alt Hacker NewsFor this valuation to make sense, you’re betting on one or more of:
1. Orbital data centers become not only a real thing, but a dominant thing.
2. Grok goes from being a second-tier model mostly useful for not having guardrails to being a step above all other offerings.
3. Twitter realizes its “everything app” ambitions and becomes the WeChat of the West.
4. Starship not only flies operationally, but finds a niche with orders of magnitude more business than Falcon 9 gets. Something like Earth-to-Earth passenger transport at a level that substantially displaces airlines.
All of which seem extremely unlikely. I’m fairly bullish on SpaceX, but as something of a “normal” business. Starship shows promise. Falcon 9 is a cheap workhorse. Starlink seems to just print money. But not anything like a trillion dollars’ worth.
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About #1, the first result in my search says:
> the global data center market size was estimated at USD 383.82 billion in 2025
Getting that entire market, with Apple-like profitability would leave SpaceX as an overvalued stock that only makes sense if there are possibilities for growth.
On #2, replacing every single white-collar job on the world and capturing 100% of their salary would leave SpaceX with a P/E close to 2.
On #3, Visa seems to have earnings of about 10% of all datacenters up there. So, no, that's not enough even for a high-growth business.
On #4, IATA says the air-travel market is about $800B large. So, if SpaceX gets all of it, it would still have a P/E larger than 2.
So yeah, either they create an all-capable AGI or they create some rocket that is cheaper to run than an airplane... And they better be the only ones on that market, and capture most of the value they create.
"Extremely unlikely" is a huge understatement.
> Starlink seems to just print money.
Does it? Those satellites are individually dirt cheap compared to historical communication satellites, but Starlink requires a whole lot of them and they depreciate outrageously quickly.
Compare to my personal favorite communication medium, single-mode-fiber. SMF from 20-30 years ago still works, is compatible with most current-generation wavelengths, and can carry extremely high bandwidth per strand if users are willing to put fancy optics and muxes at the ends or can carry lower speeds at transceiver prices that would have been almost unimaginably low 20 years ago.
Starlink satellites seem to have zero or even slightly negative value after five years.
It's an Elon company, the valuation is never going to make sense.
Most reasonable analysis here! But you forgot: “retail loves it and buys it, providing capital sufficient to stabilize.”
I also like SpaceX - one thing many of the kids around here seem to forget is that elon has managed extremely dire capital and earnings situations very ably in the past - the above list for Tesla ten years ago looked much much worse.
This isn’t dispositive to success on your list but it does mean you can treat the company more like a long call : it almost certainly won’t go away.