion
Total net change in cash:
2025 --> + $13.6 billion
2024 --> + $6.8 billion
2023 --> + $73 million
I'm saying that right now being a shitty person is a prerequisite to being good at business
swapping private equity for public equity. time to buyout the institutional investors who have been in it for 20 years
I got in at 135 I already have buyers remorse.
This dude literally slashed US Aid effectively cutting off food and medicine to the poorest people in the world leading to the deaths of 600,000 and counting, and he’s on track to be a trillionaire. So if you have been wanting to sell your soul, today is your day….
You are conflating "making money" with "making sense". Nobody SPACS during covid with a redirect address to a Chinese hut made millions. SPCX's story and narrative can absolutely make money, and it makes sense why it would. If what you are saying is absolute, then every company that violates fundamental analysis would never make any gain or money from the market.
As soon as you said white supremacist you lost me. Not into politics but I don’t recall him being racist. Did I miss something?
You like the guy. The nazi saluting, genocide committing, fat incel.
The US taxpayer (via NASA) will never fund anything like that. Both Tesla and SpaceX entire profits come from taxpayer subsidies (carbon credits and NASA contracts) and there’s really not much road left there
Exactly. The space hype is nonsense. It burns money. It's the kind of thing you should pick up for pennies because one
But it wouldn't be in deep space would it? It would be orbiting the earth and going through huge temperature fluctuations.
Also true. It's an extremely misleading and strange S1. Not seen one like it since wework
Lol come to WV and try starlink here. Mine goes out every other week
OK maybe you are not following some of the fundamental principles of finance so let me say this again: my post is about cash flow. do you know how to calculate cash flow? do you know what cash flow means? you keep referencing some sort of "massive loss". under what terms are you measuring this "massive loss"? are you referring to GAAP net income? pre tax income? EBITDA? operating margin? gross margin? I really don't know which metric you are referencing. are you talking about a specific segment of the business? there are multiple GAAP reportable segments and each of those reportable segments has separate and disclosable cash flows, GAAP net income, pre tax income, EBITDA, operating margin, and gross margin.
in any event, my post is not about any of that. my post is about cash flow and how the company is actually $17.1 billion cash flow positive from operations over the last 3 years. if you have questions about the company's cash flow, I would be happy to elaborate. although, you don't really need my help seeing as the S-1 is a public document that anyone can look at. in fact, that's where I've derived all the information I posted here. do you think I am making it up?
As a personal rule, I don't support Space Nazi's.
Even if the Nazi's built incredible machines, they where bad for everyone in the long run.
they have a lot of shady accounting in there to try to justify their insane valuation
(second attempt on this comment)
Data Center Engineer here. Space based data centers are an incredibly bad idea for a bunch of reasons. Many of which are not merely technology challenges but fundamental physics issues. Here are some articles going over the reasons:
Why Space Data Centers Are a Terrible Idea \(And What We Should Learn From It\)
Putting the servers in orbit is a stupid idea
Rush to put AI data centers in space poses poorly understood dangers
thanks for the articles will read them shortly. the main reason they would opt for orbital data centres is the same as why the internet wires run on the ocean floor -- so no one cant destroy them like military targets. it would be out of reach for 99% of the world.
$160-$175 opening day not the moonshine everyone on tiktok thought lol
Congratulations Space X SPCX - for the great IPO - Took Off Like A Rocket
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX) on Friday, 12 June 2026, established a new record as the largest IPO in global financial market history, raising $75 billion in gross proceeds.
Key Trading Metrics:
• IPO Offer Price: $135.00 per share
• Opening Print: $150.00 (+11.11% premium) Trading officially commenced at approximately 11:45 AM EDT
• Intraday High: $176.52
• Standard Session Close: $160.95 (+19.22%)
• Extended After-Hours Settlement: $166.76 (+3.6% in post-market)
• Trading Volume: Over 520 million shares exchanged hands during the regular session.
Valuation Impact:
At the $160.95 close, SpaceX was valued at $2.1 trillion, instantly positioning it as the 6th most valuable publicly traded corporation in the U.S. Post-market momentum toward the $166 mark further expanded the implied valuation past the $2.2 trillion threshold. The massive execution demonstrates deep institutional appetite for vertically integrated aerospace and AI infrastructure assets.
Institutional Impact:
At this massive scale, institutional asset managers are virtually urged to establish long-term core allocations not to be left behind as when this massive commercial space and AI ecosystem takes off. Aligned with the core strategies of major growth and mega-cap ETFs, forward-thinking institutional managers are securing "direct equity" to ensure the portfolios fully capture the long-term structural upside of this new industry paradigm.
Orbital and sub orbital are extremely different trajectories. You can reach an enormous height and still not be orbital. Not sure if this is your error but a lot of people think orbital just means reaching a certain height but orbital actually means reaching a velocity at which you will no longer return to earth. Going sub orbital is actually so easy the Nazis did it back in the 40s
Starship's shitty prototype reaches both the altitude and the velocity to qualify for getting well within the suborbital regime. It reaches the Indian ocean after starting from Texas going eastward. That's huge. It requires just a little more deltaV to stay orbital. The spaceshuttle used to do something similar. What the Nazis did in the 40s comes nowhere close to that. This talking point is way too simplistic.
Starship still sucks but we have to be informed in our criticisms.
Actually what your saying is far too simplistic it assumes the difference between sub orbital and orbital is a tiny amount of delta v.
Material physics says a little differently. The additional stress can be the difference between a ship surviving and not.
Then even if we assume you're correct, reachihh orbital speeds is the easy part, returning safely from orbital speeds is much harder. Just ask the crew of columbia
Are you even reading what I'm writing? I'm giving you specific, definitive answers as to where Starship sits within the suborbital regime.
The Space Shuttle needed to increase its velocity by only about 0.9% to go out of its initial suborbital insertion. It would use its tiny OMS engines (in those bulging pods at the back) to do so.
Without this burn it would ALSO end up in the Indian Ocean just like Starship does. And the burn was extremely gentle at about 0.05g acceleration for 2-3 minutes.
And you don't have to convince me how overhyped Starship is. Which again makes me wonder if you're even reading anything I write before you reply. Starship plagued with problems from top to bottom, conceptually if not in execution.