The SpaceX Sham

ccdrnsf about 2 hours ago 27 commentsRead Article on dissentmagazine.org

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Discussion (27 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

bigbuppo•26 minutes ago

Whether it's a good idea don't matter. Fundamentals don't matter. What matters is if enough investors think they can make a lot of money.

The bet is on a government bailout of some sort. SpaceX itself is now critical to national security, as is Starlink. Tossing every other Musk company into SpaceX means that when they fail SpaceX itself has to be bailed out. Probably safer than government bonds at this point if you can HODL.

chollida1•2 minutes ago

> Probably safer than government bonds at this point if you can HODL.

Not sure how you came to the conclusion that SPCX is safe because of the government backstop/bailout, but government bonds are less safe.

I'll take the other side of your claim here and say SPCX goes bankrupt before the US government does

nh23423fefe•6 minutes ago

Clearly logic doesn't matter if you'll say Treasuries are less safe than SpaceX because reasons.

AlexMuir•about 2 hours ago

> Although SpaceX stock has since fallen far below its IPO price

I'm a skeptic on SpaceX but the IPO price was $135, low was $108 and current price is $130. I wouldn't say that's far below.

caconym_•about 1 hour ago

Worth noting that it actually opened at $150 on public markets. It's kind of funny how we call the $135 figure the "public offering" price when there is really nothing public about it. Maybe it made more sense in some past era when it was more difficult for third parties to make private pre-IPO investments.

Not that there's anything particularly unusual about this. High profile tech companies almost universally (actually I am not aware of any moderately recent exceptions at all) fall below the actual public opening price in the days or weeks following the IPO. I honestly don't know why anybody buys them.

Dig1t•about 1 hour ago

Anyone could sign up for the IPO price. I’m a nobody and I was able to buy some shares at $135 on the opening day. You just had to sign up to participate before opening day.

encoderer•about 1 hour ago

All you had to do was put in an order with your broker (robinhood, E*Trade, etc). Some brokers did not get much allocation (Schwab) but this was not a hard stock to get at $135.

orwin•about 1 hour ago

Really? i got out of the crypto/finance bubble a few years ago, but that feels heavily like a crypto scam. You create a coin, you keep a few, sell another few to influencers cheaply, then ICO, then profit.

rtaylorgarlock•about 1 hour ago

I remember when a post of mine was flagged due to pretty obvious patent trolling against a cool FOSS project, but i made the critical error of 'crying' in my title. Maybe I should flag this to get it out of my system.

3asj176•about 1 hour ago

In retrospect it was a cunning plan to get $100B from the Musk-faithful to build Terafab. Intel is in, AmericaFirsters support it and Taiwan should feel less secure now.

The stock price is of course ridiculous: Intel lagged behind TSMC, but apparently Terafab has orders for ASML's latest gen machines (2nm). If Intel will manage to get a yield, we'll see.

All this space and AI stuff is marketing. The IPO was to get free money for a serious TSMC competitor.

rendang•about 1 hour ago

> punitive capital gains taxation

A strange turn of phrase. What is the crime in view that's supposed to be punished?

MarkusQ•about 1 hour ago

> Negative coverage of the IPO was limited due to the participation of so many major banks in the IPO process; they don’t want to poison the cash cow they’re milking for underwriting fees.

WTF? Anyone willing to read this far knows that this is flat out false. The negative coverage was unrelenting, and largely driven by big players peeved by the unconventional process. Anyone who bothers to continue past that point is probably just looking for validation.

jotux•about 1 hour ago

It's funny how our perceptions are driven by the source of our news. I generally perceived the positive coverage in regular news as unrelenting. I know the tech news sources I read were constantly complaining about rule changes and manipulations on the part of Spacex, but run-of-the-mill national news outlets seem to be endlessly hyping the stock to the point that a few of my non tech-savvy family members were asking if they needed to buy it as soon as they went public.

MarkusQ•6 minutes ago

https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/why-we-think-spacex-ipo-i...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/technology/spacex-ipo-elo...

https://montanaskeptic.substack.com/p/the-spacex-ipo-will-be...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rS3fTbC7TE

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2026/06/03/heavily-in-de...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X6YzlY_8tM

https://jamesthomason.com/spacex-ipo-bagship-carries-full-pa...

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/940001/e...

It all seems pretty negative to me.

baron3dl•about 1 hour ago

The real sham has yet to materialize. You only get a single $1T IPO. For the AI labs, investors are tapped out, and the only thing left is a huge IPO. Google, Meta, Microsoft's cash reserves are drying up, they're squeezing operations for every cent, and sure they can issue some stocks to raise cash, but not $1T.

I think this bubble's failure mode matches that of a Ponzi scheme.

sfblah•about 1 hour ago

The Fed can still declare some kind of financial emergency and increase the money printing again. My guess is this is likely, given the sway that tech CEOs have over the White House, and the reality of overseas competition.

midwestfounder•about 1 hour ago

It's difficult to get past what comes across as an attempt to analytically substantiate moralistic reasoning. The contention that it's scandalous to raise capital to support an "automated future" then a dotted line to transhumanism and then the conclusion "it's a sham" feels shoddy.

sfblah•about 1 hour ago

To me, the bigger issue with SpaceX is that there's no real argument for how space exploration will benefit humanity in any tangible way. Humans cannot live sustainably on Mars or the moon -- that's just a straight-up lie. Satellites add some value for sure, but it's pretty limited, which helps explain why most of the launches just support StarLink (which itself is probably unsustainable financially). This whole thing is just a bunch of space nerds pushing society down a terrible cul-de-sac which will lower quality of life in meaningful ways in the coming century.

ggreer•42 minutes ago

How is Starlink financially unsustainable? In 2025, Starlink generated $4.42 billion in income from $11.39 billion in revenue. Last quarter Starlink generated $1.6 billion in income from $4.3 billion in revenue.[1] So it's already a profitable enterprise, and their costs will likely go down over time as their launch capabilities improve.

1. https://s21.q4cdn.com/184289198/files/doc_financials/2026/q2...

ck2•about 1 hour ago

it's worse than a scam, he's doing real, permanent damage to the environment

* https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/31/spacex-wont-remove-all-of-...

and illegally, not sure how he's allowed to get away with it

and each starlink deorbit is putting toxic pollution into the atmosphere without penalty (launches too)

* https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...

ggreer•14 minutes ago

The article about atmospheric pollution from deorbiting satellites leaves out the biggest source of stratospheric aluminum oxide: Solid rocket boosters. A single Ariane 6 launch creates 100-200 tons of aluminum oxide in the atmosphere (depending on whether it uses 2 or 4 boosters). SpaceX doesn't use solid boosters, so it's a rounding error in terms of its contribution. Also SpaceX is switching to Starship, which uses methane instead of kerosene, drastically reducing the amount of soot produced.

Last year when this topic came up, I did the math for how long it would take before aluminum oxide from satellites was worth worrying about. If you assume the entire satellite is made from aluminum, and that aluminum oxide is as bad as the most potent ozone-destroying CFC, and that the particles stay in the atmosphere forever, it would take 5,000 years before atmospheric levels of aluminum oxide reached the same concentration as R-12.[1] So basically, it's not worth worrying about.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45493143#45494364

Dig1t•38 minutes ago

How many satellites would it take burning up in the atmosphere to raise the aluminum content of the atmosphere by just 1 part per billion (not million)? Each satellite is 300kg, it would take 57 MILLION satellites. The cost to do that at current prices would be $138 trillion.

Airplane exhaust has a real measurable impact on the atmosphere, curious why people choose to target satellite debris instead of plane exhaust as their topic of environmental concern.

slowmovintarget•about 1 hour ago

Ah yes... Critical Space Theory.

gfosco•about 1 hour ago

SpaceX and Elon are the litmus test for the future. You're either with him, or your opinions are ignorant and irrelevant.

benj111•about 1 hour ago

Sarcasm? Hard to tell.

ubiquitysc•about 1 hour ago

They work for Gab, not sarcasm

qwerpy•about 1 hour ago

@cdrnsf is posting negative articles all you do? isn't it exhausting to bathe in negativity all day long?