With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX

The SpaceX IPO prospectus states that the company is targeting a TAM of $28.5T, equal to roughly a quarter of the world's gross economic output.

Patrick Boyle said it best. Roughly 1 billion people on the planet make more than $12k annually (folks with "discretionary" income). Divide that TAM of $28.5T by 1B and the every single person needs to give SpaceX ~$28.5K every year forever in order for that figure to make sense. It's more than 3x what the planet spends on food currently.

If you listen to Elon speak, and you don't have much technical knowledge, or even maybe have some mild technical knowledge, Elon really sounds like he knows what he is doing and has very high confidence he can execute it. He can very non-nonchalantly rattle off a plan to pull off the impossible like it's no big deal. And he does have some significant achievements under his belt, but quite a bit easier things than what he promises (and promised, often a decade ago) ahead.

I can totally see why retail shareholders are so enthralled with him. Nevermind Tesla largely was a self-fullfilling prophecy, despite the prophecy not even becoming true. But the share price did, and that's all that really matter to retail traders.

His innovation has been to show that you don't need to make a product that works or makes sense. You just need to make products that get oceans of fools excited and get 30% of the way there. By that point you've locked in their childish fantasies and their money comes with it. Institutional money follows and you're on your way to being the richest man in the world. The tech product fetishism that the iPhone brought about has enabled a lot of it. A lot of people are still looking for the high that a new phone used to bring.

It’s hard to imagine it all crashing down for him tbh. He has so many ways to conjure money and his mafia has immense resources. Why people love him so much I will never understand.

You have to take Krugman with a big grain of salt.

It's been decades since he was in a policy position and these days he's more of a commentator, opinionator who is often wrong. I think he sometimes leans on his nobel prize to give his opinions weight that people should discount given how often his opinions fall flat.

He revolutionized car and rocket industry , internet industry , military industry in a very dramatic obvious way. Now grab let’s say Amazon what did they revolutionize? Yeah they do deliver to you goods from China and help you to tend hardware with some decent soft on it .

You can twist it both ways. He has a bravery to take on super complex tasks. You might not like him personally but this is so much aspiring vs see on that list of richest people folks that sell shirts and pants or telco guy .

Here was my parsing of the submission title :

> With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX

Yes, true, so why was it flagged ?

> (paulkrugman.substack.com)

Ah, ok, that's actually legit. Krugman is not worth reading on any subject, even when he's right (at least in the title).

Krugman's brushing off genuine engineering wins here. SpaceX got space launch costs down to unheard of levels and built Starlink. Tesla built and scaled EVs at a time when no one else was willing to really try. Musk has a habit of overpromising, but there is real output that we can measure as well.

I expect SPCX might stay in squeeze territory until insider lockups expire, and yeah that's financial engineering, but the stock is not going to zero anytime soon the way an actual Ponzi would.

Musk is kind of fascinating.

On one hand SpaceX and Starlink are businesses that it's practically embarrassing that seemingly nobody else even tried to build. You look into it and look at Bezos and Blue Origin and wonder if the markets can actually build new businesses anymore.

Then you set them aside and realize that he basically got away with visa fraud because he was wealthy to begin with and lucked into making tons of money off PayPal and didn't even found Tesla...

...and the lesson I take away isn't that there's anything special about Musk. It's that if you have billions of dollars almost anybody with some kind of preoccupation can build giant businesses related to it.

For example, I totally believe if some random geek obsessed with SeaQuest had been part of the PayPal Mafia they could have figured out a way to make a billion dollar business out of underwater habitats and submarines.

...at least if they were crazed in public enough about it, which seems to have turned into a key part of how Musk works at some point.

Kind of like if you have a lot of money and a few obsessions you now get ahead more by having Tom Cruise couch hopping moments than by being an actual Howard Hughes or Hearst.

Separately we obviously really shouldn't be letting companies with such concentrated ownership be publicly traded with these multi-class shares, but I guess that's where we are now: reinventing feudalism in market trappings.

A wonderfully written article. I think Musk is simply a singular example of how the broligarchy has managed to overwhelmingly influence the very fabric of political and economic institutions: he's not the only one and certainly not the originator.

I wonder if the underlying principle of Ponzi schemes have been wielded in western democracies a lot more than most realise, amplifying (through greed rather than direct maliciousness) wealth disparities that have been growing since long before Musk started Paypal. The sad point isn't that this mentality exists, but that many who can ill afford such an atrocious investment don't have the opportunity to do much about it: how many people really can do much about where their low-grade investments are really placed?

It says more about the state of transparency in economies and politics in the 21st century than it does about the man himself. Symptom of the system is what I think Musk and Trump really are.

Kudos to the author, really thought provoking.

Enron Musk.

> But Musk proceeded to destroy X’s business model by turning it into an extreme-right, Nazi-friendly cesspool, prompting advertisers to flee.

This is where he lost me. There are still plenty of liberals and independents on Twitter. It is not "extreme-right" and anyone who thinks so is either being dishonest or has no idea what the left-right scale of politics in America looks like.

guy who predicted that the internet would be a flop and whose career amounted to taking potshots from a paper calling one of the greatest capital allocators of all time a fraud

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...

I used to respect Krugman, but as time has gone on he seems like yet another New York Times style leftist monkey just whining about people they have disagreements with. Pushing the frontiers of science and technology is an unknowable endeavor for which accurate predictions can never be made unless they are not really pushing the limits. It's attitudes like this which restrict us from actually doing real R&D, and instead focusing on quarterly profits and simple stories that nincompoops can understand. Has he not seen how Tesla transformed the global perspective on EVs? Has he not driven in one in FSD mode? Has he not seen the constant launches and innovation happening at SpaceX, or the XAI leap from nothing to having hyperscaler class datacenters and near frontier models. Sure, they haven't gotten to the lead yet, but jesus christ, what's Krugman bringing into the world from zero. The world would be a far better place with 1,000 brilliant kids taking their inspiration from Musk than from taking this pessimistic, whining NYT perspective on science and technology.