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Comment by ralfd | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX will swing wildly in future, also exploding/successful Starship flights and enthusiasm for moon landing/Artemis missions.

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Which is true, but silly. SpaceX's rocket business is currently a $4B/year business. SpaceX's $2T valuation has nothing to do with launching rockets, a little bit to do with being an ISP and a lot to do with AI hype.

Yes, they claim the TAM for AI is 24 trillion dollars. Do with that what you will.

The $2T valuation definitely depends on Starship working well. Orbital data centers have no chance of being profitable otherwise.

The $2T doesn’t depend on anything to do with space. People are investing in Elon, not any specific product or technology. Hence his roll up of X and Xai into SpaceX and Tesla soon too. SpaceX is The Elon Company, not space or cars or AI.

And anyway, orbital data centers have no chance. They’re just like the Mars colony, an Elon boondoggle.

Feels like a bad bet. People are not immortal. What happens if he gets hit by a bus or has a heart attack?

It’s emotional, people like to have someone to believe in, who turns off their brains a bit. So annoying these pesky brains, always whispering rational things to do. So much more comfortable to just blindly trust into someone.

Funny how the above absolutely does not apply at the local scale. The same people blindly trusting Elon probably don’t trust their neighbors to even hold a parcel for them.

If the price moves down when a Starship test flight doesn't achieve all objectives that's probably a good opportunity to buy. Many people think "rocket go boom, must be bad" but to some extent it's expected during the development phase. They get more useful data about where the limits are when it doesn't work.

Of course there's limits to that, but SpaceX has a lot of cash to absorb failures, unlike in the early days.

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