alt Hacker NewsI sincerely hope the market is not willing to value this sort of deal at a P/E ratio anywhere near 94.
Off the top of my head, there is a very well established business involving buying expensive things and leasing them to the companies that intend to operate them so they can sell services: aircraft leasing.
AER is the biggest player and they have a P/E ratio of, drumroll please, 6. And I expect that GPUs, despite currently looking like an appreciating asset, will actually depreciate faster than aircraft in the long run.
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Yeah, only a small portion of SpaceX's revenue actually comes from Space (payload delivery). At this point they are basically an ISP (Starlink) and a datacenter/leasing company.
It's not clear if Musk (SpaceX/X.ai) is really pursuing AI any more - I expect he hasn't necessarily given up on it, and he hasn't said he has, but it seems he's rented out almost all of his GPUs to Anthropic and Google, so that's not going to be much of a revenue generator, at least for time being.
It was in the news not too long ago that Musk was looking to use Samsung to fabricate "AI chips", presumably either for X.ai and/or Tesla, so perhaps he's basically put X.ai on hold until he can reboot his efforts with his own chips (& perhaps a new datacenter)?
> I sincerely hope the market is not willing to value this sort of deal at a P/E ratio anywhere near 94.
It will very likely be valued much, much higher. The SpaceX IPO is, in itself, a marvelous piece of financial engineering (requiring co-operation among multiple actors) which has been a long time in the works.
- Right out of the gate nearly all retail investment platforms have dramatically reduced requirements for purchasing an IPO, most notably Fidelity, which previously required $500,000 in your account to participate in an IPO reduced (on Friday) this amount to $2,000
- Retail investment, despite being quieter in the post-WSB era, is at all time highs.
- Reports are that the SpaceX IPO is already highly oversubscribed, meaning there are many more retail investors interested than there are shares available.
- SpaceX has a wildy low float of only ~4% which means price discovery will be much slower then normal, especially with aforementioned demand
- All of these retail platforms enforce some sort of "soft lock-in" whereby you're excluded from future IPOs if you sell your shares within 15-30 days. So if you want to get out you're not going to be able to participate in Anthropic/OpenAI IPOs in a few months.
- Coincidentally, most of the major indexes (thankfully excluding the S&P 500) have adjusted their rules to require only 15 days post-IPO before inclusion and have no profitability requirements. Many also adjusted the rules so that low float IPOs have their weight multiplied despite the low float.
- Many retirement accounts, in one way or another, are required to track these indexes and will be forced to buy these SpaceX shares at a very likely frenzied price and further drive the price up.
SpaceX will very likely open with far more retail demand than shares, the insiders (VCs, employees etc) will still be legally locked from selling, retail investors are penalized if they sell, and so the demand will be high and supply very low.
If they can keep this demand hyped for just 3 weeks, price will still be elevated when retirement accounts are forced to buy... roughly the same time retail investor start seeing the penalty for selling expiring (meaning it is not irrational at all to be in the IPO, but it is irrational to sell before being listed in an index).
Fun fact: the other fascinating thing about this IPO is the terms for insider lock-in. At first earnings (Jun 30) inside investors unlock and can therefor liquidate 20% of their shares... but if the stock performs well, they can unlock and additional 10%. There are additional rules for continued unlocking of more shares depending on performance as time goes on. So everyone on the inside has a very vested interest in a spike in stock prices: not only will their stocks be worth more, but they can realize that value faster.
I would be surprised if SpaceX price doesn't explode in the first few weeks because for everyone involved this would make sense. It's only in August that we'll start seeing the really interesting things start happening.
Comparing SpaceX to an aircraft leasing company seems more foolish to me than a 94x multiple.
I understand the gist here, but come on. This is a generational company. It’s the only relevant space launch business, and has its tentacles deep in AI infrastructure as well. Maybe the AI bet is foolish — I don’t know — you should short it!
P/E is price to earning. Price to revenue is P/S. AER's P/S is like 3, so the discrepancy is much worse than you think.
Sidenote: 3 is actually high. 94 is absolutely ridiculous.