SpaceX went public Friday and became the sixth most valuable company in America. The rocket company is worth $2 trillion. That's more than Berkshire Hathaway, which owns actual businesses that sell actual things to actual customers who actually exist.
Elon Musk started SpaceX in 2002 with a 10% chance of success. Those were his words, not mine. He said the company would probably fail. Twenty-three years later it's worth two thousand billion dollars. The math on that works out to roughly $200 billion per percentage point of initial confidence. I checked with my calculator. It still makes no f*cking sense.
The headline specifies SpaceX is a fraction the size by revenue of tech's megacaps. A fraction. Could be one-tenth. Could be one-hundredth. The word fraction is doing more work than SpaceX's entire accounting department. But who cares about revenue when you've got vibes and a ticker symbol?
Retail traders saw the Nasdaq debut and did what they always do. They bought shares at the opening bell because a guy on Reddit said Mars colonization is definitely happening by 2028. They will hold these shares through three earnings calls, panic sell at a loss, then post screenshots of their account balance with the caption "Still learning."
The sixth most valuable company in America now manufactures rockets that sometimes explode on purpose for testing and sometimes explode by accident for the same reason. The market looked at this business model and said yeah, two trillion sounds about right. Comparable to the GDP of Italy, a country with sixty million people and several centuries of economic activity.
SpaceX sells rocket launches to NASA and satellite deployments to corporations and fever dreams to bagholders who think stock splits are bullish.
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