The bond market’s assessment also jibes with SpaceX’s stock. It’s a profitless, non-dividend-paying, one-person-controlled, empire-building project trading at more than 100 times sales, about 30 times the valuation of the S&P 500 Index. That’s the very definition of a junk stock.
Original link: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-07-02/spacex-is-junk-that-s-what-the-bond-market-says
Once again, the IPO ($135/share or $2.1 Trillion) was based on the success of some long term goals like space-based data centers and a Mars colony of one million permanent residents.
This is from the same guy who promised a fleet of Tesla robotaxis by 2025.
Space experts have since pointed out that the vacuum of space does not sink heat.
Some of the assets thrown into the SpaceX valuation include xAI (which is falling behind OpenAI and Anthropic) and Starlink (which is suffering from congestion problems already and cannot be scaled up).
So this is not unexpected.
Where does this come from? Yes there are congestion issues at the moment and even congestion charges, isn’t this just a matter of more satellites? They only have like 10,000 but planned for a gazillion and are continuously increasing …. The very definition scalable
I was reading off the articles that talked about the SpaceX IPO and why it’s a bad investment. But a websearch seems to reveal a number of problems, from the collision risks caused by exponentially larger numbers of satellites to the environmental impact of the launches to get them into orbit. And then there’s the problem that Starlink satellites are falling from space by the hundreds (and not always fully burning up in the atmosphere).
As it is, congestion, especially in cities, is critical, and Starlink is now charging extreme congestion fees. For now Starlink is being promoted as a rural option, since the US is disinterested in running fiber, or even copper. (We had programs that were so budgeted but now they’ve been shut down, and Musk has a lot of access to the White House.) But satellite internet doesn’t work well for activities that require high bandwidth, such as gaming or high-resolution streaming.
Also revealed by my websearch, Starlink customers are desperate for better customer service, and instead are having to rely on online user groups.
I’m merely a casual Elite: Dangerous player and I could have told him that.
He’s a genius btw
I still want to know how having anyone on mars was supposed to be profitable.
Unless a government is paying you to run a private prison there.
The point of manned missions and colonies now is proof of concept for the expansion of human civilization to other worlds, but yes, that’s not a private for profit endeavor but a public interest one.
That said, the research and development done for the Apollo moon shots returned to the economy $14 for every one dollar spent, so it was absolutely a sound investment. Also, those patents were sold to the US government for a dollar each (at most), and so the technology gained like microcircuitry and memory foam, are public domain.
( RANT: The public domain, the creation of a robust one is – according to the Constitution of the United States – the very purpose of the whole temporary monopoly system that is the foundation of intellectual property law.)
I completely agree, and don’t think sending trillions of investment dollars to a private company is going to get us anything like the Apollo program did. Maybe we’ll be wrong and some great inventions will arise from the challenge.
Mining asteroids or the moon seem like the next thing, but the cynic in me thinks it will likely just increase wealth inequality.
Taking a page from the Fourth International–Posadists, I suspect we’re going to have to develop a working socialist / communist society before we will be able to develop a space program robust enough for asteroid mining and offworld colonization.
With the climate-crisis fast approaching critical, we may not make it at all, or may have to wait tens of thousands of years (homo-erectus went through a long stint where there was less than ten-thousand of them), but I don’t think there is a capitalist path.
The market demands EVERYTHING be for profit.
To clarify, the problem with starlink is that the investment is mostly done (they have the projected number of sats in orbit, give or take a couple thousands) so there is no rational reason for them to raise billions in cash.
In a rational world it would now have to prove itself on its own dime.
To me it is unexpected in the sense that the market has been responding positive to all previous recent fantasies …
Bit sadly it is still extremly overvalued