Posted by dmarcos 18 hours ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/business/spacex-cursor-de... (https://archive.ph/c2Tac)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-21/spacex-sa...
What's the point of the except?
The main problem is the AI stuff.
I don’t personally think Google is worth $4T but the share price says otherwise.
Source?
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/spacex-ipo-how-index-funds...
> S&P is reportedly considering a fast entry rule change to its flagship index, though it has not yet been approved, and details are scant.
> FTSE Russell is also considering a fast entry rule for its suite of US market indexes and is in a consultation period as of early April 2026.
Only Nasdaq 100 has changed its rules, but Nasdaq 100 is not (and should not be) in most retirement funds.
Really? We're still making claims like this in the year of our Lord 2026? People in the markets today are not predicting the real value of a company, they're gambling that the various political and financial machinations from people like Elon Musk will increase the share price enough that they can sell at a profit. The value of shares like Tesla are utterly disconnected from the value of the underlying business.
No, having the option to replace technology at your leisure would be a benefit. Being forced to replace your technology because it's destined to become aerosolized aluminum in less than five years is a detriment.
5 million over 5 years capex+opex. Mostly opex
It's also a troll post
I'm not saying they aren't profitable. I don't know, but it's definitely not a given.
That’s just money in the door and the underwriters seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
Again, not debating that SpaceX isn’t a legit company or that it’s profitable. But underwriters agreeing with high valuations to stocks that collapse once they go public isn’t unheard of.
Edit: and I will concede that I should’ve phrased my initial thoughts better. Credit rating agencies and underwriters do very separate things, just like IPOs and MBS are two very separate things.
That isn't what is happening at all.
In an IPO the underwriters and the company collaborate to set the price based on approximate demand and what they want the quality of the holders to look like.
In the roadshow, the company is very constrained as to what they can say or disclose outside of the scope of the S-1. They can't include MNPI, forward looking financial projections, etc. Underwriters are also prohibited from sharing MNPI, or publishing marketing disguised as research.
So I guess if you're saying the SpaceX S-1 is completely full of shit and there's hidden risk in it, than it could be similar to 2008, but in this case nobody is manufacturing a rating, and those material misrepresentations would constitute securities fraud. Investment banks and ratings agencies aren't the same thing at all, and the buyers of marginally profitable IPO stocks are (hopefully) different than those of AAA MBS.
I agree underwriters and credit agencies are very different just like IPOs and MBS are very different. I don’t think SpaceX is committing fraud.
> That’s just money in the door and the underwriters that seem to think the business is worth $1.75T.
I was responding to this particular comment.
In 2008, the credit rating agencies weren’t necessarily found to be guilty of wrongdoing, but a variety of reasons let them roll with AAA ratings on junk MBS anyway. Similarly the underwriters are not going to be committing crimes to facilitate IPOs. They are after all taking the risk of guaranteeing the sale for the company. However, if a company wants to roll with a high valuation, even if the fundamentals aren’t matching the valuation, if there are buyers, the underwriters will set the price supporting that high valuation. They are not incentivized to accurately measure a company’s worth like the comment I was responding to suggests.
I think you're going to be surprised at the level of competition BO provides SpaceX in the Artemis program.
Did you notice the size of the Artemis rocket and the size of the payload it sends to the moon and back?
Do you expect there to be diamonds just laying these on the moon surface, no mining required.
They are only profitable because of subsidies. Pretty much 1:1.
You may not have noticed because positive Musk related news doesn't seem to make headlines anymore.
You’re not wrong factually, but it doesn’t mean what you’re suggesting it means. Their share went up because EVs aren’t selling as much anymore. All companies including Tesla are selling fewer EVs. They just have a bigger share of the smaller pie, which isn’t exactly a success when you only sell EVs, but your competitors also sell non EVs.
Edit: Constant is the wrong word. Resilient or consistent is what I was trying to say.
Competitors leaving the market means less competition which is a good thing for Tesla. If the market for EVs returns in the future (if, say, the next administration reimplements the incentives), Tesla will be there to reap the benefits.
Their sales did not remain constant.
Tesla's the odd one out: it's public but it's still in there, although Musk would probably prefer it to be private too.
We're probably looking at nuclear fission generators to get started, then converting to geothermal at any appreciable (and maybe fusion, inshallah).
That’s SpaceX’s version of Tesla’s self driving car pipe dream
Edit - I use self-driving car and Autopilot interchangeably
What I see a lot of people do, unfortunately, is reconcile this contradiction by not following the published limitations of the "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" product. They assume that Elon Musk wouldn't call it that if it couldn't be trusted to do what they expect. Then they get into fatal crashes, and someone sues, and Tesla argues that they can't be held accountable for bad drivers who don't follow the rules.
Any argument about how people don't pay enough attention since it isn't yet certified as a L4 system is irrelevant and tangential to the point.
Tesla has an insane PE ratio because it’s a casino stock (~350x). As a comparison, NVIDIA IS 40x. SpaceX Is projected to be 300-500x. These are fantasy, completely unrealizable valuations. Similar to Enron, and Enron was over 70x. Enron wasn’t some surprise either.
Typically when PE gets out of whack, market analyzers dig into what is happening because it’s usually chicanery. No longer. Everyone is along for the ride.
When people say something is like enron, they dont mean it has a high PE. Its like saying someone is like Hitler and meaning they are a failed art student
There's a lot of parallels:
* Circular transactions between companies under the same control
* Using SPVs to keep debt off the books
* The supplier funding its own customer through investment to inflate revenue on both ends
* Valuations driven by a hyped up narrative and decoupled from actual fundamentals
I have a suspicion the reason Musk wanted to combine SpaceX and X.ai is the latter gives him losses to write off against all that cash from the former plus a chance for a big AI payoff.
People underestimate how much ships changed the world. It will happen again, the only question is when.
They're prepping for an IPO and there have been some anonymous insider reports of the figures in the press
There are industry estimates
Much of their income comes from public contracts
A sobering thought.
Honestly, it felt much stranger to me to learn, a few years ago, that they're 3D-printing rocket engines. With my experience limited to building my own PLA/ABS 3D printer out of salvaged motors and parts printed on another printer, it was hard to imagine how this is anywhere near safe and precise enough. But turns out, FDM-ing some plastic blobs is not the same as fusing Inconel powder with lasers. Same with using LLMs for software engineering (whether in aerospace culture or otherwise), it's just not the same as asking ChatGPT "please make me an app to do something idk how i cannot code send halp".
They need xAI as a reason for the narrative that data centers will be in space, so SpaceX can project far more growth before the IPO. After the IPO they'll find out that data centers in space are too expensive and overheat.
I have no idea what this has to do with aerospace, but I know a bit about software and this does not look great. Cursor is obviously on a serious decline and has little to no moat in the area they are building in (IDE), which we kinda now know is maybe not even the right area (CLI). I feel like this is just a bad move?
A team could build an AI IDE in a week, this could be a race to the bottom
But, even if you want a big all-in-one editor in an Electron app, it seems obvious VS Code is the way to go (or Zed, if you you aren't committed to using an Electron app). I just can't think of anything Cursor offers that makes it worth spending extra money for it.
Cursor's token utilization is significantly better than Claude Code. Composer's latest model, for coding, is very competitive on quality given price and was clearly well-optmiized (in two months, you will hear almost nothing else than how expensive Anthropic is...this is before they try to release the really expensive models). so many very obvious things like this if you have been using this tech every day for multiple years.
unfortunately, the competition in this space is very weak because of how dominant cursor has been (Kilo/Roo/Cline all have major implementation issues with token utilization, everyone else is trying to go all in on agentic). don't see this getting better until things get much worse because of anthropic/agentic. from the decisions that anthropic is making, it seems they are busily digging their own grave. growth will come after this.
SpaceX is no longer SpaceX per se, but SpaceX-xAI.
My TL; DR (and this is mine, personally) is its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere. Space-based datacentres are a demand excuse for putting lots of solar panels in space. Going one level down, more Cursor use is a demand excuse for putting lots of datacentres anywhere.
Be it the Dyson shell thing or Lunar or Mars colonies, there's no way it'll be done relying on transports from Earth surface. It could only work if we could make them from asteroid pieces. Which makes most items on their tech tree from Starship forward obsolete. And they're already all-in on those techs. It makes so little sense in so many levels.
My point is regardless of what you think of a Dyson sphere, this theory seems to predict what the company does better than assuming everything's a ketamine fever dream.
I think Musk being a ketamine addict explains a lot and this is very aligned. Given that he can't build a self-driving car, he would have to be under the influence of very strong drugs to think he could build a Dyson sphere of all things.
That being said, some sort of financial fraud is even more on brand.
The characterisation of “level 5” autonomy as the car handling any conceivable circumstance (not that you explicitly made this claim here) is just silly. Humans can’t handle any conceivable circumstance either.
Obligatory mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM
Sure. My question was why. And my loose interrogation of the question, together with some unique domain expertise, suggests he found an excuse to work towards a Dyson sphere.
That already happened with xAI-X merged with SpaceX.
Though, in fairness, that's probably the important part. Like a base model plus "coding smarts" is probably perfect for the situation.
But maybe not as much value as I was thinking.
2. Make SpaceX valuation even higher before IPO
3. Boost XAI/usage of Grok.