Elon IPO’d SpaceX at $1.78 trillion: a decade of promises, built on a stack of self-acquisitions, unrelated business lines, and longshot projections.

We’re not buying the hype. But we’re not shorting Elon either.

Musk’s rocket company, now public at a $1.78T open. Real launches, real hardware. But the valuation might be science fiction. Its assumptions are a decade of hard work away.

A moonshot S-1 promising to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars,” freshly branded an “AI company,” stacked on self-acquisitions and unrelated business lines. Ed Nelson called it “hallucinatory.” One proposal (data centers in space) only pencils out if you can break the laws of thermodynamics.

Musk’s cult of personality runs hot. Lovers go well beyond his four baby mamas and 14 kids. Haters include Bill Gates, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Scott Galloway.

In fairness, he’s delivered more than most: electric cars, internet from space, reusable rockets. Real feats. So we won’t be litigating why he has so many fangirls & fanboys.

$1.78T rests on a personality premium decades in the making. This may be where it finally collapses, and that is not just his problem. A break in faith this big could shake firms and markets into a systemic drawdown.

Priced at $135, it popped ~20% on day one and spiked as high as $222, with nearly half of all shares changing hands. A float this thin makes a true clearing price hard to read; a retail tranche this fat invites social-media hype. We’ve seen the pattern. It rarely ends in long-term returns.

AI: 92% of the projected TAM ($26.5T of $28.5T). But Grok isn’t in the conversation with Claude or GPT-5, and Musk is leasing xAI compute to competitors, a tell the demand isn’t there. Then, day one, a $60B all-equity grab of coding-model maker Cursor. Winners there? Cursor’s investors, not IPO buyers.

“With its combination of low float, ambitious but speculative long-term narrative, and a steady drumbeat of insider unlocks over the second half of 2026, SpaceX is guaranteed to be a volatility trader’s delight. It will be alternately battered and boosted on a day-to-day basis by swings in public sentiment driven by superficial tea-leaf-reading rather than anything material, all with a backdrop of ever larger amounts of stock for the public market to absorb.”

“PayPal Mafia” and followers like Antonio Gracias’ Valor Partners, get to sell right after Q2 earnings. Ask what they’re giving themselves permission to do.

Loudest fan? Cathie Wood, the kiss of death from a fund that’s trailed the S&P by nearly 90% over five years.

Day one, the underwriters (Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs) exercised the greenshoe for an extra 83.3M shares. Strong demand out of the gate. But that’s a short-term positive that turns long-term negative in a low-float, high-FDV structure.

The structure that pumped it up will pump just as hard in reverse as the lockups lift.

On IPO day, SpaceX perpetual futures became the single largest perps market on Hyperliquid. No share ever changes hands; the bet just settles every eight hours.

Meanwhile Binance’s “SPCXx” tokenized-IPO campaign got cancelled on IPO day, “circumstances outside our control,” and Bybit and Bitget bailed too. Likely reason? They couldn’t get the shares. A rough day for the dream of clean real-world-asset access in crypto.

Numbers don’t support the valuation. But that won’t stop the fans. Should it?

An Edward Jones look at 37 recent tech IPOs found them down 3% at three months and 14% at six, and Prof G’s data has large IPOs underperforming since the 1940s. Going by that, we’d expect it to show up cheaper later.

Bigger cost lands on everyone: the hype pulls money from productive uses and threatens to incinerate capital that should fund the real OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs.