The Space X IPO is great for Elon Musk and terrible for you | The Verge

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The Space X IPO is great for Elon Musk and terrible for you

The biggest public offering ever is financial nihilism’s final form.

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The Space X IPO is great for Elon Musk and terrible for you

The biggest public offering ever is financial nihilism’s final form.

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I haven’t seen anything as stupid as the We Work IPO document in a very long time — that is, until Elon Musk filed to take Space X public. We Work was a joke. Space X is a threat. And if Musk and his bankers have their way, you are going to be their bagholder.

Lots of the top-line details leaked long before the S-1 filing itself became public. There’s the rumored valuation of more than

I guess I could believe that Musk is the Lord and Savior of a bunch of weird polygons

This is absurd nonsense, but it might not matter. Musk is the original financial influencer, and his struggling electric car company, Tesla, trades at more than 300 times earnings. Ford and Toyota both trade at about 11 times earnings. Even Nvidia, a company that is arguably printing money, trades at 33 times earnings. Tesla is a meme stock, and Space X is poised to be the next one. Never mind that it is basically a space company plus an AI company plus a social network — a meme stock doesn’t have to make sense.

So where do I start? I guess we’re all supposed to pretend it’s 2015 and that Musk cares about humanity, and especially about sending humanity to space. Musk is trying to sell a big company with a big story: his messianic mission to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars,” a phrase that occurs seven times in the S-1. (“Light of consciousness” without its astral accompaniment occurs an additional three times.) There is an artist’s illustration of “Life on Mars.” The people who live there appear to be composed of polygons. I guess I could believe that Musk is the Lord and Savior of a bunch of weird polygons; I’ve seen the Cybertruck.

(We Work guru Rebekah Neumann must be eating her heart out right now — “the power of We” is so quaint by comparison.)

Musk knows that his strength is the cult of losers who worship him. That’s why 30 percent of the IPO is reserved for retail investors. As for the grown-ups, well, there’s a Keynesian beauty contest in play; if you know that the loser cultists will buy whatever he’s selling, and that Nasdaq rule changes may get it fast-tracked onto the index, it might make sense to buy into the IPO. You’ll be watching Number Go Up regardless of the underlying value, and you’d be an idiot to leave that on the table. And the more people think that way, the more Number Go Up. Say it with me now, my Keynesians: The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

In some ways, this isn’t just Space X’s IPO. It’s the IPO of financial nihilism writ large. Robinhood profited off financial nihilism, but it wasn’t itself a meme stock. Space X is different. It’s worse. And I don’t know how normal people can avoid having it stuffed down their throats.

This company is called Space X, and it’s known for building rockets. The filing is peppered with references to the Moon (74), Mars (63) and “and beyond” (13), as in “Earth’s orbit and beyond” or “the Moon, Mars, and beyond.” But looking at the numbers from its IPO document, this is, by Space X’s own admission, an AI company.

About

Is Grok one of the most advanced frontier models? Well, it’s distilled from them, anyway!

Of course, you could figure the vibes on that out just by knowing that Space X leased out its massive cloud computing operation to Anthropic for what the S-1 reveals to be $15 billion a year. Incidentally, x AI’s government contracts aren’t going so hot, which is possibly a problem for the company’s planned IPO.

So let’s talk about Grok, which Verge readers may also know as Mecha Hitler, “a truth-seeking AI model ... which has emerged as one of the world’s most advanced frontier models,” according to the S-1. This is quite a turnaround from Musk saying in March that “x AI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.” Is it one of the most advanced frontier models? Well, it’s distilled from them, anyway!

The details on x AI’s recent deal with Cursor make this look even worse. You may recall that in April, Space X announced it made a commitment to maybe buy the AI coding company, which would give Space X a way to compete with enterprise AI products made by Anthropic and Open AI. Well, if the deal goes through, existing shareholders will be diluted to the tune of

Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, two Open AI cofounders, felt in 2018 that Musk “really hasn’t done his homework [on] AI / AGI.”

The filing notes all the places Space X is now under investigation for Grok’s production of nonconsensual sexualized images, including those of children. Three lawsuits are called out specifically in the filing, two of which are attempting to achieve class-action status.

The timing of this filing is a little bit funny. Just last week, Musk lost his suit against Sam Altman and Open AI, which accomplished basically nothing except revealing how bad Musk is at AI. Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, two Open AI cofounders, felt in 2018 that Musk “really hasn’t done his homework [on] AI / AGI.” That appears to still be true today.

Space X said that the AI unit containing X and x AI generated only

Doubtless you are thinking, well, but what about space? There’s plenty of AI bullshit there, and we’ll get to it later, but in this case it all hinges on Starship, which has so far been prone to unexpected explosions. Starship is clutch for launching the heavier versions of Starlink satellites, some of which are currently sitting around gathering dust as they wait for their rides into orbit. Some NASA (and other) government contracts hinge on it, too.

When the filing dropped, the Starship prototypes launched had barely carried more than the Falcon 9, the lowest-end rocket Space X has. You may be thinking that’s the kind of thing that would be disclosed in an IPO filing, but you’d be mistaken. “Starship V3 is designed to deliver 100 metric tons to space in a fully reusable configuration while enabling rapid turnaround times.” I am going to skip “fully reusable” except to point out that it will limit capacity if it is even achievable.

Instead of disclosure about what Space X had actually achieved to date with Starship, the language we see is this: “We expect to commence deploying our next-generation V3 satellites, designed to offer one Tbps of downlink capacity per satellite, using Starship in the second half of 2026. We expect that a single Starship launch will be capable of deploying up to 60 V3 satellites.”

Okay, so the V3 did launch two days after the filing, on May 22nd, with a sort-of successful mission. I say “sort-of successful” in that it did not blow up on launch and did manage to reach space. The problem was, Starship couldn’t keep all its candles lit — one of its engines failed. Its booster also exploded on return, but I am less concerned about this. Just getting the satellites in space is the main problem. This test flight deployed 20 dummy satellites. I don’t know how many metric tons that is, and it seems Space X didn’t say, but it’s still shy of the goal of 60 satellites. Again, this is the sort of thing it feels like you should tell investors about? You know, how your key rocket that is required for all your big plans is actually working?

Speaking of investors, there is an irritating detail I noticed in the S-1. Assume the timeline in the S-1 is correct — we have no reason to assume this, by the way; Space X’s delays are legendary — and let’s do some math. The V3 satellites Musk is talking about weigh 2,000kg, according to an FCC filing. Sixty of them add up to 120,000kg, or 120 metric tons. If Starship works as advertised, delivering 100 metric tons, that is still not enough for all 60 V3 satellites.

“It’s Musk math,” says Chris Quilty, the cofounder and co-CEO of Quilty Space, an analytics firm. He notes that the V3 satellites may not weigh exactly 2,000kg, and that if Space X stacks them so there’s no wasted volume, 60 satellites may be possible. Sure, maybe. Hard to know without details in the filing, though. If everything hinges on this ship, I expect more fucking details on the ship, you know?

There is also some outright fantasy in this section: the vision of Starship as a point-to-point transportation system

Revenue from the launch business decreased by more than a quarter in the first three months of this year, primarily because there were fewer customer launches. One possible theory of Space X was that if someone made rocketry much cheaper, many more people would want to shoot shit into space. The paperwork suggests that Space X’s biggest customer, when it comes to rockets, is Space X.

There is also some outright fantasy in this section: the vision of Starship as a point-to-point transportation system as imagined by Elon Musk in 2017. In-space manufacturing. Space tourism. Asteroid mining. Sure. Whatever. Starship was supposed to have its first crewed flight two years ago. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. But people like fantasy I guess, so it’s there in the S-1.

Starlink has also been a cost center, though it hasn’t been as bad as AI. In 2025, the company spent

There is one viable business in this IPO. It is Starlink, the satellite internet provider, which brought in more than $11 billion in revenue last year. “The reality is that Starlink is the cashflow machine that will fund the x AI and Space X Starship business,” says Quilty.

Starlink is an actual good business, even if the revenue reported in the S-1 is less than both Morgan Stanley’s projections and what Space X told potential investors earlier this year. That may be because it was heavily discounted, and consequently, the revenue per subscriber declined by about 25 percent. I don’t know, and the filing doesn’t say, what that will mean for retaining those subscribers.

Space X has stapled its unsuccessful AI dreams to the successful business

But Starlink emerged at the right time — as TV was losing dominance, meaning less revenue for the geostationary satellite TV providers. Though it started with consumers, it’s proven itself to enterprise customers as well, Quilty notes. Starlink has a significant lead on all its competitors. Maybe Space X is juicing its numbers for an IPO, but that hardly seems necessary. And while some critics note that there’s no cost of deorbiting written into the S-1, Quilty tells me that at the low orbit at which the Starlink satellites are now being sent — they’re moving down to 380km above Earth — those objects are functionally self-cleaning. That’s because the closer an object is to Earth, the less time it takes to decay; above 700km, it may take years, but at 300km it’s weeks to months, he says.

Space X has stapled its unsuccessful AI dreams to the successful business using Starlink as a guide. The idea is: data centers in space, with Starlink beaming the data back down. The pitch is that it’s easier to get solar energy in space, so that will solve AI’s energy bottleneck. (Presumably also the environment will help with cooling, which is often done, controversially, with water. I suppose you could radiate heat to space like the James Webb Space Telescope does?) “Our goal over time is to launch 100 gigawatts of compute to space each year,” the filing reads.

In case you are wondering, some variation of the phrase “The Sun contains approximately 99.8% of the solar system’s energy” occurs four times in this document. I want you to look at how stupid that is. You could say “almost all” or “more than 99 percent” and get the job done, but it wouldn’t make you sound like a real nerd. No, you need to really drive home that the decimal place is still just not quite accurate enough for your engineering needs.

Musk has figured out that if you make a bunch of sci-fi bullshit promises, people can’t really examine them carefully for plausibility

This kind of speaks to what makes my hackles go up. A very cynical way of reading this filing is that Musk has figured out that if you make a bunch of sci-fi bullshit promises, people can’t really examine them carefully for plausibility the way they might for, I don’t know, regular data centers on Earth.

Musk, who claims to want to save humanity by spreading us out among the stars and whose car company is premised on renewable energy, bought another $2.8 billion of polluting gas turbines to power Space X’s data centers, and tried to bury that particular statistic in a footnote. Space X is already being sued for its use of turbines. It’s been granted permits for 15; it’s using 46. Those turbines even show up in the risk factor section because if an injunction is granted or the permits are revoked, the existing bad AI business will suffer. Exciting stuff!

Quilty, the space analyst, is more upbeat about data centers in space than I am, viewing them as a mid- to long-term opportunity for the company that hinges on Starship’s success. Musk is not the only person hyping them; Jeff Bezos is excited about them, too, and there are several smaller companies making their own attempts. There are good reasons to be skeptical, which are, in brief: launch and repair costs, the difficulty of replacing air and water radiation cooling, the potential dangers of space debris and solar flares, slower data transfer, and the fact that Earth-based facilities will always be more cutting-edge. To me, the excitement about space-based data centers suggests typical Silicon Valley groupthink that gave Musk a chance to execute a hail-mary pass.

By stapling several failing businesses onto Space X, Musk is attempting to become too big to fail. If his road show is successful, the fast-tracking rules change that Nasdaq just pushed through means that Space X will join the Nasdaq 100 in just 15 days — putting it in the index funds favored by many passive investors. One index fund analyst suggests the effect will be that the funds will buy ”$7-ish billion” of Space X on just one day.

Artists’ renderings of Mars are just window dressing. This IPO will make Musk the world’s first trillionaire. He’ll control 85 percent of Space X’s voting rights, by the way. (The distrust that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman felt about Musk ever loosening his grip on Open AI seems pretty justified, doesn’t it? Getting me to sympathize with Altman isn’t the most loathsome thing Musk has done — that would be the hundreds of thousands of deaths he caused — but I may resent it the most.) Assorted Wall Street types are currently jerking off imagining what they are going to do with all that sweet, sweet money. Goldman’s David Solomon didn’t do that DM slide for nothing! How do you think he got “lead left” on the prospectus?

Anyway, we know the Mars thing isn’t serious because there is nothing in Space X’s risk factors about how the company has done no work whatsoever on the biological issues facing people who might attempt to live — or even just work — in space. The hope is that people will simply get so excited about the promised sci-fi future that they’ll just ignore the rest of it.

So let’s talk about what is real: the debt, which, according to Space X’s risk factors, is almost $30 billion.

Before its IPO, Space X refinanced some of its debt with a

Also, interestingly, Space X went into a technical default on a $1.5 billion credit facility by acquiring x AI, because of the amount of debt x AI brought with it. Yet another reason to view that acquisition askance!

Because Musk has 80 percent of the Space X voting rights, shareholders effectively have none

The other thing to point out about the debt is the related party: Antonio Gracias, who sits on the board of Space X and Tesla. His company, Valor Equity Partners, has three lease deals with Space X subsidiaries, worth a combined

“That’s to me, that’s the worst,” said Nell Minow, a chair of Value Edge Advisors, to Fortune, when asked how the arrangement stacks up against all the related-party deals she’s seen in the last 40 years.

Then there’s the governance issues. Specifically: Elon Musk. If shareholders don’t like the direction of a company, they have about three major rights: They can vote, they can sell their stock, and they can sue. “We’re now in a period where all those rights are diminishing,” says Ann Lipton, a professor at the University of Colorado’s law school.

Because Musk has 80 percent of the Space X voting rights, shareholders effectively have none. The litigation rights have been curtailed, and there’s an arbitration clause that suggests “there’s a real chance he’s barred anyone from suing for securities fraud,” Lipton says. The SEC under Donald Trump is effectively toothless — there’s already an attempt at settling a suit over Musk’s failure to properly disclose his Twitter ownership before his buyout offer — so there’s no real risk from them. And the index fund inclusion makes it more difficult for people to actually get rid of Space X shares — there’s much more forced buying.

Which brings me back to We Work. One major difference between Adam Neumann and Elon Musk — besides the scale of their grandiosity — is that Musk has a proven ability to rally stocks. Another is all those leaks from the S-1 that came through before the actual document dropped to create buzz and hype. It’s a violation of securities laws to leak the S-1 before the filing, Lipton says. And while it’s not impossible that they are coming from somewhere other than Space X, based on what she’s observed publicly, she thinks that Space X is the likeliest leaker. “That’s exactly what they’re not supposed to do, but it’s what I believe they’re doing, and the SEC hasn’t shown the slightest interest,” she says. “You’d think they’d at least look into it.”

The top-line data without the details on debt and related party transactions make Space X look better than it is. Now, more than ever, our society is built around gambling, and it seems a lot of people are feeling lucky. And that means that you, my friend, may wind up helping make Elon Musk a trillionaire whether you like it or not. An early index listing gives Space X more access to institutional investors through their index funds. Those index funds will have to buy Space X shares, and that means actively managed funds will probably buy Space X shares, too, to benefit from the trade — since passive funds like index funds now outnumber active funds in assets. (The passive tail is wagging the active dog, if you will.) The likelihood the shares wind up in many people’s retirement accounts means that if Space X fails, the people who get hit are not the wised-up early investors but basically a bunch of normal people, the ones who can least afford it.

And that, along with Musk’s coziness with the Trump administration, suggests that Musk has positioned himself for a government bailout if Space X fails. Now, if that’s not spreading the light of consciousness, I don’t know what is. The largest IPO of all time, after all, also means that we will possibly see the biggest flop of all time. And if I know Musk, he’ll do everything he can to make sure someone else is on the hook for that.

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