A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses(futuresearch.ai) |
A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses(futuresearch.ai) |
No longer will there be a year of price discovery for index funds, 15 days. Meaning index funds have to buy it at the peak of the hype cycle. Will be a huge wealth transfer from mom and pop retirement accounts to the ultra wealthy.
They’re taking everything thats not nailed down. A wealth tax is the only way, it cannot continue like this.
There's no rule you have to own QQQ and indeed most people don't. There are thousands of low cost ETFs that provide passive exposure to the market. If this new rule bothers you, be like most people and buy one of those instead of QQQ. Problem solved.
Like sure, let's improve our tax systems (as an aside, I would say there are many more efficient and progressive options than a wealth tax, but whatever), but I don't see how there is even a tangential link between that topic and the NDX rule change.
After 20+ years in the market, today I learned: "The S&P 500 is a float-adjusted, market-capitalization-weighted index."
So presumably an S&P 500 index fund is not disadvantaged, since it is tracking a float-adjusted index, i.e. the weight of SpaceX will be tiny if its float is tiny.
Or, is there a nuance that I'm missing?
Nasdaq already caved. FTSE and S&P are supposedly considering it.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/03/31/index-providers...
I don’t tend to let my emotions out this much here, but utterly fuck everything about this administration, and fuck anyone who voted in favor of it.
I’m genuinely confused how a passive investor winds up tracking the NASDAQ 100 versus a broader index.
Also, if you’re picking and choosing your exposures, you aren’t passive.
Or would you say that e.g. an ETF tracking MSCI ex-US is not a passive fund?
You buy VTI, you're impacted.
Seems like MSCI can add new large constituents very quickly as well [1], so to remain neutral to the frenzy until a price has been discovered, one might need to actively short.
[1] e.g. https://www.msci.com/eqb/methodology/meth_docs/MSCI_GIMIMeth...
It's absolutely bonkers and wrong but it's unlikely to raise to the level of actual misrepresentation.
But as you say, going back to the xAI + SpaceX merger, analysts consistently seem to value it as if it is, so I predict the public will too, at IPO time.
net income probably: $1.5B – $3B
P/E:500-1000
Of course people will trip overthemselves to buy it up.
Check out Matt Levine commentary, which goes into more detail (SpaceX Indexing) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-31/are...
Wait for the lock-up terms.
Any mid-sized country would have multiple cellphone and Internet providers with larger customer bases and less upkeep.
I mean if you value a company for its future cashflows, how long will Starlink be the only game in town? Will we not see other rockets/space-internet competitors in 2040 for example, in 15 years from now, from any other company (or even, any other state actor)? I think we will, and I think that timeline is generous. Without a monopoly you're competing the price towards marginal cost to cater to a tiny and shrinking fraction of the world that needs satelite internet. The vast majority of people live in urban environments, particularly among those who can afford internet in the first place, and it's only growing further in that direction.
I think Starlink is a wonderful product but there's a reason it has $10b revenue, while telecom companies around the world do more than $1.7 trillion in revenue.[0]
The argument that Starship is somehow an experimental/unproven technology that might fail to materialise was absurd but plausible sounding before flight 1, there were many new technologies simultaneously being deployed to a single launch system in one go.
But after 3 tower catches of the booster demonstrating centimetres of guided precision of the entire stack, this is becoming a tired argument.
I know the author is not making that case at all here, but it seems like one the core reasons to undervalue SpaceX is that Starship might not work out, and this all sounds exactly like how reusability might not work out for the Falcon 9 from 10 years ago.
Starship: zero competitors & potentially makes humans inter-planetary.
Seems crazy if investors put more value on Grok.
What is the realistic, non-science fiction appeal of this?
Humans being interplanetary would be an amazing technical tour de force. But relatively speaking, there isn’t much revenue there.
European settlers being on the north american continent would be an amazing technical tour de force. But relatively speaking, there isn't much revenue there.
The SpaceX IPO: retail investor notes
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47612775
SpaceX files to go public
Of course once again, you are "not allowed" to be early into pre-IPO companies which is where the actual money is made.
The moment several companies start IPOing, you are already too late for those multiples and have to wait for a massive crash until these stocks reach all time lows after IPO.
I ended up largely deferring to them, e.g. predicting the public will value xAI at $258 billion ($222b - $310b) at time of IPO, even though I've elsewhere been skeptical that xAI should be valued like a frontier AI lab.
It's a keynesian beauty contest
1. Tesla was priced at $2.5b end of 2010. 2. Tesla started production that year of the model S, with nearly 500km range and 0-100 in 4.4 seconds, still competitive 16 years later. It was an obvious disruption of a proven market. 3. that car market was valued at half a trillion at the time.
So Tesla being valued at 0.5% of the market, with disruptive technology, seems fine. Of course it was a moonshot, but hindsight is 20/20.
But what is the total market here that it's stepping into? Seems like SpaceX is servicing the majority of the market for years, yet it just has 16 billion revenue. How that gets you to 1.75 trillion, I don't know.
For comparison, it is routine to see sale prices of 3x to 5x revenue for many, many kinds of everyday businesses that have much less potential than Tesla.
There are very, very few businesses whose shares one could have purchased in 2010 that performed better over the subsequent 15 years. That is about as objective as one can get about determining whether or not something was under or over valued (in 2010).
Source: https://starlink.com/business/aviation ($250->$10k/mo)
https://starlink.com/business/maritime ($250/mo)
https://starlink.com/business/mobility ($65->$540/mo)
The point I have more issue with is that a 60 or 100 PE ratio only makes sense in a high-growth scenario. Telecoms are valued at 9x by comparison. 60 or 100 only makes sense if you expect it to grow by 10x from here, and face no competition and keep prices this high.
And that seems like a bit of a reach. The richest people on the planet live in urban environments in US/EU/Asia, with fast and widespread 5G.
Yes, rich people on boats in the pacific, hiking remote mountains, and researchers in Antartica exist, but they're not a market of 200 million people. And even if you get there, that's still just 120b, not 380b valuation.
Also, AT&T and Verizon customers don't love their provider. They despise them. I walked into a Verizon store last year and was outright scammed by the staff member into their insurance plan after explicitly declining it (they just added it to the bill anyway).
These legacy companies will be irrelevant.
That's the thing about SpaceX, some businesses are real businesses that can be modeled in normal ways, like the government launch contracts, and to some degree starlink.
Others, like ~all of xAI, and the starship stuff, are being valued completely independent of revenue. I predict the IPO investors will generally follow the analysis consensus today with those eye-popping numbers.
It's 24 years old with 16 billion revenue. Suppose you had a warchest and had the option to buy SpaceX at 1750 billion, or to spend a fraction of that to replicate its technology. Could you?
I've seen estimates that SpaceX spent less than $50-60 billion in cash during its lifetime. That's in the range of its cumulative revenue + capital raised, too.
I just don't really see how this couldn't be replicated, if the market was big enough. But it seems to me that Space isn't that useful yet, and the market isn't that big yet, to the point that it doesn't warrant lots of competitors like the thinking on AI.
So what is the near-to-medium-term economic prospect of Starship? That's the question. You can't just say "bigger rocket make more money", because there exists a useful upper to the size of payloads that companies actually want to ship to LEO in practice. To use an analogy, we have jumbo jets, but most flights are not on jumbo jets.
It’s not really sensible to compare a single spacecraft with what is essentially a fleet of ships with an order of magnitude greater cargo capacity. It’s the possibility of refueling that unlocks the ability to push really large payloads beyond LEO, and many of the more audacious plans (like a Moon base) do require a lot of cargo well beyond LEO.
Well, they are going to live with multi-customer payloads if Starship can do it for a tenth of the price. There's already a large market for ride-sharing and it's only going to get bigger.
This is only true because we are so completely beholden to the tyranny of the rocket equation with the current status quo. With the $/kg (and payload volume) that Starship would unlock, the entire ELO/GEO/Interplanetary/Deep Space market looks very different.
Labs in space. Hotels in space. Weapons in space. Much more interesting satellites in space. More government science missions. Privately funded science/research missions. etc
My 50% CI on Starship's fair market value at IPO time is $123b - $227b, with a 80% CI even wider, not based on my own modeling, but based on anchoring to analysts that give credible arguments.
SpaceX has basically admitted as much by promising Starship 2 & 3 with larger payloads (that Starship 1 was already supposed to deliver).
[1] https://www.americaspace.com/2024/04/20/starship-faces-perfo...
I think a lot of it depends on whether they can make the reuse of the second stage work without having to redo stuff constantly like the shuttle. Reusing the booster will obviously save tons of money and make launches cheaper, but they're competing with themselves here. How big is the launch market with cheaper launches? We don't actually know.
The other core value generation product will be financial transactions. It is unproven whether X money will be adopted for friction free transactions across national boundaries and whether the company can compete in the financial services sector.
I missed 2 and 3 it seems.
If you’re referring to Biden, who all but guaranteed that Trump would win a second term by having zero sense of urgency or concern, zero drive to push through popular but sweeping changes, zero real vision, falling back to politics-as-usual, and topping it all off with disastrously running for a second term until pulling out at almost the last possible second, then yes, him too, and I will personally never forgive him for stepping in when Bernie had momentum.
For anyone else, it’s hard for me to get as worked up over them. Uninspiring, ineffective, bargain basement levels of corruption is upsetting but not a reason to put fire to everything that has put this country and its residents in a position of economic power, peace and security, and as the diplomatic head of the world. If I could wave a magic wand and strip the right to vote from anyone who thought so and acted upon that belief, I wouldn’t give it a second of hesitation.
10 years is a long time, considering the global reactions to America under Trump, and also Musk's tight coupling to Trump, and even in the US given how many bridges Musk burned.
If Starlink was properly spun off and independent of Musk this would be much less of an issue, but now? Now the rest of the world is likely to treat it like the US treats Huawei.
I mean that Starlinks consumer broadband is valued at ~38x revenue, when other telcos are valued around 1.5x revenue. That revenue is 2533% more expensive, why pay such a big premium for something that's essentially the same?
If you own an ETF that buys SpaceX but without overweighting vs. float, then you're not contributing to the inflated price in that sense. You're still buying at the inflated price though, so the NASDAQ rule change still affects you indirectly.
I guess the point of the "wealth tax" comment is that any higher taxation of the wealthiest individuals would reduce their power to shape the rules to their favor, and a wealth tax is potentially harder to avoid than income taxes. I think most prior attempts just made them emigrate, though.
mv some_rich_ppl_money some_poor_ppl
You're making it more inefficient; any other hop in such a system is inefficiency.
Such a tiny minority of real people are not that important to the species. Maybe that important to some mind palace of some contemporary meat suits but they're going to die anyway; kicking the can down the road for future people. If we can fuck the future, fuck us then. Our existence is just as forfeitable
My neighbors and family have been expressing such. If we're just going to screw the next generation via environmental collapse and serfdom to rich overlords they opt to give up on the living enabling it
VTI “seeks to track the performance of the CRSP US Total Market Index” [1]. Not the NASDAQ 100. It will include the latter’s components. But it shouldn’t reference its weights.
[1] https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profi...
I’m not recommending that index. Just saying it’s separate from the NASDAQ 100. You can absolutely find a total-market index biased towards mature, seasoned issuers.
Except that at some point this stops being true. Induced demand is not infinite. There's no telling when we'll reach that point, or indeed if we've already reached it.
Developing a new rocket like the Falcon 9, even a reusable one, would cost a private investor less than $10bn. It would take time, that is the hardest part. But in terms of cash, it is a fraction of this valuation.
Then a constellation like Starlink - again, we are talking $10-$15bn. Once you have the rocket, the satellite design is not going to cost much. The challenge is getting the regulatory approvals and getting the launch rate up.
Then developing something like Starship, again a few billions, certainly far less than $50 bn. A crew capsule too, that would be a few billion, but probable <$5 bn.
For a trillion dollars you could probably throw in a space station (the ISS was about $100bn), a few advanced orbiting telescopes, a human mission to Mars, and maybe an intensive exploration of Europa. Heck, why not land something on Pluto just for kicks.
I was just making a joke about the outrage OP is showing, I wasn't making a judgment on whether they get taxed too much or too little.
In this specific case I am retired and I have done this based on financial projections assuming the game continues to be played the same. So it hits closer to home for me. But it’s a far bigger problem than just me—this is looting the retirement savings of millions of Americans—and it is far from the only thing about this administration and those who have supported it to make me absolutely livid.
There are also perfectly ordinary situations in which this pattern is used to imply the influence of an unknown party. "They built a bridge over the river." Clearly the speaker does not believe that bridges over rivers construct themselves. She doesn't need to know who built the bridge.
This excuse only works if who built the bridge isn't central to the discussion. Otherwise this is just generic conspiratorial thinking that we're being oppressed by The Elites™.
To understand why this isn't a conspiracy of a sort by some "elite" group of people to take money from 401ks and IRAs, you'd have to argue that there's a good reason to shorten the window that outweighs the reason the window exists. The fact remains that many many IPOs crater within a few months. The rule change seems to exist to leave small low-effort investors holding the bag.
Just because we're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get us.
It isn't central to the discussion. The appearance of corruption is clear; nailing down the culprit is difficult. It isn't reasonable to expect people to have a theory of corruption in order to complain about it.
>Otherwise this is just generic conspiratorial thinking
The perception of corruption is not a conspiracy theory. Corruption is an ordinary financially motivated crime, while conspiracy theories usually involve some kind of grandiose or mystical objective ("new world order").
Anyway, the question is moot because the only possible answer is "the regulatory authorities". We know who makes the rules! I just didn't want to tolerate this kind of fallacious nitpicking.
> for a trillionaire[!]
This writes itself. It shouldn't, but "should" as a concept needs a lot of work.
And even that isn't accurate. They are not bending the rules for a trillionaire, they are maintaining the consistency more systemic rules. This is how it has always been. We can all point to real or perceived ethical islands. They certainly exist, and are worth creating and preserving. But for now, the sea still sets the rules, and the sea is deep. For the deeper system, island visibility is a useful distraction. Sometimes something heavy moves near the surface and we misinterpret visibility as exception.
> Grant me that at least
Granted, indeed, and with the summarily bestowed honor of our royal favor.
Yes. The changes for Elon are exactly what they look like. Preferred treatment in exchange for the priveledge of being paid vast sums to serve him.
My sober point is that this is absolute par for the course. Every whale gets this treatment. Elon can take his business somewhere else, and expects something for not doing so.
The exception here is not a bent rule. But that the special treatment his spending power "merits" is so enormous, that the proportional conflict-of-interest sacrifice, is unusually visible.
I think talent is more important than compute, as I wrote in my Jan 2026 predictions that Anthropic would end up on top this year: https://futuresearch.ai/blog/forecasting-top-ai-lab-2026/
I'm not sure that's the case. Every value in this forecast is absurd, I actually think the author is sincere in there feeling that they are being extremely skeptical.
I’d consider someone that puts $50 into Coca Cola stock every paycheck a passive investor
They’re not. Passive vs active are terms of art in investing. They refer to the degree selection effect is at play.
Assets aren’t passive or not; investing styles are. The degree to which one’s returns earn from, or are expected to earn from, selection effects determines if you’re investing passively or actively. If I say trade SPYs, I’m an active investor. If I buy and hold a custom broad-market benchmark, I’m passive. Buying MSCI ex-US without a hedge is an active investment decision. If it’s bought and held it’s more like a passive strategy over time, provided the U.S. doesn’t dramatically over or underperform the global markets.
It's also not hard to think of half a dozen other groups that could possibly benefit and plausibly have enough clout to steer things in their favor, hence why the need to make a specific claim rather than beating around the bush a vague "they" that can't be refuted.
This calculation is why "growth" companies dominated the stock market during the 2010's: with the Zero Interest Rate Policy that most of the developed world had, the discount rate that the markets used ended up being basically zero. In which case a market player is indifferent between a dollar in 2020 and a dollar in 2040. So if a company had a 10% chance of being worth a trillion dollars in 2040, that was worth (0.1 * 1 trillion=10 billion dollars). But with a more traditional 4% discount rate then a dollar in 2040 is worth less than half of a dollar in 2020, and that means your 10% chance of being worth a trillion dollars in 2040 has less than half of the value. Even if nothing else changed about your business, just the discount rate changing halved the value of your company.
The earnings period is 1 year.
It would mean making 100% return on investment each year. Being that low is only possible if there's reason to think the business is extremely precarious and unlikely to survive.
P/E 30 means returns of 3.33%, P/E of 20 means 5%. These are sensible numbers given people have other investment opportunities.
P/E of Tesla being 400 or so means it would take 400 years of its own profits to be able to afford to privatise itself, i.e. returns of 0.25%; being that high is a gamble that future revenue/unit time will go up by a factor of about 20 to bring it into the sensible range.
The upper bound from the grandparent comment for P/E 500-1000, says the annual return is 0.1%, which is what I saw on various current accounts, not savings accounts, not special deals, current accounts.
So you have to be a complete idiot to but stock in a company with a P/E of 500!
This is obviously untrue. Would you sell a box that spits out $1 million dollars a year for 1 million dollars?
The Pilgrims starved their first year.
(Sourcing my claim is difficult. I include this reference [1], which says that the Caribbean colonies were more profitable than all the continental colonies together. It doesn't comment on the cost of the war.)
[1] https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1ay/chapter/...
Apple has a float of >99%. SpaceX is going to come out with 3-4% float. Since all big serious total market / whatever index funds are float adjusted, this means that SpaceX will be treated more like a company with $45B market cap, not $1.5T or whatever.
If you're buying most index funds, you should literally not care about this.
If you buy VTI, then SpaceX is going to be like what, <0.1% of the fund? That is noise.
> To balance index integrity and investability, Nasdaq proposes a new approach for including and weighting low-float securities (those below 20% free float). Each low-float security’s weight will be adjusted to five times its free float percentage, capped at 100%. Securities with more than 20% free float will continue to be weighted at full, eligible listed market capitalization, while those below 20% free float will be weighted proportionally to preserve investability.
> The rule reportedly includes a 5x float multiplier for low-float stocks, which would require passive vehicles to treat SpaceX as if it had significantly more tradable shares than actually exist, essentially forcing funds to chase the price.
It sounds to me like a way to increase demand for low float stocks by treating the float higher than it actually is. Glad to hear the explanations about this.
I guess figure out whether QQQ is going to do the 5x float thing?
Disagree. Buyers of index funds should care about fiduciary and waste. This is what this seems like at this price. Granted, I’d be more concerned if the fund manager was buying it without a requirement to. The issue still remains about why are we paying so much for this stock? Make it make sense?
Right, but the whole point of index funds is that you're letting the market decide what's worth investing/buying (via market cap/free float weightings) and at what price. If you're making calls on what's "waste" or not, then you're no longer a passive investor and you're just picking stocks.
1. are your finances going to be screwed from overpaying for SpaceX IPO shares through your index fund? No because as you say, it's a small fraction of typical index funds.
2. Is this a form of financial malfeasance? I think yes. The average 401k has about $150k in it. Even if just 0.5% goes to SpaceX, that's $750 per American. That's a few hundred billion. It's serious cash. If that's going to overpaying Elon 3x or whatever it is for these shares, that's a travesty. Even if for each individual it's a tiny blip that doesn't show up in the annual ROI graphs, it's a form of corruption. Like the programmer infamous Salami slicing stories at banks.
If the SpaceX IPO is wildly overpriced, even if you have just 300k in your account, yo
You have to hand it to him, he’s the best grifter we’ve seen in years.
Or how he helped dismantle USAID which leads to real death of people.
You’re being spoiled with not having a fake PR mask. He‘s just spared from real consequences because of his wealth. As soon as real consequences are at the horizon that changes pretty quickly. It just happens too rarely.
Cancel culture needs to stop, we are not a hive mind, everyone has different opinions.
Following the rules of the fund and being index is one thing. Sitting silently as this pump and dump is designed to fleece your clients, is something entirely different.
> Starting May 1, 2026, Nasdaq rules allow large IPOs (e.g., top 40 market cap) to join the Nasdaq-100 Index within 15 trading days. This forces index-tracking funds to buy new shares, often at inflated valuations shortly after listing, a "fast entry" rule designed for mega-IPOs like SpaceX or OpenAI
Do you think DOGE has done something good or did it just help authoritarians to dismantle opposition?
Since Musk, Trump, Thiel & Co. started to implement their vision of a society the world turned to the worse. And they won‘t be the one who habe to endure the harsh consequences
A P/E ratio of 1 indicates that a company's share price is equal to its earnings per share, suggesting that investors are paying $1 for every $1 of earnings.
A P/E ratio of 10 indicates that a company's share price is equal to its earnings per share, suggesting that investors are paying $10 for every $1 of earnings.
Which is the better deal? Neither! The first company could suddenly earn more per share and you will be better off. The second company could loose earnings per share and you will be worse off.
A P/E of 1 means you are paying exactly the earnings per share, which is the fairest and most non speculative price. You are paying what the company is earning.
Is there something special about the length of Earth's orbit that makes it the correct ratio for converting flows to values? If a business were incorporated on Mars, would the fair price be one Earth year of earnings, or one Mars year of earnings? (The latter price would be 88% higher.)
A huge synthetic telescope in orbit with an aperture the size of the planet?
How many private earth observation satellites?
The market is huge when weight constraints largely go away and $/kg drops so hard.
What does that even mean? Almost every single Falcon 9 customer will prefer launching on Starship if/when it is available, because the cost will be much lower. A very small segment who have payloads that are exactly Falcon 9 sized and want a very particular orbit might still be better served by F9, but maybe not.
Beyond that, much lower cost unlocks previously untenable opportunities that you have not sufficiently imagined, as stated earlier.
Of course it does. With Starship, SpaceX could've charged NASA/ESA more to launch a bigger JWST than the cost to launch with Ariane 5, with huge profit margins.
On top of that, with a much larger fairing, you could almost certainly simplify the telescope and increase capability. A significant part of the JWST's complexity is the unfolding sequence, which could be simplified with a fairing that is more than double (triple? quadruple?) the volume.
No? Contractually, maybe. But legally you can do whatever you want with index constructions.
If they are, you'd only get a license when accepting their terms.
Index providers definitely own their trademarks. You can’t market an S&P index without paying S&P. But “the available authority indicates that copyright protection for indexes may extend to the index constituent lists but not index averages, and copyright preemption principles may limit misappropriation protection for indexes to a very narrow class of ‘hot news’ uses” [1].
> you'd only get a license when accepting their terms
Sure. But plenty of indices allow for mixing and matching. The terms are designed to avoid confusion—you can’t use the term NASDAQ 100 if it isn’t exactly that. More broadly, there are tons of indices and benchmark portfolios.
[1] https://www.blegalgroup.com/market-index-licensing-a-review-...
If there were a good autopilot energy policy option, it would probably entail doing the opposite of whatever Germany votes to do.
How is this a response?
But assuming it is: How would you even call it, and how would you describe your methodology in the prospectus? "Tech 100 (compare with e.g. NASDAQ)"?
Spacex will be around 4.5% of the index [2].
If you believe the thesis of the article that Spacex is about 30% overvalued, and if the only advantage your fund manager has over the rest of the market is that they will avoid Spacex, they will save you 1% of your money over the lifetime of your investment. Assuming you're saving for retirement in 30 years time, the fees will cost you 15% or more.
Maybe your fund manager finds a Spacex-level mispricing every two years. In that case, they're worth the fees. Some people will tell you nobody can beat the market. My employer among others believes very strongly in the idea that some people do make better investment decisions than average. What is certainly true is that not everyone does.
[0] https://helpcenter.ark-funds.com/what-is-the-fee-structure-e...
[1] https://www.invesco.com/qqq-etf/en/home.html
[2] https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/04/01/how-the-spacex-cou...
Does that article say that? I didn't see "4.5xm" mentioned anywhere. Also jow does QQQ do float adjusting? Will it do the same 5x that we're hearing nasdaq is going to do? (Which would make it what, <1%?). Or something else?
Of course some do. After all, that's what makes an "average".
Some people are taller than average, too!
AFAIK the problem is that they're lobbying the nasdaq 100 index provider to add a 5x multiplier for free float for spacex. Otherwise it would be far less controversial.
There is also the concept of "Index Tracking Error". No fund can perfectly mimic the index, and that is expected and understood, but the goal is generally to have the tracking error <0.1%- 1% would be a bad track. And so an index fund could take the risk that they will have a tracking error and delay picking up SpaceX even after it joins the official index, but then if it goes up they will look worse relative to their real competitors, the other NASDAQ 100 tracking index funds. If SpaceX goes down, of course, they will have positive tracking error, but I'm not sure how much potential investors would value that. SpaceX would be something like 4% of the NASDAQ 100 at it's announced expected market cap, so a 10% movement by SpaceX would be enough on its own to get you into the notable tracking error range if you didn't have any exposure to it.
The article isn't a great source, agreed. But it does give this calculation:
> Oddly enough, had SpaceX entered the Nasdaq-100 with a market capitalization of $1.75 trillion on Friday, March 27 [assuming the new rules (?)], it would have supplanted Tesla as the fifth-largest holding in the benchmark. The electric vehicle stock accounts for 3.8% of the Invesco ETFs.
So it would come in somewhere above 3.8%, by those calculations. And it depends on market prices from day to day. Not much changes about the argument above if you make it 3% or 6%, holding constant the assumption that it's 30% overvalued.
It is just not addressed at all in the article, which makes it seem like they're assuming it's 100% of market cap.
(I'd like it to be, but until it is, it isn't).
Cost reduction depends on it being fully reusable.
Someone can win at roulette and make more money than the average player over some measurement period, but nobody can be good at roulette (when properly implemented and stuff). Stocks are somewhat possible to be good at but results are mostly random and the fee you'd pay is usually way too much.
How would you know it is or is not luck?
> roulette
Has no winning strategy - it's very different.
The winning strategy with stocks is understanding the underlying businesses better than the average investor. Peter Lynch's Magellan fund did consistently better than others because Lynch had insights others didn't. When others figured it out, Magellan's returns retreated to market levels.
I.e. investors can do better than average if they have insight others don't have and stay below the radar.
It's hard to know in the moment, but almost every promising fund has subpar long term results. Whether they lost their touch or were lucky in the first place, it means that seeking out promising funds is a very bad way to find a place to put your money.
The number of funds with significant valuable insights is low, and the number where those insights are bigger than the fees is lower.
Anyway my point was just that a big spread of outcomes doesn't prove that significantly different skill levels exist.
I'm only saying your previous "will be" is too strong a claim, not that it's completely unthinkable that it may come to be.
That said, it's not like other billionaires aren't working on the same basic idea, even if they're copying what was already proven with the Falcon 9, which is great for people who want to go to space but not so much for SpaceX investors.