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#spacex#going#tesla#space#don#more#years#inflation#revenue#car
Discussion (147 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
So I can't even see it, I care less about "vibe coding" but it sounds like someone registered a domain just to get attention on their amazing take about why they think they're qualified to tell the world the future.
Was surprised mine did not - usually a toss up with HN links. I don't get reasoning just "NONCOMPLIANT ACTION". It is interesting to have a flag telling you the domain is new, though
I appreciate this website. This format is intentional and serves a purpose.
It's great to see the small web in action.
You're right to push back on that. Let me get the details instead of hand waving.
I like having relevant graphics stickied while text is displayed alongside it (assuming by blog post you mean the typical page-like top to bottom approach).
edit: damn, if these designs are hated what modern approaches do people like? I feel like scroll based text is a relatively unexplored idea compared to the typical blog post.
When it comes to web content, I vastly prefer web like interfaces that you can't reproduce in print.
• Don't hijack any browser functionality. Scrolling shall scroll the document, the end.
• Don't scale something to the screen size, breaking zoom! Especially don't do it so that when zooming causes a different scroll position and then it all jumps to a different slide. WTF!
• Make it accessible!
If you want to make flashy graphics and animations make a game. That is not meant as to belittle games, I love games.
"• Don't hijack any browser functionality. Scrolling shall scroll the document, the end."
How would you consider the page hijacking scroll functionality? You can scroll down normally. There are animations based on scroll position, maybe that's what you meant?
The New York Times generally does the "lots of data, text and graphs in a scrolling presentation" tastefully.
We've spent a long time optimizing the printed word, including pages with diagrams and illustrations on them. You don't need to reinvent the wheel for every blog
Then not only 4.3T reachable, but even 43T.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jun/10/inflation-r...
You may be on to something...
“You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over, you know I can say it now ... you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil. Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran, until right now.”
OK then.
at some point interest rates should reach double digits like in the 70s following oil crisis
the only crazy scenario for spaceX is it does space exploration/mining and finds something extremely exotic or valuable and sought after.
All spaceX has to do is keep being as innovative and industrious as it is now, in the physical world as all other companies are getting very lazy or just working on software. Eventually it'll probably go the way of GE because humans are humans, but I think we have a few decades until more compelling places to work come up.
SpaceX seemed to lose a big step when Musk got involved in DOGE. I don't know if key people left or what, but the pace seem to slow considerably, and the successes also seemed to come to a crashing halt.
https://en.macromicro.me/collections/23654/dedollarization/1...
Besides, if I was pricing that in, I'd be buying indexes and not a specific stock. The 70% YoY inflation would rise all tides. Not just SpaceX.
Or, in other words, it's a joke.
"China launches debut mission of Falcon 9-like rocket with no advance notice" https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
Spacex is going to get rekt, China has all the materials and workforce
But either way, yeah, I’m not willing to bet much money on USD4.3T unless we can get some serious financial engineering, (read “circular deals”), going.
According to their brief, most of the revenue is going to come from AI!
The rockets are apparently just "minor" now.
I've got no idea what a share of SpaceX is worth today or 14 years from now, but fully reusable rockets are going to be one of the most important engineering achievements in human history, and SpaceX appears far in the lead to getting there first. Ignoring everything else they're at the cutting edge of.
It's really just sad to me how upset how many people are about an IPO. "Imagine what a waste, if the stock market were to overvalue the company dedicated to solving the challenges required to make humanity a multi-planetary species, when this graph clearly shows we could've wisely allocated more of civilization's resources to Saudi Aramco."
I would not voluntarily take that bet, but we have regulatory and financial engineering nearly forcing me to do so.
Just to quantify, "The projected SpaceX weighting is around 0.6% of QQQ."
So if you have $100,000 invested in QQQ and SpaceX winds up say 4x overvalued, it may eventually wind up costing you as much as $450 (i.e. 1/5th as large a loss you experienced today in QQQ).
if I could invest in just the rockets that would be cool. much less downside risk
SpaceX's target 2040 revenue of $4.3T. Let us assume that the US GDP grows at 3% p/a; in 2040 we may project a GDP of around $50T. Naturally, SpaceX would pushing 10% of the total US GDP.
Such a change is possible. It is not out of the question. Companies can and do reach that size, though obviously for mathematical reasons only a small number do. However, the claim that one will reach that size 14 years in advance beggars scrutiny. Simple credulity is not justified and it naturally follows that there will be a large number of people, even people with very bullish outlooks, who do not believe SpaceX will meet target. 30% growth p/a for 14 years would, historically, represent a fantastic rate of return and yet still it falls considerably short of target.
All the same, part of the promise to investors (whether one believes it or not) is that, even if SpaceX were to fall short of target, the long term revenue prospects are so explosive that one can't help but feel it's a good deal. (Is it? Time will tell.)
GDP rates should be nominal (5-6%) not 3%
Also, go back in time and do the same analysis for Anthropic in 2023 or Nvidia in 2021, would you have predicted their current Annual revenue for them?
SpaceX will never be 10% based on rockets.
Rockets will get shit canned in the next crash because it's less important and spacex not having saved sufficiently will get wrecked.
Their 10% basically depends on them getting to super intelligent ai first despite others obviously being more successful.
An actually wildly successful projection would be asking us to imagine they weathered the next crash ok and were very successful at rockets after exiting AI.
Sometimes there are clever ways to hack the system and the regulators can react and blame poor hindsight, that's not the case here.
Maybe make the graphic aria-hidden and add an empty tag with aria-description (or other kind of tag only screen readers see) describing the current graphic to each slide.
And why would they put their money into SpaceX anyway? What has SpaceX said the $3.4T will be based on?
1. Space-based AI datacenters. Yes, they actually said that. Anyone who knows anything about space and datacenters knows this is insane.
2. Starlink. They're saying they're going to make $3.4T by... running an ISP. In space.
3. Starship. They are betting that so many people want to send junk into space that it'll make them $3.4T.
4. Possible Tesla merger. This would definitely bump up the numbers. But Tesla's future depends on cars, AI and robotics. The US's electric car market is in decline (Thanks, Trump!) and BYD is producing cheaper electric cars faster (though US buyers won't buy BYD's, the US electric car market isn't as big as the global market, and is smaller since removing tax rebates). It's clearly not a real AI competitor, if they just rented out their AI datacenters to the competition. And China is churning out robots constantly that actually work and are cheap.
As you can see from other analyses (https://fortune.com/2026/05/31/spacex-tesla-odds-of-merging-...), their cash flow is actually much lower than they claim. The valuations are crazily high. SpaceX/Tesla's claims of how they're going to make money verges on snake oil.
Elon is the meme king.
Prices for solar panels have dropped 90% in the last 10 years.
Price per kilo to Low Earth Orbit has dropped ~50% in the last 10 years.
SpaceX's entire plan is to keep dropping both of these prices down even more with massive solar panel / starship factories.
So, given that you're bought the GPUs, you could launch them into space, but you have the alternative option of ... not launching them into space.
If you just build in space no one will be able to hold up those permits.
For what it's worth I don't disagree with you.
This depends on ridiculously low costs to orbit. But there truly is unlimited power up there from the sun.
And if solar panels drop another 90%, why not just slap them on earth?
Oh, sure, both kinds of factories are legitimately slashable as they are totally the same thing. Pretty much. Right? :-(
They definitely haven't hit all of their goals, but I don't think anything they want to do is impossible, just really difficult.
Erm, ESA thought it was a dream:
"Twenty years ago, before SpaceX had launched a single rocket, Richard Bowles, a sales director of the European Arianespace launch consortium, said SpaceX’s ambition to launch, recover and reuse rockets, cutting the price of launches in half, was a dream.
‘SpaceX primarily sems to be selling a dream. Which is good, we should all dream,’ he said. ‘I think reusability is a dream… How am I going to respond to a dream?… First of all you don’t wake people up. They have to wake up on their own… They’re not supermen. Whatever they can do, we can do.’"
https://spectator.com/article/spacex-has-put-europe-to-shame...
-Elon
The HN title editorializes its own answer to the author's question.
the title does the reflection on behalf of the reader which is a disservice.
SpaceX or any of AI companies for that matter is absolutely not worth their money, but they will be carried through by government legislation, because otherwise the economy will be fucked for the US.
SpaceX ... 4.3 trillion...what the fuck are you on about
The economy is already F'd because so few people are actually working productively- it's been a laptop-class driven economy since the 80s.
Hard to know how to where to go from there because I find that quite insane.
"Why SpaceX's 2040 Revenue Forecast of $4.3T is highly unlikely"
adding a mode on this that prevents animations would be nice addition tho
I'd have preferred the essay. This kind of Claude Code landing page turns people off when the content is otherwise meaningful.
The target audience will be looking for any reason to excuse this logic, and by vibe coding them a website you've given them their reason.
But 15 years is also plenty of time for PRC to establish reusable and lithography to invalidate SpaceX valuation rational by driving terrestrial dc and launch to commodity prices. It's like EVs, anything PRC decides to prioritize industrially, competitors going to have a bad time, but still doesn't stop market for valuating Tesla more than all PRC auto producers combined.
Would not be out of question for finance bros to figure out how to continue decoupling valuation from reality if that keeps system going.
The Fed's response will have to be to raise rates, which is going to crush the multiple of any stock whose valuation is based on the expectation of massive growth.
If I learned a good lesson, it's never say never....
Still have yet to hear how data centers in space are actually supposed to be a good thing when cooling them is much harder than on earth because they are in a near vacuum with much less heat dissipation.
> Setting up facilities to beam down energy to earths surface could also be an opportunity
Also interested to learn how this is done without creating a death ray with potentially catastrophic consequences
So if all the current telcos in the US lose all of their customers and SpaceX captures 100% of them without degrading the current margin/pricing at all, they are 5% of their way to the $4.3t goal. And the only way I can see that happening is from government mandate - which if things don't change I guess never say never. But still a very very very long way off
Just add a whole Apple worth of revenue yearly and they can just barely make it.
There's practically no way there's enough RF spectrum to handle that many clients from even LEO. There's a reason why carriers are moving to smaller and smaller and smaller cells, and places like sports venues have highly directional antenna arrays to handle the number of active clients. Will there be customers? Sure. Probably a lot! Will it be an actually massive chunk of the overall subscriber base mostly using their networks? Not a chance.
They can't even get capacity up enough to support their rural customers on practically idealized antenna array hardware.
> Setting up data centers in orbit (easier said than done) would be another huge revenue stream.
What applications demand that kind of premium on cost of running? Why choose that instead of terrestrial datacenters? What's the overall use-case for why one should bother deploying their applications into a space datacenter? I'm genuinely asking. Aside from needing to ensure low-ish latency to the most remote parts of the world and being willing to pay whatever to have that, I don't get it.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
Tesla's recent annual car sales:
2023: 1.81M
2024: 1.79M
2025: 1.64M
Elon's failed timeline predictions about self-driving and Robotaxi fleets are too numerous to attempt to cite here.
What has mostly exceeded expectations about Tesla is their stock price compared to actual productivity.
A lot of "income" comes from selling regulatory credits, not cars.
FSD is up to v14 and there is no sense in which it's "Full", or is likely to be "Full" any time soon.
The early computer industry created a good few companies which achieved profitability quickly and posted solid YoY expansion for decades.
The histories of SpaceX and Tesla show no evidence of that pattern.
I think the SpaceX IPO is way overvalued, but have you actually tried FSD v14 yourself?
My car has 8-year old hardware running v12, and it handles like 90+% of my driving. When I test drove 14 it blew my mind how good it had gotten in only 8 months of development. In my opinion, there's question that it's "when," not "if."
That has always been the question since Elon started making self-driving claims back in 2016. If you believed him any time up until now you'd have been wrong and potentially own a car that will never drive without a responsible human in the driver's seat.
Another question is how many resources each "self-driving" car needs to complete its task. All of the major self-driving taxi providers do have monitoring staff who need to intervene occasionally to get the car unstuck from some situations.
If you need to pay one monitor per 10 cars you can run a taxi service in specific markets but it's pretty hard to roll that out to a fleet of millions of personally-owned cars.
Yet if the car crashes while in FSD mode, it is still you who are legally the driver and you who will be responsible. You are the driver, regardless of what the name of the car's software is.
This can be contrasted with e.g. Mercedes' offering, which is actually self-driving, and where Mercedes is responsible if the car crashes (The limitation in that case, of course, is the very limited roads and conditions where that software will actually be enabled.).
So, yes: Until Tesla (or someone else) actually takes responsibility while the car drives itself, and the "driver" is legally just a passenger, it is not a fully self-driving car. If you ever take your attention away from the road while using FSD you are breaking the law, which says that as the driver, you must always pay attention.
Oh, they only have a tiny fleet in a few cities which are still mostly monitored? Strange.
Is just a downright lie. The Tesla Model Y maintained its title as the world's best-selling vehicle in 2025 across all powertrains, marking its third consecutive year at number one. Even the CT is the best selling EV pickup, the last bestseller could not find a way to sell it profitably.
No, the RAV-4 won that title. Its also pretty easy to make that claim when you're only making practically two models of vehicles compared to most other companies with several models. A single car selling well isn't necessarily telling the whole story.
> Even the CT is the best selling EV pickup
Easy to do when 20%+ are being bought by the ownership's other companies.
The CT is a massive failure measured by their own stated expectations. They stated they'd sell somewhere between 250,000-500,000 units a year. They ended up selling only a bit over 20,000 last year.
FWIW, the F-150 Lightning outsold the CT for 2025.
Is this something Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any of the other big AI investors are close to solving?
It was only a few years ago people were saying Tesla was going to own the entire car market, and everyone else would go out of business. The Cybertruck was going to be the best selling car of all time, the insurance business was going to be a massive money maker etc.
None of these things happened.
I plan to stay the fuck away from it either way, but he's at least someone who's not only good at this stuff, showing their work and approaching it professionally.
I haven't had time to watch the video, but I read through part of the blog post, and seems he believes 1.2T is possible,but I won't know how much I agree with that until I finish reading/watching it all.
It's at, the very least, a professional presentation so it's a hell of a lot easier to see why and what he does/doesn't agree with.
All 3 went out of the window sometimes around 2015 or so.
(out of 22,000 employees)
Because many of them are going to sell sell sell at least half of their shares
Which then means the value will PLUMMET
KNOWING OpenAI et al WILL fail is not enough to make money from that.
People seem to have a weak grasp on how supply and demand dynamics actually work in a market. Price doesn't magically plummet; people need to agree to buy and sell at a given price.