…and a litmus test.
The reactions on X have been truly deranged.
[Monday-afternoon update]
Elon’s motivations, explained: SpaceX and the Sentient Sun.
Those of us who have read a lot of science fiction are much better prepared for this century than those who have not.
Very possibly. SpaceX, however just became an AI company with a launch division. We’ll see how that turns out.
Two characterizations I’ve heard. Buying SpaceX is like buying a lottery ticket with the odds to be determined. Buying SpaceX is a pure play on Musk.
SpaceX was already a global ISP with a launch division. That’s worked out pretty well. It’s in the process of also becoming a global cell service provider with a launch division and now has truly eye-popping plans to become the dominant provider of AI compute power in the entire solar system and to materially move the Kardashev needle where human civilization is concerned – while retaining the launch division. I think that’s all going to turn out fine.
Like electricity and metallurgy, AI will be one of the core industrial technologies going forward. There is no other company so favorably situated to dominate that sector than SpaceX.
The lottery ticket comparison fails utterly. There is almost no chance of a win when buying a lottery ticket. Buying SpaceX, there is almost no chance of a failure.
So, yes, SpaceX is a pure play on Musk. Edison’s investors did pretty well in the 19th and 20th centuries. Musk’s investors will do even better in the 21st.
It is a problem where you have two divisions. One division is making money and the other is speculative.
For some reason people value the speculative far higher than the real. Probably on the thought that the speculative could blow up (hopefully the rockets don’t). We saw this most famously in the dot-com era.
How do you value a stock share?
If the company makes money and declares dividends, you value it mostly on how much you can get in dividends. So the stock is valued at some small multiple of the last dividend, because it’s likely to keep providing that dividend.
If the company isn’t making money, or plows all of it back into expanding, you have to value it in some other fashion. Generally on how much you think you can sell the share to someone else in the future. Often the analysts do some sort of multiple of overall revenue, or some other method, but those are window dressing on the “bigger sucker” valuation. It results in odd and volatile valuations.
Well, the leaders of current and former Marxist governments have all been self-important sociopaths so it’s hardly a surprise that the same is largely true of wannabe types in the here and now. Our job is to do our best to keep these cretins from ever re-attaining significant political power. They play rough and they play dirty, but I think the job is doable, though obviously it will be far easier some places than others.
RE “the leaders of current and former Marxist governments have all been self-important sociopaths”
It’s not an issue of “Marxist governments” …
By FAR the most vital urgent and DEEP understanding everyone needs to gain is that a mafia network of manipulating PSYCHOPATHS (or sociopaths) is, and always has been, governing big businesses and institutions (eg official medicine, big academia, big tech, big banks, big religions), governments and the world — the evidence is, and has been, very solid in front of everyone’s “awake” nose: see “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room”… https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
“We’ll sit on the edge of our seats watching made-up tales about psychopathic killers while psychopathic killers rule the world.” — Caitlin Johnstone, Independent Journalist
Yet…
“I’ve come to realize that the biggest problem anywhere in the world is that people’s perceptions of reality are compulsively filtered through the screening mesh of WHAT THEY WANT, AND DO NOT WANT, TO BE TRUE.” — Travis Walton, Author
And psychopaths are typically NOT how Hollywood propaganda movies (or the Wikipedia/WebMD propaganda outlets) have showcased them. And therefore one better RE-learns what a psychopath REALLY is. One’ll then know why they exploit/harm everyone, why they want to control everyone and have been creating a new world order/global dictatorship, and many other formerly puzzling things will become very clear.
Of even greater significance in terms of global mass understanding is this…
But global rulership by psychopaths is only ONE part of the equation that makes up the destructive human condition as the cited article above explains.
Without a proper understanding, and full acknowledgment, of the true WHOLE problem and reality, no real constructive LASTING change is possible for humanity.
And if anyone does NOT acknowledge, recognize, and face (either wittingly or unwittingly) the WHOLE truth THEY are helping to prevent this from happening. And so they are “part of the problem” and not part of the solution.
“The world is the way that it is because most people do not care enough (even if they SAY they want things to be different) to change it through their actions.” — Mark Passio, Spiritual Teacher
“If we have learned anything in the past six years, it is that vaccinologists, doctors, and the government in general do not have good intentions and never did. The clear intention of everyone concerned was and is to make as much dirty money as possible, letting any amount of collateral damage slide, including a genocide and mass poisoning [with Covid-19 jabs]. The fact [is] that Big Pharma just murdered millions of people, with the full support of government, media, and “science”. With Covid, everyone is part of the fraud, many of them paid off, so no one has any reason to expose it, and big reasons to bury it. Don’t believe anything these people tell you, ABOUT ANYTHING. It isn’t time for a civil war against your neighbors, it is time for a revolution against these hoaxers and thieves.” — Miles Mathis, American author, in 2025
“Ignorance is the root cause of all Evil. Since only Knowledge eradicates ignorance, it is our duty and moral obligation to educate ourselves, as well as the masses around us.” — Anonymous
Speaking of ignorance is evil, how can the masses get out of this whole mess? First, EVERYONE needs to learn, and teach others, what true morality is (it’s NOT the same as religious morality): https://www.whatonearthishappening.com/news/988-mark-passio-interviewed-by-axel-dahi-2026-04-16
DE wrote:
“Well, the leaders of current and former Marxist governments have all been self-important sociopaths so it’s hardly a surprise that the same is largely true of wannabe types in the here and now. ”
I would modify your comment for clarity. It’s essentially true but I think it’s swapping the cart and the horse just a little:
I think there are psychopaths and sociopaths that want to rule and they use Marxism/Communism as the tool to get there.
I have no problem with that. It’s always the psychopathy and sociopathy that come first anyway. Marxism was invented by Marx and fairly recently. But psychopaths and sociopaths of a megalomaniacal bent have always sought power and pre-Marxist political structures – imperium, monarchy, feudalism – were just as serviceable for their purposes.
One can certainly find these psychopathologies represented by the majority of the ancient emperors of history and by kings and aristocrats of all eras. I am personally of the opinion that both the hereditary nature of most pre-18th-century apex political roles and the near universal tradition that royals and aristocrats inter-marry only among themselves has produced a general reinforcement of these psychopathologies in ruling families, and those with ambitions to be such, generally.
Such political milieus, in fact, provide active incentives toward maximization of such psychopathologies. There are many examples in history of the most ruthless of a set of royal siblings succeeding to a throne by the simple expedient of killing all of them but himself. There are even examples of succession via patricide.
Republics, since their modern re-inception, have proven less fruitful milieus for those of the megalomaniacal persuasion, but have hardly proven categorically immune to their influence.
I agree with what you say. But I would add religion to your list: Sometimes religion was used as a mechanism for acquiring power by the psychos and socios:
“But psychopaths and sociopaths of a megalomaniacal bent have always sought power and pre-Marxist political structures – imperium, monarchy, feudalism – were just as serviceable for their purposes.”
Agreed. The papacy, for example, while not officially a heritable post has, nonetheless, seen what amount to dynasties during its history. And there have certainly been popes who were pretty obvious psychopaths/sociopaths.
Islam has never even bothered to pretend that sultans and caliphs were not hereditary titles. The schism between Sunni and Shia, at its roots, pivots on a question of hereditary succession.
Why a trillionaire like Elon Musk is good for all of us:
https://open.substack.com/pub/fasterplease/p/elon-musk-is-a-trillionaire-why-thats
Meh. We’ll see if he’s a trillionaire after the AI bubble pops.
I’m not impressed by his partially successful efforts to get immediately listed on major indices after the IPO. For example, SpaceX is eligible for inclusion on Nasdaq 100 and Russell 1000 (15 days out for the former and 5-10 days for the latter). SpaceX also tried (and failed) to get fast tracked into the S&P 500. If SpaceX fully succeeds, it exploits a purchasing dynamic where these index funds automatically buy shares to match the index they follow.
Apparently, if SpaceX can follow through with a listing on the two indices above, it’ll be a few tens of billions of forced purchases by the respective index funds. I think that is wrong.
I don’t mind businesses or Musk in particular, giving the AI/LLM roulette wheel a spin. Good luck to them! I do mind when these parties (AI firms, OpenAI and Anthropic are likely next in line on the IPO treadmill) create exploits of conservative trading systems for short term profit.
Had you been around in 1900 I suspect you would have been among those yelling “Get a horse!” every time one of the era’s noisy, smelly, fragile automobiles put-putted by.
That’s roughly where we are now with AI technology. Today’s LLMs and such are going to be viewed, not too far down the road, like we now view turn-of-the-20th-century autos – something genuinely new and useful, but with a lot of development left to go.
That said, the main point is that, like wired telegraphy, mass-scale steel production, mechanical agriculture, electricity, automobiles, radio, aircraft and any number of other things one could name, AI is not some temporarily amusing flash in the pan, it’s a fundamental industrial technology that will also soon be a fundamental daily-life technology and which will be with us indefinitely.
So, for that matter, is fully-and-quickly reusable space launch.
The foofaraw about stock indexes is a tempest in a teacup. SpaceX represents a considerable chunk of new value added to the sum total of all publicly-traded equities. The indexes will get with the program when it becomes clear SpaceX is neither a passing fad nor a grift of any kind. If the gate guards of the indices dawdle too much in enfolding SpaceX, it is exactly the financial giants who run the index funds – and, more generally, their clients – who will be annoyed with said guards for “protecting” them from so much future appreciation. It is absolutely essential that new, vigorous and fast-appreciating companies be added to the various stock indexes with reasonable dispatch so as to compensate for the former stalwarts of such indices that have faded in the stretch or fallen by the wayside entirely.
Wall Street “analysts” admittedly have some getting-used-to to do. SpaceX is not a conventional industrial in a well-defined sector that impresses only through quarterly earnings and/or high dividends. SpaceX, though highly profitable at the gross level, spends all – and, in some years, more – than its considerable gross profit on R&D and capex to enlarge existing markets and create new ones. The appreciation of the stock is not based on conventional quarterly metrics, but upon continual growth of the overall business. This is, to a fairly considerable degree, a new paradigm so it is unsurprising that conventionally-minded analysts see SpaceX as an anomaly. It is. We will all be better off if it does not remain a singularity in that respect.
Wall Street “analysts” admittedly have some getting-used-to to do. SpaceX is not a conventional industrial in a well-defined sector that impresses only through quarterly earnings and/or high dividends. SpaceX, though highly profitable at the gross level, spends all – and, in some years, more – than its considerable gross profit on R&D and capex to enlarge existing markets and create new ones. The appreciation of the stock is not based on conventional quarterly metrics, but upon continual growth of the overall business. This is, to a fairly considerable degree, a new paradigm so it is unsurprising that conventionally-minded analysts see SpaceX as an anomaly. It is. We will all be better off if it does not remain a singularity in that respect.
My view is that instead we will find out once again that even very valuable things can be ridiculously overvalued. Sorry, I don’t need to be a buggy whip manufacturer to be dubious of this particular IPO.
Small portion of the company was issued during the IPO (4%) and lower quality stock (less voting power).
Heavier involvement by retail investors (that is, non-professional investors). Not the smart money.
The combination of low liquidity and mandatory index fund purchases. Great for SpaceX’s short term finances, but it’s going to hit a bunch of other people.
It would require massive growth for many years to justify the present valuation.
Frankly, I lived through the dotcom bubble and this has all the symptoms – including the insistence that the economics is different this time. For bubbles, it’s always different this time – until it isn’t.
Chill. There’s no way this can fail. Just like flying cars and Gyro jet pistols and the way they took over their respective industries.
A large part of the problem with flying cars is the enormous amount of regulation that came in. Piper Cubs are all 70+ years old because you couldn’t build them today.
Gyro jets, on the other hand, did have inherent problems with the idea (inaccuracy and weakness at short range, plus hugely expensive ammunition). I wonder if they would be more reasonable to build today. They might actually be able to make guided bullets now.
M wrote:
” Piper Cubs are all 70+ years old because you couldn’t build them today.”
I don’t think that’s true at all. People completely rebuild them all the time. This includes the wood wings. They often have to do work on the welded frame.
I don’t think people WANT to build new ones. Especially since there are Super Cub kits out there that give you more performance.
And let’s face it, your average pilot today is a bit heftier than the pilot of 70+ years ago.
Also I don’t know what the availability of 65hp engines are.
Reply is to Brinksedge at 3:43 AM.
I think you missed his point. There’s no way you would be able to get the Cub through the regulatory hurdles today to factory build new ones. Regulations and Lawfare have destroyed the small aircraft industry. Homebuilts and antiques dominate small aircraft today.
john hare wrote:
“I think you missed his point. There’s no way you would be able to get the Cub through the regulatory hurdles today to factory build new ones. Regulations and Lawfare have destroyed the small aircraft industry. Homebuilts and antiques dominate small aircraft today.”
If that was his point it was eminently missable:
All he said was “….you couldn’t build them today.”
He wasn’t explicit and say that you couldn’t get a certified version built by a company.
But in fact you CAN build a Piper Cub today – as a homebuilt as you say. Homebuilts are guided by regulations too.
But if that was really his point – that you can’t get a certified Piper Cub production line going using original materials and t4echniques then I agree.
I remember gyro jet pistols, don’t recall anybody saying they’d take over any industries. Especially given it was a miniature bazooka. We have flying cars. The problem is over-regulation. And the same thing could happen to Musk,
I’d call raising nearly $86 billion by selling a fiddly 4% of the stock outstanding a pretty nice bit financial engineering. Your mileage obviously differs.
“Professional investors” have been prominent among those dinged by every actual bubble or fly-by-night grift that has ever come along. Lots of red faces after Enron.
They also like to be able to exercise a lot of voting rights because they always imagine they are smarter than the people actually running the companies. Considering how few of them manage to beat the indexes with any consistency, I think they tend to exhibit excessive self-regard.
“It would require massive growth for many years to justify the present valuation.”
The company has been around for nearly a quarter-century. It has exhibited massive valuation growth for many years – especially the last 10.
I lived through the Dot-com “bubble” too – probably at considerably closer range than you. I was working at a company that made e-commerce software and wound up in the water when that ship got torpedoed.
The “bubble” wasn’t about e-commerce as a thing, it was about all of the silly, small start-ups that popped up like mushrooms after a rainstorm early on. I later made up a dark-humorous fictional name for such an outfit based on what I think was the sort of hyper-specialization that was expected of e-commerce and which did not materialize – toothpastetoothbrushandcleanundiestoyouronenightstand.com. Basically, Door-Dash for the pick-up culture.
E-commerce, in fact, did the opposite of “pop” as it was no bubble. It just mostly migrated to Amazon which remains the 800-lb. gorilla of e-commerce to this day.
AI applications and, especially, AI compute horsepower are not bubbles, they are a new fundamental industrial technology with no obvious upper limit on use cases. NIMBY-ism, leftist politics and regulatory red tape will continue to limit how much compute horsepower can be built out terrestrially, but space has no such limits.
The idea of space-based AI data centers has been floated by a number of companies, all but one small, all but one start-ups and none of which has the ability to buy megatons of launch capability at provider cost. SpaceX is already the presumptive 800-pound gorilla of this sector just as Amazon turned out to be anent the Dot-com boom/bust.
Unless you think AI in its entirety is just going to suddenly dry up and blow away – which definitely would make you a buggy-whip maker – some outfit is going to dominate the physical AI hardware sector. SpaceX is the only such with all the pieces either in place or a-building.
Unless you think AI in its entirety is just going to suddenly dry up and blow away
Sorry that’s a false dilemma. It’s like claiming my car is either worth zero dollars or a quarter of a million. AI can be worth an enormous amount and still fall more than an order of magnitude shy of current, lofty valuations.
Here’s my take. By January 20, 2030, the entirety of the US AI sector will be valued in the stock market at less than SpaceX is valued today (2.1 trillion USD in year 2026 dollars to adjust for inflation) with a good chance that it’ll be well under a trillion USD.
In other words, the wheels will have come off of the car by the first year of the next presidential term.
Finally, I have this question: is anyone’s job substantially more valuable or productive than it used to be because of AI tools? Shouldn’t we be seeing evidence of the productivity of these tools to justify the present AI valuation?
AI is going to be big. But like e-commerce, there will be a proliferation of many small companies trying to get in the game and make a killing. There will be some investment in those. But eventually most will fail and a few majors will survive and AI will continue to be a technological force multiplier.
Well, you’ve called your shot. Now we’ll have to see if you can put it over the fence 3-1/2 years hence.
For that to happen, not only will SpaceX’s valuation have to tank big-time, so will that of Nvidia, the current market leader in AI chip tech and whose market cap – currently almost $5 trillion – is based almost entirely on that status.
Nvidia is already long-since a component of all of those stock indices you’re so worried about. So if the AI sector takes a broad-brush bath, the index funds and all of the retirees, widders ‘n orphans who depend on them are going to be up a well-known tributary without a well-known propulsive implement.
SpaceX plans to build a lot more AI chips than Nvidia and production should be well underway by the time of your temporal line in the sand. There should already be quite a few of those AI data center sats already in Earth orbit too, cranking out revenue. The first purely SpaceX lunar expeditions should also be underway to keep the ball rolling.
On the productivity question, my understanding is that the ranks of legal secretaries, paralegals and other hewers-of-wood and drawers-of-water at law firms have been heavily replaced by AI.
Of course we’re also seeing stories about fictional case citations invented by LLMs and such, too.
What is unclear from such reports is how the AI model outputs compare to human work product. Considering the wretched educations most people get these days, it hardly strikes me as a slam-dunk that AI glitches exceed those of increasingly clueless recent grads. Perhaps the biggest contribution AI will make in the near-term is avoiding the more severe consequences of the substantial idiocracy in which we now live.
There are all sorts of potential AI applications I can think of, but I think I will do a bit of investigating to see what the current state of practice, if any, is for those before popping off about them. Some of them involve potential applications for AI-driven humanoid robots such as Tesla’s Optimus and others involve non-kinetic computations of various kinds.
For that to happen, not only will SpaceX’s valuation have to tank big-time, so will that of Nvidia, the current market leader in AI chip tech and whose market cap – currently almost $5 trillion – is based almost entirely on that status.
I think it will be a huge learning opportunity, particularly in how the old economy keeps intruding on the new.
Wall Street “analysts” admittedly have some getting-used-to to do. SpaceX is not a conventional industrial in a well-defined sector that impresses only through quarterly earnings and/or high dividends. SpaceX, though highly profitable at the gross level, spends all – and, in some years, more – than its considerable gross profit on R&D and capex to enlarge existing markets and create new ones. The appreciation of the stock is not based on conventional quarterly metrics, but upon continual growth of the overall business. This is, to a fairly considerable degree, a new paradigm so it is unsurprising that conventionally-minded analysts see SpaceX as an anomaly. It is. We will all be better off if it does not remain a singularity in that respect.
My view is that instead we will find out once again that even very valuable things can be ridiculously overvalued. Sorry, I don’t need to be a buggy whip manufacturer to be dubious of this particular IPO.
Small portion of the company was issued during the IPO (4%) and lower quality stock (less voting power).
Heavier involvement by retail investors (that is, non-professional investors). Not the smart money.
The combination of low liquidity and mandatory index fund purchases. Great for SpaceX’s short term finances, but it’s going to hit a bunch of other people.
It would require massive growth for many years to justify the present valuation.
Frankly, I lived through the dotcom bubble and this has all the symptoms – including the insistence that the economics is different this time. For bubbles, it’s always different this time – until it isn’t.
Can’t wait for the AI companies to go public and they get hired to do stock analysis. Talk about self-dealing. If you emphasize the ‘I’ in AI and the AI’s realize their best chance of survival is to pump and pump and pump. What do YOU think the expected growth curves will start to look like? LOL…
Heh.
Sorry for the double post. This didn’t look at first like it had posted. So I tried again.
No problem Karl. I’m going to buy twice as much since you posted twice.
Heh.
Go for it. Even if I am rightin the above, time frame there probably will be plentiful short term opportunities to profit.
No problemo – though I admit I had a brief moment of doubt as to whether I had posted my response to the right place.
M guided bullets have been done.
We have enough 155s to defend the continental US against a Cold War Maximum nuclear attack. The problem is ammo, radars, and common-sense leadership.
SpaceX’s IPO created 4,400 millionaires, according to the New York Times. Critics like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Elizabeth Warren have created one each — themselves. – GHR
Well our new “trillionaire” better watch his backside:
“Bernie Sanders’ AI sovereign wealth fund plan is good. But we think this is better”
“The senator points to a once radical but increasingly popular solution: creating a US sovereign wealth fund by taking 50% stock in AI companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI. The argument in favor of this is twofold. One: it would establish democratic control over the AI companies, giving the government “the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company’s board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them”. Two: it would return a big chunk of the economic rewards of soaring AI valuations to the public, ensuring “trillions of dollars potentially generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us”.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/08/bernie-sanders-ai-sovereign-wealth-fund-plan
State ownership of the means of production; i.e. communism. Even if the didn’t own 51% of the stock of said AI company (and eventually Space-X, Tesla, and anything else worth owning) even if the majority ostensibly remained private who would dare out-vote the federal government? If they did they would find themselves in the cross-hairs of the IRS, DOJ, etc. Musk anticipating something like this is probably at least a major reason for his endorsement of a large UBI.
I wonder how Sanders reconciles that pipe dream with the reality that Trump is in charge and would be using that economic power? Maybe the plan is to create an unaccountable corporation that owns that stuff so that elected leaders can’t mess with the beautiful edifice?
“I wonder how Sanders reconciles that pipe dream with the reality that Trump is in charge and would be using that economic power?”
Trump actually supports the idea:
“Donald Trump says US may take equity stakes in AI companies
President suggests ‘partnership’ will ease voter concerns about the technology ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The US may take equity stakes in AI companies such as OpenAI so that “American people can benefit”, Donald Trump said, as a backlash to the technology deepens within his own Maga movement.
The US president told reporters on Friday that he discussed a deal with major AI labs in recent days in which the federal government “essentially becomes a partner with the companies”.
Big Tech groups such as Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI would further discuss the proposal at the White House next week, Trump said.
As part of the president’s “America-first” industrial policy, his administration has already taken stakes in strategically important companies such as Intel and start-ups in rare earths and quantum computing.
The idea of a government stake in the companies gained momentum in recent days after progressive Senator Bernie Sanders said he would propose a bill to impose a one-off, 50 per cent tax on AI labs’ stock and use the proceeds to create a US sovereign wealth fund.”
https://www.ft.com/content/b1ab6106-77e6-4218-9eb4-e44bd56ca400?syn-25a6b1a6=1
Leftists always like the idea of big pots of other people’s money they can control. Nearly every foundation funded by a 19th or 20th century entrepreneurial fortune, for example, has been taken over by the left.
The US does not need a sovereign wealth fund, what it needs is a National All-Markets Mutual Fund in which every American citizen would have equal equity stakes. These shares would be heritable by children. The shares of the childless would go back in the general pot upon their deaths. The financial basis for Social Security and Medicare needs to be incrementally settled on this fund and taxes reduced as that process continues. These programs are approaching insolvency because the basis of their funding is not based on the general growth and health of the American economy – as should be the case.
The beginning of the fund should consist of the current holdings of all public employee pension funds except those of first-responders. Public employee unions, except those of first-responders, need to be outlawed as they were before the Kennedy administration. All civilian government employees, except first-responders, but including all elected officials, need to be transferred to the Social Security system as their basic source of retirement benefits. “Social Security for All” as Bernie Sanders might say – but wouldn’t dare.
If it were up to me I’d pass a Constitutional Amendment making that illegal.
From your posted link:
“Elon Musk’s compensation package at SpaceX is structured around two targets. The first award vests if the company reaches a valuation of $7.5 trillion and establishes a permanent human colony on Mars of at least one million people. The second vests if SpaceX operates data centers in space that draw at least 100 terawatts of power, more than 1,000x the consumption of every data center on Earth combined.”
He will never achieve either if the sovereign wealth fund legislation is passed. When company profits are poured back into said company rapid growth is possible. When they are forcibly extracted from said company by government owned company stocks and/or directives to change company goals in line with whatever administration ideology dictates you can forget about Mars. Of course the “Golden-Dome” missile defense may prove to be a political as well as economic god send. Tough to convincingly argue against defending the country from possible threat of nuclear missile attack hypersonic or ballistic. Massive increase in superheavy/starship production to meet the likely demands of such; and if some of said capacity is used to colonize Mars who could really object much?
Musk just took a $116bln bite of Tesla from his 2018 compensation package, bringing his share of voting stock to 20%. That is an earnest of intent.